The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (36 page)

The Governor of the great state of Connecticut sat at her great desk, twenty square feet of gleaming wood, and felt like a small person. Although the hilltop had not been overrun and the majority of the zombies blasted into goo, she was still under the impression that her western border had fallen and that thousands of zombies were advancing across the state in one great sweep.

She felt small because her first impulse was to figure out how she could get all the food and weapons she could find, grab a boat and sail as far away as she could. After a few deep breaths, she came to her senses and began making calls. The first was to the Mayor of Harford with the bad news.

“Should we evacuate?” the mayor had asked. “I have some plans in place that are sup…”

“No,” the Governor said, calmly. “Massachusetts has closed their border and is arming it as we speak. I’m sure Rhode Island will do the same when they hear the news. This is crazy, but I think our only choice is to turn our cities into fortresses until the Army shows up.”

“What? Yeah, that is crazy.”

“No, what’s crazy is evacuating our cities and filling our state with three million nomads going from place to place looking for safety when there is none. I think we need to create those safe zones in place. So…so I want you to declare martial law in your city. Use your citizens to dig ditches or moats. Have them create walls out of cars or buses or trucks; anything that will stop the zombies. I will coordinate from here, and Ron, if you have any connections in Washington, start begging for favors.”

The Mayor of Hartford had hung up and the thought of running crossed his mind as well. Reluctantly, he stayed at his own, far less grand desk, and started making calls. With the police fighting in the west he had very few resources left to begin creating a new defensive perimeter around the city. Calls went out for firefighters, garbage men, even schoolteachers.

Television stations were contacted with carefully prepared speeches, the gist of which was: there was nowhere to run so you might as well stay and help. Although it was after midnight, the vast majority of the citizens were awake and afraid, waiting on news of what was happening in the western part of the state. A large portion of those awake were all packed up and ready to jump in their cars and get the hell out of Dodge, and a lot of them did just that. They heard the news saying to stay and they were the fastest out the door.

There really was nowhere to go. Massachusetts had armed men at every crossing. They downed trees, dug deep ditches, and strung barbed wire stolen from nearby farms. The other cities in Connecticut were also preparing defenses and were quick to turn away people from the outside. Eventually, after driving half the night they returned the way they came and began to help as well.

The western line defending Hartford was set up at the Farmington River—it wasn’t much of a river, but it was the best they had. Brush was cleared, cars were pushed end to end at every crossing, and fencing and wiring of all sorts was strung down its entire length. On the east side of the city, they used the Connecticut River as a defensive line; it was a much bigger river than the Farmington. North and south, they chose the widest roads they could as the edge of their lines and began the laborious process of hemming themselves in from all angles.

And all the while, the small zombie pack in the middle of the city continued to grow. Jaimee Lynn Burke’s appetite was never satiated for long. Thirty minutes after gorging herself until a burp would bring up a gout of blood along with it, she was hungry again. It was an eternally, gnawing, evil hunger. It made her feverish and shaky and it was hard to concentrate on her traps.

By midnight, the humans around the factory had become skittish. The cat was no longer working. For half the evening Jaimee would give the cat, a checkered one with a bushy tail, a good squeeze and it would screech out a loud, sad meow. It would only take a few of these squeezes before someone would show up. They had eaten three people that way and Jaimee’s blonde hair was stiff with old blood. It stuck up everywhere.

But now the cat wasn’t working.

She gave it a really big squeeze and it only made a sound like a toad farting. “This thing’s no good,” she said, tossing the cat to the side where it just laid with its pink tongue sticking out. Jaimee racked her addled brains trying to come up with a replacement for the cat. She thought of a dog, but they had big teeth. And she thought of a goat but there was none around. And that was all the animals she could remember. It wasn’t until one of the new kid zombies started whining loudly for more blood that she had her inspiration.

Thirty minutes later, she was in a small park. After setting her little fiends around the edges of it where there was shrubberies, Jaimee Lynn screamed out, “Help me. I hurt my leg! Oh, it hurts so bad.”

She blubbered on for a while until she heard someone coming. It was a lady with a flashlight, which stung Jaimee’s eyes when the beam struck her flush. Jaimee Lynn hid from the light behind a slide. The lady asked her, “Are you ok?”

“I don’t know, can you check my leg. I think it’s all busted up from falling off…” she looked up at the swing-set but the name of the contraption wouldn’t come to her. “From up there somewhere.”

The lady leaned in close and shone her light down on Jaimee’s leg. The lady smelled so good. Yes, there was the blood pumping through her veins, but she also smelled of cinnamon. The two went together so well that Jaimee’s stomach growled like a man’s.

“Are you cut?” the woman asked. “There’s a lot of blood all over your leg…and your dress? And…and it’s in your hair.”

The woman had long dreads and a sweet brown face that looked soft as cream cheese and Jaimee Lynn wondered if it would leave a mark if she just touched it gently. But there was no gentle left in Jaimee Lynn. She stuck her fingers in the dreads and launched herself at the sweet face and yes, it was as soft under her teeth as she had reckoned it would be.

The pack heard the scream and came racing to get their fill of blood before it became cold and before the woman’s wonderful heart would stop beating. They knew that wonderful heart wouldn’t last, just as they knew that it wouldn’t stay quiet for long. Just like theirs had, it would start again and the woman would come alive again. Just like the rest.

The End of Day Two

Author’s note

Thank you for reading The Apocalypse Crusade, War of the Undead Day Two. I sincerely hope that you enjoyed it. If so, I’d like to ask a favor: the review is the most practical and inexpensive form of advertisement an independent author has available in order to get his work known. If you could put a kind review on Amazon and your Facebook page, I would greatly appreciate it.

Peter Meredith

P.S. Yes there will be a day three.

P.P.S. If you are in the mood for more zombies, a ton more bullets and a whole lot more blood(and just a bit of sex thrown in), please check out my other ghoulish series:
The Undead World
.

Greed, terrorism, and simple bad luck conspire to bring mankind to its knees as a viral infection spreads out of control, reducing those infected to undead horrors that feed upon the living.
It’s a time of misery and death for most, however there are some who are lucky, some who are ruthless, and some who are just too damned tough to go down without a fight. This is their story.

Under the neon lights, Yuri Petrovich seemed a sick, pasty white, however since this was normal for almost everyone at the facility, it went unremarked if it was noticed at all. From his office, he passed through the agriculture research section—what once was the façade of the operation, and took the secure elevator to the lowest sub-basement.

There he grunted a 'hello' to the aged guard, Beria, and signed his name on the log board. "Time for my monthly checks," Yuri said affecting a bored voice despite the tremor in his hands.

The guard didn't look up from his magazine, a German rag that was two months out of date. "Better you than me," Beria replied, as he always did. Though the man wore a gun at his hip, he was extremely disinterested in anything concerning the facility and no one knew who or what he actually guarded.

"Key me?" Yuri asked.

Once upon a time it would have been a sharp-eyed and sharply dressed political officer who had to match keys to get into the
White Room
. Now it was only fat, put-upon Beria. He sighed heavily as he heaved himself out of his creaking chair.

"On three," he said, taking up his position on one side of the door. "One, two, three." They both turned their keys and the door opened with a hiss. Beria beat a hasty retreat to his beloved chair, where his fat rear had only wiggle room left.

Yuri went into the next room and donned his bio-suit, ran down his checklist, inspected his filters twice, and then went first through one air-lock and then a second. Despite his years on the job, the
White Room
always gave him a shiver down the spine when he entered however today the shiver went to his guts and wouldn't leave.

"Five hundred million rubles," he whispered to himself. "Five hundred million fucking rubles…"

This helped. And so did the fact that he knew Beria was completely ignoring the cameras. To be on the safe side however, Yuri went through the dull routine of cataloging the various strains of bio-weapons stored there and he did so as slowly and methodically as he could.

Though it was called the
White Room
by the sad few who knew of its existence, it was officially unnamed and not at all associated with the Department of Agriculture housed in the building above. Instead it had grown as an offshoot of the Stepnagorsk Scientific and Technical Institute for Microbiology. It was what the Soviets had called a Biopreparat facility and thus very illegal in the eyes of the world–for good reason.

Yuri glanced down the rows of steel and glass cabinets that were clearly marked: Anthrax, Ebola, Marburg Virus, Plague, Q fever, Junin Virus, Glanders, and Smallpox; each had to be numbered and their dates checked. He worked, with clipboard in hand, in the tedious manner he had cultivated ever since he had become chief of scientific research at the facility.

The term ‘research’ made him want to gag. There hadn't been a
kopek
of new research money in a decade, and every year his budget shrank. There was even talk of ending the bio-weapons program altogether.

And then what would Yuri do?

The struggling Russian government wasn't hiring many scientists, and the private sector wasn't eager to be associated with a man who had made his living producing and maintaining weapons of mass destruction. His legal options were few, and his illegal options were even fewer, but they were oh, so lucrative –Five hundred million rubles worth of lucrative. The promise of the money was the single reason he had taken to going to the one locked drawer in the room on every visit.

With a quivering in his chest that wouldn't stop, Yuri undid the stout combination lock, opened the door to the locker, pulled back on the stainless steel slab, and then forced himself to breathe in a normal manner: in and out, in and out. The body lay beneath a sheet and as always, Yuri uncovered it with gritted teeth, while his gorge rose in the back of his throat.

The body was that of a man, or rather it used to be a man, now it was something else.

He took the right arm of the thing, it was grey and stiff, and set it to hang as far as the handcuffs would allow, letting the black blood pool in the extremity. Yuri then went through what had become a routine and completely unnecessary check up. The thing on the slab should have been dead. It was quite literally ice cold since the refrigeration unit was kept at a constant zero degrees centigrade. And yet it was already moving.

The hands spread and the muscles around its mouth began to work, opening and closing. It was in the eyes where it was most "alive".  Somehow they were hungry and furious, but also glassy and empty of any intellect. Lately, Yuri had begun to dream about those eyes, and lately Yuri had become an insomniac. He couldn't sleep, knowing that those nightmare eyes would be worn by everyone he knew—if things went wrong.

Still he had a job to do and after a deep breath of stale bio-suit air, he began his check-up, starting with the hated eyes. He then peered into its ears, and nose, and its horrid, dank mouth. Then, making sure his body was completely blocking the camera, Yuri pulled a syringe from one of the zippered cargo pockets that adorned his suit and jabbed the needle into the crook of the thing’s arm where a fat vein had begun to bulge.

The thing didn't flinch. According to every report the creature that once had been a man, couldn't feel the slightest pain.

Yuri filled the syringe with black blood, and then very carefully pocketed it. The virus was blood born and though he could bath in it if he wished, a single prick from the infected needle would kill him in hours.

With sweat running down his back, he covered the body, slid it back into the freezer where it belonged and then went on to his next chore which was to switch out the attenuated viruses in their little plastic pipettes. There were a total of twenty doses of the vaccine—he took six, leaving normal saline in their place. No one would notice, not until it was too late for them.

Of the six doses, he would inject himself with one of them that night, just in case; three were part of the bargain that would make him rich, and the final two he would keep for himself.

These last would guarantee him a position of power if his clients, the North Koreans, were ever foolish enough to release the virus. Given the right conditions he could churn out vaccines in as little as four months, while he had to wonder if the Koreans would ever figure it out. They were pathetically behind in all aspects of technology, as everyone knew.

Yuri closed the last glass case and breathed a sigh of relief. He was done and not a single alarm had gone off, which meant that one wouldn't. Beria had been as poor at his job as ever. Moving quickly, now that the toughest part of his job was past, Yuri breezed through both air-locks, and with the utmost care he transferred the syringe from his bio-suit to his jacket pocket. It felt like he was carrying a bomb with a hair trigger as he made his way up to his office, however nothing untoward happened and he was able to take the needle off the syringe without mishap.

The now capped syringe and the clear pipettes he bagged and then placed inside his thermos, while the needle he dropped onto the open face of the sandwich his wife had made him for lunch; it would go to waste anyway, he could never eat after a visit to the
White Room
. Very carefully he wrapped it back in the brown bag it had come from and this he gently put in a medical waste container.

One last item: Yuri took the container, which was nothing more than a plastic bag, and walked it personally to the incendiary chute and tossed it in. Now he was done. He went to his desk and sat there picturing everything five hundred million rubles would buy, sighing happily
.