PRIME (5 page)

Grace and Quigley shared one of their trademark looks before Grace sighed and moved to sit beside Cale, ready to be honest. “We saw evidence of intelligence within the hostiles tonight.”

“Were they showing a little cave man-like control?” Cale asked. “Maybe they even looked surprised when it worked?” Grace nodded, and Cale let out a weary sigh before leaning forward. “That’s the first piece of it.” Cale nodded. “Then they start to get a cleverness in their eyes that could scare the piss out of anyone. They’ll catch your eye while they work. They seem to want us to know that they are evolving, that they’re gaining on us.”

“What happened over at Culex?” Grace asked.

“It’s a bit of a story. Wouldn’t whoever is behind that mirror like to come out and have a seat?” Alice blushed as he looked towards her. She felt like she had done something to tell him she was there, even though she knew she had done nothing of the sort. Grace waved for her to enter the room.

Blushing, Alice pushed into the room. She took a seat on the other side of Quigley, barely looking at Cale.

“Ah, the young intern.” Cale smiled; Alice had helped prep him for the vaccine. “Promotions come quick in times of war, eh?” he asked, with no sarcasm.

“Apparently,” Alice answered. “I’m sure you couldn’t have been more than a Private before.” Cale laughed at that. Alice smiled, then suppressed it, looking nervously at Grace.

“You’re sharp. I can see why they promoted you. I finished basic years ago and did well enough to become a Corporal. I did a tour in the Middle East and got myself busted up well enough to be sent home.”

“You look alright,” Grace observed.

“Well that’s cause I had a damn good surgeon out there in the trenches. Took a bit of shrapnel to my stomach after a grenade blew out a truck, I carried most of my innards in my arms as I hobbled to the tent. You can bet your ass I figured I was dying that day.” Cale smiled widely. “Guess someone was looking out for me. I ended up at Culex with a nice cushy desk job that was converted to a Government civilian position after I was discharged. It was a good life, until this shit brain Seth Stolz shows up; a transfer from Haven.”

There was an audible intake of breath from around the table. Haven was where it all started, or at least that was the patchy information that had been given out before the TVs stopped working. For Alice, Haven was home. As far as she knew she had lost her whole family when Haven dropped off the grid. Cale nodded at their looks.

“Yeah. Now I know we wouldn’t have been any better off if he hadn’t shown up, still woulda caught it, but with him there it happened like that.” Cale snapped his fingers. “Within a few days half the base was down with it. This was before it was on every TV and newspaper. We didn’t know what we were into until the first one came out of their coma. Let me tell you, this wasn’t one of the guys who came out healthy. This guy came out hungry. He worked his way through two nurses and a doctor before we were able to put a bullet through his skull. When the Bill to Kill came out, we started putting a bullet in their heads as soon as they entered the coma. At least we did for those that were still brought in.”

“This might have been better contained if people followed procedure when their loved ones became ill,” Quigley said. He shook his head. Alice was used to Quigley’s anger on this topic. She didn’t blame the families for refusing to sign their loved ones up for execution.

“Kady didn’t help that,” Alice reminded him. They all knew who Kady was. The first documented child to wake from the coma without going hostile.

“News of Kady spread and suddenly there was hope.” Cale shook his head, as if hope was where the whole world had gone wrong. He was mostly right. “People stopped bringing in their ill; even some hospitals stopped the killing until after they woke. Burned the bodies up afterward, which did the trick alright for keeping those zombies down.”

“Hostiles,” Grace corrected him again. Alice knew it was only out of habit. It was becoming harder to think of the things outside as anything but zombies.

“Hostiles or zombies, it’s all the same thing now,” Cale said. “Burn the bodies, spread the pathogen. Probably the best thing we did to help the virus was burn the bodies.”

“We all know what was done wrong,” Grace bristled. It was hard for everyone to accept how wrong the government had been about the whole thing. “Tell us about the cure. What the hell is it?”

“Not sure exactly,” Cale admitted. “We couldn’t pick up the whole broadcast. We never figured out where it was coming from. The transmission had degraded by the time it made its way to us. The techs were able to narrow its origin to somewhere west, but there’s a lot of west out there. All I knew was that if there was a chance to stop this thing, I was going to go after it. I didn’t survive war to be killed by zombies.”

The room was silent as everyone mulled this over. There were plenty of bases to the west, Haven for one, but Alice couldn’t let herself get her hopes up. Thinking about Haven was dangerous. Thinking about her brother always led to tears, and right now was not the time to cry.

5

Haven Medical Base

Simon accepted the binoculars while a heavy thudding continued building in his chest. He couldn’t see the zombie without them, and seeing it would make it real. He wished desperately for it to not be real. Simon sat for a moment without lifting the binoculars, only staring off over the fields. Wind ran through his hair, tugging it gently to the side and reminding him how much he needed a haircut. He had a brief, but vivid memory of his sister ruffling his hair and saying it needed to be cut. Simon swallowed hard and pushed that thought away. She was gone.

“Um, you gonna look?” Noah asked, his voice unsure as Simon continued to stare at the barely discernible form in the distance.

Simon wanted to say no. He wanted to hand Noah back the binoculars and leave the wall. Seeing the zombie out there had brought back flashes of the nightmares he had after he woke up. What if it was his dad out there? He knew that was next to impossible, but the thought almost paralyzed him.

“Yeah.” Simon gave Noah a brief, forced smile and pushed his glasses to the top of his head. When he lifted the binoculars, he fought the urge to close his eyes. There was no use putting off what was inevitable.

It took a second to adjust the lenses to his eyes, then another few seconds of searching over the sea of grass before he caught the figure in his sights. It wasn’t his dad. As Simon watched, Noah began speaking beside him.

“It could be a survivor, right?” His voice sounded more hopeful than convincing. Simon watched the figure shambling through the grass, stumbling as it moved forward with the grace of a drunk on stilts. There was no question in his mind, he was seeing a zombie.

It was barely three in the afternoon with the sun blaring down, and one of the zombies was out for a stroll. Granted, it wasn’t moving quickly and didn’t look like it had any grand ideas about climbing the base walls, but it was out and it was the first they had seen in full daylight. Simon dropped the binoculars back into Noah’s small hands and slid his glasses on. Noah placed the binoculars on the wall beside him. They watched the figure in the distance as it became clearer.

“It’s not a survivor,” Simon said. He swore he saw Noah’s thin shoulders drop a little bit at that.

“They don’t come out in the sun.” Noah forced his voice not to quiver.

“This one does.” Simon shrugged; he hated how cold his voice sounded. Noah nodded. He pushed himself up to his feet on the wall and looked around. “Do you see any others?” Simon asked. He didn’t stand. Sitting on the wall was more than he was comfortable with.

“No. I don’t see any other movement, but the others might report something at switch.”

“Maybe.” Simon bit his lip. The younger kids usually kept watch during the day, mostly because everyone assumed nothing would happen. That was all about to change. Noah sat back down, his legs dangling over the outer edge of the wall in a way that would be ill-advised if the zombie made it to them.

“This is shit.” Noah threw a loose stone out into the field. Simon winced at the word, hating the way it slid so casually from Noah’s mouth. Noah sighed heavily. He pushed his dreads out of his face, and shook his head. “Sometimes I wish I had just died and become one of them.”

Simon sat silently, letting this idea wash over him. To have died sometimes seemed like the greatest gift to him as well. It didn’t seem fair that he was alive when everyone else he had loved was dead. Hearing Noah say it made him think about it more. He watched the thing stumbling toward them. It was moving faster now, though not running by any means. It had caught their scent. Simon could make out a few features on the thing’s ashen face.

A thin layer of dirt covered its face. One eye was swollen shut and looked infected. Its left arm hung limp at its side, and at some point it had lost its pants. What was left of the part that made it a man was shriveled and bloody.

“You’d rather be that thing?” Simon asked. There was no better way to explain how awful it would have been to have died along with everyone else.

Noah gave him a small smile and shook his head. “No, I guess not. You want me to go tell Dodge this thing is coming?”

“I’ll do it,” Simon answered, happy for a reason to get away. He flipped around to put his feet on the ladder and steadied himself a moment before climbing down. His heart hammered with each rung, worried the ladder would slip out from under him. It amazed him to watch the other boys climb the ladders as nimbly as monkeys.

When Simon’s feet hit solid ground, he sprinted off toward the apartment Dodge slept in. Without even thinking about knocking, Simon rushed in. He was always hit by the familiarity of the apartments. The military housing was set up so the living quarters were all the same. He could see himself at the kitchen table, doing homework while his sister cooked dinner. Simon hated the apartments; they forced him to remember that he was alive and his sister wasn’t.

Simon shook off the wave of guilt that accompanied the sparse memories and ran straight to the bedrooms. Tech was drooling and flat on his stomach in the first room, and Simon shut the door quietly; no need to wake him. He opened the next door, and shut it again quickly. His face flushed. He knocked loudly on the door, willing himself to forget the image of Dodge on top of the girl. He had a good idea who the girl was.

“Hold on,” Dodge called, and there was movement behind the door. Simon heard them whispering, then Dodge opened the door wearing only sweats, his dark skin and hair sweaty. “This better be good, kid.”

“There’s a zombie working its way through the field,” Simon said. He knew he shouldn’t be trying to see past Dodge and felt disgusted at himself for leaning so he could catch sight of the girl. It was Lara, just as he had thought. She was only half under the covers. When he realized he was seeing her breast he jerked back, feeling guilty.

“It’s still light out,” Dodge answered.

“It’s there,” Simon assured him. Dodge eyed Simon a minute.

“Shit.” He bent and grabbed a shirt from the floor, pulling it quickly over his head. He pushed Simon out of the doorway and shut the door, leaving Lara in the room. Halfway across the living room, Dodge slipped on a pair of sneakers. “Show me where.” Dodge waved Simon out the front door.

Simon hurried back to the wall with Dodge close behind. When the wall came into sight, Simon saw that Noah had stood up, no longer letting his legs dangle freely below him. When Noah noticed Simon and Dodge, he began to wave them over, practically jumping up and down in his eagerness. Dodge reached the ladder first and began to climb up; Simon didn’t hesitate before following him.

“Move.” Dodge shoved Noah aside as he climbed onto the top of the wall.

Noah slipped. He landed hard on one knee before it slid out from under him. He caught the wall with his hands, scrambling to get his legs back up.

“Noah!” Simon dropped onto his stomach, reaching for him. Dodge stepped on Simon as he tried to grab his hands. They were both too slow. Simon watched Noah slip, unable to stop it, useless as always.

“Simon!” Noah’s eyes widened, and Simon knew exactly why.