Dead and Dead Again: Kansas City Quarantine (20 page)

“You might have it in your power to
change our fates, Doc,” Athena pointed out.

“And there is an equal chance I
might not be able to do anything at all.”

“We can’t think that way. We’re
betting on you being able to make a difference. What you’ve got in that case
may be our only hope.”

“We don’t even know if we can find
the case,” the man muttered.

“We’ll look for it right after we
get Lucy and Lola. Then we’ll have enough people to safely cover some
ground…maybe.”

“And if the military gets here
before then, what are we going to do?”

“Let
them
find the case,”
Calvin said simply. “That’s the kind of stuff these teams are trained for. But
if they can’t get you a ride out of here or something happens and this thing
gets beyond their wall before you get safely out, we’ll take responsibility for
finding the case and getting you someplace to work.”

“Ok, Calvin Hobbes,” The doctor
said with an appreciative nod. “You have convinced me you do not just think I
am a useless old man.”

“Far from it, Doctor. Trip says
you’re a marksman. I would love to have you with us out there. Unfortunately, at
this time you’re just too important.”

“Very well, I’ll set a table out on
the patio and watch things from there.”

“Great! Thanks, Doc. Tripper is
rerouting the security feeds into these monitors. Just change the input here. You’ll
be able to use the monitor remote to switch camera angles and you can even put
up a television split-screen if you want.”

“Outstanding.”

“Although, they’re already cutting
us off, so there’s nothing on tv.”

“It’s the…my people, I guess you
would say. They’re jamming all outgoing and incoming signals on certain public
bandwidths until their plans are in place and they feel they have containment.
They already have roadblocks up along the major roads and will be turning any
refugees back this way.”

“So they may really build this
wall?” Calvin asked.

“I would be surprised if the temporary
wall is not already half in place.”

“Shit,” Joel spat. “Fucking
government. Can’t take precautions to stop this from happening, but they sure
are ready to kill us all to keep it hidden and under control.”

“Whatever,” Calvin muttered after
an annoyed sigh. “We’ll climb that wall when we come to it. We’re heading out.
You want to come lock up after us?”

As the group left, Trip turned back
to the doctor.

“Don’t answer for strangers, dear,”
he said, reaching out and adjusting the doctor’s dress shirt under his lab coat.
“And the milkman can just leave the milk outside from now on,” he answered in
his best wife imitation, which was surprisingly good.

The others headed to the vehicle.
When they were loaded, Calvin and Tripper waved to the man as he grabbed the gate
and swung it shut. The few scattered zombies in the area were currently
shuffling down the side alley after some pieces of office equipment Gus and
Joel had thrown out a window on that side to get their attention.

“Ok,” Calvin announced after buckling
up. “Let’s roll.”

He sat in the front passenger seat,
which the others had chosen to leave open. Quinn said nothing. He started the
engine and drove in the direction Calvin pointed, north towards the bridge over
the river. The same bridge down which the car dragging the silver case had
driven earlier. Calvin directed them down a few side streets east and west as
they went, looking for the red car and the case as they continued north until
it was time to turn east towards Hef’s place. They found nothing. Calvin
decided not to radio this news to the doctor just yet.

“He calls it The Dungeon,” Gus
explained to the two new girls.

“That’s weird,” Felicia said,
holding back a shiver. “Sounds like a lunatic.”

“No. He’s not. Dungeons were not
always prisons and torture chambers. In fact, most dungeons were used for
entirely different reasons—castle vault, armory, wine cellar, castle workshop,
other storage. I mean, they also had a cell, but it was much smaller.”

“Get on with it!” Athena and
Scooter shouted together.

“Right. See, that’s where the
scientists supposedly did their research in the renaissance days. Hef says so
anyway. In towers or dungeons—the one used to be the other. First the offices
were downstairs, until hostage-taking became common and then the towers became
the workshops. And…but…” he paused at a warning glare from Calvin. “We all
spent our younger days playing Dungeons and Dragons together and he was the
Dungeon Master. He’d map out the dungeons or towns or whatever for our quest,
and then build them for our adventures. He’s got hundreds of dungeons in there.
And he’s kind of a mad scientist type. So…it kind of fits.”

“Score!” Scaggs shrieked. “You
can’t throw a 1
^st
edition Monster Manual around here without
smackin’ a geek on the ass.”

“Did we pick the best people to be
at the end of the world with, or what?” Felicia agreed merrily and the two exploding-high-fived
and ‘danced’ in place.

“Oh, definitely.”

Alright. Keep your eyes open,
everyone,” Scooter cautioned them. “We don’t want to blink and suddenly find
ourselves in the middle of a pack of these…things.”

“I doubt we’d have to worry about
it, dude,” Scaggs brushed his warning off.

“I mean, we’re wearing armor and
they move slightly faster than a herd of turtles in a sea of peanut butter.”

“Don’t get cocky. We don’t know
that they’re all like that,” Calvin insisted. “According to Trip and Sarah, the
ones they first saw moved faster. And we’ve seen a few that moved almost like real
people. We don’t yet understand their capabilities or limitations. Maybe there
are different types, or maybe they move faster after some conditions are met,
like feeding or resting. Maybe there are strong ones, maybe there are live
ones. Maybe they all die again after a few days. I don’t know everything and
neither do you, but people have been dying around us all morning and I’ll bet many
of them didn’t believe they had much to fear from these slow-moving creatures.
So let’s just be careful and maybe live another day.”

Scaggs looked suitably chagrined.

“I don’t know about you,” Calvin
continued calmly, holding her eyes firmly with his own. “But I’d rather find
those things out on my own terms, not on theirs. Let’s just be careful out
there. That’s all I’m saying.”

She nodded again and sat up, eyes
bright and more alert.

Calvin needn’t have worried,
however. The route was empty. Either all Infected had moved on, or very few had
made it this far yet. Probably the former.

“It’s over behind that group of
other businesses,” Trip said from a seat in the back.

“You sure you can find it? There
must be a hundred businesses in there.”

“It’s there. Trust me. It’s a big
blue building. You can’t miss it. We come here every Wednesday and Saturday
night.”

Quinn opened his window and
breathed the river in deeply, preferring the fragrant fishy smell to the
caustic stench of dead flesh any day of the week. Slowly advancing, everyone kept
an eye out for any dead on the side-streets.

“Good. We’re good so far. Keep
going,” Scooter muttered. “Now down tenth to Bed-something.”

“I thought you said you know your
way around here,” the Armorer complained.

“I know
where
it is. I just
don’t know what all of the streets are called,” Calvin argued. “It’s this one
here…ok, now keep going for a few blocks…now right...and left here…there it is,
up ahead. It’s that tall one in the center there. See, he put it where it
wouldn’t stand out.”

A massive, aging blue steel
exterior loomed over the other buildings. It was the largest building in the
area by a factor of ten. But it wasn’t so much tall as it was long and wide.
They had been looking at it for blocks, but he was right, the four-block-long
rusty blue building somehow did not stand out with the other buildings
surrounding it, each looking so much newer and full of purpose. Not one of them
had thought that aging warehouse was the building they were going to. Somehow
they had not even noticed it until it was pointed out. Calvin and the others
had intentionally kept quiet to test Hef’s theory. So far 100 percent of the
people looking for the building had failed to notice the large structure until
it was pointed out to them.

“He
put
it here?” Scaggs
asked. “How old is this guy?”

“Our age.”

“But, this place is a dump. It’s
clearly been here forever. It’s ancient.”

“Only on the outside,” Scooter shot
her a knowing wink.

“What? I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s
disguised
,” Joel told
her.

“You’ll see,” Gus promised her with
a squeeze of her hand.

Calvin clicked the radio twice.

“We’re here, Hephaestus,” he said
into the mic.

“What is the password?” Came the
response.

“Open the fucking door.”

“Correct. Open Sez-a-me.”

A thick, gray steel door on the
side of the rustic, but enormous old building began to roll noiselessly into a
wall allowing them entrance into a twenty-five by twenty-five foot room with
shelves of tools and equipment lining all four walls. The big door quickly and
silently rolled back into place behind them. When it completely closed, an inner
door rolled back in the same manner, much like the outer and inner doors of an
airlock.

“Nice,” Scaggs said appreciatively as
Quinn slowly pulled them into a workroom that looked like the love-child of the
bridge of the Enterprise and an IT control center.

“The above ground space is at least
forty thousand square feet,” Tripper informed Quinn and the girls. “I don’t
even want to know what he had to go through to put a basement in this place,
considering he’s right next to a river. But there is one.”

“Look over there,” he pointed across
the workroom. “That steel door over there will take you to the kitchen, dining
room and if you continue on through there, the entertainment room.”

“Rooms are upstairs there, or
accessible through several other sets of stairs within the various buildings.”
A set of metal stairs hanging by heavy wire rope from the steel girders above
ran up the wall next to the door and met a walkway that ran the length of the
far wall over the steel door Trip had just pointed to.

“What’s that?” Felicia screamed,
pointing to something in front of the vehicle.

Everyone turned to see a six-foot
man-thing clad in closed-helm black armor pointing a large black crossbow at
them. On further study the crossbow was, in fact, two crossbows somehow fastened
back to back, or top to bottom, so one flip would bring the opposite crossbow
up for use. The multi-strung bow seemed to be made out of some composite
materials, maybe a high grade of hardened plastic, with silver metal fasteners
at various joints holding it together. Extending from the top, and hanging from
the bottom crossbow were what looked like hardcover book-shaped canisters.

“What are those metal things on the
bow?” Athena wondered.

“They look like magazine clips,”
Trip answered.

“Dual automatic crossbow?” Scooter
asked, raising an eyebrow at the others sitting behind him.

“Impressive,” Tripper whistled.

The figure turned and pointed the
bow at a target, firing once, spinning the contraption, firing the other side,
then spinning again and putting a third bolt into the red, Orc-shaped target,
then a forth and fifth. The bolts slammed deep into the leather and wood target
in rapid succession, sending chunks flying. He fired one more into a head made
from painted Ballistics Gel, the bolt slowing dramatically inside the
gelatinous goo, but still passing through to chunk into the specially designed
cushions behind the test targets. The armored being then turned the weapon on
the vehicle again.

“That
is
Hephaestus, isn’t
it?” Athena asked uncertainly.

“I think so,” Scooter replied with
uncharacteristic hesitation.

“Who wants to go out and ask?”
Tripper asked.

Everyone looked at Scooter.

“Right. See you on the other side,”
he muttered, stepping out.

Scooter exited the Ambulance and pulled
the face shield of his helm up, a shower of sweat drizzled onto his bluish
armor, running down to eventually be sucked into the leather overcoat he now
wore over the armor.

“Hephaestus?” he asked, worry
etching his friendly, lightly-tanned face.

The tip of the heavy black
automatic crossbow was pointed right at Scooter’s head as the black-clad being
stepped closer and stuck its face-shield into his face from nearly a foot
higher.

“So, Calvin. What is new in
your
life?” the man asked casually, taking off his face-shield and smiling with a
mouth of perfectly straight glowing white teeth and the easy demeanor of one
who hadn’t recently slaughtered a half-dozen already dead people. With one
smooth motion, he reached one arm up and removed the helm. Calvin motioned the
others to exit the vehicle and Hephaestus unfastened four quick-connect clamps
and the armor fell away with a heavy clang to rest on the floor.

“Oh
my
,” Felicia breathed
heavily, much louder than she meant to.

Both Scaggs and Felicia blushed
before the shear manliness of Hephaestus. Olive-skinned and well-tanned, he
stood at six-foot-three with a face God could have carved from a diamond it was
so timeless and beautiful. The bare parts of his skin that showed through his blue
coveralls were tan, smooth and taught. He examined them with dark, intense eyes
that peered from the depths of a shadowy brow topped with long, raven-black,
straight hair tightly pulled back into a pony-tail. A few hairs hanging down in
front of his face made both girls want to reach out and brush them back, hoping
they would flop forward again so they could brush them back again.

The epitome of the proverbial ‘Tall,
Dark and Handsome’, Felicia was thinking more along the lines of ‘god’. This
shock-factor was normal when nearly any women met Hephaestus for the first
time, so the rest of the group, with the exception of perhaps Gus and Joel,
enjoyed watching the girls blush and stutter their greetings one at a time
after Scooter introduced them.

“This is Hephaestus Antonopoulos,”
he said, then pointed at Felicia, who bowed her brightly colored head and
practically curtsied, suddenly unsure where her hands were supposed to be. “This
is Felicia Sackoff. She’s an actress.”

“Yes, I know. I have seen her in
numerous shows and a few movies,” Hef said cheerily and held out his hand. “You
are one of my favorite new actresses,” he added in a slightly stilted deep, but
smooth and silky voice that almost purred.

Felicia shivered. “Really?” she
squealed like a schoolgirl when he took her hand. “
No
, well. I mean,
I’ve done some
small
parts in—well, I
was
in some of the bigger
movies—But
no
, it was nothing really. Just trying to be a working
actress. Oh my god, is it hot in here?” she fanned her face a few times with a
shaky palm, while still shaking the big man’s hand with the other.

Scooter pried her hand from Hephaestus’
and turned his mildly entertained gaze from Felicia to Joanne. “And this is
Joanne Scagliotti. We’ve been calling her Scaggs.”

“Aren’t the Gees silent?”
Hephaestus asked.

“Yes, we know that. Gus thought it
would be cool to make fun of how everyone always gets the silent gees wrong.”

“Yes, names are odd like that,” Hef
nodded.

“Names!” Scaggs blurted, before
taking his hand to shake it. “Antonopoulos. Is that Greek? That’s Greek, isn’t
it?” She asked in a rush.

“Yes, it is.”

“OMG, so you’re, like, literally a
Greek God,” she gushed as Felicia giggled.

“No. I am just a man,” Hef answered
modestly.

“I mean, because Hephaestus was the
Greek god of blacksmiths and other craftsmen. So his name is Greek, and it’s the
name of a god. And you’re kind of a blacksmith. And you’re a god. I mean,
you’re
gorgeous
, I mean, oh my god, you are
extremely
good-looking.”
She looked to the others and pointed at him. “So, in all ways he’s a Greek God—oh,
I’m so fracking sorry…boyfriend,” she snapped at the end, jerking her hands
back from his body as if his skin had actually burned her.

“What?” Hef asked in confusion,
looking from her to Gus.

She grabbed Gus’ left arm with both
of her hands and repeated herself, pointing to Gus with one finger. “Boyfriend,”
she repeated quietly. “I have a boyfriend,” she blushed and held on tighter.
“This,” tap, tap, tap, she slapped his shoulder. “This is my boyfriend.”

“And this is mine,” Felicia pointed
to Joel, who raised one eyebrow in his cheesiest not-sexy-at-all sexy pose and
the most impish of grins he used to funny-sexy the babes, which might explain
why he was single up to then. Felicia was a bit surprised that he wasn’t
angrier about her drooling over this Adonis, but she suddenly felt they all
knew something she didn’t.

Oh no. He’s not gay is he?
She wondered.
Doesn’t matter. This is my boyfriend. Oh damn. This is my
boyfriend? What was I thinking? I could have just waited a few hours and had
that
boyfriend. Shut up, Felicia. That god is way out of your league and gay to
boot. Joel is your boyfriend, so deal with it.
 “My boyfriend,” she
repeated.

“That is…nice,” Hephaestus said
hesitantly, looking between Joel and Gus, giving each a significant, but brief
glare that expressed his dissatisfaction with the way they had handled
something they all had discussed numerous times before.

“Anyway,” he continued, glaring at
his friends as they continued to watch the two temporarily besotted girls with
knowing looks and grins. “I am glad you made it, Calvin.” He held out both hands
and put them on Scooter’s shoulders, slapping them a few times. “I was
worried.”

“Are you ok, Hephaestus?” Scooter
asked.

“Of course. Why would I not be?”

“You’re a pacifist, for one thing,”
Scooter noted calmly.

“I fail to see how that applies to
our current situation.”

“But, you’re always preaching about
how wrong it is to kill any living thing.”

“And I stand by everything I have
said on the subject.”

“But you’re ok with killing a
half-dozen people?

“I am ok with what I have done.”

“C’mon, Hephaestus, you don’t just
get over that overnight.”

“I smelled them when they were
close…their breath, their skin. It reeked of dead things. Those creatures are
not alive, Calvin. One of them was a friend. I saw him not six hours ago. And
now he stinks of a week spent in a pine box under ground. They have rotted in
an incredible amount of time. They are not natural and they are not living.
They are dead. The Undead. The walking dead. Zombies. Whatever you wish to call
them…they are no longer people. And though I just called them that, I do not
consider them as creatures, either. They are abominations of nature and must be
destroyed.”

“We’re hoping there’s a cure,”
Calvin suggested.

“If we can cure them, then I am ok
with that.
If
there is a way to bring them back to normal. But I do not
believe this to be possible. For now I will destroy any I come into contact
with. And you should as well.”

“Fair enough,” Scooter agreed. “And
speaking of these things, we have to go out and get Lucy and Lola and Brick and
Boomer. There are a lot of them out there. Did you come up with anything that
might help?”

Hephaestus feigned an indignant
expression.

“Sorry. I’m sure you did. Can we
see it?”

“Did I get you kids anything for
Christmas, you ask? Did Uncle Fester bring you anything from his trip to Transylvania,
you wonder, feet dancing in place and fingers eager to rip wrapping paper and—”

“—yes, yes. Please Master Builder,”
Tripper interrupted his dance. “Show us your toys. We want to go play with
them, already.”

“Ah, I know who always snuck downstairs
to peek at his presents on Christmas morning,” Hephaestus pointed at Trip. “You
should practice patience, Tripper.” But at an annoyed sigh from his friend, he
relented. “They are in the garage,” he motioned with a mischievous grin.

“How come I’ve never seen the
garage?” Athena asked.

“Or me,” Sarah added.

“Wait, you haven’t seen it either?”
Athena asked.

Sarah shook her head.

“So the women don’t get to go to
the garage to see your precious cars?”

“Is it a men’s only club?” Sarah
chided.

“Yeah, are you hiding the entrance
to the He Man Woman Haters Club?”

“No. It is nothing like that,” Hef
explained calmly, unfazed by their ribbing.

“Then why haven’t we ever seen it?”

“Because you have never asked,” he
said simply. “Each of the others asked at some point to see one or another of
my creations. You showed absolutely no interest in seeing them, so I did not waste
your time by inviting you.”

“Oh,” Athena mumbled.

Sarah’s face dropped in disappointment,
knowing she couldn’t press the issue. It was fun to see Hephaestus get his
feathers ruffled, because it was so rare. It had become a game to see if any in
the group could get his blood up on something, anything, so much so that the winner
always ate and drank for free at the next group night out on the town.

“So, let’s see it then!” Athena’s
eyes lit with anticipation.

“Very well!” the handsome man bellowed
with an added flourish. “You ask to see the wonders of the Dungeon Master! You dream
of entering a world of darkness and—”

“—just open the door, dude,”
Tripper said in exasperation, but Calvin put a hand on his shoulder and nodded
for Hef to continue.

With a broad smile that weakened the
new girls’ legs, Hephaestus snatched a brilliant, multicolored robe from the
wall and threw it over his broad shoulders, then grabbed a silver dragonhead
staff topped with a crown of glistening gems. Holding the magnificent staff
high, he raised his hands and the first chords of Sprach Zarathustra burst
forth from some massive speakers hidden in the rafters high overhead. At a wave
of the staff, the lights lowered by half.

“Welcome to the Wizard’s Dungeon!”
he announced with a flourish of grandeur and smacked the ground with the staff,
sending out sparks and receiving a flash of lightning and an echoing crack of
thunder. Then nothing happened for several seconds until some fans kicked on
blowing his robes in a breeze as more lightning lit the big chamber. Other than
that, nothing kept happening. Lowering his powerful arms, he turned and offered
them a grimace of apology. They waited patiently as he waved his arms once.
Nothing happened. He gestured again and tapped the floor once more. Nothing
happened again. Nothing happened other than more thunder and lightning, that
is.

“Damn it!” he hissed, examining the
staff closely. But he couldn’t see what he was looking at in the dim lighting,
so he had to reach into his other pocket and pull out a remote to turn the
lights back up. He tried to say something, but the music was too loud. With a
visible sigh, he turned off the music.

“Just a second, everyone,” he
mumbled in an embarrassed aside and fumbled around the head of his staff for a
few seconds as if he were pressing a button in it. There was an audible clank
from the far wall.

“Whatcha doing, Scaggs? Oh nothing,
just watching a Greek god examine his magic staff,” Scaggs whispered.

Felicia and Gus laughed. No one
else seemed to have heard.

“Ah, the lock was on,” Hef’s black
eyes gazed directly at Scaggs. The lights went out again and he put the
controller back in his pocket. The music started again and on queue he shouted:

“Welcome to the Wizard’s Dungeon!”

He announced it with a flourish of
nearly equal grandeur to his first attempt. This time after the lightning and
thunder, squiggly lines of light appeared around what appeared to be the edges
of a pair of fifteen foot high double doors. As everyone watched, the lines
came together into clearly formed letters and the outline of large, arcing
doors. Hephaestus clapped one hand on the staff and the doors flashed a
brilliant light and slowly swung inward, and the breeze kicked in just at that
moment to blow his robe out behind him as if the opening of the doors had
released some pent up pressure from the chamber on the other side. The thunder
and lightning was accompanied by teeth-jarring stone-on-stone grinding even
though both doors were clearly stainless or polished steel and opened with as
much noise and difficulty as any good bank vault.

The lights in the private garage lowered
and blinked out and the Wizard’s Dungeon lights slowly increased to daylight
levels in a dramatic well-timed rise to a crescendo along with the music. The
room before them was likely originally the main floor of a manufacturing plant
on a blueprint somewhere. But now it stretched about two-hundred feet into the
distance to their left, and about fifty feet across to the wall opposite their
location. The friends stood nearly at the end of the long wall, with perhaps
ten feet to the corner on the right from their door. The magnificent floor was
tiled in rune-carved decorated granite and marble designs and part of it seemed
to be moving, though the newcomers couldn’t make out just how at first. As they
watched, the optical illusion cleared up and they could discern that a large
circular section, about one-third of the massive warehouse lazily revolved
inside the rest of the floor. The circular area was large enough to hold about ten
vehicles.

“There must be some large spinning
plate under the foundation,” Athena noted.

“Wheelhouse,” Scaggs said with a
knowing nod. But when the others looked at her for more, she added a quick
qualification. “It’s a turntable for train engines and cars. You know, to turn
them around.” She repeatedly made a circular motion with the finger of one hand
and her other hand held an invisible train that she drove into, turned on the
invisible turntable of her circling fingers, and then drove off. Felicia looked
at her as if she had grown a second nose, but Athena and Sarah nodded in
understanding. All of the newcomers gazed in wonder, and with good reason.