Plagued: The Midamerica Zombie Half-Breed Experiment (Plagued States of America) (8 page)

Twenty

It was only about an hour later when one of the visitors shook him, giving him some food. Everyone was somber. Tom could see Carrie huddled in a corner, shivering under several blankets. Tom sat and ate with his back to Penelope’s cage. He was so intent on watching Carrie for any sign of zombiehood that he was surprised to feel a warmth against his back. He craned his neck to find Penelope sitting against the bars with her back to him, eating from a can of Spam.

“You like that stuff?” Tom asked. Penelope nodded enthusiastically. “Probably better than a bite out of Tyler over there,” Tom said softly and she laughed again. It was a frightening sound on a full grown woman. She sounded like a toddler, and what was odd to Tom was that he felt as though it had the same kind of innocence to it.

Tom took off his knapsack and dug inside of it, tugging the paper from the zip-locked plastic pouch. He unfolded it and passed it through to her. At first she looked at it with suspicion. Tom nudged it toward her and she took it from him to look at it.

“That’s you,” Tom said. “That was you,” he corrected himself. He watched as her fingers touched the human face, moving slowly around the cheeks and hair, touching the nose gingerly as though she could somehow feel the lines and curves through the picture. Then her fingers touched the photo of her as a half-breed. The features were similar, but the skin tone was bleached, her features taught, almost gaunt by comparison, her bright blue eyes hidden behind a haze. And her once vibrant strawberry blond hair had lost all of its luster, looking more like dried wheat, unkempt and knotted.

“I can help get you back to the way you were,” Tom told her. “I can get you the cure.” She turned her head sideways, glaring at him. “I can make you normal again. Human.” The words didn’t seem to make sense to her. “Ugh, if you could just talk,” Tom said with frustration.

Penelope spun around to look at him, still sitting. She held a finger pointing upward and then began to twirl it, looking up.

“I don’t understand,” Tom said, realizing she was trying to use some rudimentary sign language with him.

She sighed, showing her own frustration, then raised and lowered her shoulders with another deep breath, calming herself. She pointed at her eyes with two fingers, then up to the sky with two fingers.

“Looking up,” Tom said. She shook her head, doing the same thing. “Seeing up. Seeing the moon. Seeing stars. Looking at the sky.” She pointed at him with excitement. “Looking up at the sky,” Tom told her and she nodded, smiling. She then began twirling her finger again, making it go straight up. “Twirling around in the sky,” Tom said and she shook her head, pointing at her hand that was doing the twirling. Then she made lines in the air to the ground and slapped the ground over and over again like a child blowing up her dolls. “Oh, yeah, the helicopters from yesterday,” Tom said and again she pointed at him.

It took them quite some time to work out a cadence of understanding about the signs she used and why. Tom had to look at things from her perspective before he began to understand what she was trying to convey, but by the time the sun was setting with the city of O’Fallon in plain view miles ahead, Tom had gleaned a great deal from Penelope regarding what had happened to her.

For starters, she was afraid of helicopters. It wasn’t the explosions from the day before that had borne this fear upon her, but instead the way she had been abducted. She did not know who Penelope was in her mind. She knew herself as a zombie. She had been taken by a helicopter and brought to a white place where giant men had changed her. It was painful. It hurt her head most of all. They called it curing. That word she knew and hated. Then they took her in a helicopter again and put her back. The helicopters always came, taking more and more, bringing more back like her. And life hurt her body. Life didn’t hurt her body when she was a zombie. But she was confused about Carrie. She said Carrie smelled of zombie.

“She’s turning into a zombie,” Tom told her and she gave him a confused look. “All zombies were people once. Like you were Penelope Hope. You were a young, beautiful girl that got bit and turned.” Tom was reluctant to explain the rest to her. How could he tell her that the government had used her in their experiments to find a cure? Tom realized that was how half-breeds came to exist. It was the only thing that made sense.

Other people had been sleeping off and on during the drive. Seeing Penelope talking with Tom had caused an initial heightened level of interest from everyone. Their interest waned as they realized how long it was taking Tom to learn anything from the half-breed. Carrie’s random
screaming and thrashings were chilling, mesmerizing in a way. During her coherent periods, Carrie tried desperately to convince everyone she wasn’t infected, which seemed all the more disturbing to Tom. Mike paid the most attention to Tom and Penelope, watching both inside and outside the duck from his station on the port side.

“Would you rather be a zombie or who you are now?” Tom asked Penelope quietly.

Penelope gave the question a moment of thought, staring off toward the twilight in the sky. She signed her fingers biting the air, the symbol she and Tom had made up for zombie. He was afraid of that. Then she pointed at herself and Tom didn’t understand. She shook the biting zombie sign away and then pointed at herself. She glared at Carrie.

“You’d rather be you?” Tom asked, encouraged. She nodded. “Not a zombie?” Again she nodded. He could see a tear forming in her left eye. She wiped her eyes with a sleeve and took in a deep, steadying breath. She pulled the piece of paper Tom had given her from under her leg and held it up, pointing at the girl she once was. “You’d rather be her,” Tom said and she nodded. “If you help me, I’ll make sure you get to be her again.” She glared at him with distrust. “I promise,” Tom told her. After a moment she nodded and jumped to her feet, startling Tom. She moved to her bunk and stuffed the piece of paper into her pillowcase. In a moment she was in her usual place, sitting on her lower bunk, staring up at the darkening sky, clutching the pillow in her arms.

“Damn,” Tom said, rubbing at his face. His whole body ached from sitting in front of her for so long. He stood up to stretch, holding onto the bars of the cage as the duck shook over the potholes of the old highway. They passed a ghost town. Vacant, unattended houses, stores, unlit street lights, and haunting emptiness in every direction. How could they rebuild all this land, Tom wondered? Once the zombie plague was finally under control – eradicated even – this land would come back. A little over three states worth of land would be available again, auctioned off by the government to anyone willing to redevelop it back into cities, towns, and homesteads. Tom wondered if anyone would want it back.

Twenty-One

Peske slowed down to read signs. Tree limbs draped over the road and grass grew high to overtake the small reflectors on the easements.

“That’s it,” Peske said sharply and slowed the duck to a crawl, flicking on his high beams down the exit ramp. He was driving on the wrong side of the highway, a two-lane, flat road. “There! You see that water tower?”

Hank leaned forward and could see the bulbous white tower crowning the tree line to their left. The overpass loomed ahead but Peske turned and followed the exit road, turning south on a flat, overgrown and battered asphalt road. They passed the water tower and everyone looked up to read “Midamerica” on its side. There was only one turn after that, down a narrow road. Peske shut off the lights and followed the road around a long curve until an old glass building came into view. It looked like a cathedral with a long white aircraft concourse behind it. In the distance they could easily make out an air traffic control tower behind a wall of trees.

“We’re here,” Peske called out over his shoulder.

“What do you mean we’re here? What kind of airbase is this?” Hank growled.

“This is the passenger terminal,” Peske replied. “Safest place to make camp. All the windows are intact so the biters don’t smell us out. We usually park the duck at the end of the concourse and just walk in.”

“Where is all the radio equipment?” Hank asked.

“The tower is on the other side of the runway, through an access road. That’s where the airbase is. That’s where the biters all congregate.”

Tyler had come forward along with several others. Tom was close enough to listen, but decided it was better that he not get involved just yet. They were here. That was the important part. He would leave finding a radio up to the others.

“Rick?” Hank asked. “You used to be in the military. How does it all work?”

“I was Army,” Rick replied irritably. “This is Air Force shit. They usually have books that tell you how to operate everything near or on what you have to operate. Air Force morons. You’re going to need to bring up the base generator if you want to do anything.”

“I know where that is,” Peske said. “
We siphon off it all the time.”

The duck slowed to its spot alongside the end of the concourse. Mike climbed up into it and Peske pulled away.

“What are you doing?” Tyler demanded.

“He’s checking to make sure it’s empty,” Peske replied. “Unless you want to be sitting under a spout if they’re in there?”

“How the hell can you guys do this for a living?” Tyler asked.

“Hunting zombies? It’s easy. No different than lions going into a herd of horned caribou. Any one of them could gore them lions, and the lions know it! But that don’t stop them. It’s when you start thinking like you’re going to die, like you’re prey. That’s when you get yourself killed.”

“Or turned,” Hank said, looking back at Carrie’s curled up, shivering body.

“Same difference,” Peske grumbled.

Tyler didn’t say anything. He just shook his head and walked to the back of the duck. The other hunters kept watch over the wide-open fields, the airstrip, and the road that drove through a wide stand of trees toward the control tower. Peske had said all the zombies lived over there. He claimed that the zombies hunted the city of O’Fallon at night. They didn’t come this way too often. With their luck, though, Tom figured this would be the one night the entire zombie horde decided to come looking in at the old passenger terminal. He imagined waking in the middle of the night to a thousand moans, their glowing eyes staring in through the windows. He shuddered involuntarily.

Penelope didn’t seem concerned by their surroundings. She lay curled up on her bed with the blanket for cover, staring toward the back of the duck, staring warily at Carrie. She flinched whenever Carrie cried out or snarled.

Tom felt a chill each time Carrie thrashed. He had never seen his sister’s turning, that much had been hidden from him. The soldiers who picked him up out of the street had seen her bite wounds. Tom and Larissa tried to hide them, but the blood, it wouldn’t stop. The soldiers recognized it immediately. They didn’t let Tom stay with her, and they didn’t let her come with them as they drove off. Tom watched her running behind, chasing the truck frantically as it drove toward the expressway.

Twenty-Two

Mike and the hunters moved some of the defenses out onto the airstrip. The laser trip wires were placed in a triangle. They only had three left after losing two the first night. Tom had expected them to start up the generator, but instead they ran the cables into the building and plugged them into a battery unit.

“We’ll want to be quiet tonight,” Peske said with a wink as he guided Penelope through the terminal building past Tom. Tom followed Peske to find out where he was going. Pe
ske put Penelope into the women’s bathroom with a flashlight and a couple of blankets. She picked up the flashlight and turned around to look at Peske.

“I’ll be back with grub in a few, Kitty,” Peske said and shut the door on her.

“You’re locking her in the women’s bathroom all night?” Tom asked.

“What, did you want to use it?” Peske said while turning a key in the lock. “That other bimbo ain’t going to be needing it.”

“What do you mean?” Tom asked. They both turned to see Hank and Dave carrying Carrie to a locking janitor’s closet. They pushed things out of the way, but it was still cramped.

“Pill number seven,” Peske said.

Hank was wearing leather gloves. He took a tube from his pocket and removed the muzzle that had been on Carrie for the past several hours, as a precaution Hank had said. Behind Hank stood several of the visitors, all watching like shocked voyeurs. Carrie tried to thrash about, more animalistic now than human, growling and hissing spittle. Her eyes were hazed over, weeping puss that looked gray in the dim light. Hank slipped the pill into the tube, shoved it into Carrie’s mouth, and blew. She choked on it, coughed a few times, but managed to swallow the thing.

“What does that mean, pill number seven?” Tom asked. Hank shut the door to the janitor’s closet and told everyone to disband. The visitors left reluctantly, but Dave stayed. He leaned against the door and watched everyone else, gazing toward Peske and Tom once.

“There are some things they don’t say even in the fine print, boy. Every box only gives you six inhibitors. The seventh is a kill pack. If you’re zombie, it kills you. But it don’t matter if you already took the sixth. No one comes back from that far down. And don’t go taking it first because it’ll kill you if you’re human too.”

“So Hank just killed her, didn’t he?” Tom asked dejectedly.

“Shut the hell up,” Peske glowered. “She was dead this morning at the lake. We tried to bring her back.”

He didn’t appreciate the recrimination, but there was no point in arguing it by asking why they even tried. He knew the answer. The pills were supposed to be effective on about three-in-ten bite cases. Thirty percent. They had to try to save her, otherwise they would be no different than the zombies
, really. It’s why Tom was here after all. He had to try to save Larissa. The hope of a cure. Or was it the hope of atonement?

“What about her?” Tom asked to change the subject, pointing at the bathroom. “Why lock her in there?”

“This is her home turf, boy,” Peske replied dismissively. “I already told you that.”

Tom didn’t feel right sitting with the others so far from Penelope. It felt like he had abandoned her, but sitting by her door would look bad. He needed everyone still, Penelope included. The hunters put up a tent and draped blankets over it to keep the light hidden. Inside they used flashlights to prepare everyone’s meal, but it was dark in the building otherwise. Tom sat near the wall of windows to get moonlight enough to eat.

Carrie was pronounced dead five minutes after Hank administered the last pill. Tyler, among others, wanted to see the body. Tom had no need to see another dead body. Afterward, everyone had the vacant looks of people touched by horror. Tom could imagine Carrie’s twisted features, her half-turned skin, hazy eyes, bluing lip, and gaunt expression of death. They had locked the door to her body out of safety. She was still contagious, after all, even if she wasn’t alive.

Tom considered what Peske had told him about the pills. He felt the pack of inhibitors in the cargo pocket of his pants, the telltale bumps of seven spring-loaded injectors, the last one – the kill-pack – much wider than the others.

The tent lights went out and only the dim light of the moon lit the interior of the terminal building. Everyone spread out into small groups of two or three around the tent. Each hunter kept watch with one of the visitors. Tom earned second shift with Dave. Dave manned the second floor overlooking the airstrip, keeping an eye on the concourse out to the duck. Tom walked from end to end downstairs, stopping every so often to hold his hands up to the glass and look out into the parking lot and overgrown field beyond, searching for movement or those hazy gray zombie eyes that reflected against the moonlight. Nothing stirred thankfully.

But it was the noise that bothered him the most. A constant wailing in the distance like thousands of baby birds screaming for food from their nests. It was faint, but relentless, and compared to the moaning he had heard at Biter’s Hill, this disturbed him more because the wail he heard was like that of abandoned children.

When his shift was over he walked over to the women’s bathroom and put his head next to the door, listening. He just didn’t feel safe without her by his side, without her ability to sniff out danger. He sighed, his head low, his eyes weary. A sudden movement under the door startled him slightly until he realized it was her fingers and not some rat or mouse climbing around near his feet. He slid down the wall and put his hand out to hers, feeling her soft skin, still so cold. He knew she was warm blooded. He’d felt her heat before. She held his fingers between hers and he laid down with his head over them to help warm her up. He saw the gap beneath the door. It was pitch black within, but in the near silence of the terminal building he could hear her breathing. She may have even been staring out at him. He wondered if she had been laying there all night with her nose or ear to the gap to hear and smell.