War of the Undead Day 5 Read online

  It was the whiff of her daddy she caught around every corner. She knew he had been there recently. It was why she hadn’t left yet to find clean blood, though her belly was begging for more. But she couldn’t stay there forever, and it seemed like half-past forever had come and gone while she waited on the stupid Chinaman to wake up.

  She decided, without being able to pinpoint a rational cause, that perhaps more pills would be the answer. She picked pills at random and began poking them into his mouth and down his throat. It became something of a game to the other kids and before long, they had filled his mouth with so many pills that Jaimee Lynn couldn’t even close his lips properly without some spilling onto the floor.

  “He gotta swaller them,” she explained to the others, and then “helped” him to swallow the pills by working his jaw up and down. The result was that the pills formed into a paste that had the consistency of spackle.

  “Hmm,” Jaimee Lynn said. The sound marked her attempt at thinking. It was slowly dawning on her that the spackle wasn’t going to go down on its own. “Wut I need is a stick.” Back in Arkansas, sticks had many uses and were the go-to tool of choice. You could write in the dirt with them, you could tie a string to them and fish, or you could whack a boy on the head with one if he got overly curious and tried to lift your church dress on a Sunday morning. Jaimee Lynn had done all those things.

  Now, she was going to add force-feeding a Chinaman some pills to the list. Since she didn’t want to go all the way outside, she used the hunk of bone she had been carrying around since dawn. Although she had sucked all the marrow out of it a while back, she had kept it, less as a souvenir and more as a sort of totem. This made sense as it was her father’s arm bone.

  She jabbed the pointy end of the bone down into Eng’s gullet as if she were trying to unclog a toilet.

  Unexpectedly, to her at least, he vomited up a ghastly combination of black bile and the mash of pills. Although Jaimee Lynn received a healthy spray, she wasn’t all that put out. After all, she had crawled through sewers and had slithered through rivers of blood, and she had spent part of a night curled up in the disemboweled body of a woman a few nights before.

  Eng started snoring, which gave her an idea. She tapped his forehead with the bone. “Y’all know wut he need? He need coffee. My daidy always drunk up coffee to wake hisself up.” She sent her pack out in search of coffee. Some were clueless and mindlessly followed around after Jaimee Lynn. Some forgot what they were looking for within a minute and came back to her with familiar objects: a busted lamp, a shoe, half a mug.

  “Close,” Jaimee Lynn said of the mug. “But coffee is like all black ’n all. Y’all drink it.”

  The little boy came back with the same mug dripping partially congealed zombie blood.

  Jaimee Lynn eventually found part of a coffee pot and when she hunted around in the debris beneath it, she discovered more mugs and a bag of actual coffee beans. The smell was right, but the look of the whole beans was off. Her daidy had used some sort of powder.

  “Like chocolate milk powder, only nasty,” she muttered. Nasty or not, the smell of the beans held a certain nostalgic mastery over Jaimee Lynn and she breathed them in for a minute before deciding to use them regardless of their lack of powdery-ness. “We’ll just pop them in his mouth.”

  This time she went about the operation of force-feeding Eng with more circumspection. Not only did she sit him up, she only put the beans in one at a time, poking them deep and working his jaw and neck around until the beans disappeared one after another.

  Some went into his lungs, which was a given. These he coughed out and Jaimee Lynn had a number dangling in her hair before she decided enough had gone down the right pipe to make things happen. She and her pack watched him, waiting for him to do something besides snore.

  “Me hun-gee,” one of them said.

  “Me too,” Jaimee Lynn said, crossly. She was just about sick of the Chinaman and could barely remember why she wanted him around in the first place. Standing, she went to put the bag of beans in her pocket when she realized that she was naked. “Who stoled my undies? And my britches!”

  The obvious villain was the Chinaman and in a fit of rage, she stabbed him with the bone. It kicked off a rib and got stuck in some cartilage. When she yanked it out, the Chinaman unexpectedly opened his eyes. They were black with driblets of what looked like ink leaking from the corners.

  “Guan ta ne…” He paused, worked his tongue around in his mouth and then spat out beans and bits of pills. “What the hell?” he repeated, this time in English.

  “The hell is,” Jaimee Lynn said pointing the bone at him, “Y’all made us a promise and we’s all hungry.” She could not remember the promise, though she was pretty sure it had to do with food. Her pack agreed, at least those who could follow the short conversation; they nodded solemnly and gripped their bellies, which were shrunken and sad.

  “Oh, we’ll eat,” Eng said, feeling both famished and revolted as he imagined hot red blood dripping down his chin. “First, I need more pills.” Already his head was aching worse than any hangover he’d ever had. It put him in an ugly mood and he cursed the children and shoved them out of the way as he went about scraping up the fallen pills. He filled his pockets and, as he’d been given baggy ACUs to wear, he had a lot of pockets.

  Once he was ready, he barged past Jaimee Lynn and looked out over the crater that made up most of the interior of the building. “I need a gun,” he muttered.

  “I knowd where one is,” Jaimee Lynn piped up. “That mean man what always hung around with Dr. Lee had one.” Eng followed her to the mound of corpses Deckard had made during his final stand. The assault rifle, dripping blood and gore, was found cast off to the side by one of the pack. The boy carried it in two hands like it was an axe.

  Its bolt was back and the magazine was empty. Eng glared. “What is this? Huh? I need one with fucking bullets! She will have bullets,” he said, meaning Thuy. Picturing her sent a shock of rage through him and he cursed the gun and flung it away.

  His fury washed right over Jaimee Lynn without affecting her in the least. “The army man had one.” Her stomach rumbled as she remembered how he had fought to get at the M4 he had set aside. He’d had half a dozen little zombies crawling all over him, scratching and biting, all for nothing. Like some sort of malicious turtle, he’d been encased in metal that broke their teeth. And his heavy coat defied their claws.

  Only when he stretched out for that gun was he vulnerable; his neck exposed. Jaimee Lynn had burrowed in on it and had struck the finest vein of blood imaginable.

  “What army man?” Eng demanded.

  “It’s too late,” Jaimee Lynn answered, sadly. “He’s all ated up. There’s nothin’ left.”

  Eng realized that he was disappointed by this. He shook his head, trying not to think about the blood wasted on the little parasites. “Just show me where the gun is.” Jaimee Lynn led the way to the helicopter that Eng had departed from hours before.

  “Can y’all fly this here thing, Mister Chinaman?”

  He wasn’t listening. His mind was far away. Now that he had a gun and the pack of demons, he and Dr. Lee were on a level playing field, and he would force her to cure him or he vowed he would suck every ounce of blood right out of her. This time the idea of drinking human blood wasn’t revolting in the least. It was wonderful.

  2-10:41 a.m.

  Springfield, Illinois

  Standing at the top of the capital steps, behind a bulletproof podium, the governor spoke for an hour and twenty-eight minutes, most of it self-congratulatory pap that no one listened to. The only thing anyone really cared about came near the end of the speech. Two simple lines out of hundreds: “We are a nation that prides itself on its openness, from our speech to our borders. And just as we can’t turn our back on immigrants seeking a better life, we can’t turn our backs on our own refugees.”

  He went on for some time after that, sounding to the gathered press very much lik
e a man running for higher office.

  During the wrap-up and the handshaking that went on after, the lieutenant governor was asked whether she fully supported the governor. “Unequivocally,” was her answer.

  The same question was put to Major General Josh Lloyd, the Adjutant General of Illinois, the state’s ranking officer. “One moment please,” he told the reporter. He’d always liked a direct approach and frequently a visual was far more compelling than a simple yes or no.

  With unhurried steps he walked over to the Governor, drew his Beretta, and shot the man in the back of the head. One leg kicked out as his body spazzed and he dropped onto his face, where someone earlier had spat something ugly up from the bottom of their lungs.

  The crowd, which wasn’t large and consisted of more reporters than constituents, let out a unified, but rather muted shriek and yet, they didn’t take so much as a step back. They acted as if they were watching live theater rather than a coup attempt. No one so much as blinked as the general pivoted to his right, setting his gun sites on the lieutenant governor.

  His hand was rock steady, as was his conviction that by ending two lives, he was saving millions. He fired before she could begin to beg. The bullet smashed through her breastbone and turned her heart inside out. She fell into her husband’s arms, blood splashing on his grey Armani suit. She had picked it out for him that morning, telling him that it made him look “tough.”

  With his paunch a growing concern and twenty-two years since he had been in anything resembling a fight, he hadn’t felt tough in years. Now, he felt rage. He laid his wife down and was about to get to his feet and charge the general, who was had holstered his piece and was turning toward the microphone.

  “Don’t do it, Earl.” A strong hand came down on his shoulder. It was Illinois state trooper Morris Robinson—he was “their” state trooper. He was the man whose job it was to protect them whenever they were out in public like this. The trooper carried a Glock 22; it sat in its holster, his hand nowhere near it. None of the police were going for their guns.

  “But…but…he just killed her.”

  Trooper Robinson nodded sadly, his dark face looking darker in his grief. He had really liked the lieutenant governor and he had personally voted for the governor on three separate occasions. Unfortunately, things had progressed beyond both politics and politicians.

  Leaders were needed. It had taken some convincing for Morris Robinson to see that and it had taken two huge tumblers of Crown for him to walk up the capitol steps with the lieutenant governor, knowing what was going to happen. “She had been warned,” he told her husband. The warning had been vague in its details to be sure, and yet the meaning was clear: Do not stand with the governor on open borders.

  Now Morris had to give the same sort warning to Earl. “Stay here and mourn your wife. Things will end badly for you if you don’t.”

  “Badly!” Earl cried, loud enough to make General Lloyd pause just as he was about to speak. “Badly? How can it end any worse?” Morris answered by fixing him with a steady cold as ice gaze. “So, they’ll kill me?” he demanded, his voice both incredulous and furious.

  “Yes.”

  “Let them try!” He staggered to his feet and began marching towards General Lloyd, passing right in front of John Stack, the Director of the State Police. John was carrying his sidearm for the first time in four years. He shot Earl in the back three times and had to fight the urge to turn the gun on himself.

  General Lloyd sighed into the microphone. Cleared his throat twice, before starting. “I was going to begin my remarks by calling this a sad day. And it is, but more than that, this is a necessary day that will be filled with difficult but very necessary choices. It was impressed upon both the governor and the lieutenant governor the absolute need to close our border for the safety of our citizens. They were given clear evidence that the disease had made its way into Indiana and yet both chose, at the behest of the President, to ignore the evidence presented.”

  He turned and waved a hand at the bullet-ridden bodies. “This is a direct result of going against the will of the people. We must do everything in our power to prevent the disease from crossing our borders. To that end, we will not simply protect an imaginary line on a map. I have authorized the Illinois National Guard to advance to the Wabash River and to secure it all the way north to Attica.”

  “Attica?” a reporter called out. “That’s in Indiana and so is the Wabash.”

  “It’s a few miles into Indiana,” Lloyd conceded. “The Wabash is the best natural boundary in the east.”

  Another reporter yelled out, “So you’re saying we’re invading Indiana? After what happened in Massachusetts, wouldn’t you call that horribly irresponsible?”

  Lloyd thought of the irony of the question as he stood within feet of an assassinated governor. He almost laughed and would have if he wasn’t sick to his stomach. “The situation is not the same. Almost all of their forces are either guarding their eastern frontier or trying to move east to shore up the Quarantine Zone. A state of warfare is not imminent.”

  “You say they are moving east. Isn’t it true that the Illinois National Guard was federalized two days ago? And isn’t it true that the President ordered the 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team east as well?”

  That was painfully true. “Yes, and we were in the process of transferring units east when we were made aware of the situation developing in Indiana. It made no sense to attempt to enforce one quarantine zone when we had one developing further west.”

  “What is the situation in Indiana?” someone cried out, the strident fear in their voice like an untuned violin.

  3-10:56 a.m.

  Elnora, Indiana

  By all that was right and holy, Lancaster Holmes should have been dead. He had stopped breathing nearly three hours before. Blood had filled the pleural space between his left lung and the chest wall, eventually cutting off the airflow to his right lung. He stopped breathing and Sheriff Nicolas Read had assumed that he had died.

  The Sheriff had reported Lancaster’s death as well as that of the black-eyed old lady, and then, during his and Emerald’s long wait, he had wrapped himself in guilt.

  The guilt turned quickly to fear when he heard a sudden soggy hiss from the front of the diner. Read’s grandfather had been a smoker all his life and on his deathbed, he had made that same sort of ugly, phlegmy sound. In this case, it was something like a death-rattle, but in reverse.

  “Did you hear that?” Emerald asked, her great bosom heaving, her large dark eyes wide circles.

  “Yep,” Read answered, giving thought to his gun for the first time since he had fired it. He hadn’t changed out the magazine and decided it was well past time he did.

  As he was reaching for his holster, Emerald grabbed his arm. “We have to get out of here! I-I know what you said, but we’re fine. Look at me. Do I look like a fuckin’ zombie to you? Huh? Do I?”

  “It’s too late. You know that.” There was no way they could leave now. All of Elnora was surrounded by elements of the 219th Battlefield Surveillance Brigade. These were not hardened veterans by any measure, but they had a lot of guns and were more than willing to use them. The diner, which sat on the edge of town, was something of a bubble within a bubble.

  It had been taped off by the first state police units to arrive. Then, an hour later, the tape had been upgraded to barbed wire. Thirty minutes after men and women from the Indiana State Department of Health showed up wearing blue plastic suits and carrying drawn handguns.

  “Do not attempt to leave the facility,” one of them said, borrowing a nervous trooper’s radio.

  “It’s a diner, not a facility,” Read answered in a tired drawl. “We don’t plan on leaving. Not yet. But it makes sense to move us, unless you want us to get infected.”

  “Which we do not. We are trying to set up an advanced quarantine staging area, but it may take some time. Just sit still and don’t do anything stupid.”

  The threat h
ad come across loud and clear, at least to Read. Emerald seemed to have forgotten it. “They’ll shoot you if you try to leave,” he whispered to her. She was starting to hyperventilate, and a certain madness had crept into her eyes. “Our best bet is to keep still and quiet. If that guy I shot is one of them, he’ll probably see all the commotion and head outside.”

  “Just be quiet? That’s…that’s it?”

  In her mind, that’s all they had been doing since they’d foolishly locked themselves inside the diner. Read had duct-taped the cracks around the swinging doors that led from the front of house to the kitchens. Next, he had turned off the ventilation system to keep the air from mixing. As an added guard against the disease, they had cut swathes of cloth from the cleaner aprons and wore them like masks, when they were not eating, that is.

  Other than worrying, there wasn’t much to do besides eat. They had found themselves famished and they ate until they were bursting. When they couldn’t find even a sliver of room left in their bellies, they poked around in their section of the diner, neither knowing what they were looking for exactly. Emerald discovered a battered old deck of cards in the manager’s desk, but they couldn’t concentrate long enough to finish a game of Go-fish.

  All they could do was fret and when they weren’t feeling phantom signs of becoming a zombie, they were seeing the symptoms in each other.

  The re-awakening of Lancaster Holmes changed all that. A horrible wheeze came seconds after that first soggy breath and Read began to picture Lancaster as a bearded zombie with grey skin and mindless black eyes.

  “Fuuuuck,” Lancaster said in a long groan, proving he wasn’t nearly as mindless as Read had assumed. He then hawked up something black, half the size of a rat, and spat it on the floor. “What the fuck is that? And what’s with the fucking light?” He seemed to be getting louder and stronger with each breath. As he did, Emerald seemed to shrink, growing more and more clingy until finally, Read had to shake her off of him.