Death After Life: A Zombie Apocalypse Thriller (15 page)

#

Colonel Coughlin eyed the freelancer in front of him with a mixture of respect, fascination and disgust. After all, Armstead was like an exotic zoo animal whose lethality didn’t really belong in a civilized nation and was best suited to the wilderness. He insisted on standing, even though Coughlin had comfortable chairs positioned opposite his desk. Just because this was an Army base didn’t mean Coughlin was a Spartan.

“Nice work. I didn’t think our late, great Mayor’s enclave could be taken out without a small army.”

“It couldn’t be,” Armstead said. “So I mustered an army.”

Coughlin smiled, liking the kid’s brass balls. He couldn’t be more than 25, this strange mercenary asset. The Department of Homeland Security hadn’t steered Coughlin wrong. If they had a dozen Armsteads, things would be a lot easier in the permanent war zone between cities.

“I feel like every dollar we give you, you put right back into your toys and tools,” Coughlin said.
 

“I’ve never been that hot to have a 401k,” Armstead said. His face had a strange Chris Evans look to it, even with the scars and the grime and premature gray in his light beard. This kid was a real piece of work.

“Well, keep it up,” Coughlin said, sliding the briefcase of cash across the table. “You’re a credit to your country.”

Armstead stepped forward, cutting a look at the corporals positioned behind Coughlin as if this were a drug deal about to go wrong.

Coughlin had to admit, it was hard to overdo it on paranoia these days. “Why don’t you take a vacation or something,” he said, on impulse. He didn’t want the kid to burn out. This kind of talent shouldn’t be wasted. “Puerto Rico is as safe as ever. Lie on a beach for awhile. Don’t get soft, but get right.”

“I’m right as rain, boss man. Right as rain.”

The glint in Armstead’s eyes, the broad ivory expanse of his smile, all of it added up to crazy for Coughlin. But who could blame him? He tried one more time to help. “You ever thought about getting a partner?”

“Show me somebody that won’t fuck up, slow me down or lose their shit when it gets crazy, and I’ll think about it,” Armstead said. “So we done here?”

“Affirmative. Stay in touch. You’re already on speed dial for every local and state government in the Midwest. There’s always someone who needs killing. I just have one question for you…”

“Shoot,” the kid said, with a slightly sinister wink.

“Rumor has it the dead don’t bite you. That true?”

“Shore ‘nuff. I’m an honorary member of the corpse club,” Armstead said, his cold eyes chilling even to a 30-year veteran. “Those fuckers love me. See ya later, Colonel.”

He grabbed the briefcase and walked out.

#

Voskuil became increasingly nervous about waiting in the car. He was certain that, before long, someone who had noticed their absence at the Center would sound an alarm. Someone like that little prick Leon Spivey.

Voskuil hadn’t conceived this part of their itinerary with much foresight. He realized the delay was unavoidable. It would take time for Nic to get to the station, pick up the Interceptor and the gear, then drive over.

Though he’d envisioned a street pickup, waiting in plain view would be suicide. Too conspicuous to anyone from the Center who went looking for them, or was dispatched to do so.

A thought occurred to him. There was a diner near here; he drove by it when he went to the gym after work.

Voskuil started the car and pulled out of the lot. He drove conservatively, keeping an eye out for police.

They reached the diner without incident. He parked around back, where they weren’t visible from the street.

Gladden waited for instructions. The bitch was in a mode that boiled down to, “you must command me to do the simplest thing, Mr. In Charge.” He should have known her agreement to help had been insincere. Since then, she’d clearly proven it with this robot routine. She was passively accepting of his plan rather than challenging it in any way, as a true conspirator would do. No — she wasn’t concerned about the merits of his plan because she had no expectation that she would have to complete it.

That worried Voskuil. It meant she was certain he was doomed to fail. But why? Where? When? What moment was she waiting for?

He marched his erstwhile colleague around the corner, grabbing his suitcase from the trunk along the way. Even with the new thousand-dollar bill, a million was a lot to carry.

He also brought along his bag of goodies, tucked away in a Land’s End backpack. In addition to the antivirals, he’d brought morphine, epinephrine and amphetamines from his home stash. The morphine was an emergency backup measure, in case stoned oblivion was better than rational awareness.
 

The speed was for the long drive ahead. No way would he close his eyes with these two Sapphic vipers in his midst. Sleep deprivation would accelerate the shutdown of his immune system, but it couldn’t be helped.

They entered the restaurant, Voskuil’s head on a nervous swivel every step of the way. Passing cars were less his concern than any gaze that lingered on them.
 

Nothing he noticed troubled him. The diner felt, at this early hour, appropriately sleepy. A collection of senior citizens, truckers and burnouts. No one distressing.

Voskuil felt himself relaxing as they took a table in the back. So far, so good…. Gladden wore the same blank expression she’d had since he explained his plight. She brushed dark ringlets out of her face without blinking.
 

“Call Nic and give me the phone,” Voskuil said quietly. Gladden obediently touched Nic’s photo on her phone and handed it to him as the number dialed.

“Yeah.”

“Hi. Listen, now we’re at a diner on Galveston and 23
rd
. Betty’s Kitchen.”

“Got it…. Better give me half an hour. I’m not even at the station yet.”

“Make haste, sista. If anything unexpected happens…. That’s bad luck for Lena.”

“I get it,” Nic said. Or snarled. Either way, Voskuil didn’t like it.
 

“Good. In the meantime, I’ll buy your wife breakfast,” Voskuil said, and hung up.

Gladden’s cool blue eyes regarded him with cynical amusement. “Gee, that’s kind of you to offer, Jim.”

“Least I can do,” Voskuil said.

A thirtyish hipster waitress, looking much, much more tired than either of them, appeared.
 

“Help you?” she asked, as if summoning even two simple words was an act of sheer will alone. This woman was, in her world, enduring the fires of hell right now.

The irony was lost on Voskuil because he was too wrapped up in his own shit. “Yeah, um, let’s see,” he said, paging through the menu without seeing anything on it. “Bacon and eggs.”

“Savannah Scramble or B & E Frenzy?”

“Two strips of bacon. Two eggs.”

“We don’t do that.”

“What? You don’t have bacon and eggs?”

“Savannah Scramble. B & E Frenzy. Them’s your options bro.”

“B & E Frenzy,” Voskuil said, styling himself in a Kafkaesque nightmare. “You do know that B & E stands for breaking and entering, right?”

“It stands for bacon and eggs,” the waitress said with a wholly insincere smile. She turned to Lena expectantly.
 

“Just some water, please.”

The waitress nodded and shuffled away. She had probably stopped partying fifteen minutes before her shift began and spent the last hour paying for it.
 

“You’re going to regret not eating anything,” Voskuil said. “I’m pretty sure we aren’t gonna come across any quaint breakfast spots along the way.”

“I couldn’t keep anything down,” Lena said.
 

“Just relax. Everything’s gonna be okay. Unless you or Butch Cassidy fuck it up.”

He noticed a bald guy sitting at the counter, probably in his sixties or seventies, turn around and look them over.
 

Voskuil gave him a “What’s your problem?” stare and the man turned around again. But it was clear that, for whatever reason, they were on the old geezer’s radar.

#

Winter’s beauty rest was the next victim of the unexpected wakeup call.

“Mom?” he said into the phone, tangled in his sheets beneath a wall-mounted Miley Cyrus poster. It was a raunchy cheesecake shot.

“I need you,” Nic said. “Lena’s in trouble.”

“I’m up, I’m up,” Winter said, hopping out of bed. That wasn’t hard to do, given that he slept on a tatami mat. Samurai style.

“Can you meet me at the station, ASAP? It’s an emergency.”

“Sure, sure. I’ll be there.”

“
Thank you
,” she said, and it sounded heartfelt, before hanging up.

On his drive over, Nic called back to fill Winter in on the situation.

“Damn. Doctor goes postal,” he said upon hearing the whole sordid tale. “Well, all right. We’ll deal with it.”

Voskuil’s assertion about a cure was a mindblower. If it was true, that was the best news Winter had heard in a long time. Even better than the surviving members of Soundgarden playing a show at Pioneer Square. But he dared not believe it — not yet. Winter didn’t want that messing with his head.

It could be very, very dangerous to himself and others.
 

“There’s something else you should know,” Nic’s voice said, suddenly sounding as vulnerable as their frightened civilian contact, Darla the jogger. “Lena. She’s pregnant.”

“No way,” Winter breathed.
 

“Yeah. Both our DNA, sperm from the bank. So we’re talking about two lives here.”

“Hey, you don’t have to convince me,” Winter said. “Let’s do our jobs.”

Winter went to the locker room as if he was starting a normal shift. Muscle memory took over and he slid into his uniform as if it were a second skin. And in a sense it was, because he was a different person when he put it on. He had to be.

Nic was already clad in virus-control black when they met in the garage. She reminded Winter that Voskuil was v-positive and desperate. As if he could forget. Her expression spoke volumes about her state of mind; it was as stricken and hopeless a countenance as Winter had ever laid eyes on. In that moment, Winter for the first time truly understood how much Nic loved her wife. He was looking at a dead woman, if the love of her life were taken from her. Multiplying the impact was the threat to her unborn child. Nic, as stone-cold and hardened a v-cop as there was, couldn’t control her flares of panic.

Winter put himself in that position, as best he could, and understood. What a thing to be saddled with — fighting for the life of your first child at his or her most vulnerable point.
 

“I’ll do anything I can for them,” Winter offered, and meant it. Nic nodded. In that unspoken moment, simply a look between them, a covenant was made. Though it had not been suggested, it was suddenly clear to both that the laws they’d sacrificed so much to uphold no longer applied. It was a state of mind neither had understood before, though they’d confronted it again and again in suspects, victims and perpetrators. These were shoes you could never walk in without wearing them yourself.

“We’ll need some gear,” Nic said.
 

“Gear we can get,” Winter replied.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

OUTLAWS

SERGEANT WALTER MAYHEW had done the math. He was sitting at this window or one like it for most of the last 11 years. Minus two weeks of vacation per year, about five sick days, the nine federal holidays…. The numbers crunched to something like 71% of his life over those years.

71% of his life, spent watching cops check out weapons and equipment.
 

At least the bennies were good.

Mayhew rarely got business this time of the morning, so he was irritated when the two officers showed up. It was a pain in the ass finding the equipment in the shelves, swiping their cards, entering the inventory data…. A 20-minute process, minimum.

That was fine during the day but at this hour, it was a royal pain in the ass.

“Gonna need some anti-personnel devices, masks, IR goggles….”

The Asian guy kept rattling it off. Mayhew couldn’t believe it. Six a.m., and he’s getting this shit from a couple of beat cops.

“All right, all right, cowboy,” Mayhew said. “Whatcha doing, raiding Hitler’s bunker?”

“Tac ops,” the black chick said, giving Mayhew a look it was fair to call withering.

“All right, great, you kids have fun,” Mayhew mumbled, looking at his computer screen.
Jesus. I know it’s early, but that’s a cold look to give a sad old man.

He entered the necessary information, got the screen-sigs, gave the duo their motherlode of equipment and sent them on their way.

“Have fun blowing yourselves up,” Mayhew said, a final passive-aggressive attempt to convey his displeasure at the early morning bother.
 

“Have fun jerking yourself off,” The guy, Masakawa, said, and both cops gave him the finger in unison.

Ha ha. Was that supposed to be a good line?
 

#

Voskuil felt the bald guy’s eyes burning a hole in the back of his neck. Sure enough, when he whirled savagely on him, the guy was caught in the act.

“Everything okay?” Voskuil asked, commending himself for not lacing those words with any profanities.
 

“Relax,” the old guy said, and turned back around. It was a much more composed reaction than the first time Voskuil challenged him. That was worrisome. Voskuil was confident the old coot couldn’t overhear their conversation, so what was his problem?

“Good advice,” Lena said, looking at Voskuil with what she must have thought passed for earnestness.

“Like you care,” Voskuil said. “You’re just waiting for Nicolette to show up and beat me to death, or whatever it is you have in mind.”

Lena seemed startled by his candor, and actually softened slightly. “James, I know this must be…excruciating for you. You do have my sympathy for that. But surely you understand why I’m not inclined to go on a suicide mission with you?”