Zombies vs Polar Bears: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 5 (39 page)

Another yell from behind. She didn't look back.

“Oh God. Please help me.” With great effort she
managed another couple of steps. The boat was tantalizingly close.

“Hey, is anyone there?”

It was likely no one was on the beached craft. Surely they'd have
heard her...

Her lungs burned and her muscles cramped. Soon she'd be frozen for
good. She turned to see the shore. The zombie which claimed Emil was
now standing on a little mound of dirt at the edge of the mud field.
Though it had come from further inland, she noticed it was standing
at the end of a path of disturbed mud leading to the boat.

The boat did have at least one passenger, she decided.

With another powerful twist she managed another step.

Her life flashed before her eyes, which she assumed only happened
when a person was about to die. The edge of the motorboat was so
near, yet impossibly far. The mud only got deeper. It was too wet to
get on top, and too deep to push through.

Even releasing the gun on her back seemed a monumental chore.

She looked back to shore, getting a read on her chances.

Now, there were two zombies.

I'm screwed.

###

Thank you for reading
Zombies vs Polar Bears
. As of June,
2016, I have five books completed in this series. I have plans for at
least nine. Each volume opens the world a little wider for my heroes.
There are new enemies, new allies, monumental efforts to preserve
safe refuges and Herculean acts of stupidity to ruin others. Liam and
Grandma Marty remain the focus, along with Victoria, but they each
play their role in exploring their zombie universe. I hope you'll
enjoy their saga.

Please consider taking a few seconds to
rate
my book on Amazon
. It can be a simple "I liked it."
Why? The ratings are how independent authors such as myself are
discovered. Your word is my very best advertising, so thank you!

Below you will find the prologue of book 6 in the series,
Zombies
Ever After.
The story picks up exactly where book 5 leaves off.
Will Liam and Victoria be able to find their own fairy tale ending in
a world suffering through the zombie plague?

Thank you so much for your time.

E.E. Isherwood

Major General John Jasper sat on a hard chair. He'd been tied to
it by the same team that captured him on the levee outside of Cairo,
Illinois. He had a bag over his head, reminding him of any number of
interrogations from his time overseas. There, he was on the other
side of the cloth. The hours of monotony gave him plenty of time to
think about what he did wrong. Explosions and gunfire rattled the
room from somewhere close by.
His
men were out there,
fighting.

Elsa and her team had bagged him while he maneuvered the ad hoc
battalion of Army units near the big ditch to the north of the town.
For some reason she wanted all his men outside the town, though his
military brain could fathom no legitimate reason for doing so. The
Paladins were not well-suited to direct fire. That's why he had them
back in the town, so they could rain the hurt on the zombies as they
came over the interstate to the north. Keep the fighting miles from
town, instead of at the front gate.

But he'd done as she asked. Homeland Security had taken charge of
all military operations inside the continental United States, getting
around Constitutional roadblocks, as part of the government's
response to the zombie outbreak—he'd long since given up trying
to call them by other names—and her role in Homeland gave her
direct control of his units. Up until that day she'd deferred to him
on tactical issues. He never imagined she would relieve him of his
duty. How many other two-star generals could she tap here in nowhere,
USA?

“I did everything she asked, and still she relieved me,”
he thought. Though, being totally honest with himself, he knew what
he did wrong.

“Mrs. Peters. I shouldn't have gone to see Mrs. Peters.”
Though Elsa never told him not to, she did suggest the 104-year-old
woman was her prisoner. By all indications Elsa had made every effort
to kill her, which was confusing as hell, since she was supposedly
cured of the zombie plague.

And then you broke her out.

It seemed the chivalrous thing to do. Marty Peters had gone loopy
from heat exhaustion because Elsa had cut her air conditioner power
cord, and the temperature in the room had gone into the stratosphere.
If he hadn't gone there, she
would
be dead.

“So what's the score, old man?” he said to himself.
“Elsa knows where Marty came from, and knows the doctor who
cured her. That doctor went AWOL, then Marty shows up in Cairo. Elsa
finds the old woman and locks her up, intending to kill her. Why? She
wanted me to go track down the good doctor. Why?”

Nothing made sense. Zombies. Elsa. Cures, or no cures.

He knew enough to assign a general framework to his life. Elsa
wasn't who she said she was. He was absolutely sure of that. Homeland
Security was full of boot-licker bureaucrats whose idea of “security”
was patting down toddlers and feeling up women at airports. Obviously
they failed in epic fashion in preventing travelers from bringing in
the plague from overseas. He was far from a patriot in the vein of
the Patriot Snowball movement, but he didn't believe for one second
they were capable of causing the zombie plague. His sources all
insisted it came from overseas. Homeland dropped the ten-thousand
pound ball.

And that's why she wants to blame old ladies and rogue
administrators.

So, Marty Peters was the good guy. Whatever else she had going on,
she was an enemy of Elsa Cantwell. That made her his friend, though
it didn't elude his steel trap mind that his biggest assistance to
his new ally was getting himself relieved of duty and tossed out of
the Zilch World War, just when it was getting important he be there
with his men. She was probably back in her prison room by now. Or
dead.

He tried for the hundredth time to jiggle his hands in the
bindings. Unlike the movies, he was unable to free himself and make a
heroic escape. Before all this, he was comfortable in his desk job—a
few years from retirement and the good life on a tiny wooded lake
somewhere—and his physical training had been a bit lax. That
was costing him, now.

A door opened, then closed. Someone had come into the room. He
tensed up, listening.

“Hello, John,” a female voice chimed.

“Good—” he didn't know if it was day or night.
“—morning?” He'd been taken at dusk, and it felt
like hours since he'd been hauled away.

“Not quite.” Elsa pulled the bag from his head. He was
in the same hotel room where Marty had been kept. The dirty motel was
near the front gate of the town, which explained how he heard the
fighting over the levee, to the north.

And Elsa had completely changed. Far from the attractive, but
reserved-looking blonde woman he'd known since she arrived in Cairo,
she had transformed into—

“You're undoubtedly wondering why I'm dressed like this?”
she nodded to him as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the room.
He couldn't take his eyes off her, despite his inability to properly
focus, or his general disdain for her.

The woman was in her thirties, but had the body of a woman in her
twenties. She looked like she had just come from the gym, where she
apparently ripped up the StairMaster as well as the free weights. She
wore tight-fitting black capris and a similarly tight orange sports
bra. But now that he could see the silhouettes of her powerful legs
and the muscle definition on her arms, he could see she'd been a
wolf-in-sheep's clothing all along. As a product of the modern
military, he was focused on her mind, and the dumb decisions she
seemed to make. It never occurred to him she was as strong as this…

“Did you know eight of the ten women in my graduating class
were CrossFit champions in their respective countries? I was a champ
for several years in my home country of Iceland. Look it up
sometime.” She laughed. “You probably thought I was a
pushover, and that's why you didn't respect me in our meetings, or
when you went to free Mrs. Peters from this detention facility.”
She swept her arms around the room.

“I didn't know this was a prison.”

“No, I guess you weren't as smart as I'd hoped. Maybe losing
you won't be the blow I thought it would be.”

He couldn't help feel the sting of that statement. Elsa's six-pack
abs drew his eyes when he should have been paying attention to her
words. He missed some of what she said next.

“...and that's why you're here, John. I told you I needed
someone I could trust to do what was asked of them. You've gone off
the reservation. Now you have to pay for that, I'm sorry to say.”

He looked up, to her cool blue eyes. With the blonde hair he
really could imagine she was from Iceland, though her English was
flawless. “I thought she was a threat. I had to see for myself.
But she's just an old lady. All I did was get her medical help.”

He was telling the truth, though now he was glad he set her free.

While she responded, Elsa untied the rope around his feet, then
his hands. “John, there's so much you don't know, I wouldn't
know where to start. Homeland Security has many branches, and the
division I work for has been planning for this event for a long
goddam time, and you and that old lady aren't going to mess it up for
me. That's the main thrust of what
this
is all about tonight.”

As the ropes came off his hands, he imagined himself lunging at
her and putting a stop to whatever it was she was doing, but his old
arms had been bent backward and the soreness prevented him from
moving them quickly to his lap, much less using them to tackle her.

Her quads bulged in her stretch pants.

“I know what you're thinking, John. Can you take me? Well,
Major General, do you think you can take down a helpless little girl
like me?” She laughed, knowing his impotence at that moment.

“It's not very fair. I can't even move my arms.” He
tried to convey bravado, but the truth was still unflattering to a
career soldier. He finally got both arms to his lap, and began
rubbing his hands to restore blood flow.

“I'll tell you what I'll do,” she said as she walked
to and opened the motel room door. “If you can get by me in the
next sixty seconds, I'll let you go on your way. If you don't, I'll
kill you.” She giggled. “Sounds fun, doesn't it?”
Her smile was evil.

He took a deep breath and continued to rub his hands. The feeling
was just starting to come back into them.

“Fifty seconds left, John.”

“Give me a second.”

“You don't have many of those left. You aren't getting out
of this door.”

Another ten seconds went by. He tried to stand, which went better
than he assumed it would. Yet he plopped heavily back down into the
chair. A plan formed in his head.

More hand rubbing. “Why are you doing this? You can't off a
two-star just because...”

He hoped that was true. It would have been absolutely true before
the sirens.

“That's what I've been trying to tell you, stud. I can do
whatever the hell I want.”

But why? Who the hell are you?

“Thirty seconds left. Tick tock.”

John imagined himself doing the actions, knocking Elsa down, then
running for his men. Maybe he could convince them to arrest her. It
wasn't very clever, but most military actions succeeded when they
were dead simple.

“Wow. Nothing? You're just going to die there? I'm so
disappointed in you.”

He feigned having trouble standing. When he made it to his feet,
he turned part-way around and pretended to lean on the chair back.

Here goes nothing.

With a firm grasp in both his hands—still in pain—he
lifted the wooden chair from the floor and turned as fast as his body
would allow to throw the chair the ten feet over to Elsa. In his head
he intended to follow the chair for a deadly second strike, but that
turned out to be something his thirty-year-old self could have done.
Not his current self.

Elsa was clipped by the chair on one arm. She let out an ambiguous
sound, like air hissing, as she dodged. It took John several long
seconds to reach her. He knew he'd taken too long.

The smile on her face invited the challenge.

Rather than wait for him, she advanced. They met a few feet from
the door, but Elsa dipped low as she put a shoulder into the side of
his ribs. He tried to grab her.

What the!

His arms slid harmlessly over her oiled-up midsection. She'd
positioned herself behind him and in one fluid motion put her arms
around his neck and flung herself onto his back. He saw himself in
the dirty mirror on the wall. A bemused look on his face signaled his
acceptance of how this was going to go down.

Elsa's knees dug into his back as she pulled on his neck. The
woman knew her stuff.

He let himself fall backward, praying he'd crush her. The stars in
his eyes from her painful grasp didn't give him many options.

“I should have walked her out the door. Then I would have
won the bet,” he thought as he hit the carpet.

Things happened so fast he couldn't keep up. Elsa hung on but
flipped around from his back to his front as he fell backward. He
landed on the hard carpet and she let go for a brief second, but
re-mounted him from the front. This time she straddled his neck so
her powerful legs trapped his head.

He was looking up at his beautiful killer.

“Nice try, John. It restores some faith in my decision to
bring you into my circle, though you ended up failing all around.
Most people do. Half the people are below average, all the time,
don't ya know? You can take comfort you have a long line of failures
marching before you.”