Life Among the Dead (Book 4): The End (41 page)

14

At the beach shooters are lined up along the stone wall that looks down over the sand. The plummeting dead have slowed in their numbers, from a waterfall to a mere trickle. The ground gleams with spent shell casings in the sunlight.

Rocky had no trouble catching up to the man that brought her here, both look along the line of people for their respective special someone, a group is off to the side watching the incident come to a resolve. There hasn’t been much action within the park’s high walls, certainly nothing of this magnitude.

Abby slowly takes a place along the firing line beside Vida, he wants to say something but can’t get past his relief to see her safe and sound. He scrambles for something to say, anything, just when he is ready to attempt he gets interrupted by the roar of Carla’s machine gun.

A stranger in a strange land, Rocky feels out of place. For the first time since she can remember she is actually nervous. She’s typically apathetic to what others may think, and for the most part that’s still true. Still indifferent to the views of the clean looking faces around her, it’s the one person she does care about that has her fidgeting, raking her fingers through her greasy hair to make sure it’s looking its best, her usual ‘I-don’t-care’ style but not matted down anywhere or sticking up.

“Rocky?” a voice behind her makes her breath catch in her throat and her heart skip a beat. Her eyes burn for a second with relief, but just for a second, she pushes down the welling emotions that bubble within her.

“Hey, KB,” she says casually, as if her being here is no big deal. She turns and sees the face she’s been dreaming about.

“How?” the blonde asks, shaking her head at the impossibility. She could have sworn her friend had been killed that night.

“You missed one hell of a jam,” Rocky plays off her survival. “Too bad the league isn’t still around, would’ve been a record for sure.”

Try as she may to look as cool as possible, she rubs her palms anxiously against her thighs as Killer B approaches, rolling to her for a hug. It’s hard to pull off an ‘I-don’t-care’ attitude when the person holding you knows how much you truly do care. Over Killer B’s shoulder Rocky sees Kelly Peel, she feels instantly threatened by her though the songstress has yet to give her reason to be.

Rocky feels compelled to expunge any weirdness that may be lingering between her and Killer B, “KB, about the—uh—kiss…”

The words she struggles to come up with as an explanation, the awkwardness she feels between them, is forgotten in an instant when Killer B kisses her, finishing the tender moment that ended in sadness what feels like a lifetime ago. It’s a kiss that tells Rocky all is well between them, and all will be as she has dreamed about.

They separate, looking into one another’s eyes. In this moment Killer B sees the Rocky that’s been hidden from her, one that can in fact love and does love. They embrace having finally and truly found each other.

“KB?” the hug tightens on Rocky’s end. “Did you really have me lugging Kelly friggin’ Peel’s Heelys all this time?”

15

The amphibious onslaught winds down, fewer and fewer corpses emerge from the surf now. From the many shooters that man the boardwalk the space between shots widens like a bag of microwave popcorn that is almost done. The beach where the residents of Story Book Land once played is now a killing field, bodies lay in heaps as waves of salt water crash over them.

Dan Williamson walks down a set of stone steps to the sand seeing a chance to test a theory.

“I need ten volunteers!” Carla announces loud enough to be heard by all. “The rest of you can go get the word out that’s it’s safe to come out. People may be hiding so look everywhere.”

She joins Dan on the beach, stepping around the fallen zombies. She finds him crouching over one corpse that’s still active. The ghoul had taken a few rounds to the spine and is paralyzed from the waist down, it’s not deterred by its infirmity, it digs its fingers into the sand trying to get closer to another body on the beach, Gar.

Everybody’s favorite stoner is dead, he’s been dead long enough that he should no longer be a temptation for the zombie. There isn’t much left on Gar’s bones having been so thoroughly devoured by so many corpses. Dan wonders why the ghoul is still interested in him, so interested that it ignores the arrival of two viable meals.

“What’s going on?” Carla asks him.

“I owe Heather some answers,” he replies as he tip toes around corpses to get closer to the handicapped one. “I’d like to be able to give them to her.”

The fact that this zombie is so adamantly trying to get to Gar intrigues Dan, he postpones his experiment to get a closer look. “Back in a sec,” he tells his friend and rushes back up to the boardwalk before she can respond.

Dan heads straight to Brock’s lunch truck and searches the condiment area. He picks up a small plastic container of onions and spills out the contents, returning with the cup and lid. Carla watches as he reaches for what Gar always wore around his neck, his vile of green goo, tied with a length of hemp cord. The goo is what Gar claims started it all.

As the potsmith explained it, the vile is vacuum sealed because once the substance touches air it expands rapidly. Dan witnesses this first hand, around the tightly sealed black cap is a small crack allowing the sample 6 to escape in a quick squiggle. The vile is collected into the plastic cup, the corpse on the ground tracks its movement through the air above it. Until now the dead woman on the sand hadn’t given the two living souls much notice, now she follows the bauble intently.

Dan seals the plastic cup’s lid, squeezing out the air. He had come to test a theory and discovered a brand new one.

“So, Gar was right?” Carla says. She feels bad for having lost him under her command, she feels worse for not believing his wild story.

“It appears so. The dead don’t want us, they want what’s in us,” he replies. With most of the air forced out of the container the stream of green eventually slows, then stops expanding out through the fracture in the vile. Dan contemplates the possibilities and concludes that the New Breed feed on the classic zombies for their sample 6 since they don’t see them as their own kind any longer.

“Can I borrow your knife?” Dan asks. He’s ready to do what he had come down to the beach to do. Carla hands him her pocket knife, and watches as he slides the blade across his palm.

“Fuck me! What the hell are you doing?” she asks shocked.

Dan is kneeling over the corpse that reaches for the plastic cup, its mouth open wide. He drips his blood into its greedy mouth. Just like the three that tore him apart at the petting zoo, the zombie falls limp. He recounts the story to Carla in a whisper as they head back up to the boardwalk, slow enough for him to finish his tale before they are within earshot of any of the volunteers. He shows her his palm, blood stains it, bringing the creases into detail with darker shades of red, but there’s no longer a wound. Just a thin red line along his palm remains of the deep gouge he made with the borrowed knife.

Dan hands back her pocket knife. “Keep it,” she tells him.

He understands her being leery of him. She apologizes with her eyes, wordlessly he shakes his head to tell her ‘it’s all right’. “I have to give Heather the all clear,” he says, taking his leave. “Talk later?”

“You bet,” she assures him, trying to sound normal, like she didn’t just see him heal almost instantly, and kill a zombie with his blood. She watches him jog off to his family, worried about what he may be turning into.

The volunteers are keeping their eyes and weapons on the water, it’s very peaceful now that the gunfire has ceased entirely. “That’ll do guys,” she gives the ten permission to leave. “I’ll take it from here. I will need someone to get a hold of the Coast Guard, they let that big ass boat through, the least they can do it tow it off my beach.”

“Young lady,” Major Barnwell is there, she doesn’t recall seeing him all day. “I’m commanding officer. I’ll give the…”

“And, I’m the mother fucking Sheriff of New Castle, that’s who I am! Get on the damn radio and call the Coasties! Move your ass!”

Speechless, he does as he’s told. The man in charge heads off to make the call. Carla is left relatively alone. She leans on the wall with her elbows looking over the beach, over all the bodies and the large beached vessel. She looks over the gravesite of the love of her life. Letting out a cleansing sigh it’s as if she’s seeing it all with fresh eyes, as if the time since losing Oz has been a haze, a very bad dream. She feels strong once again.

The ten remaining volunteers have dissipated except for two, Vida lingers a second to give Carla a pat on the back and a smile. She turns to take her leave and comes face to face with the man she has been ignoring. Her smile fades instantly as Abby finally thinks of something to say.

“Don’t let me catch you out of you armor again.”

“What the fuck did you say to me?” she inquires, stopping in her tracks as she was trying to pass him by. Her Latin anger flares.

“You heard me,” he responds. “Our team is out there. Suit up and let’s go.”

It isn’t the apology she was expecting, but that’s what it is all the same. It’s his way of letting her know he is in fact sorry, without groveling. He’s telling her that he was wrong not to trust her, that he knows she is a capable soldier. Nowhere is safer than side-by-side.

Section XV: 99 Red Balloons

1

Weary eyes open. It’s quiet and warm. It feels safe. From the shadows approaches a blurry dark figure. Rough Rider jolts alert to protect himself.

“Easy, Rough,” the smooth voice of Soul Train soothes him.

The involuntary tensing of his body has caused pain to flare. Rough Rider cradles his stomach. “Jesus, Soul, what happened?”

“We underestimated the New Breed and paid the price,” the man explains. “We never assumed they were capable of an ambush.”

“Jackie?” Despite the pain it causes, the man tries to sit up. He doesn’t see his wife anywhere in the medical suite.

“Easy! She’s fine. Just ran to grab a soda. Lay back.”

Relaxed in the knowledge Peace Maker is all right he lays back, melting into the comfortable mattress. “Everyone make it?”

Soul Train just shakes his head sadly. “They took back the corridor, and took out a lot of the military and New Castle folks that volunteered to hold the safe zone. The Major wants to pull everybody in and stay in.”

“We can’t do that!” Rough exclaims. “We have to hit them back, harder than ever. We can’t let them win, that’s not the Ruby way!”

“Preaching to the choir,” Soul Train agrees. “Abby hasn’t said a word about it yet. Debating the idea, I guess.”

“Shit,” Rough Rider says, one word summing up the situation.

“Yeah,” his friend agrees. “I hear ya.”

Peace Maker returns quietly, not wanting to disturb her husband who is on the mend. Soul Train sees her enter and gets up to leave them alone.

“Where you going, Fancy Boy?” Rough Rider asks.

“Can I grab a soda you oaky fuck?” Soul train asks. “Your lady is here. Figured I’d leave you guys to it.”

“Not a second too soon, honey,” Rough Rider tells his wife. “Soul almost crawled in with me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Rough,” Soul Train says on his way out the door. “I’ve turned many a married man to the dark side.”

Alone, Jackie gives Wade a kiss. “How do you feel?”

“My guts feel hot and it’s hard to breathe.”

“You have some cracked ribs, severe bruising. But, no internal bleeding,” she says.

“Are they really thinking about locking the door?”

“By the sounds of it,” she says with a nod. “Our all-out war on the dead may be over before it got started.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, I hear ya.”

2

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Carla asks Dan on their way to a meeting that will determine the course of action that will be taken, the future of life within the theme park. Since survival has sculpted the three main factions that reside in Story Book Land differently, delegates from each have often met to discuss issues that arise. “What if they lock you up for being weird?”

“I’m not weird,” Dan defends himself. “Just different.”

“Different then, Mr. Sensitive. You know they’re going to start milking you again, don’t you?”

“Probably,” Dan whispers, thinking about the reaction he has been having to the procedure, the ‘crawling out of his skin’ feeling.

“Before, they would use that machine to take your blood, keep the plasma and give you back the red cells. What if they keep it all now?”

He really is trying not to think too hard about it, but feels he has to tell them that his blood is a weapon against the dead. “I’m healing faster now, I’ll make more blood.”

“What about Heather and the boys?” Carla poses the question. “They’ve been ‘exposed’ to you, what if the Army fears they’ve contracted what you have?”

“I’m not contagious, just different.”

“The Army might decide to be cautious, play it safe,” Carla adds. “Or, what if it’s sexually transmitted, you know, in your…you know?”

“It’s not in my ‘you know’!”

“You don’t know what’s in your ‘you know’,” she retorts. Their conversation has been mostly in whispers but both are getting louder with each exchange. “I remember learning in Health Class that it’s a blood product…”

“Why are we talking about my ‘you know’?”

“I don’t know,” Carla drops the subject, exasperated. She’s just worried about losing her friend. They complete their walk to the meeting in silence.

They enter the castle on the hill and head though the plywood halls to the designated room, the Major’s office. They are early, but already hear voices talking as they enter, Abby and the Major have begun discussing the matter.

“You almost lost a man out there, son,” the military man reminds the much younger leader. “I lost several. The New Castle people also took severe casualties. Had your people been in the park when that ship came aground, we wouldn’t have lost that brave young man on the beach.”

“We can end this,” Abby tells him with confidence.

“We can wait them out,” the Major plainly states.

“They are finding ways to last longer!” Abby says adamantly.

“According to this Rocky Roadkill person you found out there?” the Major skeptically dismisses her accounts.

“We’ve seen it! The dead irradiated themselves out of instinct. Even before becoming the New Breed they would gravitate to cold and dry climates to last longer.”

The Major rubs his chin in contemplation. He himself hasn’t spent much time fighting the zombies, the military had taken heavy losses and fallen back to the safety of Story Book Land early on. What Abby says rings true, and confirms what they’ve heard from a group of Marines out West in Camp Pendleton. That region is a veritable desert, their base is surrounded by the old variety.

“The fact that they eat us might also be proof,” Carla pipes in. “Gar was right, the dead want us for this.” She holds up the plastic container that holds Gar’s vile.

“Onions?” Abby asks.

“No, Sample 6.”

“This again,” the Major says. “For the last time there is no proof…”

“We’ve run tests with Bob-o,” Carla asserts. “It’s true! Given a choice between a drop of this and a living person, a corpse wants this ten times out of ten. The stuff grows exponentially until it reaches a certain size proportionate to how large its starting point is. A speck will grow to the size of a basketball. After it’s fully grown it begins to sublimate. It becomes a gas rather than get bigger.”

“The only thing that halts its growth is placing it in a vacuum,” Dan adds. “Or, exposing it to this,” he holds up a vile of red fluid.

“And, what is that?” the Major asks patiently.

“My blood,” Dan answers, wincing involuntarily. He has no idea how the news will be taken.

“Your blood?” the Major repeats, surprised. “The same blood we’ve injected into every man, woman and child. Why didn’t you tell us this?”

“This is new,” Carla jumps in when Dan falters. “Everyone got plasma from Dan, where the antibodies are. This new feature is located in the protein of his hemoglobin, from what we’ve found. Long story short, a few New Breed tore him apart and died during the breach.”

“You died?” the Major asks Dan puzzled, this is the first he’s heard of this.

“No, the dead died,” Dan says.

“They died for real,” Carla clarifies.

“This is a new development…” Dan struggles to explain.

“He heals very fast now,” Carla picks up where he left off. “Like, Wolverine fast.” She points out the scar tissue around his throat. “You should see his foot.”

“It kinda grew back,” Dan concludes as simply as he can.

“So, your blood is both a vaccine and a weapon?” Abby asks intrigued.

“Uh-Yup,” Dan confirms.

“This is from being bitten by a bubble girl zombie?” Abby sums up for his own edification.

“We believe she was a living zombie,” Carla says. “Her condition caused the virus to establish itself in her without a fight. It was weaker, so when she bit Dan his body was able to fight it and beat it. He’s not a zombie.”

“I’m not a zombie,” Dan repeats. “Just different.”

“We can use this!” Abby says to the Major. “Now that we have a weapon…”

“We will be sealing the gates indefinitely,” the Major declares without allowing the Rubicon leader to finish his sentiment. He knows what Abby is about to say and he isn’t interested. “Aside from delivering enough of our vaccine to inoculate the Marines, we will no longer be exposing ourselves to danger beyond these walls.”

“I’ll send a group of my people to deliver the goods,” Abby volunteers. “After that we’ll be right outside the gate if you need us.”

The Major is speechless for a second as he watches the young leader stand after delivering his statement in a ‘that’s-that’ fashion. He can’t imagine choosing to live outside the walls, making that choice for so many others. “Son, I can’t let you do that.”

“You can’t stop us either,” Abby says. “We’ll retake the corridor, set up a new line of defense and resume pushing out.”