“
Holy shit… that thing's still alive,” Jinks whispered.
“
It’s a Zed," Danny answered, heart hammering. "It’s not alive in the first place.”
“
That's gotta be the oldest zombie we’ve seen still functioning,” Jinks said.
"Bitch!" Cindy spat behind them. Danny jumped. “Serves you right!”
Cindy handed a plastic bag of blood to Tess. Danny glanced at her. Tess removed the end from the tube on the bag as Cindy drank through another like it was a straw. Crystal appeared to be wrapped up in her own thoughts as she drained a blood bag of her own.
Tess looked at the dark, maroon liquid sloshing around inside the plastic.
“
Still good," Cindy said. "Fridge still works. Yeah, yeah. The real thing.”
With a glance at Danny, Tess started to hand the bag back to Cindy.
“
Later,” she said, then stopped. As if on a whim, she pushed a button on the wall panel. A slot hissed up to produce a tray. Tess placed the open bag on the tray and hit the button again.
“
No, don’t give it to bitch lady!” Cindy exclaimed. “We can use it!”
“
I want to see something,” Tess said, watching intently.
The Zed dragged itself across the floor. It was slow going. The corpse was weak. Johnson could barely move, but it was a small room. After a few long minutes, the wasted thing drew itself to the tray and pulled down the blood bag.
The troops moved on to check the next room. Cindy went with them.
“
My old place,” Cindy giggled. “Sorry about the mess. Hard to keep house when you’re locked in a straight jacket.”
Danny accompanied his crew as they cleared the rest of the building while Tess and O'Shea stood in the hall and watched Johnson devour her meal. None of the troops reported anything out of the ordinary. It just looked like a medical facility. Underground. Behind a false front. With a few Zeds here and there.
“
It all works, Captain,” Lieutenant Gibson said. “Power’s up. We got water. I’m assuming the computers will work, but I’m not touching them. Now, what do you want us to do with the prisoners we got?”
Danny gave him a grim smile. “I think we've got just the place for ‘em. Get ‘em in here.”
Against much protest, the troops dragged the two into the room. Two young men, the oldest not much past twenty.
“
Peel them down to their skivvies and bring them down here,” Danny said as he grabbed two sets of shackles from behind the security desk. He lifted the keys from a hook on the wall. “We need to get rid of these bodies.”
“
Burner,” Cindy muttered, tossing her empty blood bag into a garbage can. “Doc said if I didn’t behave, she’d throw me in the burner.”
“
You know where it’s at?” Gibson asked.
Cindy glowered and shook her head. “Here somewhere.”
“
Start looking, people,” Danny said.
Gibson sent two squads to find the incinerator. In the meantime, Danny led the two prisoners to one of the dorm rooms. The troops shackled one of them to the wall and the other on the bed next to him. In a flash, their blindfolds were removed.
“
Okay, kids," Danny said. "This is home, until I decide what to do with you. You've got all the comforts, so don’t bitch.”
He stepped outside and shut the door. The two pulled at their shackles. Both yelled, but in the hall, no sound issued from the room. Danny chuckled and walked away. Cindy followed at his heels.
“
They don’t like being cooped up, no-no,” she giggled. “Book ‘em, Danno, throw ‘em in the slam!”
Danny turned to say something. Cindy stopped and grinned at him. Danny hesitated, then turned and kept walking.
He met up with Gibson at the entrance. Gibson had found the incinerator in another shed on the outer farm property. The simple system just ran on propane, and he already had it warming up. Danny assigned a team to dispose of the bodies. The troops found biohazard suits—enough for the whole team—before they began to handle the corpses.
Another team began the decontamination job. Cindy’s room went first, then the one formerly occupied by the three corpses. Meanwhile, the outside team established a perimeter. The farmyard had gone back to the wild. The overgrown property hadn’t seen any maintenance in decades. The troops checked the rest of the outbuildings, plus the woods two hundred yards out. They found no Zeds or anyone else.
Later, Danny selected a team of twelve to spend the first night at the Farm, as they'd already begun to call it. The rest of the troops would move on to the Arsenal. Bill and Hunter would stay from the Raiders. Lieutenant Gibson left his second, Sergeant Major Harter, in command of the Marines. As the day eased toward night, Danny pointed his Humvee toward the Rock Island Arsenal. Behind him, the Marines rode in the Rhino. Two wounded lay on stretchers on the back of the troop transport. They'd been stabilized, and they would receive further treatment upon arrival on the island. Jinks sat in the passenger seat beside Danny, and Cindy rode in the seat behind him. She couldn’t stand to spend the night in the facility that had taken her life from her.
They drove through the west end of Rock Island, long known as the bad part of town. Even before the outbreak, not a night passed out here without shootings and stabbings. Now burned-out buildings sat empty under the approaching dusk. Danny's troops waited, ready on their guns, but nothing showed. Abandoned cars lined the expressway. Danny radioed ahead so Tom's people would be expecting him at the gates. One of the two bridges had been blown, and the other connected the Arsenal with Rock Island and Davenport.
Danny rounded a curve, his foot still on the gas. He blew past the old armory, which some developer or another once had the bad taste to turn into a casino, and made the turn up the ramp to the Arsenal gates. Gunfire greeted his approach.
His troops jumped to their guns. The trucks rolled to a stop as the last of a pack of Zeds fell under a hail of bullets.
Outside, a young private saluted as she opened the massive, iron gate.
“
Sorry, sir,” she shouted up at Danny's window. “We have trouble with this sometimes. They pile up at the gate, and we can’t open it while they’re here. When we have someone comin’ or goin’, we have to clear the way.”
Behind her, six troopers in haz-mat suits stepped out of the guardhouse. Five others provided cover. As Danny watched, two of the suited soldiers picked up a Zed and flung her into the river. The corpse spun in the current for a moment, then submerged like a waterlogged tree.
Danny rolled through the gate at the head of his convoy. In quick minutes, the soldiers disposed of the corpses and resumed their positions inside the gate, closed and locked behind them. Danny observed as the soldiers sprayed each other down with what smelled like bleach water, then began to peel off their suits.
With hardly a word of greeting, Private Johanson slid into the back of Danny’s Humvee. She left another in charge as she directed his convoy toward Major Jackson’s house. A large, white Victorian home that had been built after the Civil War now acted as the Commandant’s Home. Two other houses stood beside it, along with the original Colonel Davenport home. Tom resided in the big house these days. Danny would have to give him a hard time about that.
As the truck rolled to a stop, Johanson hopped out. With a salute, she excused herself and headed back to her post. She had two hours left on her shift, and Major Tom was waiting for Danny's bunch.
Danny walked up onto the porch and knocked. He blinked at Star when she opened the door. For a moment, he said nothing. Tom walked up behind her.
“
Hello,” Danny began.
Tom wrapped his brother up in a tight hug. “Glad you folks made it. I was beginning to wonder if you would. I've been out in Davenport today, clearing a few nests and helping some of the survivors over there.”
“
We found the place just fine, but it can’t hold us all. We figured we’d crash here.” Danny looked at Tom's girl. He gave her a nod. “Star.”
She nodded back.
“
Dan, let me introduce you to Tammi Vincent. Star's gone.”
Tammi hobbled over on her crutches and held out a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Dan. I hope we can start over.”
Danny sighed as he took her hand. “We’ll see, Tammi.”
“
Who’s this?” Tom asked. He nodded at Cindy, who stood on the porch with her hands held in front of her like a soccer player waiting for her picture to be taken. Jinks stood to the other side of Danny.
“
This is Cindy. She’s one of O’Shea’s people from Glen Ellyn. You’ve already met Jinks. We've got twelve more out at the Farm.”
Tom nodded again. “C’mon. I’ll get you people bunked in. We have lights, showers, heat… we’re self-sufficient, so you should have a pretty good time of it here.”
Danny loaded his crew back into the trucks, and they rolled to the central part of the island. The quarters there consisted of duplexes and four-plexes built. Danny oversaw as his troops set up camp in two of the four-plexes for the night. After a meal and some quick time on the computers, they collapsed into sound sleep.
In the morning began the routine. First, they secured the Farm. They strung a four-strand barbed wire fence around the perimeter. Nothing that might draw attention. Nothing that would make a person look twice. Within three days, the troops had one hundred yards in all directions locked behind a tall, iron gate. One team stayed at the Farm while the other two rotated to their quarters at the Arsenal.
On Tom's turf, Danny's troops helped with patrols. They cleaned out nests of Zeds, worked with the small contingent of Coast Guard in boats up and down the Mississippi, and assisted in establishing trade with other survivors. Every fourth day, they enjoyed some time off. It wasn’t a bad routine.
Danny stayed in touch with Pepper and Jenny online, thanks to Tom's community computer bank. Here, eighteen months into the apocalypse, humanity saw some return to normalcy. One of the TV stations was back on the air. So was one of the radio stations. Danny gained some comfort from these signs.
Over the weekend, Danny went home with his team of Raiders and half the Marines. The Farm would serve as a permanent station as long as O’Shea needed it. He'd located another doctor in the Quad Cities to help him with his research, and Tess helped, too. Danny still wondered about her role in the whole mess, back before Johnson turned her into a lab rat. He never asked.
Back at home, he helped his wives put up vegetables for next winter. Peeled tomatoes, snapped green beans, sliced carrots. These small, ordinary tasks almost let him forget the world outside their fences. Cindy traveled to Snareville with him, and she was put to work right along with him, too.
“
Seems kind of strange that they knew where to hit you,” Pepper mused as she bent over a tomato plant. With a soft
plop
, another fruit went into the bucket.
“
I thought so, too, but maybe the scavengers just happened to be up early that day.” Danny frowned as he pulled his own fruit from the plant.
“
They usually don’t get organized all that quickly,” Jenny said from a nearby row. “Something like that roadblock takes some planning.”
Against his will, the gears started turning inside his head. “We’ve got some prisoners locked up at the Farm. I’ll have to ask them what they know.”
The girls chuckled. Danny could be a persuasive person when he put his mind to it. As one, their smiles faded as they returned to their work.
“
You think we got a leak here?” Danny asked quietly.
He watched as Ella brought out another bucket to take the place of the one they'd filled. She took the full bucket back to the edge of the garden, where she was busy sorting out the harvest for the ladies in the kitchens. Through the window, Danny could see Cindy inside, peeling tomatoes to help make juice.
“
Sounds like it,” Pepper said. “I’m sure you’ll find out, baby. We’ll take care of it when you do.”
“
So… why’d Cindy come home with you?” Jenny asked, broaching a new topic as she dropped another bell pepper into her bucket.
“
Hey, she’s nice,” Ella spoke up from the garden's edge. “A little hyper, but nice.”
“
I’m sure she is, El, but that doesn’t explain why she came home with Dan,” Pepper said, cocking a brow his way.
“
Jeez, are
you
girls paranoid,” Danny muttered. He groaned as he straightened. “She didn’t like stayin’ at the Farm. Too many bad memories for her, and the others weren’t leaving the place. I didn’t want to leave her with Tom and make him be responsible for her.”
“
So you’re responsible for her instead,” Jenny deadpanned.
“
Well, no… but if I left her up there, she would've run off or got herself shot.”
“
So you bring her home for someone to shoot here instead?” Pepper inquired.
“
Less people here. Well, less trigger-happy people, anyway. Most of us know what’s going on.”
“
What exactly are
we
supposed to do with her?" Jenny stood and planted her hands on her hips. "She’s infectious.”
Danny frowned. “Just find her a place to sleep, I guess. She’s been helping out, and we’ve all been inoculated. I don’t see how she’s a threat.”