Dead and Dead Again: Kansas City Quarantine (41 page)

“Yes, we saw him there, and your
women on the patios.”

“Right. And we see your three men
in the alley, the sniper to the north in the back of the pickup and the other sniper
across the street in the park. It’s not safe out there, by the way,” he warned
her.

“Tell her I’m going to shoot the
dick off of that guy in the park if he doesn’t get his rifle off of Lola’s
tombstone,” Lucy whispered into her mic.

“The Infected love the parks for
some reason,” Calvin continued without pause. “And you should warn your man
that if he doesn’t stop leaning on the tombstone of our very dear departed
friend, my other friend Lucy is going to shoot off a certain body part he was
probably hoping to use on his next Three-Day.”

“That’s hardly professional.”

“Her words, not mine. And I’m sorry
but we’re mere civilians and I guess I don’t have the control over my people
that you do,” he apologized insincerely. “But it really isn’t safe for him out
their alone. With his attention on us, he might not see the ones that find him.
They can be very quiet.”

The captain and sergeant shared a
quick look, one asking and the other uncertain. Finally the captain nodded.

“Baker,” the sergeant growled over
his mic. “Move in. We don’t need you out there. Stovington, close the perimeter
to concentrate around the west and south entrances.”

“What’s up, Chief?” Tripper asked,
walking up to Calvin and giving a lazy salute.

“Trip Grissom, this is Captain
Batmouche’.

“I need to know what you know about
the car that took the case away,” the Captain didn’t waste time with further
introduction or handshakes.

Tripper looked to his buddy, who
nodded almost imperceptibly. Calvin tried to keep a flush from his face as he
realized that instead of getting high they could have all gone out and looked
for the case some more. But he had felt his friends really needed a break and
some time to breathe and have fun…and also he had forgotten.

“It would be really helpful if you
would tell us everything you know.”

“Sure thing, Captain Buttmunch,”
Tripper replied flippantly.

“Batmouche’” the captain hissed.

“Batmouche’, right. Sorry about
that,” he mumbled.

“Are you?”

“Sure.”

“If you misheard it, that is one
thing, but I believe you mispronounced it on purpose.” She snapped crossly.

“You’re right. You caught me. I do
that sometimes. I just can’t help it.”

She stared with narrowed eyes, to
which he shot back his most brilliant, toothy grin. Tripper was an asshole, but
he was charming as hell and few women could stay mad under the barrage of one
of his charismatic grins. The captain sighed and looked to the sky for help. “Are
you going to help us or not, Mr. Grissom?”

“Sure thing, ma’am. Well, it was a
red late-sixtees or early seventies Chevelle, red with gray primer spots on the
hood. One guy behind the wheel. Heavyset with a red jersey. Couldn’t see if
anyone else was in back. The car crossed the river safely. There were no
missing rails on the bridge when we went through later and no damage so it had
to have made the far side of the river. Once it reached the Northland, well,
that’s a straight shot for quite a ways. As far as I could tell, they went on
past Two-Ten Highway at the least unless he regained control and turned
somewhere. We had to turn there because we had friends and family to look for.
We never saw the car again. The way he was driving, I doubt he made many turns
successfully. Calvin made us check all of the cross-roads up to Two-Ten on our
trips in and out, but we didn’t see anything. For all I know, he might have
recovered and driven off to wherever the hell he lives.”

“I don’t think he would have kept
driving with something dragging under his bumper,” the Captain shook her head,
fingering the ammo clip of her rifle the way others would a chin when deep in thought.

“Hey, you weren’t here when this shit
went down,” Tripper argued. “You don’t know what stupid shit someone would do
in that situation. I can guarantee that all you’re thinking when it’s happening
that first time is that you’ve either lost your mind or you’re tripping. You
think maybe you’re dreaming or that the world has just turned upside down and
gone to hell in a hand-basket and you’re fucked. As it turned out, it was the
latter and a lot of us weren’t too keen on staying downtown for very long.”

“You would still stop to check your
vehicle, I think,” the Captain countered belligerently.

Tripper snorted. “I drove six
blocks with a broken tie rod and no steering so I wouldn’t have to get out of
the car.”

The Captain eyed him suspiciously.

“You gotta remember, dude, we
didn’t have guns. We didn’t have armor. We didn’t even have any of these nice
steel melee weapons. We had our fists, our feet, and our car keys and suddenly
half of the people around were trying to eat us.”

“You should have stopped him.”

“We didn’t have any way to do
that.”

“You should have shot the driver,” she
stated heartlessly, with a set jaw. “You had the M-16 at that time, according
to the doctor.”

“That guy was alive. Or so we
thought. We weren’t planning on doing any killing of living people. And thanks
for throwing me under the bus, Doc,” he glared at the doctor, but quickly
shrugged the blame away and shot a grimace of apology at the older man.

“Individual people don’t matter,”
Batmouche stated harshly. “The only important thing is the package.”

“Wow, just like Calvin said you’d
be; all orders and no emotion. Well, excuse me Captain Spock, but it wasn’t
the
package
then,” he finger-quoted the words in the Captain’s face. “It was
just some suitcase this crazy old man was carrying—sorry Doc. Once we had some
proof that all of this was real, and Doc was who he said he was,
then
it
became
the
package.
We were planning to go out and get it
sometime before we left, but we wanted things to calm down a bit first. And we
would never have been so emotionless as to shoot an innocent person who had
done nothing to us just to get the case back.”

The captain turned to her men and
said, “We’ll have to start with the blocks right off that road from where it
finishes crossing the river and two blocks to either side, moving north.”

“You don’t want to go down there
yet,” Tripper informed her with a direct look. “Last time we checked, that area
was crawling with Infected.”

“We’ll handle it.”

“Not with the few guys you’ve got
out there,” Calvin countered. “Look…ma’am. You don’t know what it’s like out
there. I mean, we’ve got it lucky here. We have the Hedgehog and the Paddy
Wagon and the streets are pretty clear now. But several of us were on foot and
without armor there for a while and it was a nightmare,” he spoke quietly,
trying to put all of the emotion they’d gone through into that one look, just as
his acting class instructors had tried teaching him. As with those classes, he
failed completely. He could tell that the woman before him saw only a weak
civilian, someone who hadn’t been trained to fight, a man who had already
turned his back on generations of military heroes.

Batmouche’ straightened and puffed
out her sizeable chest, marking the opening scene in many daydreams Trip had
had throughout the years. Somehow, he felt this meeting wasn’t going to go the
way those particularly enjoyable fantasies had, however.

“That reminds me, Mr. Hobbes. As I
said earlier, we’ll be taking your vehicles with us.”

Yup, that’s what I thought,
Trip would have spat if his brain had let his emotions control his mouth.

“The hell you will,” Calvin said
with blunt acidity, fingers going to the safety on his rifle, but barrel safely
pointed at the ground. “You’re the second group of people who said they were
going to take something from us. Wanna take a guess what happened to the last
group?”

“I would imagine that is the story
behind the bullet holes in your armor…but I’m afraid those are Military issue
vehicles and I’ll have to appropriate them until I can track the numbers to
make sure they weren’t stolen.”

“The sixth Amendment forbids you
from illegal search and seizure as well as from taking personal property
without adequate payment,” Athena noted smartly.

“We’ll be keeping the weapons and
the vehicles and you’ll be leaving with the doctor now,
Captain
,” Calvin
insisted firmly, giving a previously agreed upon signal by tugging on his ear.

With the exception of Calvin and
the Captain, everyone with a weapon raised their guns at that same time.
Tripper aimed at the sergeant, and the others picked someone to shoot based on
firing arcs. The group of civilians had more people, but the army had more training.
Knowing this, however, Sarah now had her m-16 pointed at the Captain’s head,
and Athena began a very slow, nearly imperceptible shuffle step towards the
large red head, hoping to get within striking range for at least one swing on
the arrogant bitch with her panabas. Unfortunately, two guns were trained on
Calvin and one on Tripper and the girl private seemed to be a little too
interested in her advance. She stopped. No sense causing anyone to get nervous,
thereby getting her fiancé shot…again. Calvin would get them out of this.

“Back door is secure, traps in
place,” Scaggs announced. “On my way.”

“And your rifles,” the captain
added. “I believe the good doctor said you stole them from the Police Station—”

“—Jesus, Doc,” Tripper complained
to an innocent, apologetic shrug.

“We could execute all of you right
now as looters,” she promised.

“You’ll be the first corpse hitting
the floor,” Athena promised, brandishing her panabas, knowing full well she
would never reach the Captain before the soldiers gunned her down. “What we
did, we did to stay alive,” she exclaimed boldly.

“Yes, but you still broke the law.”

“You weren’t here,” Tripper argued.
“You didn’t see it. There wasn’t any law here. There still isn’t. But we’re
keeping it as close to the letter as we can.”

“And yet you say you couldn’t shoot
one man to possibly save everything?”

The captain said this with such
snide cynicism, Calvin had to step between her and Trip or things might have
gone the wrong direction in a hurry…the kind of wrong that happens when two tense
groups stand facing each other brandishing various weapons and someone does
something silly and thoughtless but well-deserved like punching the leader of
one side in her stupid face.

“We don’t kill people who aren’t
hurting us,” he explained. “It would be nice to be a bunch of trained killers
with only one mission, to get the package out no matter who stands in the way.
Or even to be standing on a wall knowing the continuation of the entire world
might hinge on you shooting anyone coming from the other side. But in here it
wasn’t quite that black and white. We have to consider how many innocent
civilians will be hurt, left behind or unprotected because of our actions. Your
people get to sit tight on the walls and watch from a distance while we’re
living the end here.”

“Stand down,” the Captain ordered,
nodding to her people. With a sigh, she turned to Calvin as if she were about
to have to explain something to a very stubborn child. “Mr. Hobbes, we aren’t
just sitting tight. We have cordoned off a one-hundred mile radius around your
city to protect the rest of this nation, possibly the world, at any cost.”

“What does that mean?” Scaggs
asked, walking in from the hallway with her rifle already pointing at the
captain.

“Along with the National Guards and
numerous police forces and millions of private citizens of several states we have
built a twenty foot manned wall throughout this region, one hundred miles from
the center of your city, in every direction.”

“Bullshit. There hasn’t been enough
time,” Scaggs called what she had believed all along to be a bluff. “I thought
all that was just to trick us into staying put.”

“We started immediately after
confirmation that the package had been diverted.”

“Oh, so you came marching into the
middle of hell and you think you’re just going to be able to waltz out
unscathed?” the redhead said. “Pop off for a tea and crumpets with the vicar?
Don’t ask me why I went British there, but the sentiment in the question remains
the same. You think it’s going to be that easy?”

“We came in here without any
trouble. I think we can handle getting the doctor and his case out the same
way. And I’m sorry that the government has decided to leave you and yours to
your own devices, but that’s what Quarantine is. You cannot leave until the Quarantine
is lifted, so it wouldn’t do any good for us to take you with us. You stayed
too long. You should just sit tight and enjoy what you have here.”

“Thanks for the advice Captain
Buttmunch,” Trip snapped sarcastically. “But, we’re leaving. We may not be
going through that wall, but we’re getting the hell out of here to someplace
safe.”

Calvin nodded.

“Actually, Mr. Grissom. You and
your people really should think about staying here for a while. As you have
just exhibited to us, this building is very well-protected. The Red Cross and
the military will be airlifting in supplies for your population throughout the
quarantine. The Army Corps of Engineers and other departments will be sending
in volunteers where needed to ensure that all city works continue operating, or
at the very least ensuring that people already employed with the cities will do
their jobs.”

“How the fuck are you going to do
that?”

“Perhaps by giving supplies in lieu
of pay to people already in here...”

“That might do it,” Athena noted
with a thoughtful expression. “For some of them, at any rate. But how do you get
volunteers to go into a Quarantine Zone knowing they can’t come back?”