Survival Instinct: A Zombie Novel (63 page)

“Well, Danny’s older brother here happens to work for Keystone.”  McGregor gestured to the boy next to him.  The boy in question gave a look that suggested he didn’t want to get dragged into the conversation.  “Apparently he works in some underground facility where all sorts of things happen.  If that’s not where this came from, then tell me where did it?”

“It did not come from Keystone,” Kara didn’t hide her defensive tone this time.  “It could have come from anywhere.  From some other company in China for all we know.”

“I’m pretty sure the news would have caught on to something sooner if it started in China,” McGregor raised an eyebrow.  “It started here.  In the city that, you reminded us, was built by Keystone.”

“I would have heard of something like this being done.”  Kara tried to remember if she
had
heard of something.  She couldn’t think of anything though.  She had been to the underground White Box a few times and couldn’t think of anything suspicious she might have seen there.

“You said yourself you only did some money delegating,” McGregor had taken on an accusatory tone.  “Tell me, did you ever look at what your money was being put into?  Did you even care?”

“Of course I cared,” Kara snapped at him.  She did not like being accused of something she had no part in.  “I’ll admit that Keystone has a weapons division but I never funded that section.  All my charity and fund raising work was for the health research department, where my father worked, and what he would have wanted.  We’ve looked into cancer research, limb replacement and assistance, a cure for AIDS, rare diseases no one else is looking into.  We even had that damned concert today for spinal cord injuries.”

She spat that last one in his face, remembering he used a wheelchair.  Figuring that would have won her the argument, or at least given her the upper hand, a small smile tried to tug up the corner of her mouth.  McGregor, though, had a completely different reaction than she expected.  He smiled back.  Rather broadly too.

“Maybe you should have stuck with the military funding,” he said.

Kara frowned.

“My spine is fine.  It’s my legs that were damaged,” he explained.  “I’ll admit I probably would have lost them if it weren’t for the wonderful care of your health organization, but I wouldn’t be injured in the first place if it wasn’t for them.  The money you put into military development doesn’t just go into weapons.  It also goes into protection.  Things to keep us from being shot, not just things that shoot.  It also goes into reconnaissance, like satellites and spy planes.  Things that could have seen the helicopter before they sent me and my partner in there.  Not to mention, I’m pretty sure we were there because of your health organization.  I remember reading later, after our mission was complete and I was recovering, that your company had recently signed a treaty to move into and explore that particular area for plants that could benefit health developments.  An area where I shot and killed the rebel leader.  As for your precious health research having nothing to do with this, you said yourself you looked into rare diseases.  This looks like it could be a disease to me.  A rare one at that.  Like a fast-acting rabies.  So tell me, how deeply into this research did you look?  Or did you just skim the words that sounded good?”

The inside of the car went utterly silent.  The only sounds came from outside and from the wind rushing in through Walter’s broken window.  Kara remembered the incident he was referring to, about the exploration team.  She had just thought it was good luck that the rebel leader had been killed and was replaced by someone who was willing to negotiate.  She knew that Keystone had influence over government officials, but never thought they would use it to do that.  And what he said about what was happening around them, it was true, it did look like a disease or virus of some sort.  She had immediately thought it was something weaponized, but it could very well have been some accidental exposure to something they were working with.  It did seem to bring the dead back to life, after all, and wasn’t that what health care was about?  Pushing back death?

“I’m sorry,” was all she could say in the end.

“For what?”  McGregor wasn’t going to let her get away with just that, apparently.

“For what happened to your legs,” she started with,  “and for possibly –
possibly
– funding something that could have caused this.”  It was still guesswork.  They couldn’t know for sure if Keystone had anything to do with it.  “I still don’t think it was Keystone.  They would have made a public announcement if an accident occurred, but I’ll admit that they may have been working with something I know nothing about.”

It was silent in the car again for another several blocks.

* * *

“So what was it like growing up rich?” Danny spoke up, breaking the heavy silence.

The question threw Kara off guard for a moment, and so it took that moment before she answered.  “Although there were a lot of down strokes in my life, it has still been a lot better than most peoples’ lives.”  Kara hated the other rich people who thought they were suffering, that their lives were hard.  They had no idea.

“Did you own a horsey?” Alice wondered.

“I did,” Kara smiled at the memory.  The horse she owned as a girl was the closest thing she had to a pet, even though she only went to the stables to ride it twice a month or so.  “His name was Gregory.  He was a great big, grey thing that was rather dim-witted as far as horses go.”

With no idea why, Kara found herself suddenly overcome by emotion at the thought of Gregory the horse.  She hadn’t thought of him in ages, but all of a sudden, she could remember everything about him.  The feel of his soft muzzle, the awful smells he usually had lingering about him, the discoloured spot on his left front hoof.  She even remembered the way he would always favour that leg on days it was going to rain, like an old man with a bad knee.  She remembered all these things, but couldn’t, for the life of her, remember what became of Gregory.

“I would like to own a horsey,” Alice said in a voice of declaration.  “My Daddy says they’re too expensive and couldn’t live at our house, but I want one anyway.  I think Shoes would like to have a horsey friend.”

“What would you name your horse?” McGregor asked the girl.  All the cold and vicious tones he had directed at Kara earlier had completely left his voice.  He was much kinder to the small girl.

“I would name her Butterscotch,” Alice answered without hesitation.  “She would have fur like gold, and I would feed her apples every day.”

“I always wanted a ferret,” Danny chimed in.  “I would probably call him Bandit but I would have to see him first to see if the name suited him.”

“What’s a furret?” Alice wondered.  “Isn’t that a Pokémon?”

“Yeah, but I said a
ferret
.  It’s kind of like a weasel, but much cooler,” Danny told her.

“Do you have a pet, Mister Walter?” Alice asked their driver.

“No, but I grew up right near a pond that was always full of frogs,” Walter shrugged.  “They were sort of like my pets.  I would try to catch them all the time, and whenever I did, my mom would shriek at me to put it back in the pond.  I don’t think she liked having them hopping around the kitchen.”

Danny and Alice laughed.  That was something Kara had never known about Walter.  In fact, now that she thought about it, she didn’t really know that much about him at all.  She only knew about the things he did while he worked for her.  They lived under the same roof, but there was still that boss-employee line that had never really gone away.  Kara would like to consider Walter her friend, but she realized she couldn’t really do that.  She wasn’t even sure she knew what a true friend was, not since she was seven years old anyway.  And seven-year-old friendships are vastly different from those of a grown woman.  Aren’t they?

“What about you, Mr. Eggor?”  Alice turned to McGregor.

“I have a dog,” he smiled at the girl, but Kara noted a hint of sadness in his voice.  It sounded like something about the dog bothered him more than what happened to his legs, which made no sense at all.  “He’s a German Shepherd named Rifle.”

“I bet Shoes would like him.  Where is he?”  Clearly, Alice didn’t notice the same thing Kara did.

“I don’t know.”

Danny also looked uncomfortable about this topic.  Something must have happened recently if Danny had met the dog.  Actually, Kara didn’t know that.  She didn’t know how the two had met.  She just assumed it was recently, the way she had met Alice.  But they could have been neighbours for all she knew.

“So, how did you two meet up?”  Kara decided that that would make a good change of conversation.

“I found Danny in my garage actually,” McGregor didn’t explain much more than that.

“What were you doing in his garage?” Kara asked Danny.  She didn’t want to butt heads with McGregor again, so perhaps the boy could carry on as good a conversation with her as he did with Alice. 

“Hiding,” Danny said with a roll of his eyes as if it were obvious.

“How did you meet Alice?” McGregor asked.

“Walter and I found her in the back of a smashed car.”  Although that wasn’t technically true.  Walter had really found her on his own.

“And you and Walter…?”  McGregor didn’t need to finish the question.

“Walter’s worked for me for several years now,” Kara told him as she turned to Walter.  “We were together when things went south.”

Kara watched McGregor nod in a knowing manner in the rear-view mirror.  There was something he wasn’t saying, or maybe asking, but she didn’t know what.  Perhaps there was a reason for it and she shouldn’t ask.  For
now, she would hold off on that one.  Things still seemed rather tense.

“Lord,” Walter muttered under his breath.

Kara glanced at him and then in the direction he was looking.  They had turned a corner that led onto a major street, which led to the highway they were trying to get to.  Being turned around while talking, Kara hadn’t noticed they had to cut through a parking lot to get to the street.  The road and all streets leading to it was packed full of cars.  In fact, several other cars were taking their example of crossing through the parking lots.  Everybody seemed to be heading to the highway.

“What is going on?”  Kara looked at all the cars and even more at all the people.  It was crazy how many people were walking around the flood of vehicles.  Foot, car, truck, bicycle, everything was heading to the same highway.

“I guess we weren’t the only ones who decided to get out of the city,” Walter grumped.

“This still seems like a lot though.”  Kara looked at the masses.  Considering her first idea had been to hole up at home, she figured many others would try that as well.  It wasn’t possible that so many people had the same kind of experience that Kara had had with the McGraws.

“Something isn’t right,” McGregor actually agreed with her.  “They must know something we don’t.”

Kara nodded.

McGregor rolled down his window a few inches.  “Hey!”  It took him a while, but he finally got the attention of a pedestrian who didn’t shy away from his calling.  “What’s going on?  I mean, why is everybody leaving?”

“Same reason you are,” the guy sounded like he thought McGregor was an idiot.

“What do you mean?” McGregor frowned.  “It seems unlikely to me that we all came up with the same idea at the same time.”

The guy frowned at him for a moment, then a light dawned in his eyes.  “Oh shit, you didn’t hear the broadcast.”

“What broadcast?”  Kara turned and leaned toward the open windows to hear better.

“Over the radio.”  The man pointed to where he assumed the radio would be in the Jeep.  “It’s been coming in and out, but it seems everybody’s tuned in at some point.”

Kara turned back to the front and flicked on the radio.  She scanned the frequencies until one partly came in.

“Flee…  City
… Not a… Infection is sweep-…… -ble Keystone is responsible…  Inside…”

When Kara heard that line about Keystone being responsible, she froze for a moment
, but then snapped the radio back off.  She stared forward out of the Jeep but could feel eyes boring into the back of her skull.  McGregor’s, Danny’s, even Walter’s.  Alice was probably the only one who didn’t get it.  If the dog, Shoes, could see her, he would probably be looking at her too.  Kara couldn’t face any of them at that moment.  What had she done?  She had funded the end of the world, that’s what.  While she pretended to be a humanitarian, she was actually helping to destroy life as they knew it.  Not knowing what they were up to was not an excuse.  She should have checked in on them more often and more thoroughly.  Sure, there were legal documents, but lawyers who also worked for Keystone wrote those, and maybe they didn’t know the truth either.  She had given her money to feed a monster.

“You don’t happen to have room in there to give me a ride do you?” 
The man McGregor had been talking to saved Kara from having to say anything further.

“We’re packed in here fairly tight.”  McGregor didn’t outright refuse.  He sounded like he was mulling it over.

“Nah, it’s all right.”  The man suddenly waved off the idea.  “I just realized I’d rather not be packed into a can with a bunch of strangers.  I mean, I don’t know if any of you are infected.  You also have a dog in there I just noticed, and I’m allergic,” the man sounded nervous, like he had noticed something about the car or their group that he didn’t like, and it certainly wasn’t Shoes.  “I’m going to go east on foot through the woods anyway, so it would have only been a short ride.”