Plague Town (21 page)

Maybe it was the adrenaline-filled experiences of the day, but I wanted Gabriel like I’d never wanted anything
before. I wanted him even more than I’d wanted that steak dinner. And that was saying something.

We were both close to the point of tugging off each other’s clothes and doing the nasty right there against the wall when a door slammed somewhere down the hallway. The effect on Gabriel was instantaneous.

His hand slid away from my breast and the other let go of my wrists as he stepped away from me so suddenly I would have fallen over if I hadn’t been leaning against the wall. My breathing ragged, I stared at him.

His breathing was a little choppy, too, as he spoke.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That shouldn’t have happened.”

“What the fuck?” Or not, as it seemed. Frustration made me blunt. “What the hell
should
have happened?”

“I lost control,” he said. “It’s not... I can’t allow it.”

What, and I
can
?
I thought angrily.

“So it’s not okay for Mister ‘I’m better than everyone else,’ but it’s something you’d expect from the slut,” I countered. Hurt wrestled with anger. “Thanks, but no thanks, Gabriel.” No way I was crying in front of him.

He looked as though I’d slapped him. Then his expression went unreadable.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean by ‘this is wrong?’ What, are they gonna court-martial you for making out with a recruit?”

“No, but—”

“Then maybe you’re allowed to screw anyone below your rank.”

“That’s not it at—”

“Then near as I can figure, this was all just some kind of sick joke.
Wasn’t
it?”

He stopped trying to speak, and just stared at me.

“What, did you make a bet with the rest of the guys? Tony owe you a twenty?”

“That’s enough!” Gabriel was getting angry, too. I knew I was pushing him, but I didn’t care.

“Gee, let’s see how fast can I get Ashley all hot and bothered, and then dump her ass and—”

Gabriel grabbed my shoulders and shook me once, then twice before slamming me up against the wall.

“Stop it,” he gritted.

I shut up. Something in his tone scared me enough to cut through the rage.

Another door slammed shut, someone coming or going. He let go of me, and I steadied myself again.

“That’s enough,” he repeated, and he took a deep breath. “This isn’t about you.”

I shut my eyes, fighting the urge to punch him. When I thought I had myself under control, I opened my eyes again.

“Then as usual, it’s all about you,” I said.

“Yes.” For some reason, I didn’t think he was taking it the way I’d meant it. “It has nothing to do with you at all.”

Another deep breath.

Then I punched him hard, right in the solar plexus, catching him by surprise. He doubled over with a grunt and I shoved past him, moving to a safe distance down the hall. Then I stopped, and turned back to him.

“You know what’s funny, Gabriel?” He slowly straightened up, hands on his knees as he regained his wind. “For a moment there, I could have sworn it was about both of us. I thought I’d been wrong about you.” I paused before adding, “I won’t make that mistake again.”

With that, I turned and walked away quickly, heading for my room.

I wasn’t hung-over the next day, unless you count an emotional hangover, in which case I had a doozy. No time to nurse it, though, either physically or emotionally. There was work to do.

We spent two days clearing the buildings on the Redwood Grove campus, one by one. After the zombies were eliminated in each building, hazmat-suited teams would come in and take away the corpses for disposal. Any survivors were taken to Patterson Hall.

The entire time I was luring zombies out of buildings, killing them, sweeping the buildings for the ghouls too clueless to answer the dinner bell, and locating survivors too terrified to answer our calls, I was going through my own personal hell.

I was doing it all under orders from the guy who had humiliated me.

Worse, there wasn’t anyone I could talk to about it.

I’m here to tell you, it sucked.

But I did it all. I can’t say I had a smile on my face, but I gritted my teeth, determined to do my job and kick ass. Though I wished it was Gabriel’s.

“Yo, Tofu!” Kai hollered from the front door of the Poly Sci building, mid-afternoon on the second day. “You’ve got zoms on their way out the front door.”

“Roger that, Lando.”

“Ashley,” he added, “You’ll be on the front door after we dispatch the zoms.” He used nicknames for Kai and Lily, but for me it was all formal.

Whatever.

I hated the fact that he made me feel like a high school kid with a crush. Somehow he managed to tap into every insecurity still lurking in my psyche.

Faint moans grew louder as Kai—“Lando,” that is—dashed through the doors, clearing the stairs in one jump. He whirled around and opened fire as the hungry zombies staggered outside, looking for food.

At least thirty of them poured out and down the stairs, most of them looking to be former students with maybe a couple of teachers thrown in for good measure. I didn’t recognize any of them, for which I was thankful. Anonymity made it easier to put bullets in their heads. Something in those flat, freaky pale irises and bloody corneas made it easy to forget these things had once been human.

Kai, Lil, and I did pretty damned well, without wasting time or ammo on body shots unless totally necessary. I couldn’t help but be proud, though, that out of the three of us, I was the best shot.

Once we had taken care of the crowd that had followed Kai outside, he, Gabriel, and Lil went inside to finish the job while I kept an eye out for stragglers. As I waited I thought about Lily... Lil, that is. She insisted on being called that now. I suspected it was more than an affectation to her, more than Tony’s geeky need for movie-type labels.

For Lil, the new name was a way to differentiate between the girl she’d been and who she’d become. She’d seen more horror in a very short time than most people see in a lifetime, and had gone from an almost neurotically introverted student to a member of a killing team. All of the wild cards could say much the same thing, but from what little that Lil had told us, it was obvious she’d led a particularly sheltered life before the attack.

She still worried about her cats. And her mom, too, who may or may not have returned from her trip to San Francisco. But it was easier to focus on the killing than think about what might have happened to them, so she’d thrown herself with gusto into zombie killing. Only time would tell what this was doing to her on a deeper level.

Hands clutching at my shoulders pulled me from my thoughts and I turned to find a male zombie in chef’s whites, arms outstretched by way of the standard zombie greeting.

I stumbled backward, nearly falling on my ass as I narrowly avoided the bloodied teeth snapping at my neck. Regaining my balance, I unsheathed my long blade. I suddenly felt the need for a more visceral activity than just putting a bullet in its brain.

As the zombie Chef Ramsay lurched toward me, I slipped to its left and sliced through the back of its knees. The razor-sharp blade cut the rotting flesh and tendons as if going through butter. Zombie chef fell forward.

I pulled the blade to my right and used the momentum of the body and hips to put all my strength into a parallel cut that took its head right off the neck. A final—and unnecessarily vicious—thrust through one eye finished the job.

I paid more attention after that, keeping my thoughts to the task at hand. A couple more ghouls stumbled around the far corner of the Political Science building. I dispatched them each with a bullet to the brain, thus satisfying the need for target practice.

The rest of the team emerged from the building about twenty minutes later, a trio of trembling co-eds and an equally shaken male teacher’s assistant in tow. All four hung on Gabriel’s heels like a paddle of ducklings following their mommy.

“Any trouble, Ashley?” Gabriel’s gaze flickered somewhere between my left ear and the middle of my forehead.

Asshole.

“Nope,” I said, all business. “Six stragglers, six shots.” I remembered the one I’d sliced and diced. “Oops, seven stragglers.”

“Not too bad.” Gabriel nodded. “We’re definitely making headway. That’s half again what we had at the drama building.”

“And nothing compared to what we found at the dorms.” Kai shuddered at the memory even as he spoke.

The dorms had been slaughterhouses, walls and floors slick with blood, both congealed and fresh. There were very few bodies, however, since most of the corpses had gotten up and joined in the feeding frenzy. Plenty of
pieces
of bodies though, some recognizable and others reduced to unidentifiable lumps of raw, bloody meat.

What few students had survived the massacre were nearly catatonic, given over to Dr. Albert and the medical team.

Gabriel radioed our status to the Powers That Be and we waited for the hazmat team to arrive so they could clear the corpses for incineration and take the survivors back to safety... or the med ward. Kai sat with them in a huddle, softly sweet-talking the girls to set them at ease.

“When are we going to start on the town?” Lil asked, taking a sip of water from her canteen as we waited.

“Hopefully in the next couple of days.” Gabriel took off his helmet and wiped sweat from his forehead. Lil offered him her canteen. He took it with a nod of thanks and drank some water.

“We have that much more to do here?” she said.

“It’s going to be far more dangerous out there than it’s been in here, you know,” he said. “We’re talking plenty of businesses and hundreds of personal residences, including several apartment complexes. And we’re not going to be able to contain the town the way we have the campus.

“Even though the military established a perimeter around the infected area,” he continued, “we’re talking
a hundred square miles of mountainous woods, rocky terrain, and a lot of houses and homesteads tucked away off the beaten path. That’s a lot of places for the zoms to hide, and we are desperately short of manpower.”

“Oh.” Lil’s voice was very small. I glanced sharply at her. Something was going on that she wasn’t saying.

Gabriel handed her back her canteen. She offered it to me. I shook my head ‘no.’ Call me immature, but I didn’t want to take a drink after he had touched it with his lips.

The hazmat team showed up and began piling bodies in the back of their big old garbage truck. A jeep with a similarly protected driver pulled up right behind them. We loaded the three co-eds and the teacher’s aid onto it for their trip to Patterson. All four looked to Gabriel as the jeep drove off.

Was no one immune to his manliness?

Feh. Screw him.

We met up with Team B on our way back to HQ. Gentry and Tony were supporting a heavily limping and deeply chagrined Mack. Kaitlyn lagged a few feet behind, sullen as ever.

“Mack, you okay?” I hurried over to them.

“You weren’t bitten or anything?” Lil joined me, green eyes wide with concern. Lil liked me, but she loved the Postman.

“Nah, no bites,” Mack said, looking embarrassed. “I just took a bad step and torqued my ankle a little.”

“Tripped on a dead zombie,” Tony explained helpfully.

“It’s true,” Mack said. He shook his head and looked disgusted. I patted him on the shoulder.

“At least you didn’t step in it,” I said. “That would have been gross.”

Mack laughed.

“Thanks for the silver lining, Ash.”

“Bad news is that he sprained it pretty thoroughly,” Gentry said. “Good news is it’ll heal up pretty quick
if he elevates it and ices it for a day. Wild card perk number twelve.”

“What are the first eleven?” Kai asked.

Gentry grinned and shrugged.

“Heck if I know. Maybe we should start a list.”

After dinner we had another session of training by watching zombie movies. The night’s selection included Lucio Fulci’s
Zombie
and the rest of the remake of
Dawn of the Dead
—the movie that started the trend of sprinting zombies.

Zombie
was notable both for its ‘zombie vs. shark’ action and the propensity of the women to throw their heads back and scream when attacked.

“This is totally unrealistic,” I grumbled. “It’s like they
want
to get eaten.”

“The point,” Gabriel said in his “lecturing” tone, “Is that everyone reacts differently under stress.
You
might not panic like that, but most people do. And you’ll need to deal with the results. That’s your take-away.”

“That, and don’t make out in a graveyard,” I said with open disgust. “I mean, seriously. When you’re on the run from zombies, who thinks it’s a good idea to rest
and
make out? In a cemetery!”

“Don’t take it all too seriously.” Simone sat in the front row next to Gabriel. Jamie was in her usual place next to the DVD player. “We may be able to glean some discussion points from these movies—” Somehow, I had the feeling she didn’t really think so. “—but you should also take the opportunity to kick back and relax.”

“In that case,” Tony offered, “we need to watch
Zombie Strippers
. It’s a classic!”

That earned him dirty looks from all of the women in the room—especially Kaitlyn.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if once in a while it was a
man
who froze?” Kaitlyn snapped. I agreed, but wasn’t about
to say so. Not and give her a shot at me with those claws.

“Now
that
would be unrealistic,” Kai replied with a distinct lack of self-preservation. Kaitlyn looked as if she was about to respond, but she just crossed her arms and glared. If I was Kai, I’d sleep with one eye open for a couple of days.

We finished
Zombie
and moved on to
Dawn of the Dead
, picking it up from the scene where they first arrive at the mall. Gabriel hit pause after the young ingénue put everyone in danger by trying to rescue her dog.

“We call this Ripley’s Syndrome,” he said. “After the scene in
Alien
.”