Death and Biker Gangs (3 page)

Doctors have an irritating habit of cloaking their actual diagnosis in a lot of confusing jargon. “You’re saying we’re all infected?”

“I’m saying we probably all have the pathogen. Maybe the immune system keeps it at bay until death or severe illness. There’s too much we still don’t know, and won’t be able to figure out until we have access to better labs. But yes, I think it’s transmitted by air. The bites likely exacerbate the situation, or host a more virulent form of the virus…” He favored us with one of the most depressed smiles I’d ever seen. “I hate it when things don’t play out like they do in the movies.”

Tony sighed. “Well, shit.”

“My sentiments exactly,” the doctor said, heading for the doorway. “Please, do
not
talk about this to anyone. Even the general; he needs to decide the next move. Either way, we’re going to have to drastically change the way we handle the bodies. That burial pit…”

“Burial pit?” I asked. That sounded all kinds of ominous.

“The military has been…well, we needed a place to put bodies. Those who had died of natural causes, you see. We couldn’t keep them here, not with the threat of cholera. There’s a pit about twelve miles east that used to be a pond before the drought…”

I refrained from burying my face in my hands. “I’m guessing we should rename it the reanimation pit?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “
Rock Weekly 
had you writing headlines, didn’t they? Well, I called it. Evil stardust will do us in.”

Doctor Samuels paused at the door. “Evil stardust?”

“Tony thinks evil stardust is the root of all our problems,” I said.

The doctor nodded thoughtfully. “That sounds about right.”

Ugh.
 If I’d thought Tony was a pain in the ass before, he’d be downright unbearable now.

Doctor Samuels left us alone with twice-dead Harrison. I briefly wondered if I was supposed to move him, or if we could safely leave him here for some peon to manage. “Well, this blows.”

The biker on the other side of the room moaned softly, and I whirled around, yanking my pistol out. Tony had to physically shove my hand down. “Easy, Annie Oakley. He’s just waking up.”

The patient opened his eyes and focused blearily on me, then dragged his hand across his face. “What the hell happened?”

“You’re in our medical facility,” I said. “I’m Vibeke. I stitched you up.”

“Stitched me up?” He still couldn’t really move, but his gaze darted around in alarm. “What happened to me? And why does my ass hurt?”

Oh, this was about to get awkward.

TWO

“Good morning, Midlands Cluster,” Gloria Fey murmured through my headphones two days later. “Sorry for the long silence, but we ran into some unpleasant sorts while looking for fuel. Looks like our local brigands have increased their territory…”

She might as well have renamed her program
Bad News with Gloria Fey.
No one knew how she continually pushed through her transmissions; with all the crap in the air, even the military installations had trouble hearing each other. 

But Gloria Fey, former entertainment reporter for the nightly news, had somehow gotten her hands on some high-end transmitting equipment, and seemingly overnight had transformed herself into the go-to girl for all of our daily post-apocalyptic goodness. Twice a day, every day, she told everyone with a working radio how bad things were, where to go for help, and other interesting (and often classified) findings compiled by her scouts. 

She did not, however, talk about people outside the blast radius reanimating. Apparently that was still a well-kept secret.

General Hammond ground his teeth every time someone mentioned her, but he seemed to put up with her existence. What else could he do? She was as much a link to better times as she was a harbinger of what might be a very dark future. And besides, she had a lot of intel on where the local troublemakers were hanging out, which made life easier for our scavenging groups.

Listening to Gloria had become a sort of morning ritual for me in the days and weeks after we arrived in Elderwood, and she filled me in on all the bad news in the world as I shimmied into my jeans, two layers of socks, and boots. “Those crazy brigands,” I muttered, looking around for my tank top and thermal shirt.

My tentmate, a former teacher named Augusta, grumbled and rolled away from me, pulling the blankets up over her head. I would have apologized, but we went through this every morning. 

Augusta and I got along pretty well. During our rare downtime, she taught me random self-defense moves and I tried to teach her how to shoot straight, but we usually worked opposite shifts. On a daily basis, I got up early and dressed quietly, but all efforts at being polite went out the window when Tony showed up to walk me to work.

She hadn’t tried to strangle me yet. I figured it was only a matter of time.

Gloria began rattling off the last known positions of local brigands. She’d been talking about them since I’d gotten to Elderwood, and it had taken me a few days to figure out she was using the new PC term for 
roving biker gangs
, which had become all the rage since the apocalypse hit. Gloria droned on while I rummaged around for my shirt under the bed. 
Where did I drop that thing?

“I’m heading out,” Tony announced, barging into my tent.

I screeched and snatched up a blanket, covering myself as much as I could manage. 

Augusta sat up with a gasp, fumbling around for the bat she kept near her cot. “What? What is it?”

“It’s just Tony.” I scowled at him over the blanket and yanked my headphones down around my neck. “What do you want?”

“Hastings stopped reporting. I’m going to see if they’re still around.” His gaze dropped to the blanket, and that old sardonic smirk found its way to his face. “Aren’t we past this?”

“In what universe are we past this?” Yeah, the dead walked and Facebook was a distant memory, but that didn’t mean Tony was getting a free show.

What did he say about Hastings? 
I stood up a little straighter. As far as I knew, Hastings was the only city that still talked to us. “Hastings stopped reporting?”

Augusta must have realized that sleeping in wasn’t on the agenda. She sat up with a groan, pushed her dreadlocks back from her face, and reached over to turn up our oil lamp. “Vibeke, tell your boyfriend to stop showing up before we’re dressed.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.” I’d at least managed to put on my bra before he came bursting inside, and I spotted my tank top stuffed halfway under my pillow. “Tony, can you turn your back or something so I can—”

“Goddammit, McKnight, what about 
covert ops 
don’t you understand?” General Isaac Hammond—who I felt could’ve been Denzel Washington’s stunt double in another life—strode into the tent like he owned the place, realized I was still partially undressed, and had the good grace to look abashed. “Oh, hell. I apologize, ladies.”

“To answer your question, Tony only has a passing familiarity with the word 
covert
,” I said, scowling at my one-time coworker. “Subtlety isn’t his thing.”

The general turned his own scowl on Tony, who seemed thoroughly unrepentant. “
Covert
 means 
quiet. 
It means you don’t go blabbing about your mission to everyone in sight.”

“I’m not telling everyone in sight. I’m telling my lady-friend. She’ll miss me if I’m gone. Right?”

I stared at him. “Can I put my shirt on now?”

The tent flap moved again, and Dax poked his head inside. “So were they naked?” he asked, looking about as wicked as he could manage—which, with his big blue eyes and mop of blond hair, wasn’t really wicked at all. Mischievous, maybe, but not wicked.

Boys will be boys, even after the world ends. I would have thrown something at him if it hadn’t required dropping the blanket. “Will you all fucking 
leave 
if I have a wardrobe malfunction?” I demanded. 

I realized the general was still standing there and felt my cheeks get red. “Sorry, General.”

General Hammond just buried his face in his hands.

I know how you feel, General, 
I thought. 
I had to freaking 
live 
with them in Astra. 

In my previous life, I’d been an associate editor and roving reporter for
Rock Weekly
, a struggling magazine that had not quite managed to make the transition to the Internet. I’d been interviewing Dax’s band, the Blood Nuts, after a late show when the meteors fell and turned downtown Astra into an inferno. We’d found Tony, an editor at the gun magazine upstairs, the next day, and holed up there while the world fell apart around us. 

Tony had guns—antique guns, but hell, they worked—so we all stuck together. I was still impressed we’d managed to survive each other, much less the endtimes. 

Augusta sighed and pulled the covers back over her head. “I really hate your friends, Vibeke.”

“They’re not my friends, they’re my freaky traveling companions. Did you bring the dog, too?” Dax had formally taken over the role of caring for Evie, since he rarely had to leave camp for anything. He took her with him when he made his rounds, and she was a hit with just about everyone.

I always wondered about Evie, though. Tony and I had stumbled across the small golden retriever in a parking lot while encountering our first undead, and she followed us back to the magazine offices. Where had she come from? What happened to her original owners? Was her cheerful nature just the way goldens were, or did her walnut-sized brain mean she didn’t feel pain the way humans did?

“Nah, I left her with the guard. I know Gussie’s allergic.” Dax smiled at the lump that represented my roommate. I figured Dax was a few years younger than Tony and myself; he hadn’t lost his youthful good nature yet.

It got obnoxious after a while.

“Aw, shucks, Dax, you’re all right. The rest of you can go to hell.” Augusta peeked out from under the covers. “Uh, not you, General. You’re all right, too.”

“I’m relieved,” he said dryly, returning his attention to Tony. “Is there anyone else you’d like to inform? The cooks, maybe, or the camp children? How about you set off a panic while you’re at it?”

Everyone seemed to have forgotten that I was standing there in only a bra and my jeans, so I decided to try forgetting about it, too. “What’s going on in Hastings?”

General Hammond sighed, then reached up to adjust his cap. I’m pretty sure explaining a covert operation to a medic, a guard, and a processor hadn’t ranked high on his to-do list for the morning. “The last report we had out of Hastings was that Los Angeles went completely dark. No response to hails.”

Dax forgot about being polite and came right into the tent. “What did you say about Los Angeles?”

Hammond pinched the bridge of his nose. “They took some bad hits, but they were hanging in there. Communications were sporadic already; now it’s generally believed the city is gone. The last thing we heard from the relay station was that hundreds of thousands of revenants converged on what remained of the survivors, and once that happened…”

Most of us could put the rest of the story together on our own.

“LA’s kind of a hellhole, anyway,” I said, shoving the blanket at Tony. “A few zombies might be an improvement. Hold this, will you?”

He obediently held it up, providing something of a shield while I picked up my shirt and pulled it over my head. I glanced up fast enough to catch him peeking over the top.

“Jesus,” Dax muttered, staring at the floor. I figured he was referring to LA falling, not Tony trying to get a look.

“
Anyway
.” The general relaxed slightly once I was fully dressed. “I sent out five hundred soldiers last night to deal with whatever’s happening at the pit. McKnight will stop by them on his way to Hastings to let them know about the radio silence.”

“I will?”

“It’s on your way.” Hammond seemed to be bracing himself for an argument. “Unless you’ve got a problem with it?”

“What about the roving biker gangs?” I blurted out. “Gloria Fey was just talking about them…”

Hammond let out a long-suffering sigh. “That woman…”

“Hey,” Augusta said, “Gloria keeps us informed.”

“Her information is often out of context and all she’s doing in some cases is stirring up panic,” Hammond snapped. He turned to me with what I recognized as his 
I’m Talking to Frightened Civilians 
expression. “To answer your question, Vibeke, the brigand we captured swears up and down there’s no alliance—just separate groups trying to carve out their territories. I think one man will do better than a platoon. It’s easier for him to hide.”  

“Yeah, but a platoon has a ton of machine guns,” I said.

The general’s mouth twitched up into a smile. “Your boy can take care of himself.”