Zombies Ever After: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 6 (10 page)

He ducked back to the ground.

The drone rotated, so it faced the park defenders back at the
intersection. They were only a hundred yards away. A bullet whizzed
by—missing both him and the drone. Danger was everywhere.

In his haste he forgot to grab the box of ammo for the shotgun, so
he only had the two shells he'd loaded earlier. Unsure if he was
doing the right thing, but unwilling to do nothing, he picked up the
shotgun.

More pings hit the drone; it returned fire with a few quick shots.

Liam did the only thing he could think of that might help. He
aimed for the drone.

The white helicopter shot one of its tagging arrows at him as if
to defend its black mate. It hit him in the meat of his shoulder and
hurt much more than the last one.

Now angry and scared, he focused on putting the two rounds in the
most vulnerable part of the floating menace next to him. He couldn't
identify a definitive weak spot in the workings, so he just aimed for
what he figured was the backside.

He pulled the first trigger and felt the powerful recoil. The
target erupted in a flurry of sparks.

When he pulled the second trigger, he was a little bit off target,
but it tore into the upper mantle of the drone and also probably
struck the rotors. It was hard to tell because he was hesitant to
look directly at it as he fired in such proximity.

The black drone dipped a couple of feet after the second shot,
then recovered. A smell of burnt electrical components washed over
him. It also stopped firing.

The white drone repeatedly fired at him, but the little arrows
were more of a nuisance than anything.

He ran for the blockade.

3

As he ran for the people, several dogs sprang out from among the
houses on that side of the road and made directly for him. In happier
times the wild dogs might have been looking to him as a playmate.
Today, he wasn't so sure. At the lead was a wicked-fast dark-brindled
Greyhound.

He concentrated on avoiding the bodies of zombies that had been
shot while keeping a good pace across the open roadway. Though it
might have been unnecessary, he waved his hands from time to time, to
signal he was intelligent. All it took was one nervous shooter. He'd
read that trope a thousand times.

The black drone continued to sputter where it was, and the white
drone followed him for a short time, continually punching him with
tiny tagging spears. In a matter of seconds, the Greyhound caught
him, and he believed the dog was going to jump on him and attack, but
it decelerated at the last second and paced him. The other dogs
surrounded him, but they didn't attack, either. He felt as if they
were conducting escort duty, though he recognized he was in full-on
panic.

A few dogs yelped as the drone fired tags at them.

Moments later, as he neared the intersection manned by the people
of Forest Park, they waved him in between two of the large vehicles.
The dogs trotted down the street, rather than follow him, leaving him
to wonder about what the strange pack represented. The drone went
after the dogs.

Above, several men and women aimed rifles back into the street,
but they held their fire. He simultaneously hoped they'd fire on the
drones, but not on the friendly dogs. He was too winded to make
suggestions either way as he ran through the makeshift gate.

“Close it up,” a clear male voice called out.

Liam ran twenty yards beyond before stopping behind the barricade.
The wreckage of another black drone littered the street and provided
a suitable resting point. Though he only ran for a short distance,
he'd spent it all on the last sprint. He was breathing hard and was
hunched over when a man about his dad's age found him. He wore a blue
baseball cap with a C on it, and had a cheerful face bracketed by a
dark, full beard.

“You got lucky, kid. We nearly shot ya.”

“Yeah...I noticed.” He picked off the tagging darts.
There were ten of them, all on his right side, and back. “Did
you see those dogs?”

“Streets are full of dogs. You know how many people let
their dogs go? They thought they was helping 'em out. But, yeah, them
dogs was acting real strange. Happen to you a lot?”

Liam shrugged, not sure himself.

The man helped him pull the darts while he spoke. “And those
droids been sweepin' nearby for a couple of days. We saw 'em down the
streets toward downtown. This is as far west as they've been, so far
as I know.” He moved in front of Liam so they could talk
face-to-face. “But this is the first time I've seen them bother
a healthy person. That's why we shot it.”

“What about this one?” Liam pointed to the broken
drone on the ground.

“Dunno. My shift started a couple hours ago. Heard there was
a shooting here last night. Something about sneaky zombies.”

He'd said it with something Liam read as incrimination.

Though he was covered with dried blood, which had blackened and
cracked all over his chest and hands, he still wore the suit jacket
and carried a now-useless shotgun. If he pretended to be a zombie, he
figured he'd have no problem being a convincing specimen.

“I'm not a zombie. I promise.” He set the shotgun on
the ground. “And I'm not a threat, either. I just came here to
find my girlfriend.”

The man laughed. “This is about a girl? Well, why didn't you
say so?” As Liam stood up straight and continued to catch his
breath, the man called back behind him toward the roadblock. “Hey
Sue, this boy is here on a count of a girl.”

More laughter. And a few cat calls.

“We had Black Widow here last night,” one man cried
out.

Liam felt his cheeks redden, mostly from anger.

“Don't take it personally, kid. These people haven't had
much to laugh about. We lost a heaping of good folks overnight.
Helping you find your girl is something any of these people would
rather do than shooting at those dead things, ya know?”

He calmed back down. After what he'd seen on his run, this was
nothing to fret over.

“I tried to come in last night, but you shot at me.”

The man smiled. “Have you looked at yourself, kid? I don't
even think your girlfriend would recognize you.”

“She and I end up like this a lot.”

The man re-appraised him. “Why do I feel you're not telling
a fib?”

He reached out a hand. “My name's Randolph. I'm one of the
suckers in charge of this intersection.”

“Liam. Why are you a sucker?”

Randolph looked around, apparently to see if they were out of
earshot of the others. “I'm guessing you came from downtown?”

Liam nodded.

“We see the planes overhead. Hear the battle. Now these
drones show up shooting. I'm managing the gate on the edge of it all.
What the hell is going on out there?”

Wow, a question I can answer.

Liam thought of a movie where they made fun of an obscure guard
for having the answers to some of the most secretive mysteries of the
organization he worked for. Now, the table was flipped. He knew some
of the big secrets of the Zombie Apocalypse, and this guard knew
nothing.

“To the south there's a pit mine full of hundreds of tanks
from World War II that some secretive group represented by a lizard
have been stashing for fifty years. Don't bother trying to collect
them, though, because a cemetery's worth of undead soldiers are
guarding them. But if you do get a tank or two, don't drive them
downtown. We tried that. Warthogs dropped from the sky to kill our
Tigers, but we survived long enough to reach the Polar Bears. Let me
tell you, if you want some tough fighters on your side, da 'Bears are
the people you want. They're part of a hundred-year struggle against
government corruption, led by families like mine, so it would seem.”

He took a deep breath. “And finally, the United States
government has been infiltrated by a secretive bureaucratic
organization called the National Internal Security. They're trying to
hunt down elderly people like my great-grandma, but they're also
leading a massive convoy from the East Coast to their new home here
in St. Louis. The Polar Bears, led by a school teacher holed up in a
building downtown,” he pointed with his thumb over his
shoulder, “is waiting for them. Oh yeah, and my mom used my
video game to lead a national march across the country before the
zombies came.”

Randolph watched him the whole time and nodded where appropriate.
Liam waited for the laughter, but it never came.

“Your mom was a leader in the Patriot Snowball?”

“You've heard of it?”

At that, Randolph finally did laugh.

4

They chatted about his statement for a few minutes. Randolph
turned out to be an active listener who asked a lot of pointed
questions about many aspects of his previous outline of events. He
took Liam's story at face value, which pleased him greatly, but they
couldn't make any sense of the tail end of his tale. Neither had any
clue about the drones. Liam explained the relationship between the
floating ones and the tank model on the ground, but it was a mystery
who controlled them.

“We know the Army's nearby. They shoot those machine guns up
and down the roads in the night. They spray rounds down their firing
lanes, knocking down lots of infected. Only zombies would be dumb
enough to get into those kill zones.”

Ummmmm.

“We have to hide when they shoot because those things travel
up the road to our blockade. Had one woman get clipped when they
first did it. She'll live...”

They both stood looking back toward downtown as the conversation
lulled. It gave him the chance to look at the reverse side of the
blockade, where the shooters were on watch.

“Why don't the zombies come over the top of your roadblock?”
He'd seen them stack up and get over larger obstacles.

“We've had some close calls, but those days seem to be gone.
Now...they wander in alone for the most part.”

“You think they're thinning out? There were still a lot of
them downtown yesterday morning.”

“I don't know about downtown, but out here in the Central
West End, we haven't seen groups of them for days.”

“But there are still piles of them in the street.” He
had wondered about the bodies even before this street. Back when he
went into the pit mine, he'd noted many of the same zombies he'd
faced on day three were still lying along the railroad tracks on the
property. It was like they didn't decompose.

“Yeah, we have nowhere to bury the dead, so we haven't been
exposing ourselves out in the street to collect them. We take fire
from resident human stragglers over there, just to keep us from
trying.”

“I was shot at, too,” he reminded Randolph. “It's
the Wild West.”

“You're safe here. We got somethin' good back in the park.
If you've been there, you know.”

The park!

“Thank you, Randolph, for getting me through your line. I'll
never forget it. But I have to keep moving.”

“I understand. My wife is holding together a little lean-to
in the camp. It's what passes for a life, until we get back on our
feet.”

“You think this is going to end?”

“Kid, I did a tour in Afghanistan, right at the beginning. I
saw town after town of people living in rock huts. No clean water.
Little food. No concept of hygiene. Weather and landscape that would
make most men want to lay down and die. Yet they did just dandy,”
he said wistfully. “And so can we. Every structure you see is a
rock hut. Basic shelter. Hygiene is going to get dicey. Food...iffy.
We have good climate, lots of vegetation, good crop potential. We
have it way better than those savages, don't ya think?”

“But we have zombies. Are we going to fight them forever?”
He wasn't sure why the guy would know...

Randolph thought about it, then answered in a way that reminded
him of any number of school lectures. “Are you
willing
to fight them forever?”

Liam thought about a scene in the far future. He and Victoria are
sitting on the front porch of a large farmhouse, watching their kids
play nearby. A zombie comes stumbling out of a row of corn...he has
his rifle at the ready in a flash. But Victoria, the better shot,
puts it down first.

Then he imagines himself on his deathbed. A very old man. And a
zombie comes crashing down the hallway of a hospital. Too weak to use
a rifle, he lifts his lightweight 22 caliber pistol and puts a round
into the brain pan of the undead.

Vigilance would be the price of life, going forward. Unless a cure
could be found. Something to either reverse the process
or...eliminate all of them at once. Right there, at the intersection,
only vigilance looked like a realistic possibility.

“Sir, I just walked out of a building of heavily-armed
resistance fighters and cleared six miles of Zombie Hell to be with a
girl I just met. There is
nothing
I wouldn't do to protect
her.” He felt himself grip the empty shotgun.

Randolph held out his hand to shake goodbye. “Liam, my young
friend, it's going to take an attitude like that to get through this.
What humanity needs now is fighters. People to hold back the savages.
You've seen what it's like out there, and things haven't even gotten
bad yet.”

They shook briefly. Liam had a look on his face that was easy to
read.

“I know. You think the worst is over. Most people do.”
He swept his hands around in all directions. “See all this? All
those people back in the park. It's too much. The Afghans got by
because they're spread out and have minimal needs. Our people have
lots
of needs.”

Randolph laughed sarcastically. “Drugs. Have you seen people
in withdrawal from drugs? You seen anybody with the DT's because they
got no more alcohol?”

Liam didn't know what to make of the lost souls back in the park.
They might fit the description, though as far as he knew they were
still on drugs.