This Plague of Days, Season Two (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (20 page)

Mrs. Bendham still sat in the back of the van, on the lookout for cars following them. The others had gone into the tree line to relieve themselves.

The gas can wasn’t quite full. Another car sat at the bottom of the embankment.

“Make it fast!” she called out across the road. She hurried along to the next wreck, the soft sand giving way under her feet. She slipped and slid down the short hill on her bum.
 

It was a green, two-door Hyundai. Judging from its bends and dents in the roof and sides, the car had rolled over several times on its last journey. However, the car had landed on its wheels and, no doubt due to the forgiving sand of the embankment, all the windows were intact. It was unlocked. She opened the driver’s door to pop the lock on the gas tank.

The stench from the car hit her in the face like a cloud hand closing over her mouth and nose.

Again, the flies. Eyes open, she saw a cloud of flies and the horror of rotting flesh beneath them. Maggots wriggled and roiled and fed.
 

Eyes squeezed shut, Jack was back in Brandy’s bathroom. This time Brandy’s eyes were not closed. Her head was turned and flies crawled over her friend’s staring eyes. Brandy said, “
Give up, Jack
.”

The corpse raised a wrecked arm stained dark red with dried blood. “I gave up. It’s not so bad.” The flies stayed. The rictus grin was new.

Jack opened her eyes to face the Hyundai’s interior. She closed the door as quickly as she could, fell to her hands and knees and threw up.
 

Would she ever think of Brandy again without seeing the gash in her arm and the flies feeding? Had the insects erased her sweet memories of happy, bitchy, irrepressible Brandy forever?

It saddened her, but yes. Jack was sure she couldn’t think of Brandy without seeing her friend, a bloody naked feast, dead in her bathtub. Or worse, grinning in her bathtub and inviting Jack to join her.

Jack stood and, despite herself, looked inside the car. The sun had cooked the body in the back seat. The hot car was a crock pot. It stewed the carcass of what was once a relatively happy, coffee-drinking taxpayer. The occupant was a sloppy, liquid mess.

She shouldn’t have looked. If Anna and Jaimie got sick tonight, there was a better than even chance that tomorrow morning she’d give up and drive them all into a tree at full speed.

What else should she worry about instead of infection or brutal murder? Car accident on a lonely road? Lightning strike? Cholera or an infected scratch that turns gangrenous? God’s wrath? Rivers of blood? Killer asteroids? White-eyed killers?

She took a breath. Food, clothing, shelter. The van was shelter. The spring heat necessitated water more than worry about clothes. Douglas Oliver had stored several cases of water in the rear of the van. It should be enough. The old schemer had also packed cans of soup, energy bars and chocolate bars. His plan seemed to give them the most food for the space allowed.

Jack worried that the chocolate would make them more thirsty and the water was too precious to burn through fast. She had instructed Mrs. Bendham, their self-appointed supply sergeant, to dole out the soup since it dealt with nutritional needs and thirst at the same time. Their emergency supply would be whatever Mrs. Bendham had squirrelled away in her massive blue cooler.
 

Jack sucked on the hose, waited too long for the gas to come and threw up again a moment later. Her eyes watered uncontrollably and her gums burned. She spat, but she couldn’t get the taste of gasoline out of her mouth. She pulled her bottle of water out of her jacket and tried flushing. Then she worried that with all the swishing and spitting she was wasting precious water.

She thought they’d packed all they needed for the trip. At that moment, Jack would have traded all her water for one full bottle of Scope mouthwash.

W
E
PRAY
FOR
SLEEP
,
OUR
MINDS
TO
TAKE

T
he infected took down the two lead Marines first. The next bunch went for the little girls, heedless of bullets and concentrating their forces on the easiest prey.

Aadi sprang forward, angry and sure the doctor had jinxed his aspirations for more time with his girls. He swung haymakers at a snarling woman with his bare fists, knocking her down and putting himself in front of Aastha.

A teenage boy went for Aasa. He had a shoulder wound so deep, one arm hung useless. The infected boy reached for Aasa with his good arm. Sinjin-Smythe kicked him in a shin and pushed him into the oncoming mob.

“Get out of the way!” Pendle bellowed at his charges. Despite his warning, he and Cameron kept firing. There were too many infected to hold their fire.
 

Sinjin-Smythe felt the breath of a bullet whizzing by his head as one of the attackers fell at his feet, brains splattered.

A tall woman in her late forties with white blonde hair, yelled to the refugees. “
Koma hingao
!” She stood in the door to a shop across the street, waving the refugees in.

Dayo pulled Aastha away from an infected man reaching for the little girl and kicked out, planting the heel of her foot in the man’s solar plexus. He went down without a sound, the air knocked from him. Aadi scooped up Aastha as Sinjin-Smythe yanked Aasa up and followed Aadi toward the shop. Desi pulled Dayo behind him and backed up, raising his Walther.
 

These infected were unlike the white-eyed terror Sinjin-Smythe and Desi had seen attack Merritt in Indianapolis. They acted like dumb, raging animals. These were like the Sutr-Zs they’d fought in London. They lunged, jaws snapping, and they weren’t afraid of Desi’s pistol until he shot one of them in the face.

When they saw their lead attacker go down with a scream, two others who had come at Desi turned and ran for the alley. Their mistake was pausing to try to drag one of the fallen Marines with them. The cannibal atop Dysart growled at the pair, not wanting to give up his prey.
 

Lance Corporal Pendle shot each of the snarling trio with three precise head shots. “Our intel was wrong!”

“I don’t know why you’d say that!” Desi yelled.

The two remaining Marines — Pendle and Cameron — kept firing on the nearest zombies until they went down. Then they concentrated their fire on the infected who had brought down their comrades. So enraptured were the ghouls in their feeding frenzy, they ignored the gunfire. When shot, they fell atop their victims.

The Marine closest to the alley had lost his rifle in the first moment of the attack. However, he had managed to kill one of the infected. His dirk’s bloody hilt was still clutched in his fist, the thick, triangular blade buried in the forehead of the young woman who had leapt upon him.
 

The remaining cannibals, a dozen or so, split into two groups and retreated back up the alleys from which they’d come.

The Marine named Cameron switched magazines in a quick, practiced move. “Like bloody sharks, they are! Hardly know when enough’s enough!”

One of the Marines was still alive, but losing blood from gashes at his hands, ankles and head. Lance Corporal Pendle knelt beside the fallen Marine, assessing his wounds. “Edwards? Can you talk?”

The Marine shook his head and one of his eyes rolled up.
 

The civilians all stood at the doorway to the shop as the woman who had called to them urged them inside. “They’ll be back!” she said in clipped English. “You must come inside!”

Pendle didn’t take his eyes off his fallen man. “Doctor! Can you spare a minute?”

Sinjin-Smythe trotted over, peering at the patient over Pendle’s shoulder.

“It doesn’t look too bad, Doctor.”

The virologist bent closer. “It’s not depth of the bites and scrapes. It’s what’s in them.”

The Lance Corporal sighed. “There’s nothing to be done, then?”

“You know there isn’t.”

“Can you learn anything from him?”

Before the virologist could answer, the Royal Marine’s eyes rolled back into focus and he began to try to get his feet under him. He did not growl. He hissed as if something about his breathing was damaged. It was probably a broken rib, but the man was undeterred. He needed to feed.

“Cameron?” Lance Corporal Pendle said. “A favor?”

Cameron had already lined up his shot. He hesitated only long enough to say, “Sorry, mate.”

Pendle scooped up Dysart’s rifle and fallen pack just as the zombies attacked again, this time in greater numbers.

A
MID
THE
BIRCHES
,
BETWEEN
THE
MEANINGS

J
aimie walked out of the tree line with his father. The boy had peed in the woods.

“You haven’t done that enough,” Theo said. “It’s a part of your education that has been sorely lacking. We urinated in the woods for millions of years. It’s really only lately that anything else has been an option. The last couple of hundred years, I mean.”

“You okay, Mom?” Anna called down the embankment.

“Finishing up crying and puking!” Jack was still on her knees. The gas can, almost full, sat before her. She held the end of the hose in her fist. Fuel dribbled out around her thumb. “I can’t clamp this forever. I need you to empty the gas into the van quick and then come back for more. Ask Mrs. Bendham to find another container to carry gas.”
 

We had plenty of gas cans but then Carron and his idiot looters blew up my beautiful home,
she thought.

Anna picked up the gas can. Jaimie walked down to the car and, before she could stop him, looked in the Hyundai’s windows.

He pinched his nose with one hand and made a face. “Liquefaction,” he said.
 

Her son’s lack of reaction to suffering — ‘flat affect’ psychologists called it —disturbed her. And yet, she envied him. “Numb is better than hysterical, I guess.”

“Agreed,” Anna said. “And I resolve to get lots of psychotherapy when the crap has stopped hitting the ceiling fan.”
 

It took the gas from three abandoned cars for her to fill the van’s tank. The cars must have travelled far before they’d been abandoned or their occupants stopped to die. Jack scrubbed her lips with her forearm, spitting gas droplets from her burning mouth.
 

At last, she had no tears. “Are you there, God? It’s me, Jacqueline. If you could do us a small miracle and make this gas taste like wine…well, You could at least do that.” She smiled a moment and then another tear ran down her cheek. She closed her eyes and took a deep, cleansing breath.

“I’m sorry, Theo,” Jack said. “We have to push on to Maine as fast as we can. I hope your brother is there waiting for us. I thought maybe we could go look for him in Chicago, but it’s too crazy out here. We can’t risk even trying to go into a city. The road wouldn’t let us if we tried.”
 

Theo shrugged and nodded, but it was Jaimie who spoke. It was the longest sentence they had ever heard him speak.
 

“We are not unsaved,” he said.
 

His parents smiled.

Later, as Jaimie slept, he heard the doctor with the strange name tell the nice Irish policeman about Wiggins.
 

As soon as the word Wiggins came to him, the dream shifted and Jaimie saw him. Wiggins fed on the neck of a man in uniform who wasn’t quite dead enough yet. Wiggins shook his head and was covered in pumping carotid arterial spray.

Jaimie told the dying man to let go of his pain. Then he whispered to the man who had been Wiggins. “They don’t understand what you are. They speak of Sutr-A. They call you an Alpha.”

But Wiggins didn’t fully understand, either. Jaimie did not speak for himself. He was a messenger for The Way of Things. The trees told him something very old had reawakened and only he could interpret the culling song that was the virus.

Later, at the edge of sleep in the van, Jaimie murmured to his father what he knew for certain about the white-eyed man from the Brickyard. “Ascendant.”

S
HARPENED
TEETH
AND
THIN
CLOWNS
SEETHING

I
n the battle for the Brickyard, Wiggins’
Sutr-A zombies first fought, not to kill, but to add to their ranks. The infection had raged through the camp and through the army’s ranks as one Alpha became two, then four, then eight. But it was the zombie children who saved the night for the Alphas.
 

The military would have won if they’d used the tanks, but Wiggins commanded the youngest of the infected to rush the military’s lines. Some had fired on the advancing wave of white-eyed children, but even the most hard-hearted had hesitated. The span of one pang of empathy and a heartbeat’s regret was enough hesitation to turn the battle.

Amid the chaos, the army first tried to save the children by containing the infected instead of exterminating them. When the children turned on their would-be saviors, the force with superior firepower lost heart. The Alphas had merciless numbers on their side.

Wiggins led the final charge, bringing down General Alphonse Emery himself. Knocking the general’s empty pistol aside, he screamed, “Teeth don’t need to reload!” He grabbed the general by the ears and ate his face.

Then the true feeding frenzy began.

In minutes, the wave built to its bloody crescendo. In hours, the new, Sutr-A army had risen from the defeated humans. Only those who ran away survived.

As dawn light crept into the Brickyard’s refugee camp, the first Alpha stood naked and victorious amid a field of corpses.
 

Wiggins was not Lieutenant Wiggins anymore, of course. He remembered what he had been and his past disgusted him. Some new power coursed through his veins. He felt stronger and sharper than he’d ever felt. Whatever he had contracted on the container ship was not a disease. Diseases didn’t make improvements. He understood now that he had a strain of the virus, but like all viruses, it had evolved. So had he. It was like a warm blanket wrapped his body. The blood lust and strength pulsed through him like a powerful drug with each heartbeat.