Zombies vs Polar Bears: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 5 (8 page)

Until now. Until he met me.

He kept that to himself.

“So he brings in guns from Cairo?”

“I never asked him where they came from. But think about it.
All those barges floating down the river. There's no telling what
could have been in all those containers. I've watched them float by
for weeks. He said they captured them down there. If you think about
it, Cairo is possibly the richest town in America right now.”

Liam had thought nothing about money since the sirens ended
society. But his hunger told him that at some point someone was going
to have to start growing food or slaughtering cattle, and for anyone
to buy that food they are going to need money or other goods for
trade. In that light, Cairo actually could be one of the most wealthy
towns in America. That assumes the upriver towns don't go looking for
their missing barges and cargo.

“So there are Polar Bears in Cairo?” It seemed
obvious, but it opened new avenues. If he had friends there, besides
the captain, maybe he could get messages to Grandma.

“Liam, let me ask you an important question. It's what I ask
every person who claims to want to join with da Bears.” He'd
said it funny, though Liam couldn't guess why.

“In the Twentieth Century there was one institution that
towered above all others in the sheer number of people it
exterminated from the earth. Can you guess what it was?”

Liam knew the answer.

“The Nazis.”

“Nope. They were efficient killers, for sure. And they
worked over the Jews to the breaking point. But they by themselves
pale in comparison to this institution. You have to think bigger.”

He only had a vague recollection, even with his Polar Bear father,
about the big events in history. He was familiar with the important
dates in American History—1776, 1865, 1945—but he'd never
had to know about the number of deaths per century. Who would even
teach such a thing?

They continued to walk the tracks, but Jason let him off the hook.

“The institution is government. 250 million killed in the
Twentieth Century alone. I'm talking about Democide, Liam.”

The word was foreign. Jason expected as much because he continued
right along.

“We all complain about political parties and we think
America is broken and all that, but the real enemy is the very
institution of government. It has the capacity for some good, but
when it goes off the rails,” he kicked a rail, “it goes
big. It's the single biggest killer in the twentieth century. The
Nazis were bad, but they weren't as bad as the Communists in the
Soviet Union or China. The statists use the apparatus of government
to punish those that won't say the correct thing or think the correct
way.”

“But we've moved beyond all that. We've evolved,” said
Victoria.

Liam wasn't going to argue with his girlfriend. It made sense. No
big genocides had happened recently, that he could remember.

“You think so, huh? But until this conversation you weren't
even aware the word existed, or that nearly the equivalent of the
population of the United States was rounded up and exterminated in
the last hundred years. How can you say something can't happen, if
you don't even know it exists?”

No one had any retort.

Jason continued. “How many people do you think have been
killed by this plague? Millions? Billions? Almost everyone?”

Liam stopped. “Wait just a damn minute. Are you saying that
governments put out this plague to kill their own citizens? How does
that even make sense?”

“I'll answer your question with a question. How does it make
sense that the Soviet Union killed almost seventy million of
its
own people
? Who do you think makes the decisions of government?”

“Politicians?”

“Wrong. Bureaucrats. The true engine of the state. It took
people to drive the Jews in cattle cars to the ovens. It took people
to march the walking dead into the gulag archipelago of Russia. And
it took people to create and disperse the bug that killed us all.”

He gave Liam a serious look.

“This was no accident, Liam. You have to know that. And the
people who did it are in our own government. And they want you dead,
you dead, you dead, and me dead.”

“But why,” asked Victoria in almost a whisper.

“That's what the Patriot Snowball was all about. We wanted
to expose the faceless bureaucrats. Who were the anonymous political
action committees, corporate shills, and lobbyists behind all the
decisions made at the highest levels of government? Who was really in
control of the most powerful and potentially destructive force in
modern history? And these days, we want to know what they knew about
the virus.”

“An NIS agent spilled the beans. He said it was the
President who released it.”

“Partial credit, my friend. Partial credit.”

Jason looked to the path up the side of the escarpment.

“We're almost back to my people. We'll have to continue this
later.”

“Wait,” Victoria cried. “Are you some kind of
secret agent? How did you learn all this stuff?”

“Agent? No,” he said with a chortle, “I was a
lowly college professor. Educators are popular with our group.”
He pointed at his temple, then tapped it with a smile. “We know
where the bodies are buried.”

When the group reached the top of the bluff overlooking the
Mississippi River, Liam was reacquainted with the desperate group of
survivors huddled in the woods up there. On his last pass through,
the people were patiently waiting for their opportunity to cross to
Illinois. He figured some of them had made the trip, but he also
guessed there were more today than there were two days ago.

Jason walked them right into a circle of serious-looking men and
women in various types of camouflage clothing, tending radios.

“This is the heart of our network. Old-school shortwave
radios.”

Liam whispered to Jason. “Won't they track you here?”

“We only listen, up here. We move around if we need to
broadcast. We, uh, have a central leadership team that feeds us news
and orders.”

Liam wondered if his dad had been a part of that leadership team.
If his note was true, he almost certainly was. He kept that to
himself, for now, and showed genuine appreciation for the people
listening to the radios. They played their part to keep people alive.

“Excuse me. I need to check in. You can make yourselves
comfortable in the waiting room.” He pointed to a clump of
trees with a smile. “We also have some bottles of water.”

Bottled water was ubiquitous. It was almost as if someone
para-dropped pallets of plastic water bottles into St. Louis because
everyone carried one. Those sitting in the dry leaves where Jason had
pointed were still sealed, which was good. He dodged a bullet when he
drank the creek water the other day; an activity he wanted to avoid
doing again.

His mom excused herself to talk to Jason, leaving him and Victoria
on their own.

“Just like old times,” Victoria said with a sad smile
as they sat down under the leafy canopy. “You and me against
the world.”

He looked back to his mom. “But now we have to take care of
my mom. I thought I'd lost you both when that Arizona jumped for the
boat.”

She laughed. “That's what you're going with?”

“What?”

“Arizona?” We're calling it an Arizona zombie?”
Her head was cocked sideways, daring him to agree.

“Well
technically
it's an alpha zombie, but yes.
Whoever discovers new species of animals gets to name it.” Once
again he felt his science teacher would be proud he was putting her
guidance to good use. He felt an inner tension start to let go.
Things were getting back to normal with Victoria, his rock. Getting
out of dangerous scrapes was preferable to dwelling on the death of
his father. The only thing that made it seem less shocking was that
so many other people were also dead. It broke his heart, as it would
for any child, but it did not break his soul. He couldn't take time
off to grieve when the forest could reach out and grab him at any
second…

He looked around, wondering if he imagined that as part of an
elaborate sixth-sense. But all he saw were the hungry faces of young
and old spread among the trees.

“It was scary, whatever we're going to call it. If every
zombie was as smart as that one, we'd all be dead already. You and I
wouldn't have ever made it out of the tank room. Normal zombies
suddenly seem pretty stupid, don't ya think?”

He tried to remember Ms. Bunting's science class. He wasn't a
model student, but she made things interesting, so he listened more
than he might have otherwise. They had a unit on crossbreeding of pea
plants by some geneticist who figured out that certain
characteristics are passed on to successive generations. The Arizona
had displayed several characteristics in one package, like it had
accumulated them from somewhere. But without breeding…

“Ugg.”

“What?” Victoria answered.

“I just had a horrible thought.” He shook his head.
“Do you think the zombies can...breed?”

He thought of a book series which involved zombies doing “it”
with their victims, but something that terrible couldn't possibly be
real. It was an unlikely possibility...but one he had to admit he
couldn't discount out of hand.

She gave him the “did you hit your head in the shallow end
of the pool again” look.

“I know, right. It's horrible. But how do you think that one
zombie got all those skills? It could climb, jump, swim,
and...whatever that smell trick is called. It had to get those from
somewhere. But...”

“But zombies don't have baby zombies.”

They sat together, side by side, until Victoria snapped her
fingers. “What if it wasn't a zombie at all? What if it was a
human disguised as a zombie? That would explain how it did all those
things. Maybe when it fell in the water all his makeup washed off and
that's why he had to disappear.”

“Hmm.” Liam thought about it. It did make a lot of
sense. Then he thought about another zombie book he'd read a long
time ago. There was something about it that applied to this
situation…

“Or, I read about people who went crazy in a zombie plague
and started to act like zombies, even though they were still human.
They gnawed on other humans, behaved like zombies and even mingled
with them. I forget what they were called, but they basically took
pretending to a whole new level.”

“That would make more sense than thinking a human put on a
zombie costume to attack us for no good reason. He may have really
thought he was a zombie, and we just happened to be at the wrong
place at the wrong time.”

He wondered about that. It was more frightening to think that
something as cunning as an Arizona in how it approached, could also
be cunning in how it selected its prey in the first place. If it had
been successful in killing them all, it would have eliminated a
Snowball leader, a patriot gun-running captain, and a tight family
unit who had the inside track on the NIS.

The implications were too terrible to share with Victoria.

What are the implications? For real.

He wasn't sure he believed it. Could it be real? Could zombies be
programmed to seek out specific targets and attack them?

No, that's got to be something I read in the fiction section.

He was on a roll thinking about his books, and the examples
within, but he couldn't remember ever reading about programmable
zombies. That was a relief, though he reluctantly admitted it still
didn't mean it was false.

He only smiled at Victoria, hoping she wasn't a mind reader.

2

Lana returned to Liam and Victoria, providing the needed
distraction for Liam. He didn't want to put any more fear into the
girls than was necessary. Zombies were terrifying enough without
thinking they could sniff out specific enemies. Early in the
disaster, while on the train out of St. Louis, he imagined the
zombies were following them with a purpose, but they were also on an
obnoxiously loud train leaving the city in the dead of night. What
else were they going to follow? But the idea formed they could follow
him...and now this.

“Hey guys. Cairo is still intact. I knew you'd be concerned
about Grandma. So am I. One of the radio operators said the town is
being deluged by zombies from the north, but they have strong
defenses in place.”

“Liam and I walked on their levees and saw the huge ditch
they built. They had tanks and other weapons pointed in that
direction, too. They can handle them.”

Liam wanted to point out the futility of defending any refuge in
the long run, but he was already thinking negative thoughts and
didn't want to compound them. He nodded to let his mom know he'd
heard.

“But there are problems.” She took a seat against a
small tree across from them, then looked around. There were people
nearby, but not within quiet-voice range.

“I heard Jason talking with his people. They gave him a
bunch of bad news. Something about that big convoy. About the Army
across the river. Boats. They were feeding it all too him. He walked
away with one of them, so I came over here to not be too nosy.”
She smiled.

Liam wondered if she thought of his dad at times like this. He
would have been at home in a bank of shortwave radios sitting in a
random forest somewhere. Was this up her alley, too?

“Mom, do you like this kind of stuff?”

She looked surprised. “What? You mean smelling like sweat,
looking like I always just woke up, and crying eight hours of the
day?” She softened. “I'm sorry. What do you mean,
exactly.”

“No, I just meant doing the stuff that dad liked to do.
Shoot guns. Run around in the woods. Collect ammo.” He thought
of his dad's secret stash of guns and ammo in their basement. Most of
it had been destroyed, he knew, though they each held the distinctive
AK-47 rifles which his dad had horded. They pulled extra 7.62x39 ammo
from
Lucy's Football
. “Or did you do it because you, um,
loved him.”