War of the Undead (Day One): The Apocalypse Crusade (A Zombie Tale) (34 page)

Without the paper trail, or the hard drive, and without Deckard and the others pointing fingers her way, the prosecutors wouldn't have any reason to even suspect sweet, innocent Anna. She just had to think of a way to destroy all of it. "The zombies will eventually kill them," Anna mused, "only that would leave the evidence intact. But,” and here her eyes narrowed, “a fire would do it. A big fire would take care of everything."

She sat back picturing it and for a time the throbbing in her hand went unnoticed. Fires weren't as easy to set as most people supposed, especially in this modern day of glass and steel buildings. Yet, Anna knew, these buildings were built around a skeleton of wood. There would be plenty to burn, it was simply a matter of getting a fire going and sustaining it.

"If only I had access to the labs," she said, pursing her lips. The dark hid the fact that she was subconsciously striking one of her "poses." As a teenager she had experimented with how she looked under different hues of light and in diverse poses. She practiced those which drew the most attention from the boys--even at a young age she was well aware of the effect she had on members of the opposite sex.

There, in the dark, even with a smudge of grease marring the perfection of one cheek, and her hand mangled and bloody, she was striking. This did her little good, alone in an elevator shaft, however she wasn't a one trick pony. Her beauty was a blunt tool; her mind was a fine instrument, which few could match.

She set her mind to the problems of starting a fire. First she created a mental catalog of the fourth floor labs--for the most part the paraphernalia was of a bio-chemical nature and, although she could've started a fire with some of it, it wouldn't be big enough to burn down a house let alone an entire hospital, and yet there had been an explosion.

"Think, damn it," she hissed to herself. "How do I start a fire without gas or...holy shit!" She began to grin. "I have gas. The release of propane in an enclosed space would account for..."

A sudden string of gunshots jarred her out of her thoughts and brought her back to the present. It was the sound of Sergeant Foster and his men being ambushed. Like everyone else in the building she held her breath, listening, her full lips hanging open. Unlike everyone else she was rooting for the zombies—if the police won through, she’d be screwed.

When the firing stopped, she sighed in relief. Out of those left alive in the building, she was the only one not blinded by hope. For her it was clear that the rescue had failed. She could hear the screams of the troopers as they were eaten alive. It was a sound that shivered her, but instead of causing her to give up the plan of burning down the building, the screams cemented it.

Anna rationalized that death by fire was far preferable to death by zombie--she'd be doing Thuy a favor by burning down the building.

As Foster escaped, alone, out into the wet night, Anna began the task of finding a way down into the elevator car, without the use of her sight and with only one hand. She was delayed a half hour when Thuy opened the door on the fourth floor and set Stephanie, Chuck and Burke to keep some sort of vigil over Anna’s supposedly dead body.

It wasn’t much of a wake, and the three of them didn’t say much about her “passing” besides such sayings as
Good riddance
and
She was a bitch, anyway
. The words drifted down on Anna like hot, bitter ash, and when the three finally tired of their watch and shut the door, Anna went at the elevator hatch with even more eagerness than before.

There were two bolts holding the hatch in place. They were tight. Her fake nails snapped off one by one and then her real ones began to crack and peel back. Eventually, persistence paid off, the bolts gave way and the hatch swung down. A sharp, white light shot up, filling her with hope. The first thing she did was to inspect her aching hands: the right one was cut in a number of places and the nails were ugly, but otherwise unhurt in any lasting manner. The left wasn’t as well off. Her pinky finger was cut to the bone near the base. Above the laceration the finger was dislocated or broken and went off at an obscene angle as did the ring finger next to it. The pain made her nauseous and the blood...

She wasn’t one for blood. It was the reason she’d chosen the field of study she had. Because of the possibility of infection, the Com-cells being the most fearful in her mind, she had to glove the mangled hand. That meant she would have to straighten the fingers. Acting quickly before the fear of more pain could set in, she grabbed the two fingers, pulled them out and then up.

Bone grated on bone. It was like sawing glass with another piece of glass. A gasp, and then a small cry escaped her, as tears ran down her face. She balled her right hand into a fist and thumped it repeatedly against the metal rail that shot away upward.

The pain was a roar inside of her, muting the world beyond. She tried her best to cry in silence, but she’d been heard.

From below, a moan cut across her pain-filled mind. A zombie came up to the elevator doors and stood swaying slightly, looking in. Anna leaned back from the hatch for fear of being seen, however her morbid curiosity didn’t allow her to lean too far. There was a question on her mind:
Did she know this person?
The hospital wasn’t very large after all.

It had been a woman. The scrubs she wore narrowed it down to one of the medical staff. From her face it was impossible to tell who it had been since it was mostly eaten away; there was a lip hanging from her gaping mouth, but her nose was nothing but a ragged hole and the single eye she had left was black as the shadows in the elevator shaft. She still had most of her blond hair left on her head and since there were only three blondes on the med staff it narrowed it down somewhat.

Before Anna could figure it out, the zombie turned away. Another one took its place: from the blue work shirt and the belt at his hip, she knew it had been one of the construction workers. She was sure he’d deserved his fate. For the past week she hadn’t been able to walk ten feet without one of them making kissy noises at her ass, as if that would possibly turn her on in the least.

The construction worker zombie was shoved out of the way and another stuck his head into the elevator. “What the fuck?” it muttered. “What was that?”

At first Anna shrunk even further back, terrified. It was Von Braun and his evil reputation preceded him; he was the boogieman being whispered about on the fourth floor. With his ability to think apparently somewhat intact, he was the most dangerous zombie of them all and if Anna hadn't been in such a dreadful position she would've remained completely silent, however it wasn't a secret how much he hated Dr. Lee.

Maybe I can use that
, she mused. Injured as she was, she knew she needed help.

“Hey you,” she said in a low voice.

Von Braun spun and glared up at the hatch his black eyes searching, his nose snuffling. Her perfume was pronounced in his nostrils, however he did not connect it with a human scent. The perfume was too sweet. What made him hungry was deeper, mustier.

Beneath the perfume he caught a whiff of her. “You’re a girl,” he said. “I like girls. I like them soft. I like them pure.” His hunger came across unmistakably, almost sexual in its potency—this was something she understood.

“You can’t have me,” she said, in a sultry voice. “But you can have the others. I can get them for you."

His face squinched in puzzlement. “Who? Who can you get? The gook? The nigger? I’m so fucking hungry I could even eat a goddamned nigger!”

Anna didn’t know the term “gook”, she was too young to understand the racial slur, but she knew “nigger”. She found it extremely distasteful, but that didn’t stop her from using it as a tool. “You can have the nigger and all of them. I just need your help. It’ll be like a trade. See that key?” She pointed at the elevator control panel where a silver key sat in a slot.

He turned and squinted. “This?” He slid the key out and held it up to the hatch.

“Yes! Just drop it on the floor and then press the button with the three on it. The number three, do you understand?”

“No,” he said, truthfully. The gook and the nigger and all of
them
were on the fourth floor. Why did she want to go to three? He didn’t understand and that made him nervous. His Diazepam was running down. He could see the little bag pinned to his hospital gown; there wasn’t much left and he knew that when it was gone he’d turn dumb like the others. The thought scared him and nothing ever scared Von Braun.

“The three is right in front of you,” Anna insisted. “Just reach out your hand and I’ll direct you.”

“I know what a fucking three looks like you fucking whore, bitch, shit! I want something out of this.”

“What are you talking about? You’re getting plenty. You’re getting the nigger and the goot.”

“It’s
gook
, you dumb fuck!” Von Braun yelled in a rage. “Gook! Like slant or slope or fucking chink!”

Now Anna understood. “You mean Dr. Lee.”

“Yes, I want her, badly, but there is something I need. I have to be able to think. I can’t be like all of them.” He pointed out into the hall.

She peered down through the hatch trying to decipher his meaning. There were two things which set him apart from the other zombies: the fact he could speak and the IV bag that hung from his shoulder. It was almost empty.

“You need some more medicine, don’t you? What’s the name of it?”

“How the hell-fuck should I know?” he cried, his diseased spittle flying. “I can’t fucking remember. I just know it makes me normal.” He tried to smile to show how normal he was. It was hideous. Not ten minutes before he had torn the throat out of one of the Middleton deputies and now his mouth was an ugly hole filled with black spores and congealed blood.

Anna coughed and turned her chin. “Just…just hold up the IV bag so I can read it. Oh, Diazepam. That’s just Valium. Weird.” Why would Valium make him lucid? It certainly didn’t make him normal. He was far from normal. The scientist in her wanted to figure out the puzzle that Von Braun represented, however the criminal in her, who was on the verge of getting caught, wanted to please him long enough to escape.

“I can get you some more Diazepam,” she told him. “Just hit the three button.” He stretched out a hand and then paused. “Right in front of you," she said.

“No. It’s on two. I know that much. Who do you think you’re fucking with, whore-dick? Who do you think you’re trying to trick?”

“No one,” she said, thinking fast. “They have meds on both floors, but we can go to the second if that will make you happy.”

“Getting the fucking gook who did this to me will make me happy,” he replied.

“Ok sure. Hit the two and we’ll get you fixed up.” Now that the key was out of the control panel, Anna didn’t think that she needed Von Braun and figured she would ditch him as soon as possible. He hit the button. Anna cringed as an awful screech struck her ears. “What the hell?” she asked. The sound was grating. It made the hair stand up on her arms. And it was a second before she realized what it was: it was the sound of metal on metal, it was the knife she had stuck up under the counter weights. “Thuy was wrong,” she said with a smirk. “The knife didn’t stop anything.”

Thankfully, it was a short ride, only a single floor. “Go check to see if there are any zom...I mean anyone out there,” she said, as the chime sounded and the door slid open.

He stared out into the hall for nearly a minute, ignoring the doors that kept trying to close on him. He was having trouble counting the three zombies walking about; saying three and counting to three was not the same thing. “There’s, uh, some of them. I’ll get rid of those fucking retards.” He left, snarling curses at the other zombies.

“About time,” Anna said under her voice. Hurriedly, she slipped her feet through the hatch and dropped down into the elevator, making sure to clutch her injured hand to her chest while holding her good hand over the surgical mask to keep it from slipping.

“Move your ass!” Von Braun was screaming. “Come on, move it!”

Curious, Anna snuck a look down the hall and was surprised to see him herding three zombies before him. As docile as sheep they accepted his abuse. He slapped, punched, and kicked them to the north stair and then shoved them through the door.

“Wow,” she said. A minute before, she had been all set to leave him there but, after what she had just seen, she changed her mind, realizing that if she could control Von Braun, then in effect she could control all the zombies. That was power.

She stepped into the corridor and he immediately charged, forgetting everything at the sight of her perfect skin. “Stop!" she ordered. "Remember your medicine. Von Braun, remember I’m the only one who can keep you thinking straight. I’m the only one who can get you back to normal.”

This stopped him and for a few seconds he stood in confusion. “I am normal, damn it! I’m not like them.”

“And you can stay that way as long as you do what I say. Now, point to where the meds are and I’ll get them for you, but you have to stay put.” He pointed at an odd collection of sheets, blankets, and shower curtains hanging off the side of the hall. Anna went to it, walking on her tiptoes, ready to race away if Von Braun even so much as twitched in her direction.

He looked like he wanted to do much more than just twitch. His hands were opening and closing and he had begun to drool. “Stay,” she warned as if talking to a dog.