Zombies Ever After: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 6 (37 page)

“Because of Duchesne.”

“Bah. That's the easy answer. Revenge. You've been part of
this almost since the beginning. This can't be a coincidence. It just
can't be.” She ran her hand through her sweaty hair, apparently
not pretending at being worried. “Duchesne came for Marty. He
could have killed us on the spot. You were there.”

The NIS agent had them dead to rights. That was true. But he left
Hayes and Jane in what might be billed as an overly elaborate plan to
kill them later. Why not just put bullets in their heads?

“And how is this girl involved?” she indicated Debbie,
now helping settle in one of the old ladies. The woman wore a light
green pantsuit, reminding her of Grandma Marty when they'd first met.
She seemed docile in the face of so many guns.

Liam's charge, perhaps because he had no gun, was much more vocal.
She yelled for a nurse over and over as he guided her to a bed.

“Nurse, I don't want to be here!”

Liam said something, but Victoria was out of earshot. He was
probably trying to say something funny to her, though it wasn't
working. Debbie put an end to her complaints when she came over
brandishing her shotgun. Liam stepped back from the bed, surely
thinking of whether to overpower the girl.

“I think I recognize her from the house where Grandma and I
waited for Liam to get better after our escape from...Duchesne. There
were lots of other teens in the house, and I'm pretty sure she was
there.” She couldn't be positive as it was hard to identify
people from always seeing the tops of their heads as they leaned down
to their tablets and smartphones. She wished she would have taken the
time to get to know them. Make allies. Identify enemies.

Debbie and Liam returned, and the four of them formed a tight knot
in between two rows of beds, about twenty or thirty feet from the
wide stairwell—and the hovering drones.

“Debbie. Why are you bringing people to this boat?”
Jane asked with innocence.

The girl stood very close to Liam, and her gun was pointed
directly at the floor. Any one of them could overpower her in a
second, yet no one did. Behind Debbie, the drones remaining
menacingly stationary.

“I'm, like, an assistant to the Mayor of the town. He asked
me to keep watch on any elderly people I could find while things were
nice. But, um, when the town, like, um, got zombie-fied, and stuff,
he told me I could be a big help by evacuating these—”
she waved around the room “—million-year-old people.”

Victoria was about to reply, but Debbie continued.

“He said that, um...I could, like, have any car I wanted. I
could get away,” she said with seriousness. “It was easy,
until, like, now. Most people wanted to get out of the town before
those, um, things, ate them.”

“But what happened to these people?” Jane interjected.

“What do you mean?”

Jane huffed in frustration. “They aren't awake! Can't you
see that? This whole thing—it isn't normal.”

“How am I supposed to know? I'm, like, just the delivery
girl.”

She spoke with an annoying uptalk. Victoria thought she sounded
like she'd spent her life watching her tablet, instead of paying
attention in school.

“But, like, the owner of this boat is almost here,”
she said evenly.

Liam, this might be it.

She tried to talk to him using her mind. Willing him to know how
she felt.

I love you, no matter how this ends.

John watched as the Blackhawk maneuvered over the river. He was
positive it didn't belong. Whatever it was doing, he had to know.
Though not a gambling man, he'd bet Elsa was in that chopper. The
ropes hung down, and someone at the top had come to the
door...waiting.

From where he was, it might be possible to walk to hundreds of the
interlocking barges sitting on the waterway. But the one under the
helicopter was his destination.

He hunched over and pretended he was forty years older.

This is nuts.

He figured he had two cards to play. Either he could charge in,
bullets flying, or he could labor in as if he were a disoriented old
man. And what better way to play the old man than to wander the
barges as if he were lost? To him, it made sense.

It pained him to do it, but he placed the rifle in a cranny behind
some spools of metallic wire. No old timer would wander around with a
gun slung over his shoulder. He still had his pistol and had no
intention of throwing that down.

He rubbed his sunburned head. His scalp and thinning hair yelled
at him for losing his hat. If he'd been forty years younger, the
prospect of sneaking up on a mysterious situation might even have
thrilled him. Now, his legs felt heavy as he jumped the short way
from the first boat to the second. No one bothered to put ramps
between them other than the direct route to the helicopter.

For many minutes he bounced from barge to barge, but always he
moved closer to the one he wanted. There was some concern he would be
mistaken for a zombie—he could see scores of them on the
shore—so he stopped frequently to rub his back or tie his
shoes. Things no zombie would do.

“I need some luck,” he said to his shoes on one
stoppage.

Luck isn't a tactic, John.

As he neared the action, he lost faith in himself. Any second he
would get noticed. Or shot. Or worse—captured.

His zig-zag path took him to an open-topped barge parked
diagonally upriver from his target. The pile of bodies inside made
him stop. The container was mostly empty, but near one corner a
hundred bodies lay in a heap like they'd been tossed down from the
top deck.

He'd seen plenty of corpses the last few weeks. Enough to last a
lifetime. But these made him consider stopping his charade and run
back to his tanks and forget this little side trip. They were all
elderly. Most he recognized by their skin color as local townsfolk—a
good portion were ancient black women. They were dressed in a
colorful, but macabre heap—hands, heads, and shoes poked out
the edges. One mixed group of gray-haired men was dressed in orange
jumpsuits like they'd been taken from a prison. In fact…

He looked closer. They were chained together.

My God. What is this?

The ship stank. The bodies had been in the hot sun for too long.

Unwilling to give up on his mission, he closed the distance to the
towboat. The tinted windows of the bridge wrapped around the
superstructure, and he assumed he was being watched. Surely, the men
in the helicopter had seen him, though somewhere along the line the
people up there had roped down. His situational awareness was a
disaster.

He pressed forward and got onto the deck of the all-white towboat.
It was designed to push the flat cargo containers up and down the
river and was the width of one barge. It happened to be paired to
just one of those vessels. The ropes of the helicopter hung above it,
confirming he had gone about this the right way.

The door into the crew space was marked with a series of imposing
warnings stenciled onto the paint.

“Property of Ste. Genevieve Cement Fabrika.”

“MOPP 4 required beyond this point.”

A pair of logos—one for nuclear and one for
biohazard—rounded out the advertising on the door.

No, at the very bottom, a comparatively gentle warning advised
that hardhats are also required.

“I don't even have that,” he said to himself.

He went for the handle, but it was locked.

Sensing he was running out of time, he followed some steps up to a
narrow deck which ran along the outside window of the bridge on the
second level. From up there he could see the length of the barge. A
satellite dish was on the near end. At the far end, there was a hole
in the outer covering and some steps going down.

He put his face up against the window of the bridge—right at
the corner. He hoped he could get some intel on who was running the
boat, but he was disappointed. He could see nothing. Next to the
window, a nearby door had a small porthole window, but he didn't see
anything through there, either.

“OK, we'll do it the hard way,” he said in a normal
voice as he pulled out his pistol.

He raised his arm, intending to strike at the window where he'd
just been peeking in.

That's when the mechanical lock of the door cycled, and it swung
open a few inches.

“Please don't,” said an emotional male voice.

“Identify yourself,” John replied. Part of him laughed
at the thought there were a dozen armed men inside, just waiting for
him to come through the door. His ruse got him this far, but wouldn't
work a second longer.

“I...I just work here. I can't risk the equipment.”

“That doesn't tell me who you are.”

“I'm Bill Dredsel. I keep the
Elma Jean
running. Who
the hell are you?”

John made a decision. If there were twelve men with guns, he'd
have no chance. He decided to be bold. He pushed through the door,
gun in hand.

A skinny old-timer in dirty overalls skittered backward into the
bridge compartment.

John almost dropped his gun when he saw the place. After weeks of
primitive living, blood 'n guts fighting hand-to-hand, and the
rickety town of Cairo—he felt like he'd walked onto the space
shuttle. The wrap-around windows showed the barge sitting in front of
them, but it was filled with computer data, as if it were also a
giant computer screen.

The area where he'd planned to smash the glass had a running
string of data falling like snow from top to bottom. It became clear
why the man didn't want him to break the window. It was more than
mere glass.

Bill had his hands up, though he kept stepping backward. John was
happy to see the proper amount of fear on the man's face.

“All right, mister,” he said in his best cowboy-movie
voice, “I want to know everything that's going on. And we'll
start right here.” He pointed to one corner of the carnival
display of information—it showed four people standing in an
area that looked like the ward of a hospital.

They were surrounded by several armed figures dressed in black.

Liam had seen the helicopter hovering when they came into the hold
of the barge, so he wasn't too surprised to see drones or more people
come down the steps. After settling the two old women—the one
endlessly called out for a nurse—he stood talking to the three
younger women as the intruders dropped in.

He held Victoria by the waist. He wanted to keep her close until
he could think of a way to get out of what was turning out to be a
multi-layered prison.

Debbie with her shotgun.

The drones.

Whoever was in charge of the creepy hospital.

The helicopter.

And, should he make it outside again, the town was surely overrun
with zombies.

Debbie seemed to anger at the sight of him holding Victoria. Even
as the new men approached, she raised her shotgun toward him.

“Liam. I thought we had something. I, like, saved all
these—” she started to laugh. “Oh, my. This has
been fun, but I can't keep up this silly charade. Who talks like
that?”

She stepped back toward the approaching dark-clad figures.

“I'm done talking like that. My mom is here—finally,”
she shouted back to the new arrivals.

One of the men walked up to Debbie with a DNA sniffer.

“This is her.”

Debbie smiled wickedly while she pointed her shotgun at Liam, but
her face cringed when the newcomer reached to her and injected
something in her neck. A second later, she dropped to the floor with
a hard thunk.

The shotgun fell to the metal hull and clanged loudly. Though it
was impossible, he waited for the gun to fire itself.

Dad would scold me for thinking such nonsense.

There were three men, each dressed in black tactical gear and
wearing face masks.

“Drop your weapons!”

Victoria set her rifle down, as did Jane.

Two of the men grabbed Debbie and pulled her toward the steps.

“Wait,” Jane cried out. “What do you want with
her?”

“Elsa Cantwell is wanted for conspiracy to commit genocide.
That's all you need to know.”

“You want a teenager for genocide?” Liam blurted out.

That seemed to take the man by surprise. Even from behind his
mask, Liam saw the indecision. The man turned around, crouched next
to Debbie, and whisked away her hair. It had covered her face as she
went down.

“Oh shit. He's right. Check this. Fast,” he said to an
assistant.

The machine was pointed to Debbie again. It only took a few
seconds.

“Sir, this says it is Ms. Cantwell. The DNA checks out.”

“We've been played.” The man ripped off his face mask.
He was middle aged, about the same as his dad, but he wore cropped
hair and had the chiseled features of a movie superstar. He looked
around the room, settling on Liam and his friends since they were the
only ones on their feet.

“Sir, the drones?” Victoria asked as he approached.

“Ours. Well, they became ours. Look, I don't have much time.
What's going on here? Who are you people? Why the beds?”

“You mean you don't know?” Liam asked with disbelief.

The man laughed.

His partner came up beside him, using the machine on the three of
them. He only needed to get close before the thing bleeped.

“Holy shit! These three are Priority Level 5 targets.”

The weapons of the men came up in unison.

Liam tightened his grip on Victoria's soft midsection.

“We're innocent,” Liam said weakly.

“This kid is wanted in connection with bio-terrorism,”
the man with the equipment said while pointing to Liam. “This
girl is listed as infected, deceased. And this woman—”