Death and Biker Gangs (4 page)

“That I can.” Tony attempted to slide an arm around me, which I artfully dodged. “Your concern is touching, Vibby dearest.”

Augusta’s hand snaked out, tapped along the storage unit that served as a bedstand, and picked up her wristwatch. She squinted at it in the glow of the lamp, sighed, and put it back down. “I might as well get up. I’m on duty in an hour.”

“You’ve been reassigned,” the general said. “Everyone has. I need you at the west gate—we’ve got company.”

My head snapped up. “What’s at the west gate?’

“Leprechauns,” Tony said. “What the hell do you think?”

I glanced over at my cot. The muzzle of the antique assault rifle I’d adopted poked out from underneath, and the sight of it reassured me slightly. Tony and Hammond had seen to it that I practiced with it, and I’d developed into a halfway decent shot. “Should I go?”

“No,” Hammond said firmly. “We had some newbs come in late last night—the revenants were probably following them—and they need treatment. You go in to work, just like always.” The general tried for a reassuring smile, but he just looked pained. Then again, most authority figures tended to get that expression when Tony was around; my former editor had worn it quite often. “It’s just an influx. We’ll pick them off within the hour.”

I didn’t like the idea of stitching up zombie bites while actual zombies were banging at the damn door, but the general hadn’t led us wrong in the few weeks we’d been at Elderwood. “Okay,” I said, reaching for my pistol holster and the motorcycle jacket I’d picked up in Astra. “I’ll head up there.”

“Dax’ll walk you back while I’m gone,” Tony said. “Won’t you, Dax?”

Dax was still staring at the tent floor.

Tony gave him a shove. “Dax!”

Dax jumped about a foot in the air, then looked in my direction with bleary, suddenly bloodshot eyes. “Yeah, I’ll walk you home. Six o’clock?”

I nodded. “Sounds great.” 

I didn’t comment on his eyes. Mine often started watering in the bad air, too. 

Nobody moved.

Augusta sighed. “I feel like I’m back in the damn dorms. Will y’all get the hell out of my tent?”

I zipped up my jacket once I got outside, but it didn’t do much good against the bitter cold of our early, possibly permanent winter. The meteors kicked up one hell of a cloud cover, and no one in the immediate vicinity had seen the sun since the universe turned Earth into a pincushion. I turned to say goodbye to Dax, but he’d already shuffled off toward Sector Twelve, where single male civilians over age eighteen lived.

“What’s his problem?” I asked, staring after him. Dax usually had a smile for everyone. It was generally refreshing…until it wasn’t.

“He’s probably grieving for the good people of Los Angeles.” Tony held out his arms and flapped them around a bit. “So do I get a hug or anything?”

I wrapped my arms around him. To his credit, he didn’t try to cop a feel. “Be careful out there,” I muttered into his jacket. “Hammond’s been bitching about those brigands for weeks.”

“I don’t fear biker gangs. Biker gangs fear 
me
.” He sent me his best ladykiller smile, then sauntered after Hammond.

The man was either a legend in his own mind, or was damn good at acting like it. 
Oh, Tony. Please stay safe. 

I turned around and headed to work. At least up at the medical center I could charge my phone—my useless phone, which still couldn’t find a network after all this time—and make a decent pot of coffee.

It’s weird, the things that stay the same after everything else has gone to hell. I still wanted my morning jolt of caffeine, even at the end of the world. As long as Elderwood had coffee supplies and working generators, I had my cup. It was almost normal…if I could forget, just for an instant, where I was and what had happened.

I plugged in my phone as the coffeemaker percolated softly in the background. I dialed my parents’ home number, just as I did every morning, on the off chance that the stars would align and something would go right for me.

No service, 
the phone said. It probably didn’t even search for a network anymore. If any towers were still standing, there likely wasn’t any electricity left to power them.

But I still tried every morning. When it didn’t work, I shoved thoughts of family and friends into a dark corner of my mind. It was the only way I could function.

I left the phone on while it charged, just in case.

I never spent a lot of time planning for the apocalypse. I figured if it happened, I’d be toast, and thus didn’t see a reason to learn how to fight the undead or negotiate with the military or ration food supplies. I’d faced a bitch of a daily commute for my job at 
Rock Weekly
, and worried about things like gas prices going up, my insurance policy, and whether the Kardashians would finally just go away.

In one night, all those problems became very small.

I kind of hoped the Kardashians were still kicking.

***

If I’ve learned anything since the end of the world, it’s that things can always get worse.

It doesn’t matter if you’re on a converted military base surrounded by soldiers with big guns. Something will inevitably go wrong while you’re trying to suture a squirming moron’s wounds—which is really, really awkward when you only received a crash course in suturing, anyway—and he will 
not 
shut up, and right when you’re about to whack him with a sedative to get some peace, a zombie will come crashing in and everything will go to shit.

The patient screeched and threw himself under the bed, leaving me standing there with a needle full of sedative and a growling, festering undead soldier leering at me.

No, sedatives don’t work on the undead. We tried that early on.

“Kill it!” the patient whined.

Maybe this is why things went to hell in a handbasket—everyone expected someone else to do the dirty work. I held the needle up in as menacing a fashion as I could manage. Maybe if I jammed it through her eye…no, that meant I’d have to get too close to her. I chanced a glance to the left, where I’d tucked my pistol next to my portable kit.

“
Kill it!
”

“Please remain calm.” I sounded like the GPS system on my phone. 
Turn left to avoid the undead. Rerouting. 
“Noise attracts them. Just shut up and stay still.”

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…”

I’ve often wondered what God thinks of all this. I like to believe He didn’t have anything to do with the meteor shower and ensuing zombie bonanza. It’s just such an asshat move to pull on your supposedly beloved creations.

A scream ripped through the hallway. I hoped that meant someone had seen Private Undead.

She snarled at me, or tried to; only one side of her face worked. The other half had been thoroughly gnawed on, though her blood had long since congealed into a black blob on her cheek and most of her neck. One revenant had probably knocked her down in a fight, and its compatriots had quickly descended on her. 

I figured she’d been dead about five days. Her boots hung in tatters around her feet, indicating she’d made quite a journey to be here. 

Machine gun fire echoed dimly from another portion of the building. 
Ah, shit. 
That meant there were more of them.

There’s always more. Zombies like to congregate.

The dead soldier stretched her hands out for me and took a lurching step forward. I dove for my gun, knocking my little suturing tray out of the way in the process. It clattered to the ground, and the ghoul briefly switched her stare to all the shiny instruments scattered across the tiled floor.

I slammed the syringe down on the counter and picked up my pistol, managing to thumb the safety off on the second try.

“Shit!” the patient squeaked.

Private Undead heard the higher tone and started in his direction. The patient squeaked again and burrowed deeper under the bed, whimpering prayers and curses and all manner of other things I couldn’t identify. Private Undead decided he looked juicier than me and headed for him with alarming speed.

I squeezed the trigger as she dropped to her knees, and my shot bounced off the wall. The patient screamed and slapped at her stretching hands, and I had to line her back up in a hurry. “Get down!” I barked. The patient mustered his senses enough to curl into the fetal position. 

Dammit, she’s a fast one. 
The undead aren’t particularly renowned for their speed, but every now and then an agile one turns up to throw a wrench into things.

“
Shoot her!
” the patient screeched.

“Chill 
out!
” I got her in the head while she stretched for the wounded man, and he screamed 
again 
when she tumbled forward, landing right next to him. I checked the doorway to make sure others weren’t following, then hurried over to help him out from under the bed. “You can’t just freak out like that, it helps them 
find you
,” I scolded, checking him for bites. The few sutures I’d managed to put in had torn out during his dive under the bed. “And you wrecked my stitches!”

“There was a fucking zombie in here!”

“Do you have 
any idea 
how hard it is to put in a decent stitch?” I hastily wrapped his arm in gauze. “You can’t 
freak 
when you see the undead. They’re usually pretty slow—”

“
That wasn’t slow!
”

“—so if you freeze up, there’s no excuse!” I picked up my phone from the counter and jammed it into a pocket.

“What are you doing? I thought I needed stitches—”

“And I need to see why we’ve got revenants running around the medical center.”

“You can’t 
leave me 
here!”

I grabbed the doorknob. “Just lock the door. You’ll be fine.”

The patient stared at me, his mouth open in a perfect 
O 
of terror. “But what about 
her
?”

“She’ll stay down this time.” I stepped into the corridor, slamming the door behind me. If the dude was smart, he’d lock the door and stay quiet until the threat passed.

Unfortunately, 
smart 
and 
zombie apocalypse 
are not usually terms that go together. For every person that figures out how to shoot straight and keep their wits about them, there’s thirty more that melt down into a screaming panic. Tony was right; something about the undead just makes people stupid.

Bullets ricocheted a few doors down. I grabbed a passing nurse in blood-splattered scrubs. “How did they get in?”

“They opened the fucking back door.”

I stepped back, aghast. “
What? 
How could they even do that?”

She shook off my hand. “Don’t know, don’t care. Someone says they’re coming from the burial pit.”

The nurse ran off, leaving me standing there with my pistol. We had ghouls coming through the 
back door
? The medical staff went largely unarmed. Hell, only about five percent of the non-military Elderwood population packed any heat. Most of the civilians had showed up immediately after the meteor shower, when the government first stepped in. General Hammond had offered lessons in firearms, but they went largely ignored. Joe Shmoe off the street isn’t really equipped to deal with the end of civilization as we know it, much less rotting cannibals.

I headed for the back entrance. By the smell of things, there were zombies who needed my bullets in their skulls.

I swung around the corner and nearly plowed into a lean figure in a dusty leather jacket. A pistol muzzle pushed up against my jawline, then abruptly snapped aside.

Tony shook his head at me. “Wrong way, Vibby.”

I would have hugged him if there hadn’t been at least a dozen ghouls shambling along some forty feet behind him, with more spilling in through the back door. My mouth dropped open a little bit. “Holy fucking—”

“Shit’s hit the fan.” Tony grasped my upper arm and started dragging me back the way I’d come.

“Close the door!”

“Good idea. You want to fight your way through them to try it?” He gave me a jerk. “I don’t care how good your aim has gotten, you don’t have enough bullets in that pistol for all of them, and more are stacking up outside. And goddammit, I 
told 
you to check corners.”

“I thought you left for Hastings!” I stumbled along behind him, glancing over my shoulder at the rampaging dead things in the background. They were in the camp. They’d gotten into the 
camp.

“Shit got way out of hand at the pit. I came back here to warn Hammond, but he already had a situation.”