Zombies Ever After: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 6 (39 page)

“They're not involved in this,” he told Ben.

I'm pretty sure.

“Someone just downed a military chopper and assassinated a
good man. No matter who they are, they've got the drop on us. And now
we're trapped with all these dead people.”

Ben stood up.

“OK. I don't know what's happening here. If you're part of
some elaborate ruse to get us here, I promise I'll make you pay
before I'm taken alive. You get me?”

Liam got it. No matter who came down the steps, he might get shot
for simply being there.

This time, Victoria pulled
him
in close.

4

“Liam, I saw Hayes get off a helicopter far up the river. I
don't know how, or even why, he'd be here in Cairo.”

Liam and Victoria split off from Ben and his partner and kept
their voices low enough Jane couldn't hear.

“That tracking system is pretty impressive. It told me you
were in Cairo. I would never have left Forest Park if I wasn't sure
you were here.”

“And I would have never left, either, but we were attacked
by NIS. They almost killed me and Hayes. They did kill some of the
Polar Bears in Hans' house.”

“I know! I found them. And your shirt,” he said with a
smile. “I knew you were there.”

“Hayes left a bomb,” Victoria said with a start,
though it was clear Liam survived.

“I found it. Poof,” he made a gesture with his hand of
an explosion. “I ran out the back door and hid behind a tree.
The whole place went up. And...I lost your shirt.”

She hugged him, laughing softly.

“One of the dying patriots helped set it up. Hayes was sure
he'd kill this Elsa chick. They have some kind of relationship.”

“You mean like they're in love?” he said with wonder.

“I don't know. I don't think so. She included an invitation
to her wedding when she killed the men in Hans' living room. Like she
knew he was coming, and that he would be the one to read it. He said
she was trying to get even for killing Duchesne, who was her fiancé.”

Liam looked out over the beds. Ben and his partner had flipped
beds on opposite sides of the room and faced the distant staircase.
He didn't think it was likely an enemy agent would just walk down
those steps like there was no threat down here. If these guys were
Secret Service, he imagined they were pretty much the best of the
best.

Debbie and the drones remained on the floor, bathed in the
daylight coming in from the opening above the steps.

“Why do you think Hayes is here? Why didn't he come with
us?”

Liam faced her, but he couldn't say what he truly thought.

Hayes lied about everything.

“I don't know. If he's here, maybe this Elsa person is here?
Maybe he hoped to surprise her,” he offered.

Liam called out to Ben. “You said Elsa was wanted for
genocide. What exactly did she do?”

Ben set his gun on the side of the bed, which was facing up at the
ceiling. He ducked down a little so he could address Liam. “Elsa
Cantwell was part of the overthrow of the democratically elected
government we had before the last election. We didn't see it as it
happened, but once the infection spread across the world...let's just
say cybersecurity became a thing of the past. Government secrets
were hacked and released in torrents. Old debts were settled.
Talented freelancers engaged in brute force attacks with no worry of
being caught. None of it mattered because the government itself was
fading.”

“Except for you guys.” He thought it was obvious.

“Yes, we have some very talented freelancers, too. And they
were more than anxious to hunker down in a government safe house in
exchange for the use of their talents. I'd call it World War III,
though most people never saw it. What you see out there now is World
War IV—the sticks and stones edition.”

“But why go after Elsa now?”

Ben looked at him with sadness. “Do you know what it's like
to be the only ones fighting for everyone else? The Marines. Army.
Air Force. They're all focused on killing the zombies. We're a
relatively small organization. We recently lost a President. Maybe
two. Our street cred is mighty low.”

“So you wanted to prove to the world who was responsible for
besting you?” he said, finally understanding their motive. It
was exactly like his own. Track down those responsible for ending the
world—and pin them to the wall in his tell-all history book.

“No. We're aren't vindictive. We need to find Elsa because
she's used government hackers—for a long time—to write
herself into many of the FEMA and Homeland Security org charts.
Without the President, and an unknown number of people in the
Presidential chain of command gone, we have no way of knowing who is
actually in charge of this nation. The line of succession works
wonderfully, except when all the members are missing. In fact, whole
families are missing. Not just the person in line for the
Presidency.”

“Whole families? Like, someone went out and killed the
family members of anyone close to the Presidency? Would that include
Senators and Representatives?”

“Possibly. The Speaker of the House is number two. The
president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate can assume the presidency if
the first two are dead. There are seventeen people who can assume the
presidency, starting at the Vice President, and ending with the
Secretary of Homeland Security.”

“Homeland Security,” Liam said with realization. “You
said Elsa wrote herself into the org charts there. She wouldn't by
chance be in charge of the whole shebang, would she?”

Ben studied him. “You catch on fast. Who did you say you
were again?” He smiled, but it was guarded. “But she
isn't the head of the organization, as far as we know. At this
moment, in this boat, I really can't say.”

He laughed while he turned back toward the stairwell.

“My family was on a kill list, like you just mentioned.
Everyone up and down my family tree was on that list.” He
couldn't reveal it was Hayes that canceled the hit.

“Do you have any family members in government? Maybe a
Secretary of Energy or Transportation perhaps? There are a lot of
Secretaries in the line.”

“My Grandma was a member of the House of Representatives,
from Colorado.”

“Rose Peters?”

The fact that he knew the name before he'd said it was greatly
troubling.

5

The look on his face probably spoke for him.

“I have to know all the tier one officials. She happens to
be very special, though. She disappeared a few months ago, at the
height of that Snowball business. She was wanted for treason. Did you
know that?”

He shook his head.

“It was all a sham, of course. We know that now. But back
then, boy howdy, the FBI was on the hunt for her.”

They both looked to the front, where the drones began to hover
once again.

“I guess they hacked our hack,” he said with a
determined grin. “I've got to pay attention.” He turned
back, using the bed as concealment.

But not cover, as Dad would have pointed out. Bullets could come
right through the bed sheets and flimsy mattress. The hold had a
distinct deficiency of anything solid to hide behind.

The drones hovered for a few moments once they were fully
operational, then went up through the gap in the roof above the
stairs, like balloons escaping a party. When they cleared the area,
only the beeping of the patients' electronic monitoring devices and
the soft gurgle of the water remained.

He was about to make a comment when another drone fell through the
opening. A small drone he recognized right away as matching the style
of the one he'd seen back in Forest Park. The one that talked to him
in Grubmeyer's bathroom. He'd finally been caught, but he could
hardly believe how much had to come together for her to find him a
second time.

“Are we having fun down here?” The tinny voice was
Elsa's.

“Hello Elsa,” Jane yelled.

The boxy little drone zeroed in on them and floated right between
Ben's men to be near him and Victoria. Evidently, Jane wasn't of
interest to the operator.

“Liam. I'm so glad we've run into each other again. I've
finally got you where I can talk to you in peace.”

The distant echoes of gunfire called out that lie for him.

“Sorry for shooting your man, Ben,” said the drone as
it turned toward the Secret Service leader. “But I can't chance
anyone getting away. I've got some of the most dangerous people in
America right there with you. Did you know?”

Ben looked at him, then at Victoria and Jane. He saw that the man
was being tested.

“I know what it says on my computer, but I have reason to
suspect my system's been hacked. These two kids don't look like they
could rip open a teddy bear, much less threaten the U-S-of-A.”

“That's their secret. They look like a couple of clueless
teenagers, even act like it most of the time. But put them in a
corner and they fight like freakish honey badgers. Watch out,”
she said with a laugh. “We tracked Mr. Liam across several
miles of hostile territory in downtown St. Louis. He evaded
everything—and I mean everything—to get to his girly
friend in the park.”

Victoria squeezed his hand.

“And the girl is just as bad. She escaped from several, uh,
situations I've been monitoring from my mobile headquarters. Assisted
by primo enemy numeral uno. A man I think you all know, and some of
you love, Mr. Douglas Hayes.”

Some commotion rang through the speaker before she continued.

“I tracked you all coming down here. It was a nice effort
for Douggie to try to get himself clear of you all, but I found him.
I found all of you. The boy who weaseled himself into our little
secret. The girl who can't keep herself from poking into places she
doesn't belong. The brave Secret Service dopes who have been on a
months-long wild goose chase. The renegade doctor and his wife, who
just can't get it through their head that this is a killing
operation, not a life saving one. Who else is down there?”

They all looked around.

“What about all these people in the beds?” Liam called
out.

“Oh, they're part of another of our experiments. Did you
know that the oldest people in our trials were able to channel
zombies using their minds? Why do you think so many found their way
to Cairo? I wish Jasper were here—I had him convinced it was
mere chance that all of them came ambling down along the shores of
the rivers. That it was bad luck.” Her laughter was not
friendly.

“These zombies you see out there are from Chicago and
Indianapolis, but I'll let you in on a little secret of mine because
it excites me so much. The zombies from St. Louis are coming down the
shore of the Mississippi, too. They're the ones this is all about.
They have a
very
special skill. Did you know?”

While the discussion was ongoing, Ben had moved a lot closer to
the front steps. Elsa either let him go or didn't know he'd gone.
Whatever it was, she finally called him out.

“Don't bother, Ben. My drones are up top, safe from your
hackers now at the bottom of the river. If anyone so much as sticks
their head up top, my drone buddies will take it off. Oh yeah,”
she started. Someone interrupted her on her end, and the line stopped
broadcasting for a moment.

Finally, she returned. “Sorry about that. I'll let you keep
guessing about the St. Louis zombies. Maybe you'll figure it out when
we start loading them onto all the barges so helpfully gathered by
the city of Cairo,” she laughed. “Meanwhile, I have good
news to share. I have a surprise package about to head
your
way. You'll never guess what it is.”

He was pretty sure it wasn't anything he'd like.

“Have any of you heard of the Broken Angel delivery system?”

No one responded.

“Ben, I'm surprised. Oh, well. You see, when you get into
the weeds of what the government really does, you find some pretty
cool stuff. It turns out there are ICBM's sitting in North Dakota
which have been stripped of their nukes. The eggheads thought it
would be neat to slap on a conventional warhead, tighten up the
guidance package, and roll it out as some kind of special delivery
system when they wanted to decapitate a foreign government. Can you
imagine?”

Liam looked at Ben, as the resident agent of the government. He
merely shrugged.

“All that money! Pissed away on a weapon that could never
get off the ground without alerting the world to a possible nuclear
missile strike in progress. How do you reassure anyone you aren't
launching a nuke? Only one thing could result.”

“Nu-cue-lar war,” he said with awe.

He'd finally found his use for the annoying word.

“That's right,” said the voice in the drone. “But
now, with the whole world offline. Well, no one will care that a
missile took off from ass-end-city N-D and was on a trajectory to
armpit-lane I-L.”

“You're ICBM'ing us?” Ben shouted.

“That's right, suckers. If I don't use these weapons now, I
may never get the chance again. This is the end of the world people.
Everything left is single-use.”

The tinny speaker laughed.

“But before I get the satisfaction of watching your little
boat sink with the world's biggest bullet, I'm coming aboard to
collect something of mine. I'll be along in a jiff,” she added
with good cheer. “I need the two kids—without guns—on
the top deck in sixty seconds. No SS. No old timers. No one named
Hayes. You all can stay down there. And Liam?”

“Uh huh.”

“Bring the unconscious girl.”

He turned to Victoria, sensing that they'd really, truly, for
real, reached the end of their adventures.

“Well, partner...” he sighed.

She looked at him with watery eyes, but she didn't have the look
of defeat. Far from it.

“Death by nuclear missile. I think we've graduated to the
big leagues,” she said with a smile and a wink.