Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 2): Siren Songs (19 page)

“And you realize
of course
I just spent two days,
tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, precious fuel, and many
other toys and manpower to bring your
grandma
here. Oh, what?
You forgot? I didn't bring
you
here. I brought
her
here. Now that I have her here do you think for a second I need you
and your attitude around?”

He stepped in it now.

Uh oh.

“Sir, I'll do as you ask. Please leave Liam with me. I
really do need his help getting around after all the excitement of my
travels.”

Hayes had a penchant for the dramatic. He left it hanging for a
long time whether he was going to give Marty her wish.

Hayes had kept Marty and Liam in suspense for a long period of
time. So long that Liam needed to shift his weight to his other foot
while he stood there holding grandma.

He's going to kill me.

Hayes was looking at Liam, studying him. He realized at last what
it meant to have your life in someone else's hands. His mouth may
have just gotten him killed. Then how would he avenge Victoria? “I'm
sorry. I get mouthy when I'm nervous. It got me kicked out of my
house by my parents. Please don't kill me.” He knew he was
falling on his sword, but he couldn't stand leaving his fate
completely in the hands of this man.

“Kill you? Is that what you think of me? Listen, I hated to
have Victoria shot, but you see how the world is now. Everyone wants
to kill everyone else. Bullets are flying. These plague victims are
chomping. I really didn't have time to argue with you. You see that
now, right?”

He didn't wait for any reply. “Anyway, I'm not going to kill
you. I just enjoy messing with your head because you are so freaking
annoying. But consider this one helpful hint before you settle into
your new lives. Grandma, I'm talking to you on this one. If either of
you so much as sneezes and I don't like it, I won't kill you for it,
but I might have my friends over there kill you for me. A minor
detail perhaps, but my job is all about the details.”

He spun around and shouted out, “Enjoy your stay!”

They entered the tent and found their way to a couple of empty
cots. Grandma asked to lay down, which was easily accommodated with
Liam's arm.

“Thank you, Liam. For all your help on this trip. I just
need a little time to rest now. And pray.” She had her Rosary
out again, holding it to her chest.

Liam was once again reminded of a dead woman with her arms folded
across her chest, dressed in her everyday clothes. It gave him the
chills to look at her. He stood there for a few moments to observe.
She seemed to drift off to sleep almost as he watched. Satisfied she
was still alive, he looked around at the rest of his tent mates.

Well, I'll be.

Everyone in the tent, maybe ten others, was elderly and frail,
just like the group he'd left in the MRAP. He was now convinced the
common denominator was age. It wasn't background, skills, knowledge,
or anything else. The CDC was collecting
old
people. But why?

“Hello, everyone. I'm Liam and this is Marty.” None of
the old folks looked as if they were as old as Grandma, but he didn't
feel right asking them to call her “Grandma.”

“We were kidnapped at gunpoint two days ago and brought here
in one of their military transports. Is that how you got here too?”

Before anyone could answer a nurse came up to the tent, wearing
camouflage scrubs and with a light mask over her mouth and nose. She
asked “Ruth” to come with her. Once identified, the nurse
moved to help one of the women rise from her cot—it took her
some time to do so—and she went off with the nurse.

Once that distraction was over, an elderly man got up and
introduced himself. He was thin and dressed in sweat pants and a
well-faded Hawaiian shirt, but seemed energetic and alert. Qualities
in short supply with the crowds he'd been hanging with lately.

“I'm Zachary Taylor—yes like the President, my parents
had high hopes for me—so pleased to meet you Liam. I look
forward to meeting your grandmother when she's up to it.”

“She's my great grandmother actually. She's 104.”

The man let out a quiet whistle. “I'm sorry about how you
found your way here. Most of us volunteered to be here.”

“Really? Did they promise you anything? Threaten you? Tell
you why you're here?”

Zachary looked around to the few others sitting up and alert, as
if to take their temperature on this point. “They told us the
world was going to hell and that we had a chance to save it. Most of
us—”

He looked around the room, scanning each bed.

“—yes, all of us here now were in various nursing
homes in the area when they found us. You see, once the power went
out things became very—what's the word I'm looking for here?
Terminal? Yes, things got terminal at the nursing homes. A few
families came to get their loved ones, but many of us were already on
our own when we went into the homes, and we had no family or friends
left on the outside. No matter how bad things got in there, we had
nowhere else to go.”

Zachary went on to explain how the loss of power was followed by a
short but tense period on reserve generators at his home, but those
failed pretty quickly. Power had been going on and off for a couple
weeks before the final shutdown, so the generators had already seen
hard use and poor maintenance. The final straw was lack of fuel.
“Needless to say, many of the residents required power to live
in comfort; some needed power simply to live. It was in the first day
after the sirens people started to die—and the stream never
stopped until there were only a handful of residents left. Even the
help had scattered to the winds as things got progressively worse.
Then Hayes showed up. At that point it was myself and another
woman—we joked about being the last man and woman on Earth,
wouldn’t that be ironic? Hayes offered us a place to stay and
explained why he needed our kind of people on his team, including the
downsides.”

Liam interrupted. “Why! Why does he need people of your
generation?”

“Experiments of course. They are experimenting on us to try
to solve the riddle of the cure.”

“And you let them?”

Zachary looked around, suddenly with a sadness about him. “Son,
you're a bright-eyed kid—what are you, about 14?—so you
can't see things for what they are. The world has collapsed. People
are dying in the streets. What hope of survival do any of us old
fogies have? What hope of ever contributing again? I can't speak for
us all, but I'm doing this so my death means something. I see that
look in your eyes. I know I'm going to die soon. We all do. If the
Department of Homeland Security says I can help make a difference in
finding a cure and protecting my fellow man I feel it is my civic
duty to try.”

“You said Homeland Security. Are you sure this isn't a CDC
facility?”

“No, Hayes definitely said he was with Homeland Security.
Why? Does it matter who he's with? Obviously this is a government
operation.”

He couldn't answer that out loud. It mattered he saw a
discrepancy. His dad would be shouting from the rooftops this was an
ah-ha moment. He would never accept it didn't matter which entity of
the government had shown up at his doorstep and asked for his
cooperation. He would demand to know whose name was on the letterhead
of the warrant. He'd want the address of the judge, in fact.

Hayes represented a group with lots of manpower, lots of military
gear, and an apparent inside track on finding the cure to the
infection burning through the population of the world. He was willing
to tell lies to get them all here, including a lie about who he was
with and what he did. Finally, he was willing to have Victoria shot
in cold blood just to spank Liam into compliance.

Liam was agreeing with dad on this one.

I think it's pretty important who he's really with.

In front of Zachary, he just shook his head no.

2

The tent settled into a routine after the initial introductions
and Liam's encounter with Zachary. Most of them were lying on their
cots, resting. His watch displayed 2 p.m.

Two hours until bedtime!

He chuckled internally at the jocularity concerning old people. He
knew it wasn't universally true, but Grandma
was
often in bed
at the unnaturally early time of 7 p.m. For a fifteen-year-old, the
night was just getting started at seven. Rather than take a nap he
pulled out his phone. Looking at it, he felt the sadness creeping
back in.

I should have taken her picture with this.

How he missed that trick in all his time with her he'd never know.
Before the sirens he was always snapping pictures of friends, pets,
and even the odd pile of dog poop. He'd send them to friends as part
of the life of a silly teenager. But he never thought to take
her
picture.

“Maybe I could ask agent Duchesne for a copy of the picture
he took of her.” He could only laugh at the multiple layers of
futility in that thought.

He was staring at the lock screen and noticed he was getting a
Wi-Fi signal. Looking closer, the little display icon showed it was
trying to acquire a signal. It hadn't found an open one. When he got
past his lock screen he swiped around a few times until he was
looking at the available hotspots.

He was about to scroll through the list when he was aware of the
nurse returning to the tent. He put his phone into his pocket just as
the nurse arrived. She seemed to pause her eyes on him, but he
admitted it could have been his imagination. He wondered if he looked
guilty.

“Liam and Marty? Come with me please. You need to meet with
the base director.”

Liam moved to the nurse. She was still wearing a mask. “Would
it be OK if I let my grandma sleep? Can I come with you now and then
tell her what I learned later?”

The nurse nodded in the affirmative and she began walking away
without comment.

He waved to Zachary so someone knew he was leaving the tent.

He tried some clumsy small talk, but the nurse was not very
friendly. Soon they were at another of the smaller tents, but this
one was closed on all sides and they had to go through a small door
flap on the front.

Inside was nice and cool, though it had a strong musty smell
common to all canvas tents left outside for any length of time.
Several dim fluorescent lights were hanging from the tent's roof,
their wires all running into a bundle near and under the back tent
wall. He also noticed a tube of some kind was blowing air directly
onto the man sitting at the lone desk in the middle of the tent. No,
not just a man. A soldier. He was an older man with near-total gray
hair, including a gray mustachio. He was wearing a camouflage
uniform, the eagles visible on his shirt as he looked up at Liam.

“Hello, Liam and...Marty.”

“Uh, hello, sir. I'm Liam. My grandma is sleeping. The nurse
said I could take notes for her.”

He turned around but the nurse was already gone.

Dang it!

“Welcome, Liam. I'm Colonel McMurphy. I run this place. I've
asked you and your grandmother here so I could explain what it is we
do here and why you two are so important to our cause. I would have
preferred to tell her directly, but we'll roll with it. I expect
thorough notes for her.”

Liam couldn't tell if that was a joke.

The colonel stood up and moved to a row of silent computers
against a side wall. Instead of taking a seat at one of them, he
grabbed a few sheets of paper from a printer tray and handed them to
Liam. The topmost appeared to be a satellite photograph of the city
of St. Louis. There were a few red blotches in the middle of the
photo, and some near the top.

“This is unclassified by the way. I think everyone knows
what you're about to see, even if they can't visualize the world from
space. The first sheet shows the areas of the initial outbreaks in
your city as best we can tell. Things moved so quickly we may never
know for sure how the disease spread in those first few days. The
second sheet is more in line with what we all know today.”

The second printout was the same view of the city, but the
coverage of red was absolute.

“A bit dramatic perhaps, but true. The disease is now
everywhere. If I had a globe it would pretty much be a red orb. There
are holdouts of course, places like this, but anywhere man can walk,
the disease will be walking there.”

Liam handed the papers back, and looked at the colonel as if ready
for more impressive information.

“You know most people see that second sheet and practically
wet their pants. You seem unconcerned by what I'm telling you.”

“I escaped the city with my grandma—no thanks to you
military jerks who killed a lot of my friends when you bombed the
Arch—and I've seen the zombies up close for six days now. I'm
scared as hell around them, but I'm more scared around Hayes—he
killed my girlfriend
thankyouverymuch—
and I'm scared
silly standing here in your office waiting to learn what you are
going to do to my grandma.”

The colonel walked back to his chair and sat heavily in it. He
motioned for Liam to sit in one of the chairs in front of his desk.
“You call them zombies, huh? I'm hearing that more and more,
and from unexpected places. I've seen what these things become, so I
guess I could see why you'd use that word.” He seemed to chew
on his lip as he thought about something, but he continued on a
different tact, “Normally I'd give a dog and pony show about
saving the world and my audience would be willing to step into an
acid bath if they thought it would help further the research of this
disease. I don't think you or your grandma will be so easily swayed.”