The Down Home Zombie Blues (13 page)

Theo’s stomach rumbled. When had he last eaten? Did that even matter? If Jorie and her commandos couldn’t stop the zombies, there’d be no one left in Maritana County to worry about a holiday dinner or syrup-soaked
melomakarana.

“I hope to be there for Christmas dinner,” he told her, running a traffic light as it flashed from yellow to red. He had to get home, had to find out if Jorie had any more information on the zombies. Plans had begun to form in the back of his mind. “But one of my detectives caught a case last night. I might be working.”

“Your vacation—”

“Part of the job. You went through that with Uncle Stavros.” His uncle had been a street cop his entire career with BVPD. Theo still went to the burly old man for advice from time to time. In fact, he could—

Nah.
Doc White Braids’s image surfaced again.

His aunt sighed and murmured a protective prayer in Greek.

“I’m always careful,” he told her. “If not Christmas, then New Year’s, okay?”

“
S’agapo,
Theophilus.”

“Love you too, Aunt Tootie.” He meant it. Tootie and Stavros had been the sole stable influence in his life. “Hug Uncle Stavros for me. I’ll talk to you in a couple days.” He closed the cell phone with a snap and—fingers tapping impatiently on the steering wheel—found himself stopped behind a line of traffic slowing to turn into the Sweetbay grocery store parking lot.

The questions in his mind, however, just kept on coming.

Jorie sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the small room, her gaze flicking from the data scrolling across her T-MOD to her team. To her left, Herryck and Trenat were dissecting the latest information on the herd’s movement. Their voices rose and fell, halting only when Rordan—Commander Kip Rordan, on her right—swung away from his T-MOD to interject something.

Immediately, Tamlynne Herryck’s expression would change from studious concentration to unabashed bliss. Her wide mouth would soften, and her light eyes would unfocus slightly.

Not that Tamlynne had any particular interest in Rordan. But there wasn’t a female on board who minded looking at Kip Rordan, Jorie included. A few had even done more than look at the tall, well-muscled commander who kept his shoulder-length shiny black hair neatly pulled back and clipped in a tail. Jorie didn’t think Tamlynne was in that group, but it didn’t matter. Rordan might be blessed with an extremely good face—she thought him almost pretty in spite of his strong mouth and straight nose—but he was also a good tracker, and he was even better at analyzing and synthesizing herd data from a T-MOD. Handicapped by Danjay Wain’s death, Jorie needed a team that could obtain information quickly and respond even faster.

So when Captain Pietr had recommended Rordan’s inclusion in her team at the last moment, she’d agreed. Even though Kip Rordan was equal to her in rank and head of his own tracker team. And even though Kip Rordan was Lorik Alclar’s close friend.

But that could be a benefit. Jorie was determined to gain the captaincy Pietr dangled before her. Let Rordan be witness to her team’s success and report it, firsthand, to Lorik.

A success that could well start with their first chance to challenge the zombies. Data on the herd was coming in more quickly now as the juveniles—always on the outer edges—were thrumming in anticipation of creating scent trails from their kills.

“They’re weaker,” Tamlynne Herryck said, pointing to the oscillating lines on her T-MOD that represented the younger zombies.

“But there are more of them,” Jorie answered just as Rordan did, her words running over his.

“Look at their numbers.”

She glanced at Rordan, nodding. “Exactly.”

“Ten,” Trenat offered.

Ten juveniles at the front of a craving. There were rarely more than six.

“Should be interesting,” Jorie quipped, then: “We have two sweeps, seven minutes before primary emergence. We—” And she halted, hearing a rumbling mechanical noise outside the structure. Most likely that was Petrakos returning. One of the lines of data on her T-MOD represented his location, and last she checked, he was less than a mark from his structure.

But he could also be with that shorter man, that Zeke Martinez. Petrakos had said it was normal for Martinez to come by. Though Jorie’s pretense of being Petrakos’s lover was supposed to put a halt to that.

Unless their pretense hadn’t been convincing—something Lorik would probably find amusing if that information got back to him. From Rordan. He stood as she did. She waved him back down as she tugged her headset through her hair and let the metal circlet drape around her neck. “If he’s with one of his coworkers, they expect me to be here. Run one more deep scan on those juveniles, confirm their R-Five levels again. I’ll be right back.”

Jorie sidled through the half-closed doorway and headed for the galley.
Kitchen,
she corrected herself, as a boxy white land vehicle lumbered into view. She could see Petrakos at the helm. No one else seemed to be with him, and no other vehicle followed. A curious sense of relief—and validation that she’d judged him correctly—flooded through her as he guided the vehicle to a halt. He thrust both hands through his short, spiky hair and, for a moment, held that position. Then with a movement that hinted at restrained anger, he shoved open the vehicle’s door and stepped out.

She opened the kitchen’s solid door, then the mesh one leading outside—a rush of warm, moist air hitting her instantly—and watched him approach.

He’d come back alone. Jorie hadn’t been sure…Clearly, this wasn’t a blissful experience for him. But she knew that he understood the potential of the restrainer implant: he could be located and terminated without warning. More than that, she knew he understood the threat the zombies posed. Had Theo Petrakos returned with a contingent of his own to force the Guardians to expose their existence, had he added more weapons to the nil-tech projectile one that was clipped to his belt—or if he’d not returned at all—she wouldn’t have been completely surprised. As Captain Pietr was fond pointing out, nils, so egocentrically tied to their own small ball of dirt, believing the universe started and stopped at their front door, were prone to do those kinds of things.

Theo Petrakos hadn’t. She couldn’t afford to discount that he might have plans in direct opposition to her own. But for now he was cooperating.

This was the first test she’d put him through—and he’d passed. His eventual reward would be banishment from everything he held dear. That fact put a damper on the small surge of bliss she’d experienced upon his return.

“Any news?” he asked as he mounted the wide steps. His gaze had been on her the entire trek from his vehicle. He was still focused on her now.

Jorie raised her face as he came up to her, tried to read past the expected concern and fading tinge of anger there, and failed. “There is movement on the outer edges of the herd. No portals yet. But we expect formation in less than two sweeps.”

As always, she hesitated, waiting for him to question the meanings of her words. Their language incompatibilities—while decreasing hourly—were still an impediment. But he was nodding.

“Where?”

“Come. I’ll show you.”

Jorie heard Trenat and Rordan arguing over the potential strength of the three lead juveniles as she returned to the small room, Petrakos on her heels. She listened for a moment, mentally filing away the data as she hunkered down in front of her T-MOD and then motioned for Petrakos to do the same.

Herryck scooted sideways, making room.

“Thank you,” Petrakos said with a nod to Jorie’s lieutenant.

“You are…well go,” Herryck replied haltingly.

Petrakos frowned, then a small smile played across his mouth, erasing some of the worry Jorie had seen on his face—his very good face—since he’d returned. “Welcome,” he said. “You’re welcome.”

“Well come,” Herryck repeated.

Petrakos nodded. “You don’t speak…”

“Vekran,” Jorie supplied as he crouched down next to her. “Herryck is learning.”

“Herryck?”

She hadn’t introduced him to her team. There’d been little time to do so; plus, there wasn’t a need. Petrakos would be in their lives for only the few days it would take to deal with the zombies. When the mission was finished, he’d return to the ship with them, of course. But he’d be isolated. The less he knew about the Guardians, the better.

Or so regulations stated.

Still, that didn’t mean he couldn’t learn her team’s names. Conversing with Petrakos would give Herryck much-needed practice in a language similar to Vekran. Though the lieutenant didn’t need to learn the variations that turned Vekran into English. Once this mission was complete, Jorie doubted they’d visit this nil world again.

“Tamlynne. Herryck,” Jorie said, with a small gesture at Tam. She pointed to Trenat. “Jacare. Trenat.”

“Kip Rordan,” the commander said before Jorie could, irritating her slightly. She’d never had any problems with Rordan before. But she hadn’t worked with him since she’d ended her relationship with Lorik.

Now she had seniority over him. Or did she?

The thought struck her—had Captain Pietr offered a promotion, a captaincy, to Rordan as well? It was no secret that she and Rordan had different command methodologies. She doubted he’d ever asked Pietr to relocate a nil’s family. But she’d
earned
the right for special concessions—her success rate was one of the highest in Guardian records. Higher than Rordan’s, in fact.

Could that too be an issue?

She shook off her disquiet and watched Petrakos nod at the introductions.

“Theo Petrakos,” he said, hand on his chest in much the same manner as when he’d named himself on board the
Sakanah
hours earlier. “Theo.”

Theo. No, the use of his first name was too personal for her. He was a nil with a restrainer implant, and he would be sent to Paroo.

“Petrakos,” she said, and brought his attention back to her T-MOD. “We have several unusual things.” She stabbed one finger at the cluster of small icons representing the juveniles at the herd’s edges. “The juveniles”—when he nodded his comprehension of the term, she continued—“are usually at the leading edge of a craving. Four, six of them most often. This time, we have ten.”

“Ten?” he echoed.

“The entire herd is much larger. It is singular to our experience.”

“So many juveniles or the large herd?”

“Both.”

“The herd is—” And he continued with words she didn’t understand.

He must have caught her puzzlement, because he started over. “The herd acts as if with one thought, all together? Or each zombie in the herd acts on its own?”

“The C-Prime controls all.” She remembered telling him much of this on the ship. But he’d just been through his first PMaT, and his brain, understandably, might not have been functioning at optimum. “But the C-Prime can code instructions into one or a smaller group, send them on a mission. They perform this, they return, they reintegrate. You understand?”

“So this C-Prime sends ten juvenile zombies—”

“Yes and no.” Jorie bit back a sigh. It wasn’t only the language difficulties. The Guardians had studied the zombies for over two hundred years. To impart that information in a few minutes was difficult, even if she didn’t have to rethink each word she used. “It is somewhat inherency. Juveniles perform a function in a craving that goes back to the original zombie program of protecting stations, worlds, from unknown infectious agents. The craving—the seeking out of potential viruses on ships and passengers—is their motivation. The C-Prime…it need not say yes or no.”

“You’re saying it’s instinct.”

“Instinct?” She wasn’t familiar with the word.

“It’s inherent—instinct for the juveniles to move at the start of a craving.”

“It is their inherency, yes. The C-Prime, it can guide. But the inherency, the need to define and eradicate the threat, is already there.”

He was nodding. “And where is the C-Prime guiding them to?”

Jorie glanced at Herryck, received her nod, and then turned back to her T-MOD and Petrakos. “Here.” She tapped at the screen, bringing up a regional map created by her ship’s seeker ’droids.

Petrakos sat back on his heels. “Fuck.”

She’d heard him utter that word before, didn’t know its meaning, but he was clearly never blissful when he uttered it. “We have one and a half sweeps before the first portal, Petrakos. I need everything you know about this place. These buildings—”

“It’s a shopping center,” he told her, and she could hear the tension in his voice. “We call it a mall. Everything under one roof—stores, restaurants, all inside.”

“I understand. An enclosed plaza with many establishments offering items for purchase.”

“Good. Across the street, there’s a movie theater and another shopping plaza. All together, hundreds, thousands of people.”

“It will be near sunset,” she told him, because the dismay she heard in his voice unsettled her. “The people will return to their structures to celebrate the evening meal—”

“You don’t understand.” He suddenly leaned forward, hands fisted. “This is the biggest shopping time of the year. Everyone will be there. Not only the store workers but families, children. There is no way you’re going to be able to keep the zombies’ existence
or
the Guardians’ existence a secret.” He uncurled his fingers and pointed to her screen. “Not there. You’re going to have to deal with the zombies openly.”

Herryck, Trenat, and Rordan had all turned from their duties and were watching her. She knew Trenat understood none of Petrakos’s words, but Herryck had a working knowledge of Vekran, and Rordan spoke even more. But even if they hadn’t, they couldn’t miss the anguish in Petrakos’s voice.

She translated into Alarsh a summary of what Petrakos had told her. “If this wasn’t a nil world, we could bring down two gravrippers. For their speed, if nothing else.” A cloaking device for the craft would be ideal, though the Guardians had yet to perfect one.

“We’d still have to jam this planet’s sensors,” Trenat pointed out. “They’re just advanced enough to track us on descent. We can’t permit that.”