Zombies Ever After: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 6 (15 page)

“Just tell me how I can erase this tape. I’ll help you
if I decide I agree with what you’re doing.”

“No questions asked?”

“Oh, nuh-uh. It doesn’t work like that. I’m
going to ask lots of questions. I happen to know exactly where
Grandma Marty is, but I’m going to guard her like my own Nana,
for now. If you want to know where she is, the first step you’re
going to need to take is to erase this tape.” It was her turn
to point to the video screen of her room.

“Deal,” he said with his old charm. He went to
fidgeting with the controls while she stood on and watched.

Maybe it was coincidence, and he intended to use the tape just to
find her. But here he was in the control room at just the time she
arrived, and he’d gotten her to agree to his terms. All he had
to do was erase a tape he should never have had in the first place.

She sighed.

Was I just played?

Hayes stepped back. “Here, this button will erase that
entire log. It’s been on a continuous feed, so you’ll
erase the whole thing. Then I’ll turn it off.”

Studying the image, she tried to guess where the camera had been
hidden. Her best guess was that it was in the closet at the back of
the room. The view was through one of the slats on the metallic door.

“I’ll be destroying that camera when I get back
there.”

He seemed hurt. “No, don’t do that.”

She held her hands on her hips, indignantly.

“I’m serious. Remove it, but don’t ruin it. The
factory that made that camera is probably burning somewhere in China.
They’ve been hit with this virus, same as us. If you destroy
that piece of technology, there will never be another one like it. At
least not for a very long time.”

“I thought you said you were working on a cure?”

He laughed quietly. “The last time we met, I believed we
were on track to find a cure and save the remaining population.
That’s true enough. But today, weeks later, I’m a little
less enthusiastic about our ability to save human civilization.”

“Is that your job? Save civilization? Wasn’t it to
spread a virus?”

He finally looked serious. “I deserve your scorn. I made the
virus that was dropped on those marchers and hell was unleashed,
rather than just giving some politician a victory. But I told you
before; I’m a changed man now. I’m trying to end this
disaster before it wipes mankind and his civilization off the Earth,
forever. After everything I’ve seen, the race now is to save
the former. The latter is already gone.”

“And so you tracked me down to help with that.”

“Honest. Let me show you what I’ve been doing here.”

He led her out of the control room, and down the steps.

2

“Don’t,” she said quietly.

Hayes had walked up to the double doors of the room where she’d
earlier witnessed the zombies walking among the test subjects.

He turned to her while at the door. “Don’t worry; this
is a controlled experiment.” She could just make out the smile
in the low light. But when he turned back around, a zombie was at the
window. Hayes jumped.

“Oh shit!”

He stumbled back a few steps before regaining control.

“They’re never at the door.”

“I might have riled them up,” she offered. They had
scared her in much the same way before she left to go upstairs.

“Yeah, well, it’s all good. We’ll just have to
look around that one.”

He moved back to the door, and she stayed close, but behind him.
She didn’t trust him not to open the door and toss her in. That
would make a fun “experiment,” she was sure.

The blood-soaked zombie hovered, but as she got a better look at
him—he was dressed in hospital scrubs—she noticed he wore
the equivalent of a bridle. A strap wrapped around his head, and a
thick piece of leather or another material was wedged tightly into
its mouth, so it was prevented from closing its jaw. It couldn’t
bite a banana, much less skin.

“When I was here, I saw these zombies walking through those
people in the beds. People I knew during the day, today. I watched
over one of them, only to find out they were being abused at night by
this sick prank.”

He turned back to her. “Prank? This isn’t a prank. Far
from it. We’re witnessing the first zombies
not
to
attack humans when they have the chance. Those people in there are
alive.”

With a nod to the window, he continued. “Look inside. Those
people are fine. It’s the zombies who are different.”

As instructed, she checked it out. The closest zombie was an
unwelcome distraction, but its behavior was a far cry from the
violence and attacks always associated with them. Still, it was
pawing at the door.

But, sure enough, there were other zombies walking the room, and
while they seemed to make circuits around the beds of patients, they
did not attack them.

“It’s a sick experiment. How are you allowed to do
this?”

“I still have my resources. I had the University stand down
from guarding this place, so I could be assured I could conduct these
tests in private. They give me people suspected of being infected,
and I send them back people I know are clean. Everyone wins.”

She peered into the room, wondering if the people lying in the
beds would agree with him. Unaccountable testing was a nightmare
scenario for an ethical nurse or doctor. Her impulse was to go in
there and kill the zombies and release the victims.

“Do you see any patterns?” he asked matter-of-factly.

“Should I?”

“Just watch them.”

She took a few minutes to study them. The zombies on patrol did
move around to all parts of the room, but if they were making any
patterns, she couldn’t see them. Sometimes the zombies would
appear to stop, or make slow, deliberate reversals of direction, but
as far as she could deduce, they weren’t doing anything in a
pattern.

“I don’t see anything unusual, beyond zombies not
attacking them.”

“Hmm. I’m disappointed. You seemed pretty sharp,”
he said with mock sadness.

“Just tell me.”

He strode away from the door, heading back up the steps.

“This way, please. Keep up.”

In moments, back in the video room, Hayes keyed in some data and
the room below appeared on the screen. The camera was on infrared, so
the low light was not a factor.

The images were from a previous time frame. The tell was that the
zombie at the door was walking the room, rather than looking for
intruders.

“OK, watch again from this camera angle. You should see it.”

Minutes went by as she watched.

She tried to think of something to say that would sound
intelligent, but by all appearances, the movements were completely
random.

“Nothing?”

She remained silent.

“Let me speed it up.” He pressed some buttons, and the
image sped into high gear. With the advantage of speed, the pattern
became stunningly obvious.

“They always move to the same spots.”

“Exactly! Though the movements seem to be random, they spend
extra time at a select few of the people. And what do you think they
have in common? Take your time.”

She watched in awe as the pattern continued to scream at her. It
was almost embarrassing that she’d missed it earlier. It was
like the zombies hovered at those waypoints and either turned around
or lingered just a bit longer than they should. But while pattern
screamed at her now, she couldn’t deduce the point of
commonality among those particular victims.

Thinking back to her day, she recalled the root cause of why those
people were in the room in the first place. Something that might
explain everything.

“They're infected?”

After a dramatic delay, Hayes looked at her and gave her the
thumbs up sign. He was also transfixed by the pattern. Finally, he
pulled himself away and looked at her. “Yes, sorry. You got
that one right. High marks for you, after all. We’ve figured
out that the docile zombies search out other zombies, but because
they’re being affected by the trial vaccine, they seem to get
confused when they run into them. That’s the hesitation you
see. But, given enough time, say an entire night in a controlled
environment, we can tell who has been infected.”

“But what does that prove? We already know who’s
infected. Like, almost everyone!”

“Ah, but that’s the part you’re missing, here.
Those people are infected with the virus, but they aren’t
displaying symptoms. They’re carriers, but they don’t
spread the disease in any way we can tell.”

“Typhoid Mary’s.”

“Yes, that’s an apt comparison, but Mary Mallon didn't
care if she was infected. She knowingly spread Typhoid despite
repeatedly causing death and destruction in her wake. These people
have no way of knowing they were infected. We ask all kinds of
questions when they were ‘volunteered’ for this
quarantine system. We can’t find anything that ties them all
together. Nothing that says how they were all infected.”

“Or why.”

“Yes, or why. But you can see our problem, can’t you?
I mean humanity’s problem.”

She thought of all the people huddled together in the park,
waiting as refugees for the world to recover so they could go back
out and rebuild. Some percentage of them could already be infected,
and no one in the world could pick them out of a crowd.

Except Hayes. That figures.

3

“So the whole thing with Grandma and the elderly people you
killed was just a sideshow so you could walk these zombies among the
living and find these carriers?”

“Oh, I wish it were that simple. And please, I didn’t
kill them for sport. We were in crisis mode. We still are. No, I
stumbled on this while developing the work on Marty’s blood. I
injected her blood into a raving feral zombie, and the results are
what you see on the screen. It appears to make the zombies docile and
harmless. That’s a step in the right direction. With more
blood, and more time, I think I could refine this and find the cure
itself. But this side effect, this latent infection, troubles me more
than words can say. It’s almost like the virus is fighting
back. Like it knew I was close to a cure, so it has gone deeper to
hide.”

“And the elderly?”

It was his turn to sigh long and loudly. “Those early days
were the easy ones, I’m afraid. We had many willing volunteers
in that critical age bracket. Men and women lining up to do their
duty to find the cure and protect their loved ones. Make a
difference, before they passed on. But now...”

He looked at her, remaining uncharacteristically serious. “We
have a whole row of advanced medical facilities, and some nitwit
administrator kicked out everyone over seventy-five. Sent them home
to die. They wanted to focus on those with better chances for
survival.”

“Triage,” she said flatly.

“Yes. Exactly. But little did they know the cure could only
come from someone over the age of 100. They literally chased off the
people who could cure everyone.”

“You have some on this floor. I saw them. Surely you can
find more elderly? Grandma Marty isn’t the only one to survive.
There have to be hundreds in St. Louis, even now.” She and Liam
had looked up the census data for age, and also found one centenarian
practically around the corner. Hans Grubmeyer was 105. She held onto
that piece of information, for now.

“As I said. The heady early days of gathering those people
are gone. We have a few test subjects up here, but they are all spry
eighty-year-olds. Anyone left alive today, of suitable age, is
hunkered down in bunkers or other defensive strongholds with other
survivors. They aren’t likely to come out so they can get
involved in virus research.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you killed all
your original test subjects?” She knew it was wrong to prod
him, but she didn’t want him to forget that she knew what he
did.

“You aren’t going to let it go, are you?”

“After you let us go to chase Duchesne, he almost killed us.
A couple of times, in fact. But Liam, Grandma, and I were able to
escape, and a barge ran him over and killed him—”

“He’s dead?”

“Oh, he’s dead,” she said with glee. The two
weren’t friends, as best she could tell, but they knew each
other. “And after we left—”

Hayes interrupted her. “Sorry. He’s dead?” he
asked again with some skepticism.

“Yes, as a door nail, whatever that means.”

Hayes paced the small room, looking nervous.

“What’s the big deal? He was a real...jerk.”

“It’s not him. I was hoping you two would get away and
that he would conduct his usual inept pursuit. If he’s gone,
that means...”

“Wait a minute. You sent us out there knowing we’d get
caught?”

“Well, I knew you’d stop at nothing to rescue Marty.
Plus, I planned to help out a little. And yes, I assumed you’d
get caught, but I also knew how resourceful you two kids were—Dutch
thought you were beneath him. That’s why I figured he’d
fail. I never imagined he'd let himself get killed by you two.”

“We didn’t kill him. He
died
while trying to
kill us.”

“It doesn’t matter. This changes the whole scenario.
For you, and—worse—for me.” He stopped pacing and
seemed to ponder his next move.

“What’s the big deal? If he’s dead, we’re
in the clear. No one can possibly know where we went. You didn’t
know where we went, and you still don’t know where Grandma is.”

And I’m less inclined to tell you now.

“The hierarchy of the NIS is very rigid. A lot of it is
based on the oldest and best-bred families from around the world.
Most of them immigrated here, to America, because of the endless
opportunities for money and connections. But those families are all
working together, and intermarriage is strictly controlled. The
ultimate taboo is marrying outside approved families because that
means the offending family member must be convinced to call it off by
any means necessary, or the entire family of the outsider must be
brought in. And that happens about as often as a sheep marries a
fox.”