Five Days Dead (3 page)

“What’s your name?”

“Kara. Sergeant Kara Litmeyer of the Founder Federation Legion, Utah Hub Brigade.”

“Kara,” he nodded as politely as his nature allowed. “Harley Nearwater.”

“Are you a neand?” Kara asked.

“No. Just a wanderer on the path. What brings a Federation legionnaire so far out in the sticks?” 

Her eyes widened and then darted to him, then away, then to the windows, the doorway and back to him again. “I’m lost.” Her voice squeaked.

“Lost?” He looked at the bloody scar on her temple. “How is that even possible?”  

“He took it away from me.”

“What?”

“The Link. He took away my linktag.”

Harley nodded as if what she was saying was not completely insane, but of course, it was. Crazy blinkers. Everyone on the planet with a linktag was a blinker, although the name was losing its significance with each passing generation. When the linktags were first developed and implemented people connecting to the Link mentally with their tag had a tendency to blink rapidly while trying to divide their attention between the Link and the physical world. Most people didn’t exhibit rapid eye movement and blinking when connected to the Link anymore, but a lot of that was because people spent more time on the Link than in “realtime.”

Blinkers injected nanotechnology in their right temple. The injection left a small, star-shaped scar and while you could easily get the scar removed with your right to medical account, few used their RTM to do so. Having the tag scar meant you belonged, that you weren’t a pilgrim, or even worse, a neand. The insanity in what the scared, shivering woman on the bed had said is that once injected with the nanobots, you couldn’t just perform a surgery and have them removed. They were a part of you. They connected you to the Link and the Link to you. It was one of the reasons Harley wouldn’t have a linktag. Not the only reason, but definitely one of them. He had no interest in being a blinker. 

The scar on the young woman’s temple looked ugly, but whoever had done that to her had about as much of a chance of removing the linktag that way as they would have if they had removed her arms or legs.

“Who is he?”

The woman bit her lip, started to sob and fought it away. She tossed the rifle on the bed beside her.

“I don’t know. I was meditating one night, just trying to clear my head and get in tune with my emotions because it had been a pretty rough couple of days. I had been fighting with Alain, my husband. I was thinking about Alain and trying to calm myself and this strange man just appeared out of thin air. He didn’t scare me at first, even though one moment I was alone in my apartment and the next there was this stranger standing beside me. Crazy huh, that I wouldn’t be scared?  But he was tall and he was handsome and so I thought it might be nice to talk to him, even if he didn’t have a brain in his head he would be nice to look at and harmless I thought. He looked harmless, anyway. The Legion teaches you how to take care of yourself, so I just wasn’t worried. If he tried anything, I would kick his ass. But then he looked into my eyes and I looked into his and I got lost I think. I think he hypnotized me. He had gray eyes, the grayest eyes I’ve ever seen and looking into them it was like there was a storm going on in there and I couldn’t move.”

“Sure you weren’t on the Link?”

“No. This was realtime. He was in my apartment.”

“Did your husband see him?”

The woman shook her head. “My husband is on the Link, not realtime.”

“Your husband. Is he flesh or digital?”

“Flesh, digi, filler, does it matter?”

Harley shrugged. “Not to me.” 

It was considered improper to differentiate between a digital version of a person and the flesh and blood version. Even asking if someone in the digiverse was “real” or “simulation” was deemed hateful. It was racist, bigoted behavior. Harley made a point of always asking.

“That’s why we were arguing. His realtime is in the Paris Hub and one day while I was at work I had the strangest thought. I just thought I’ve never touched my husband. I mean flesh to flesh. I’ve never kissed his lips in realtime, or ran my fingers through his hair in realtime. I’ve never made love to him in realtime and that just made me sad. I don’t know why it made me sad, but it did. I’m not neand-minded, or anything, and I’m no bigot. What world you live in is up to you, digiverse or universe, to each his own, you know? Pick your realm and enjoy it, I say. But when I talked to Alain about maybe catching a flight and visiting him in realtime Paris he got so angry and it just escalated from there. But the thing is, I couldn’t get it off my mind and after work I found myself visiting the parks of the Utah Hub. Have you ever been?”

“No.”

“They’re so beautiful. And they’re never very crowded. I watched a couple with their children playing on the grass and it just made me want to be with Alain in realtime even more. We had talked about having children, but I think we had pretty much decided they would be digi, not flesh. But now I wasn’t so sure. So I thought I would try and meditate for a while in realtime, to clear my head and decide what I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it. And that’s when the man with the gray eyes appeared in my apartment.”

Harley leaned forward and his stomach growled loudly. He hadn’t bothered to eat since breakfast and the exertion from the day was catching up with him. Kara heard his stomach and stood up to go to the small kitchenette. “Are you hungry? I have food. There’s some broiled chicken and vegetables, lots of vegetables. I also have water, milk and even some beer. When I woke up I was here and my uniform was here and pulse rifle and all of this food was here with me. I don’t even drink beer, but there’s plenty of it.” Her voice was more relaxed now and her body language spoke of fear washing away.

Harley raised an eyebrow. “I drink beer.”

Kara dished him up a plate of food and Harley sat at the bar and ate, not realizing how hungry he had been. He drank two beers very quickly, recognizing that his body probably needed the water more but not caring. He sipped the third beer as he turned Kara back to her story.

“What did he want?”

“Want?”

“The man with the gray eyes. What did he want?”

Kara leaned on the opposite end of the bar and bit into a carrot. Beneath the dirt and the tear stains, her chocolate skin was very smooth and beautiful. “He said he wanted to help me. He smiled at me and said he wanted to help me. He was very handsome, even more than Alain, and I always thought Alain was the most gorgeous man I have ever seen, flesh or digi.”

“Help you how?”

“He said the linktag was a form of possession. That with the linktag I would never be able to think clearly, never be able to make my choice.”

“Choice?”

“Yeah, choice. Crazy. He said I had to decide which side I stood for or if I chose neither, but I needed to decide and he hoped I might choose his side. He said as long as I had the whole world screaming inside my head I would never be able to find the quiet I needed to make my choice. I needed an exorcism.”

“An exorcism?” Harley smiled.

“He actually said that. The strange thing was that looking into his eyes it made perfect sense to me. So I nodded my head and he touched me.”  Her hand went to her temple, and her face twisted with pain or the memory of pain as she did so. “I woke up here. And I can’t reach the Link. My linktag is gone. I can’t connect with anyone. I haven’t talked to Alain in four days and the quiet here, the quiet is deafening. How do you deal with it, the quiet? How do the neands survive in so much quiet?”

“May I look?” Harley motioned toward the scar on her temple and she nodded, reluctantly.

He walked to her and touched her lightly on the chin, tilting her head to get a good look at her temple. The scar was a black oval in the shape of an expanded thumbprint, as if the stranger had burned his fingerprint into her flesh. 

“I don’t even know where I am.” Kara said as Harley examined her temple. “I walked around town a couple of times and I saw a few people but when I tried to talk to them, they ran into their homes. I think they were blinkers because they looked scared, like I was a neand or a zombie or something. Me, a neand.  It’s just crazy. I found the old city hall and found out this is Price, but I don’t know it.”

“It’s about 70 miles from the Utah Hub.”

“That’s it?” Kara grinned wildly now. “Thank god!  Could you help me find my way back? I don’t know what he did, but I’ve got to get back. I’ve got to find a way to get my linktag back. Alain will be so worried.”

“I could.” Harley said, getting up and going back to his backpack and saddle bag. “In the morning. Do you know who this man was? Any idea?”

“None. I asked him who he was and he said he was Prince Albert in a Can. He seemed to think it was pretty funny, but I don’t have any idea what he was talking about. Do you?”

“No.”

“He said he was just a wanderer on the path, which is why it startled me so much when you said you were a wanderer too. Do you know him?”

“No. This is the first I’ve heard of him,” Harley lied.

“Why would he leave me here of all places?  He gives me food and my uniform and my rifle and beer, when I don’t even drink beer, and not a drop of wine when I could really use a good glass of wine. Why would he do that?”

“An offering,” Harley muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Kara sat back down on her bed and smiled and Harley was surprised to discover he found her quite lovely. “You could stay in one of the rooms across the hall and we could get a start toward the Hub tomorrow, do you think?”

Harley picked up his bags and threw them across his shoulder.

“Harley.” Kara smiled at him, and it was a genuine smile, the fear had all but evaporated from her smooth face. “Thank you. Thank you for finding me.”

Harley shifted the bags and then drew his sidearm in one quick motion and shot the young woman in the chest. The pulse blast threw her against the wall and passed through her body and the thin wall behind her. As she crumpled to the floor her lips twisted from a smile to a dark circle of surprise.

Harley walked to where she had fallen and reached down to pick up the pulse rifle. Kara reached up for him and she clutched his right arm. He looked into her dying eyes and was surprised to see they were gray. She smiled, and a thin line of blood escaped her lips.

“The end,” she whispered.

“The end?”

Kara gripped Harley’s arm even harder and tried to pull herself upright. She failed. “The end is coming,” she gasped.

Harley frowned as her grip slipped and her arm fell to the floor. Her eyes were no longer gray. They were black with death. 

“For you I think it’s already here.”

He took her pulse rifle, holstered his blaster and went across the hall to find a room where he could sleep.

Zombie Happy Meals

The Rages brought a storm into the dead city in the middle of the night; three hours after Harley killed the lost woman who told tales of a gray-eyed man and sobbed about missing a husband she had never touched. 

The wind hit the city first, hurricane strength winds that picked the rubble off the streets and flung it across the valley, ripped trees from their roots and lifted the roofs off several of the older buildings in town. The rain started half an hour later, pounding rain that came in waves. Harley watched from his hotel room as the roads turned to rivers, and when the wind threw a mangled bicycle through his third-story window, he pulled the blankets and pillows off the bed, went into the bathroom and closed the door. He slept in the bathtub. The storm lasted until mid-morning, but he was able to sleep through most of it. While he slept he dreamed and as with most of his dreams, he dreamed of his mother when he was a little boy and he thought that perhaps he had been happy then, but it was a dim memory and he couldn’t be sure. It seemed like he smiled more then, but he was young and weak and maybe he smiled so he wasn’t beaten, instead of because he was happy. It was murky in his mind.

But the memories about his mother weren’t quite so murky. He remembered her vividly. He muttered her name while he slept fitfully in the bathtub, because he missed her and knew that he had not done right by her and that he should change that before it was too late. She was still on the reservation, and he hadn’t spoken to her in more than four years. She was all alone there unless she had hooked up with another deadbeat and if she had she was worse than alone. He remembered going to work with her at a little country store and he sat on the floor behind the counter while she worked. He spent most of his day just sitting there on the floor watching his beautiful mother with long, black hair and the sad eyes, thinking that when he was bigger and stronger he would take care of her and make sure none of the bad men ever beat her or cursed her again. But in the end he had grown up and left her and the reservation behind. In the end, he had become a bad man himself.

When he woke the storm was still raging, but it had lost its fury and he knew it would die soon enough. He was hungry but wasn’t sure he could get food through the Link with the Rages underway. He thought about going next door to eat some more of the chicken, but the sight of the dead woman on the floor might make him lose his appetite. Instead, he went downstairs and rummaged through the hotel diner. The freezers were still working and the water was still on but the tap puked dirty brown for several minutes. While there wasn’t much in the freezer to interest him, he found some vegetables that he thawed and steamed and ate at the reception desk, looking out the windows at the flooded streets. The cats and the coyotes had all run away when the storm hit. Harley counted himself lucky that he found cover before the Rages. The desert between Price and Huntington would be rivers of mud now. 

The wind and the rain finally lifted as morning turned to afternoon. Harley took a moment to slip on his eyeset and track the weather on the Link. It was moving east, a broiling black cloud that sparkled with lightning. He was heading north and there were no other storms on the horizon. While he was linked he made a quick scan of Price. He didn’t know Price as well as he should. He had passed through it for years and years but never bothered spending much time in the city. There just wasn’t much of a reason to bother. Even when people cared to try, the city had been gasping its last breaths. But now he needed to know it well enough to find a ride. There wasn’t any sign of animal activity, but in the daylight he wasn’t terribly worried anyway. Once he started through the mountain pass he would have to be more alert because the mountains were thick with deer and elk, mountain lion and bear. They would be on the hunt.

There were still almost 1,200 people living in Price. At one time the city had been home to 18,000, but most had left in the Exodus. Of those who were left he wasn’t surprised to find most were pilgrims, but there were also more than 200 blinkers, which he found a little odd. Blinkers wanted the comforts of a Hub. A blinker looking for the country life was an oddity.

“Intrestin.” Harley put his eyeset back in his pack. Most pilgrims wore their eyeset throughout the day to be in constant contact with the Link. Harley used his sparingly. He didn’t need that much information flooding into his mind. He certainly wasn’t interested in sharing his thoughts with the rest of the world.

He buttoned up his pack and slipped it on his shoulders, picked up his saddlebag and left the hotel in search of a ride. 

The storm had done its damage. Water still trickled down Main Street, and there was now a small lake in what used to be the parking lot of Wal-Mart. Harley knew as he approached the river things would get worse and hoped the flooding hadn’t washed away the road. There was a cottonwood tree toppled across the street, its fall broken by three old NG automobiles. Part of the old city hall had collapsed and there was the pitched roof of a building sitting on the lawn of the prehistoric museum. With shattered trusses bared and shredded shingles it looked like the skeleton of some great beast.

Harley walked two blocks west and stopped when he saw a young boy throwing rocks at the windows of a long abandoned clothing store.. The boy didn’t see Harley at first and when he did he was about to throw another rock. He didn’t throw it, but he didn’t drop it either.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?” The boy asked. He was wearing an eyeset, but his clothes were filthy and his hair was unkempt. He looked like he wasn’t more than 10-years-old.

“You.” Harley said.

“You a neand or somethin’?”

“No. Why do you live here?”

The boy shrugged. His T-shirt was thin and his collarbones were sharp little points beneath the material. “Folks don’t care for the Hub. Not our kind.”

Harley nodded. “They let you run around the city without a weapon. Aren’t you afraid of animals?”

“Ain’t no animals to speak of.”

“Cats? Rats?”

“Got me a stick to beat ‘em with. They ain’t so bad in the daylight. At night, they’re worse. Bunch of cowards. Cats and rats.”

“Is there any place in town where you can still get a hot meal?”

The boy wrinkled his brow. “If you’re not a neand, why don’t you just order something and have a stork deliver it?”

“I’d just rather not. Thought it might be nice to eat a meal with someone else. You hungry?”

The boy didn’t answer for a moment, and Harley knew he was on the Link. “Mom says I can’t, you might be a boy lover. But the McDonald’s is still open. Neands mostly eat there. Food’s not very good. You know where that’s at, McDonalds?”

Harley nodded. “I know.”

“K then.”  The boy turned and started to walk away. He still hadn’t dropped the rock, but he did pick up his stick.

“I’m looking for transportation. A car, truck, motorcycle. Know where I can get one of those?”

“Everywhere that sells somethin’ like that closed.” The boy called back.

“Was there a place here that used to sell old cars?”

“Like antiques?”

“Like antiques.”

“There’s Krantz, down there. There’s still some cars in the lot, but they’re dinosaurs.” The boy pointed to a side street and then turned and ran away.

Harley adjusted his pack and walked where the boy had pointed. At the end of the next block, there was a squat building in the middle of an overgrown parking lot with a faded sign that read Krantz Classic Autos. The building looked like it had suffered some damage in the Rages but the dozen automobiles in the parking lot looked fine. They were all antiques, just like the boy had said. Harley found two that looked like they still ran on gasoline and several that ran on NG.  What he was looking for was something electric that had been retrofitted to feed off an energyband. He found it in a dilapidated Ford pickup with a dent in the quarter panel. The tires were airless and still had good tread, but the most important thing was it was old enough that its system didn’t bond with the owner through the Link. That little bit of technology had singlehandedly eliminated most automobile theft in the world. What was the point in stealing a car if its computer system wouldn’t power up unless it recognized your Link?  

Retrofitted with an electric motor that fed off a powerband, the old Ford didn't need Link access to run. Harley spent half an hour combing through the dealer's office until he found the vehicle's access tag. When he activated it, the truck drew power from his powerband and hummed to life. He threw his saddlebag and backpack in the passenger seat, secured his sword between the seat and arm rest and draped his holster and sidearm to the passenger seat head rest where he could quickly pull it free if needed. He pulled out onto the street and navigated around the debris of a dying city on his way to McDonald’s.

The McDonald’s was in the corner of the Creekview Center on the old State Route 6 business loop. The golden arches had been destroyed in the storm the evening before or perhaps an earlier storm, it was hard to know for sure. There were 20 or so cars in the shopping center parking lot; most of them had shattered windows. There were two cars in the McDonald’s parking lot and both looked like they had at least moved in the recent past. Harley parked the truck, pulled his holster free from the headrest and strapped it on as he opened the front door and stepped inside.

McDonald’s looked like it still served the public, as few as they may be. The tabletops were a little worn, but they were clean and music softly whispered in the background. The ventilation system was working and lightly tickled Harley’s short cropped hair beneath his hat as the glass door slid shut behind him. Everything appeared as it should be, but he felt a familiar prick of anticipation and adrenaline anyway. When he stepped up to the counter, he understood why.

The cook and the cashier were sprawled dead on the floor behind the counter. They were being eaten by zombies. There was a female and a male Wrynd and they were both ripping enthusiastically at the cook and cashier’s necks. The zombies were moaning and slurping and completely oblivious to Harley and the blood pooling around them as they ate. The woman looked to be in her mid-20s and while she tore at the plump cook’s fleshy neck her fingers were digging at his chest. Her fingernails were long and pointed and were doing a fair job of opening a hole in the dead man. She was after his heart. As Harley stood there, she stopped chewing and started to focus on tearing the dead man open. All Harley could see of her as she fed was her profile, but it was impossible not to notice under the blood and the gore dripping from her face that she was smiling and that once, a lifetime ago, she had been lovely.

Harley thought to turn around and slip back out before they noticed him but found that he could not. He cleared his throat instead.

“You two about done with your Happy Meals?”

The male zombie, a Wrynd who looked also to be in his 20s, stopped chewing on the dead woman’s neck and let his hands slide out from underneath her shirt, where Harley suspected they had not yet begun tearing away flesh, but more likely appreciating it. He licked his lips as he looked at Harley and Harley looked back into his black eyes with disgust.

“Can’t you see we’re eating?” The zombie screamed.

“I see it.” Harley put his hand to his sidearm and waited.

The male Wrynd lowered his head, then roared and leapt to his feet. He was very fast and almost before Harley could respond the zombie was standing on the counter and reaching clawed fingers toward his face. Almost. Harley drew his blaster and pointed it directly between the black eyes of the zombie and waited to see if he would need to pull the trigger. He didn’t…yet. Harley kept the blaster pointed between the Wrynd’s eyes and watched as reason seemed to blink back into the blackness of those eyes, and the zombie hopped back down and managed to smile.

“Is that you Harley?”

Harley holstered his weapon but kept his hand on it, just the same.

“Ralph.” Harley nodded to the young zombie. “Didn’t think you cared for fast food.”

The zombie named Ralph laughed and wiped some of the gore on the sleeve of his torn shirt. “Funny shit Harley. Ain’t that funny shit Nina?” He looked at the female zombie who was no longer feeding but still absently tearing at the dead man’s chest. “Fast food.”

Harley tried not to show his disgust, but it was difficult. He took two steps back, so he didn’t have to see the dead man and woman on the floor and what the zombies had done to them. Harley had a long list of things he hated. The Wrynd may not be on the top of the list, but they were damn close. Bunch of drug addicted psychopaths. 

In every city on the planet and especially in the Wilderness you could find a Wrynd tribe somewhere, hiding in the shadows, preying on people stupid enough to go where they shouldn’t. Most people just called them zombies. While the Wrynd were a lot of things, one thing they weren’t was the undead. They were certainly alive, if you could call their existence living.

The Wrynd Horde was the result of the latest and greatest drug experiment designed to make humans more than humans. It had been floating around for 10 years or so, a synthetic drug rumored to have been developed to make a super human. It worked beautifully, but with some unfortunate side effects. Those under the influence enjoyed euphoria coupled with incredible reflexes and almost superhuman strength, but they also had a tendency to display erratic, extreme aggression and an insatiable desire to tear their opponents apart and feast on their flesh and blood. It turned the veins and sclera black. Society called them zombies, but they preferred the name Wrynd, after the inventor of the drug. Elias Wrynd had tried and failed in his formula to make a super human 520 times. Wrynd521 was his final attempt, final because he had injected himself with the drug and eaten his associates. Whatever idiotic secret government agency developed the drug shut down the experiment with Elias Wrynd’s death, but not before its formula was leaked on the Link. Now the drug was everywhere and the Federation didn’t seem too keen on eliminating the problem, which Harley found “intrestin.”