Zach Carter, Zombie Killer Read online

  “There’s a limit to the salvage operation, there,” Jimmy said.

  “Yes, contrary to what conventional wisdom, the most important personnel right now are anyone with petroleum mining and refining experience. But we have secured several facilities in California.”

  I was thinking. Mostly stewing, but it came to me. “You can’t fly around looking for what you’re looking for because the aircraft attracts Zeke.”

  “Yes. And going back to what I said before, Zeke seems to get really worked up when they see helicopters or aircraft of any kind. Think about it — are they more violent when you’re on foot or in a vehicle?”

  “You really are suggesting they have some sort of grudge against technology — or mankind’s highest expression of organized activity.”

  “Either that or their just savages that get agitated at loud noises.”

  “Could be both,” Jimmy said.

  “So you want something from us,” I said.

  “We are recruiting ground teams to investigate several areas of interest,” Breem said. “And news of Carter and his fellows actually filtered back to us.”

  “What are you offering?” I said.

  “We’ll put this compound under our high value asset category, meaning they can expect regular supply runs, communication and defense in case of massed attack, and information sharing. But mostly, a chance to be part of rebuilding the larger society.”

  Still stewing, I said. “You’re recruiting us because you don’t want to jeopardize your own shaky resources. If we succeed that’s great, if we fail, too bad too sad.”

  Now Rice was beaming like a recruiter who just gotten a sig on the bottom line — Welcome to the United States Army Son!

  Chapter 9

  “Can you believe these corny ass badges, right out of SG-1,” Jimmy said over the walkie.

  “I do believe I saw you walking a little more upright once you slipped into your BDUs,” Roy came back with.

  “Yeah, well, in case you hadn’t notice there’s no clothing factories running anymore, so we got new threads that’ll last us awhile,” I said. “Even if we are tagged with being part of the Zombie Expeditionary Detail.”

  “That spells ZED, in case you didn’t notice,” Jimmy said.

  “I did, and you know dickhead came up with that one,” Roy said.

  “Yeah, well, what are we going to do? At least we were able to negotiate some goodies for Peters and his crew,” I said.

  “And we all caught the veiled threat if we didn’t get all patriotic,” Jimmy said.

  “Uh-hunh. That they would use Peters as bait and draw out a couple thousand Zekes to the compound with their whirlybirds — and then leave ‘em hanging,” Roy said.

  “But seeing as how we did, Breem had his crew send out sorties into the city and drew out a couple hundred Zekes they mowed down in the streets,” I said.

  “And they did get those supply drops, and radio equipment tying them back into what’s left of civilization, and access to answer if they come up against stuff they can’t handle,” Jimmy said.

  “And don’t forget the ammunition,” Roy said. “Crossbows are great, but nothing’s as satisfying as pumping Zeke full of lead.”

  “So why are we so bitter,” I said.

  “Because we’re out here on our own again,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah, I’d like to see how that kid Rachel turns out,” Roy said.

  “There’s a good chance you will, buddy, all we have to do is stay alive. Besides, didn’t you see the way Peters took her right over?” I said.

  “Yep, funny how this plague may have turned out to be the best thing in the world for him,” Roy said.

  “It certainly helped him become the guy who’s capable of taking care of a whole lotta’ other people,” I said.

  “You know guys, I’m really glad we’re talking out all our angst here, but maybe we should get back to work,” Jimmy said.

  We had been on the road west out of Albuquerque for going on eleven hours, and were closing in on our destination. But since it was closing in on four in the afternoon we had already decided to bunk in for the night. We had to go inside a formerly secure facility and chances were Zeke was in residence, so we didn’t feel like fighting in close quarters, in the dark, after driving all day.

  Another thing we got in the Fed goodie bag — antipersonnel mines, with a quick tutorial on how to set up a tripwire perimeter.

  “Be careful to set ‘em higher than dog height,” Roy called out to Jimmy, who was busy setting wire between temporary posts around an old gas station. I was scanning the horizon for any shambling Zekes. The good part about the southwest was the long line of sight. We were far from any old town or city here on the Interstate, but Zeke had a habit of turning up when you least felt like dealing with him. I didn’t spot any movement, at least not on the ground. High overhead, I could hear an aircraft at the outside of my ability, which would have probably gone unnoticed back in the day when the world was full of machines running us all over the globe. Even with the mil-spec glasses Rice had gotten for me, I couldn’t make out any kind of markings on the plane, but it looked more like a private jet than anything the government would be using nowadays and that made me realize there was a dimension to human survival I hadn’t even considered.

  Raising Breem’s HQ on the shortwave unit they had also provided us with, I asked if they had anything flying over this section of the country at the moment.

  A grunt radio operator got back to me with a standard non-reply: “Government flight activity is non-disclosed information. Sir.”

  Sir. Everyone who’s spent any time around the military knew it was a non-standard, all-purpose acronym for ‘fuck off.’

  “Let Breem know we will be addressing our target in the morning,” I said, and ignored whatever cozy, I’m sitting in my radio shack nice and safe smartass response he may had had for me.

  At dinner, I told the others about what I’d seen.

  “Fuck all, you figure some billionaire holed up when he saw it was coming down, stocked himself up with like a little city’s worth of shit,” Jimmy said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Tough keeping all that staff alive, pilot, ground crew, mechanic,” Roy said.

  “Never mind the stewardesses,” Jimmy said. “And the chefs, maids, gardeners.”

  “Yeah, real tough. Must’ve broke his heart to treat them like human beings,” Roy said. “Probably had to let them sleep in the big house.”

  “What do you think, chief,” Jimmy said.

  “I’m betting that Breem is just as worried about some rich guy’s plans as he is about Zeke’s non-strategic strategy he’s got us looking after.”

  “Government hates competition,” Roy said.

  Chapter 10

  The first Zeke hit the first wire about three in the morning. We had long perfected the art of sleeping light, and rolled up, weapons drawn. No Zekes inside, all three of us hit the exterior of the gas station, to watch three other Zekes get blown apart by the waist-high, outward facing charges. Night vision goggles were useless, as they gave off no body heat, and thus didn’t day-glo green. But there was enough starlight out here, to see there weren’t dozens of shambling figures looking for a midnight convenience store snack.

  But there was one Zeke, standing alone, at what must have been another tripwire, because you could see a little glint coming off the posts that held it taut. He had stopped short, he might have even been pressing against the wire, but not enough to trigger the mine. I lit up his forehead with the red dot that means go. Jimmy and Roy both yelled over to me that they didn’t see any more Zekes moving around. I didn’t answer them on first call, keeping the laser steady on his forehead. And he kept standing there. Second call, I answered Jimmy, told him I had a Zeke lined up.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “He’s just standing there, against a tripwire.”

  “He stuck,” Jimmy said.

  “No,” I
said.

  And Zeke kept standing there, red dot on his forehead.

  “Is he thinking?” Roy said.

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” I said, the chill night air running through my t-shirt. “But I think he learned not to keep coming.”

  “What are you waiting for,” Jimmy repeated.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and pulled the trigger. The Zeke went down, twice as dead, the way they all do.

  After a brief powwow, we decided to restring the perimeter with fresh mines and get a couple more hours sleep before heading out on our first assignment.

  Over coffee, Jimmy said, “you sure you weren’t having a bad dream.”

  “No. He wasn’t about to ask to borrow a cup of sugar, but I think he saw how his hunting buddies bought the farm and he stopped short of getting his own head blown off.”

  “But he didn’t know what else to do,” Jimmy said.

  “Right. It was like the one great idea of his undead life,” I said.

  “But it acted out of a self-preservation instinct,” Roy said. “We’ve never seen that before.”

  “Yeah well, don’t worms avoid the petri dish full of bleach? That doesn’t mean they’re going for their driving test next week. It could just mean that some of them have some rudimentary reflexes left,” Jimmy said.

  “Or are rediscovering them,” Roy said.

  “Why don’t we go take a look at him and see if he was carrying a copy of ‘Avoiding Zombie Deathtraps for Dummies,’” Jimmy said.

  He was still there, and still twice-dead.

  “Looks kind of fresh. What are we, over a year and a half out, now?” Roy said.

  “Yeah, he doesn’t have the Zombie lifestyle written all over him, make the hard-core homeless look downright well-groomed,” Jimmy said.

  “Roy, you want to secure him,” I said, and he took a sharpened spade to Zeke’s neck, then kicked the head away.

  “I figure he’s only been turned a couple months, tops, if he was staying inside,” I said, turning out his pockets and pulling out a wallet, that I handed to Jimmy.

  “Charles Pendergast, Arizona DL, US Air Force ID card, couple CCs, couple buyer loyalty cards, couple family pics, the usual,” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah, but he’s also carrying this,” I said, after wedging out a personal GPS locator from inside the small coin pocket of his chinos.

  “Think maybe his wife didn’t want him going to titty bars,” Jimmy said.

  “No. I’m thinking someone’s tracking the migratory patterns of the undead,” Roy said.

  “I’m starting to think you were one of those government conspiracy dudes, Roy,” Jimmy said.

  “There are a whole lot of possibilities here, guys,” I said, “Let’s mull it over and discuss enroute.”

  I used the shortwave to contact Peters, on a different band than the official channel we used to talk to the government dweebs. “Be advised. We have spotted unknown aircraft, possibly privately controlled, and we have also encountered Zeke displaying possible intelligent behavior, over.”

  “Acknowledged.” It was Peters himself. “Now just so you don’t have to agonize about it, Petey already told me about the way he found Zoe. That makes two known incidents of Zeke being more than just a killing machine.”

  “Ralph, at the time I just didn’t think it would have been a good idea.”

  “And I know you left it up to Pete. He kept it to himself, but it was eating at him, and when we adopted Rachel, he thought it was too important to let it go.”

  “You adopted her?”

  “Easy to do make the rules when you’re in charge. ‘Sides, she’s everybody’s kid here, we’re still small enough to be a damned commune.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Nothing. I mean, it changes nothing, except as a reminder we gotta’ stay on our toes. Zeke was impossible to begin with, remember? Now if he picks up a couple skills along the way it just means the enemy is adapting, which means we’ll have to. It’s good intel, that’s all.”

  “But do you think it means there might be a cure?”

  “Absolutely not, there’s no making someone human again after going Zeke.”

  Chapter 11

  None of us felt like scrounging among the bits and pieces of shattered Zekes to see if any of them had tracking devices, so we packed up and set out on our field trip.

  “What do you think Breem really has us looking for?” Jimmy said over the radio.

  “He want us to piece together the vision he can dimly see,” Roy said.

  “Bottom line, we agreed to help because this isn’t going to be over until the last Zeke is down,” I said. “And we all know it, so stay alert, stay alive and let’s see what we find.”

  It wasn’t long before we pulled up to the military facility that wasn’t much of one when the world was turning. Now it looked like hubris crossed with folly, a toll plaza on the Ozymandias highway.

  SOP, we circled the fence that had always been an arbitrary line in the desert, in order to provoke any Zekes to perk up and give us open shots instead of having to take them on close quarters. Nothing, which was more cause for concern than if we had twenty semi-retired human beings on the attack. Out here in the Arizona desert, where would the dead make off to? Once they turned, Zeke wasn’t a big traveler.

  “Man, either they all got wiped out by a big bad Zombie hunter or they’re all hanging out in the shade,” Jimmy said.

  “Killing Zeke inside is like fighting in a bathroom stall,” Roy said.

  “They could all be alive,” I said.

  “And what? Off the air so that Breem doesn’t know any better?” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah, it’s willy, but we have to check it out, I said. “Why don’t we set up a wide tripwire perimeter so we don’t get boxed in,” I said as I drove up to what looked like the main building.

  “Copy that,” Roy said, and the two of them went to work as I entered the single story block structure.

  It had the abandoned feel of the exterior; when I threw a rock toward the back of the large room, the echo died as if there wasn’t any point. And no Zekes came to greet me.

  When the others joined up, we entered the small rear room that was also empty — except for the high-tech looking stainless steel elevator doors in front of us and the emergency staircase to the right.

  “Hello, Area 51,” Jimmy said.

  “Shit,” Roy said. “Breem didn’t tell you about this?”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s just get to it.”

  The stairs were empty. All five flights of them, all dark because the battery power had faded long ago, so it was like a space walk on the dark side of the moon, cold and dark and dead. Even stopping every flight and listening for sounds of a Zeke answering the dinner bell didn’t make us feel any better. Zeke may not be alive, but at least he moves with a purpose.

  At bottom, an electronic security door was propped open.

  “It’s like they wanted us to come in here and see what happened,” Roy said.

  “Let’s get it done,” Jimmy said.

  Even with headlamps and barrel-mounted flashlights, the dark barely gave way. But not so much that we couldn’t see what had happened to the staff of this place.

  “Headshots, every one of them,” Jimmy said as we swept past dozens of men and women, all in uniform, several with their own service pistols still clutched in their desiccated hands.

  We had split up by then, and were going room to room and cubicle by cubicle in what was obviously a highly guarded military science lab. We counted thirty six dead, with no Zekes in the bunch.

  Until we got to the quarantine room. There were still fourteen Zekes inside, behind Plexiglas walls that looked three or four inches thick. They had been standing around, doing nothing, the way livestock look in a barn in the early morning before the humans put them to work.

  In the split-second it took for them to register the human hands behind the flashlights, they all rushed the glass,
clawing at it, smearing their distorted masks full of dried blood against it, in an attempt to destroy what they used to be. They were all wearing the remnants of uniforms.

  “When we get to the point that Zeke activists talk about the inhumanity of keeping them in zoos, we’ll know the world is back to normal,” Jimmy said.