Last Fight of the Valkyries (35 page)

“Where did they come from...where did they go?” She
let out a giddy laugh, though her voice was dry like his. “I
think I'm finally going crazy, Liam. I really don't care. I just
climbed out of a grave! They saved us.”

“I thought that was my job?” It came out in a whisper.

She looked at him. He only saw her pretty eyes.

“You did your job. You got us out of there.” She
nodded to the hole.

He was too tired to argue. Instead, he stood.

“Come on. We need water.” He enjoyed being on his
feet, thankful that his arms hung to his sides at rest, while he
looked for his target. “This way.”

He had gone ten paces when he remembered Victoria.

Good boyfriends help their girlfriends.

But she was already on her feet. He absently thought she was
stronger than he was. She was more likely to pull him to
his
feet. This time was different because he was insane with thirst, and
had a touch of delirium.

My excuse. I'm stickin' to it.

As he expected, the low point of the cemetery contained a small
creek. He stumbled into the rocky depression—it was more of a
drainage ditch than a natural creek—but it contained his prize.
Years of Boy Scout warning blared in his head about drinking
untreated water, but he threw all the books into the fire of his
thirst. He was not going to be denied by science.

He nearly fell as he bent down to stick his face into a
particularly deep section of the creek. He took long, dangerous
gulps. The water filled his stomach until he could feel its weight
inside him.

Victoria put her head in next to his. All was quiet for a long
time.

Liam, finally sated, used the water to wash his face and eyes.
When he was done, he felt like the proverbial million bucks.

Down the creek, and beyond the cemetery, he could see the dingy
brown of the Mississippi. They had almost gone full circle.

He grabbed her and pointed where he was going. He was too tired to
explain.

They stumbled through the cemetery, wary for the dead, and the
undead. He was careful to go around the plots, as if to atone for the
desecration they'd inflicted upon the robbed grave sites.

You had no choice.

Well, other than death.

He had no energy for moral dilemmas. He'd done what was necessary
to survive, though it didn't sit well with him once he'd made the
realization. How many men and women used the same excuse in his
zombie books? The one excuse that seemed to always exonerate any
crime.

He hopped over the low stone wall marking the boundary of the
cemetery. He then crossed the railroad tracks next to the river, and
scrambled down the rocky bank. In moments, he stood alone at the edge
of the wide river.

The quiet was only broken by small ripples along the shore, or
birds in the distance. A woodpecker far away registered as the
loudest noise until Victoria came tumbling down the rocky bank. He
watched her on unsteady feet as she closed the final few paces to
stand beside him.

“Are we safe? What do we do now, swim?”

He thought that sounded exactly perfect. He swooned a bit at the
thought of the cool water around him. He'd last felt it jumping in to
save Pink.

“We'll find some driftwood and float away,” he finally
replied.

Overhead, far across the river, he saw the movement of a drone.

He pointed. “Can't we get some peace and quiet?”

Victoria said nothing.

Minutes later, still waiting for driftwood to float by, Liam's
phone rang in his pocket. He'd absolutely forgotten about it since he
pulled it out in the boat, not wanting to risk getting it wet when he
jumped overboard.

From inside the plastic bag he could see the data. It was a text
message from the same 435 area code that sent them to the quarry. It
was brief and to the point. “Now you know truth. Swim away.”

He didn't bother replying. The person on the other end knew he was
alive. That was all that mattered, for now. Patriots. Villains.
Cures. Plagues. Life. Death. These all swirled through his exhausted
mind.

“We're going to wait until a large tree floats by, we're
going to grab on, then float with it until we find the boat parked
downriver. If it's there, we're going to take it. If not, we keep
swimming. They told me to find Jason up on that cliff, but I'm going
to Camp Hope. I need to find my parents. My dad. I need to know if he
knew about this place. I need to know—”

He spoke so only the two of them could possibly hear. “I
need to know once and for all if my dad had anything to do with the
Patriot Snowball movement. Maybe he knew the men who died helping us
escape.”

“I'm with you. Always.”

She grabbed his hand and they steadied each other as they watched
the water flow by. They'd jump when the time was right.

Together.

For once, things went exactly as Liam planned. They'd found the
boat left by the captain. They had no way to know if he was coming
back, but they left a note sticking out from under a rock saying
where they were going. It said they were coming back.

The powerful boat made short work of the smaller Meramec River. It
took less than an hour to speed up the increasingly narrow river
until they reached the same point he and Victoria had first arrived
at the river after leaving the Beaumont Boy Scout Reservation a week
ago. From there, it was a mile walk to the front gate of the camp.

When he arrived, he was recognized by the Scouts defending it. His
spear matched many of the spears carried by the guards. The Hope
Spears were a specialty of the place. He was excited to tell tales of
what his spear had seen and done recently. But first, he had to find
his parents.

He vaguely recalled the cheering crowds. The fawning younger
Scouts. The pats on the back. The camp had been emptying out when he
left, but now it was back to its former size—and looked to be
growing even larger.

Must find parents.

His dad had broken his leg, so the natural place to find him would
be the infirmary. It was where he last saw him, though on the day he
left, he only said goodbye to Mom because Dad was so badly injured
and couldn't come out to see him. Though if he'd told them he was
leaving the camp, he thought his dad might have tried to come out to
stop him.

Word spread rapidly. His mom found him.

“Liam, thank God you're all right. Where have you been?”

The age old question. In the Old World, he saw the question as an
invasion of his privacy. Where are you going? Who will you be with?
Are girls going to be there? All the things that used to make him
upset were tossed aside. Now he was glad to share his tale, because
he'd made it back to tell it.

Finally, after all his “missions” to save Grandma and
help find the cure, he would offload the task to someone who could
actually make things happen. If anyone was more prepared for the
Apocalypse than his father, he hadn't found him.

“Hi Mom. We found Grandma in the city—”

They hugged while they spoke.

“We left her in Cairo, Illinois, she's safe there.”

His head was dizzy at the feeling of security he felt in his
mother's arms. But it couldn't last. He released her.

“We figured out something important about the plague.”
He scanned the area, wondering if he would be shot by a mysterious
assassin for revealing the secret. In the end, after all he'd been
through, he fought away the fear. “It affects the dead. It
apparently lasts forever. Like, literally forever.”

He conducted another sweep of the nearby camp. “Where's dad?
I need to ask him some important questions right away. He may be in
danger.”

He began walking to the bullet-ridden and boarded up
administration building, as he assumed he'd be inside. When his mom
didn't follow, he motioned for her to come to him. When she demurred,
he turned back to face her.

“He's somewhere else?”

Her eyes were sad. Like she'd been crying a lot.

“The survivalists came back?”

A head shake no.

“Zombies?”

Another head shake.

He tried to force something positive into the mix. His heart
warned him not to do it, but he wasn't going to listen to the
warnings of his brain.

“He went to a hospital?” His voice was tentative, as
if he knew it was a lie.

Her tears answered his question.

It was unfair, but anger spilled out, rather than sadness. “What
then? Where the hell is he? I've survived a lot of stinking death out
there. I climbed out of a freakin' grave. I really need to talk to
him. The fate of the country is at stake. Maybe the world!”

His mom cried freely. It was obvious to any bystander why.

Still, Liam pushed. “Where is he, Mom? Where?”

2

His dad's grave was just a stick in a muddy mound on top of one of
the nearby hills. The camp made a best effort to bury all the people
who died during the recent attack by the survivalists. An attack made
to find
him
, he was sad to admit.

I ruin every safe space I encounter.

Victoria walked with him up the hill. His mom followed too, but
she remained behind—she seemed hesitant to get too close to
Liam in his condition. The only thing she'd gotten out was that he
died because of the wound on his leg. He'd shattered a leg bone and
without proper antibiotics it had become infected and he'd caught
something which made him burn up. He died suddenly, not long after
Liam left the camp.

“Why! Dad, why?” He was mad now. A visceral anger at
the suspicion his dad knew more than he let on, but more than that,
he was mad his dad didn't trust him with that knowledge. It could
have made all the difference in the effort to fight—

For what? The truth? For the cure? What could he have known that
would have made any difference in the fact there was a massive cavern
with hundreds of tanks in it? Did he know about that? Wouldn't that
have been the first place he'd taken the family if he did?

He ran through a multitude of possibilities, but the only thing
that made any sense was that his dad really didn't know about that
place. Whoever was behind that great steel vault had to be someone
other than the Snowballers.

He fell to his knees at the grave. Vertigo struck as he looked
down at the ground.

Is he clawing up through the mud, like I did?

Without thinking about it, he moved backward on his knees. Just a
foot. Enough to not be in the way.

“Dad. I really needed your help.” He said it with
resignation. Victoria took it as her invitation to kneel next to him.
She put her hand through his arm, and held him.

He was reduced to tears. At some point, his mother closed the
distance and stood next to him. She looked down at the grave with
him.

“He was very proud of you, Liam. I think he knew he wasn't
going to make it. He made me promise to tell you of his pride in you,
though I refused to listen to him. I never saw the end coming.”

Liam realized he'd been a jerk. He'd lost a father. She'd lost her
husband. If he lost Victoria now, it would destroy him. He'd been
very nearly ready to kill himself back in the tank room when he
thought she'd been bitten. His mom was stronger than he was. That
became apparent once he took five seconds to think about it.

He stood to be next to her.

“I'm sorry, Mom. I had no right to yell at you.”

He held her, just as Victoria had held him. After a long period of
silence, his mom spoke.

“Liam, your dad left you some notes I think you're going to
want to see.”

The anger burst out, totally outside his control. “I knew
it! He
was
involved.”

“Liam, before you say anything else, you need to see them.
It's not what you think.”

He could think of a lot. His dad worked for the bad guys. He was
part of the government conspiracy. He was part of the Patriot
Snowball plot, and he
did
release the plague. He was in league
with Hayes and Duchesne and everyone Liam hated right now. He stood
against everything he'd taught Liam since he was a baby. The bad
thoughts flowed like the river. His exhaustion, grief, and sour mood
wouldn't harbor any thought his dad was really a good guy.

Was he good or bad?

He wouldn't be able to rest until he knew the truth.

“Let's go,” he said in a spiteful voice. Then, upon
seeing Victoria's silent rebuke, and realizing he
was
being a
complete jackass, he softened it.

“Please, Mom, I have to know.”

###

Please enjoy a brief sample of
book 5,
Zombies vs. Polar Bears
on the following pages.

“General. Please. Go on.”

Major General John Jasper sat in a room full of idiots. The town
of Cairo, Illinois had become the centerpiece of middle America's
efforts to protect the populace from the roving masses of infected
citizens plaguing the countryside, but his ability to get town
leaders to do anything useful for him had been spiraling downward
almost as fast as the country's healthy population.

“As I was saying, the only way we're going to keep the sick
people out of this town is if your civilians constantly watch the
riverbanks. It doesn't take a degree from the War College to know
that sick people are going to float down the river and end up on your
shores.”

It had already happened, many times. The town had been lucky
because there were a handful of go-getters who patrolled the levees
and graveyard of barges littering the shore around town looking for
them. They fancied themselves “zombie-killers,” though he
refused to utter that word in serious meetings like this one.
Whatever they called themselves, they weren't officially
sanctioned...