Generation Dead Book 2: What You Fear (3 page)

“Lead on, old son
,” I said, gripping my weapons.  I was actually looking forward to some kind of activity.  My blood was up and it wasn’t going to go well for any undead I might encounter in the near future.

Jake led me to the back bedroom, and there was a woman lying on her side.  Her labored breathing filled the air with a promise of death, and I had to keep from slamming my tomahawk down on her temple that instant.

“Look by her collarbone,” Jake said.

I leaned over, careful not to disturb her in any way.  I looked her up and down, and didn’t see anything unusual on the first pass.  On the second, however, I saw what Jake wanted me to see.  At the base of her neck, there was a circle of veins, black in color and fanning away from a central dot in an almost lazy pattern.  I wasn’t fooled.  We’d seen enough infected flesh in our lives that we were almost immune to it.  This woman hadn’t been bitten.  She had been deliberately infected with the virus.

I turned back to Jake and stepped aside as his mace descended down.  It finished off the woman with a heavy crunch, and then Jake stepped to the side.

“Any ideas?” 
He asked.

“Well, the what is
that she was infected, and the how is through a needle in her neck.  The big questions are the who and the why,” I said, looking out the bedroom window.

“Exactly.  This wasn’t a random outbreak, and it sure wasn’t anyone messing around with one of the old zombies that got careless
,”  Jake said.

“Well, what can we do…hang on.”  I stared intently, wishing like crazy it
was light out.  I thought I saw movement across the road, and I was hoping to have a clear vision of what it was.

As I stared out the window, I saw a subdivision across the street buried in darkness.  The trees were very grown over there, blocking out any moonlight that might have made it to the ground, and since it was overcast, the darkness was almost tangible.

“There!” I jabbed a finger at the glass, and showed Jake what I had thought I had seen earlier.  A man was leaving a home, jogging quickly across the street.  He didn’t look our way once, which was probably a good thing since we should have attracted attention with all of the castaways we had rounded up.

The man stopped at a home and squatted down by the front door.  From our vantage point, we could see him working the door quickly and quietly.  By his feet there looked to be a bag, but it was too hard to tell in the darkness what it really looked like.

In a few minutes, he had managed to open the door on the house and slipped quietly inside.

“Come on!” Jake said, turning and running for the open door.

I was right on his heels and stopped only briefly to tell Julia to head for the rest of the community and drop off the kids.  I told her not to tell them what had happened until we could get this thing settled down.  In the back of my mind, I was thinking about the rest the zombies we hadn’t accounted for.

Jake was down the street and approaching the house when I showed up on the sidewalk.  Jake was crouched low, swinging wide and coming up around the garage side of the house, trying to stay out of sight of the windows.  I went over to the house the man had exited, walking through the open front door.  This subdivision was larger than the other one and I found myself inside a
split-level home.  I checked the downstairs quickly and headed for the upstairs bedrooms.  I was hoping whoever lived here didn’t have any children.

A glance into the nearest rooms revealed a library and a workout room, so I reasoned whoever was in here probably didn’t have kids.  The last bedroom door was ajar and I made my way slowly, keeping my
Ka-Bar knife out in front of me, my tomahawk held back and ready.

Pushing the door open slowly, I eased into the room.  I was expecting to see another couple lying on the bed, quickly succumbing to the injected virus.  What I got, however, was a naked woman lying on her stomach, her head buried under a couple of pillows.  I flicked on my light, and she lit up
as if she was infected, so that was that.  As I approached to finish her off, I noticed a blemish on her left buttock.  I shook my head as I figured out that whoever had broken in here, they had found a woman who slept in the nude, and injected her through her butt cheek.  The humor of it escaped me as I pulled the pillows away to expose the back of her head.  A quick punch with the knife and I was out the door again.

When I reached the front door, I heard a lot of grunts and sounds
as if someone was hitting a bag of sand.  I stepped outside and found Jake engaged in a serious fight with a man who clearly didn’t want anyone to have found out what he was doing.

Chapter 5

Jake and the man circled each other, and I could see the man had some kind of training.  He held his hands open, about level with his face.  He kept his eyes on Jake, and I could make out a dark line by the corner of his mouth.  It looked like Jake had scored at least one hit. 

The man’s eyes flicked over to me, and Jake took advantage of the opportunity to lash out with his left hand, striking the man’s right forearm and knocking it into his face.  The bigger distraction allowed Jake to step forward and land a blow to the man’s midsection, eliciting a grunt and a roundhouse that missed by a mile. 

The man jumped forward suddenly, shoving a right jab towards Jake’s face.  Jake slipped the punch and uppercut the man’s arm, pushing it up and opening a chance to strike at the man’s exposed ribs, which Jake did with a crack
that I heard from across the street.

The man backed away, holding his side and staring hot murder at Jake, who stepped away from the clumsy punch that missed by a yard.  Jake
tried another punch at the man’s head, but got his fist blocked and a return jab turned Jake’s head an inch.  The older man grinned and tried a duo of jabs, but Jake slapped them away and landed a punch on the man’s nose that started another dark line to trickle down the man’s angry face.

The man stepped back, shaking his head an
d wiping the blood off his nose.  He reached into his bag, and Jake stepped away, his hand pulling out his knife as he got a good look at what the man was holding.  From my position, I couldn’t see anything, but it looked like it was a small knife or something.

Whatever it was, Jake was very cautious about it.  He held out his knife in front of him, slowly
sliding his feet forward, making sure his footing was secure.  I wondered what the man was holding, and it suddenly dawned on me.

It was a syringe of zombie virus.  One scratch from that evil thing, and Jake was a dead man.  The other man thrust the needle towards Jake, and Jake jumped back, keeping his knife out.  The man stepped forward, but stopped when Jake said something low that I couldn’t hear.  The man with the syringe moved back a couple of steps, keeping an eye on Jake and his knife.

It occurred to me that Jake had an infected knife, since that was what he must have used to kill the sleeping zombies.  So the two men were facing off with deadly metal in their hands.  In a strange way, I actually found the conflict ironic.  However, the feeling lasted a fraction of a second and I ran over to the combatants, tomahawk at the ready.  At this distance, I could easily plant the blade in the man’s forehead without much trouble.

The man backed away, the prospect of facing two men too much, and he suddenly bolted for the side yard.  I wasn’t about to chase him down, so I let fly with my ‘hawk.  The weapon sailed across the grass, and the axe blade buried itself in the calf of the fleeing man.  The man cried out and went down in a heap, pulling at the weapon that had brought him down.

I ran over with Jake right behind me.  As we approached the man, he lunged at us, striking out with the virus.  I danced back, bumping into Jake. 

“Watch it, he’s still got that syringe
,” I said, pulling out my falchion.  With that needle around, I wanted to be able to do damage from a distance, and three feet of sharpened steel could do just that. 

The man’s eyes grew wide at the sight of my sword, and Jake pulled out his mace as well.  The man saw that we could kill him without threat to ourselves, so he did the wise thing and dropped the syringe.

“Back up,” I said, indicating movement with the sword.

“I can’t! My leg is bleeding!” The man touched the tomahawk sticking out of his calf and hissed in pain.

I stepped close and kicked him in the chest, pushing him back several feet and dropping him to the ground.  He cried out in pain and tried to sit up, but the point of my sword touched his throat and he stayed where he was.  All I needed to do was lean forward two inches to kill him and he knew it.

Jake carefully retrieved the hypodermic and walked over to the man on the ground.  He yanked the tomahawk out of the prone man’s leg, earning a short bark of pain and a murderous glare from the recipient.

Squatting down, Jake wiped the blade of the axe on the man’s shirt.  Scared eyes followed Jake’s moves and it was a full minute before Jake spoke.

When he did, it was right to the point.  “Why are you turning people into zombies?” Jake asked, holding the syringe out over the man’s face. 

The man stared hard at the deadly thing above his face, and then swallowed.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I live in this house.  I just forgot my keys and had to break in.  Why did you attack me when I came back outside?”  The man tried to sound indignant, but it was tough when Jake laughed in his face.

“Really?  You live here?”  Jake chuckled. “So what’s this then?”  Jake waved the needle over the man and then placed his hand in a position to use it as intended.  “Why did you try to poke me with it?”

“You were attacking me!  I don’t have any weapons!  What was I supposed to do?”

I had to admit the man could make a convincing argument. 
However, we knew what he was up to, so it didn’t matter.  “Who sent you to do this?”

“I live here!  No one sent me!  Who the hell are you?”  The man gave it his all, and I had to admire the arrogance of him.

“What’s in the syringe?”  Jake asked.

“Nothing bad.  You can inject yourself and see.”  Scared eyes gave way to crafty ones, and it wasn’t a pleasant sight.

Jake chuckled.  “Here’s the problem as I see it.  You’re not complaining enough, and you’re not yelling for your neighbors to wake up and help you.  When we fought, you were silent.  In fact, you went out of your way to be quiet.  So I’d guess if we woke up your neighbors, not a single one of them would know who you are.  If the stuff in this needle is safe, we’ll give you a little poke.”

Jake stabbed down with the syringe, stopping just short of the man’s chest when the killer screamed in terror.  Jake pulled the needle away and the man’s relief was almost tangible.

“Nothing bad, huh?”  Jake asked.  The man deflated, and refused to meet our eyes.  The sky overhead was beginning to take on the early morning purple of sunrise, and I suddenly had a nearly overwhelming desire to go to sleep.

“Who sent you?” I asked again.  I touched the tip of the sword to the man’s throat, and he tried to burrow into the grass with the back of his head.

“I don’t know! “ The man said.  “I just get a bag of coins, a metal box containing the needle, and the name of a town.   That’s it!”

“That’s it? You go
to cause outbreaks, death and destruction, and you have the nerve to say ‘that’s it’?”  I was getting angrier by the minute.  “I ought to kill you right now on general principles.”

“Think you’re so great?” The man sneered.  “Why are you defending these sheep?  A new world is coming and you can’t do anything about it.”

“I can,” Jake said quietly.  He placed the tip of the needle against the man’s neck.  Just enough to let him know it was there, but not enough to break skin.  “I’ll ask you one last time, and then I’m going to inject you with the ‘not bad’ stuff you wanted me to inject into myself.”

“Aaaagh!  Wait! No!  I’ll tell you what I know!”  The man tried to twist away, but he didn’t dare move too quickly.  Any thrashing around his head and he was dead.

“Quickly, then.  I get tired of games,” Jake said.

“All I know is the leader of the group
who wants to take over is named Ben.  I don’t know his last name.  But I know he hates this world and he hates the man who made it happen,” he said.

That didn’t make any sense to me. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I heard the man who built society again is the same man Ben blames for his brother’s death. I don’t know any more!”

I looked over at Jake, and he was deep in thought.  He shifted forward and started to ask a question.  “Tell me something…”

Suddenly the man screamed and pulled away, scrambling to his feet and trying to hobble away.  His leg kept giving out on him, and he kept falling to the ground, but he still got up repeatedly.  I followed him with my sword, figuring to smack his legs and trip him up, but as I got closer, the man suddenly turned and lunged at me.  I brought up my sword reflexively and he ran himself through.  His face was a study in pure hatred, and he died cursing.

“Jesus, what the hell?” I asked, pulling my blade out of the man.

“Better give him one on the noggin, Aaron,” Jake said.