The Down Home Zombie Blues (29 page)

Jorie tuned them out as she stripped out the components from the secondary T-MOD and inserted the salvaged ones. All house shields were disengaged, except for the roof. PMaT transports were primarily vertical. If the Tresh transported into the backyard and came through the door, rifles flaring, she’d have a battle on her hands.

But her two MOD units couldn’t maintain the shields, continue to scan, send out a scrambled seeker signal, and continue to interpolate data while she swapped out components. It was as if she were working under battlefield conditions again. Except this was Guardian MOD-tech, not Interplanetary Marines. And, yes, that meant there were crucial differences, including the lack of necessary redundancy and a reliance on a correlative data source—the ship, now unavailable.

She resealed the units and restarted the tech programs, holding her breath for the ubiquitous program-failure warning screen. The blue screen from hell. When none appeared after five minutes, she relaxed somewhat. First hurdle cleared.

But it would be another ten minutes for the units to completely synchronize and another ten for the diagnostic to initialize and complete.

She pushed herself to her feet. She was thirsty. And perhaps a spoonful or more of that glorious peanut butter. And a honey puff if Theo and Martinez hadn’t eaten them all.

She clipped her scanner to her utility belt. It erupted with a screech, sending her pulse racing. She jerked it up, noted coordinates, then spun and grabbed her Hazer from the bed, damning herself for dropping the shields.

Theo heard the familiar screech, dropped the plastic container of honey puffs on the kitchen counter, then pulled his gun out of the hip holster under his shirt. Only as he lurched toward the living room did he realize it was his Glock. Not the laser pistol. Too late. Something was already oozing out of the green glow on his living-room wall.

“What the fuck?” Zeke rasped from behind him.

Theo knew Jorie had to be on the way in here, but he couldn’t take a chance. He fired rapidly three times, center mass.

The zombie screamed, its cry grating on his ears. A juvenile, he realized. Razor-clawed appendages thrashed, neck twisted—damn! His new leather couch!

He saw the pinpoint of white and fired once more.

The head jerked back. Four arms flailed outward. The creature slammed against the wall and, with a violent shudder, crumpled to the floor.

A stream of Alarsh curses reached his ears. He shot a glance to his left. Jorie, double-stack rifle in her hands.

“Is it…?” he asked her.

She angled the rifle down, then whipped up her scanner. She nodded. “Dead.” She turned to him, eyes widening. She stared at the Glock in his hand. “You terminated it with…that?”

He looked down at his gun. “Yeah. But it didn’t disappear.”

She trotted over to where the zombie lay, serrated jaws agape, some kind of yellow liquid spilling onto the floor. The worms writhing on its surface were slowing, spasming. She squatted down, ran the scanner over the hideous length of the thing, then rose.

“Hell’s wrath,” she whispered, and raised her gaze as he stepped next to her. “We just might have a chance.”

A gagging sound behind Theo made him turn. Zeke, hand over his mouth, looking decidedly green. The detective’s eyes were wide as he bolted for the kitchen doorway and then—judging from the sound—proceeded to lose his honey puffs in the sink.

Theo had never liked the yellow curtains in his spare bedroom, anyway. Camille had picked them out. He yanked them down and handed them to Tammy, who carried them without comment or question to the living room. Jorie was explaining the different functions of the zombie’s appendages to a thoroughly embarrassed Zeke Martinez as they awaited Suzanne’s arrival. If they had to move the zombie—and Theo suspected Suzanne might want to take it back to her clinic—the curtains would come in handy. If they didn’t move it, they would still come in handy. Just because he didn’t puke his guts out like Zeke did when he first saw one didn’t mean he enjoyed looking at that thing on his living-room floor.

“Why didn’t the shields stop it?” he asked. Tammy was on his leather couch next to the pile of curtains. She gave him a smile as he walked toward Jorie.

“I disengaged the shields when Martinez arrived,” Jorie said, and Theo nodded, remembering now. “All but the overhead. I couldn’t reactivate them and repair my tech, so they stayed off. But I forgot that I’d reduced their dimensions to fit within this structure’s walls. Because of her.” She pointed toward the front window and, ultimately, Mrs. Goldstein’s house. “That left a gap. A slight one, but enough that a vertical insertion could occur.”

“You’re saying the Tresh sent the zombie?”

“The Guardians have worked with the fact that the zombies’ appearances were at random locales even when spurred by a craving. That no longer appears to be true. The Tresh now can control them. It’s almost as if they’ve returned to their original programming.”

“You sound pleased about that.”

“I am. Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed. Our problem has been that the zombies defied programming for all these years. But there’s something that pleases me even more.” She glanced up at him, head tilted, mouth slightly parted.

Oh, hell, yeah. He knew what pleased her more. Same thing that pleased him, and they’d done it twice since early this morning. But he had a feeling that wasn’t at all what she was talking about.

Down, boy. Heel.

“Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“The Tresh sent this zombie in shielded. Another reason I know the Tresh now control them. I told you about the shields the Devastators used here, the L-One and L-Twos.”

He nodded, grateful for all those years watching
Deep Space Nine
and
Next Generation.
He wouldn’t even begin to guess what she was talking about if he hadn’t.

“This,” she pulled at the rifle strap slung over her shoulder, “is the only thing I have that can penetrate those shields. Devastator shield technology utilizes extremely complex phase patterns.”

“But you modified that Hazer, right? We don’t have any more of those.”

“We don’t need them. We have that.” And she pointed to his hip and his gun’s holster peeking out from under the edge of his T-shirt.

He pulled out his gun and held it in his palm. “This?”

“Very basically, the shields are high-level energy fields used to counter high-level energy weapons. Not a nil-tech projectile weapon that no one has seen, let alone used, in hundreds of years.”

He slid the gun back into his holster. “But the house shields reacted to my hand.”

“Because they’re patterned to counter denser, physical intrusions. A body. An asteroid. They also require a larger generator and a much larger energy source. Ships and structures can maintain them. A single individual’s personal
portable
shield generator cannot. It would be”—Jorie lifted her scanner—“at least five times this size. It takes both my MOD-tech units in your bedroom to generate a basic shield around this structure, and that’s working them at capacity.”

Theo stared at her, trying to grasp all she said. It sounded like good news, though he wasn’t totally sure why.

“How does this help us defeat the Tresh?” he asked as he heard the sound of a car pulling down his driveway. The edge of a red roof moving past his side window told him it was Suzanne’s Jeep Cherokee.

“It doesn’t, not exactly,” Jorie said. “What it does tell me is that I can get to the C-Prime with far less problems than I anticipated. The drones and juveniles guarding it will all be L-One or L-Two shielded. With only one modified Hazer, there was no way I could defend myself on all sides. Even the Hazer takes several concentrated shots to dissolve a shield. But if we have help,” Jorie glanced at Zeke sitting on the arm of the recliner, listening, “and sufficient projectile weapons, we have a damned good chance.”

That sounded encouraging. “But why is its body still here?”

“First guess, without studying data? Same thing. Your projectile weapon simply punctures, thereby ceasing the zombie’s functions. But it doesn’t utilize energy as an implosion catalyst the way a G-One would.”

His porch door clanked closed and then there were quick steps across his tile kitchen floor. Suzanne arrived in blue jeans and a red T-shirt bearing the image of a scowling orange tabby cat wearing fake fuzzy antlers on its head.
Paw-Humbug!
was in white lettering across the top.

“What do we have—” Suzanne stopped and stared down at the dead zombie lying against the wall. Then she put her hands on her hips and, with a shake of her head, turned to Theo. “That’s the most butt-ugly thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

As Suzanne Martinez examined the zombie, Jorie checked on both MOD-tech units and, satisfied they were functioning, reinstated the house shields. Then she keyed in another diagnostic, looking for anything Prow might have left behind. The program would run slowly due to the power drain from maintaining the shields. But now that she had a possible solution close at hand, she was willing to wait for the results.

She returned to the main room and touched Theo on the arm. “House shields are activated.” She looked at Martinez, then at his spouse. “You understand? Don’t exit, don’t open a window, without telling me first.”

“No more zombies, no Tresh?” Theo asked.

“In this room, no.”

“How’d they know we were here?” Martinez asked.

“They’re not sensing us.” Jorie gestured to Martinez, then to Tamlynne. “They’re sensing the resonance of Guardian equipment. They may have been monitoring the shields, looking for changes. Or they may have simply been taking a routine sweep of the area, knowing we’ve been here in the past. Either way, when I changed shield patterns, they knew.”

That was why repairing tech in the field was so risky. She’d thought she’d secured the locale—it was secured by Guardian standards. But not by marine field-combat standards. She had to work that way in the future or it could cost lives.

Damning herself, she walked over to Tam on the couch and repeated her instructions about the shields in Alarsh. Tam nodded. “Understand, sir.”

“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Martinez offered, evidently figuring out what she’d said to Tamlynne. He looked a little less pale, but Jorie noticed he was keeping his distance from the zombie. “How is she?”

“There’s some memory loss, some disorientation,” Jorie told him, moved by his concern. “I’ve seen it before. If we weren’t in this situation, it wouldn’t be an issue.”

“You really are from outer space.”

Jorie grinned wryly, in spite of her consternation. Martinez’s earnest amazement was almost endearing. “It’s not outer space to me. The Chalvash System, the worlds of the Interplanetary Concord, and the spacelanes that connect them. That’s home to me. To us.” She nodded at Tamlynne.

“What are you going to do if you can’t get back?”

Jorie opened her mouth, then hesitated. It was the one thing never out of her mind, and yet she had no answer. Then she felt Theo’s hand brush her shoulder and come to rest against the back of her neck.

“She’ll be fine,” Theo said.

“Sorry.” Martinez splayed one hand outward in apology. “I shouldn’t have asked that.”

“The Guardians never abandon a team member,” she said finally. But they couldn’t rescue her and Tam if they didn’t know they were alive.

Yet if they did, that would mean she’d never see Theo again. She wouldn’t let them send him to Paroo. She’d tell whatever lie she had to in order to prevent that. His life was here: his friends, his neighbor, his duty, his aunt and uncle he spoke so fondly of. She could never ask him to make that sacrifice. No, the pain would be hers alone.

She pulled away from the warmth of Theo’s fingers—and the growing ache in her heart—and knelt down next to Suzanne. “There are some components I need extracted from its chest. It will have to be invasive.” Next nil world she visited, she would make sure a JS-6-4 was standard equipment in all field packs. “There may be fail-safes, autodestructs. The Tresh are famous for that. Can you do an extraction here, or should we take this to your clinic?”

“The clinic. I have access to all my equipment there. Nina’s on duty again, but she won’t come in from the kennel wing unless I ask her to, and I won’t. Plus, I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave this in Theo’s living room. The neighbors might object when putrefaction sets in and it begins to smell.”

“God, Suzy, please!” Martinez looked pained.

“Ezequiel, my love, I’m still baffled how you ended up in Homicide.”

Martinez waved dismissively at Theo. “His fault.”

“I’ll drop the rear structure shields,” Jorie said as Theo, behind her, tried unsuccessfully not to laugh. “Which vehicle?”

“Mine’s larger,” Theo said. “I’ll fold down the backseats. Zeke can ride with me—”

“I’ll ride with Suzy, thank you,” Martinez said quickly.

That feral grin Jorie loved so much played over Theo’s lips. “Okay, Jorie rides with me and the zombie. What about Tammy?”

“She can come with us,” Suzanne offered. “You won’t have room.”

That was probably for the best. Until Jorie was very sure of shield integrity, she wasn’t comfortable leaving Tamlynne alone in Theo’s structure, even though physically she functioned well. She hadn’t panicked when the zombie appeared, and she’d assisted Theo with removing the viewport draperies with no problems. In those ways, the lieutenant seemed to be healing.

Her conversations, however, were still disjointed. And there were no answers on the Tresh’s appearance or Rordan’s disappearance.

“Let’s wrap this thing up.” Theo nudged the dead zombie’s shoulder with the toe of his boot. There was a gurgling sound, and another gush of yellow liquid ran through its jaws. “Zeke, give me a hand?”

But Martinez’s hand was over his mouth. And he was moving as fast as he could out of the room.

20

“I told you before. We don’t have that kind of time.” Theo paced the back hallway of Suzanne’s clinic. Zeke had hoisted himself up onto a metal grooming table and sat, palms planted against the top, keeping out of Theo’s way in the narrow corridor.

Smart move. Theo’d had a feeling this conversation was coming and, on the drive over, had done a lot of thinking. His amusement over Zeke’s reaction to the zombie had faded in light of the very real problems the creature portended. So he’d run through a few scenarios again, just as he had when he and Jorie returned to his house after the confrontation with the Tresh in Gulfview.

But this time, he caught the one big mistake. The downside to his answer to all their problems. He just hoped it wasn’t too late to fix it.

He’d also made some very big decisions. And now that he had, he wanted to act on them. Stalling was driving him crazy. There was too much at risk.

“Seeing that zombie thing will speed up the process, I think,” Zeke said.

“Negative. The chief will want FDLE called in, and FDLE will want the feds. Then there’ll be the usual fight over who heads the Zombie Task Force and who gets to staff it. Us? County? The National Guard?” He understood Jorie’s objections so much more clearly now. “And where’s the funding coming from? By that time the Tresh will have the whole herd in the ‘new and improved’ aisles and we’ll be in really deep shit.”

“We’re already in deep shit,
amigo.
She said there could be three hundred of these things. There are only three of us. Those are not good odds.”

“Yeah, I know.” Theo stopped pacing and ran one hand through his hair. Okay, so he hadn’t worked out all the kinks in his plan yet. “Plus, Tammy’s not much help.”

“Even if she could be, four is not good odds. We need to request at least a couple SWAT teams. For starters.”

Theo shot a glance at Zeke. Yeah, he remembered thinking that was the answer. “I’m not dragging Jorie into the chief’s office the day after Christmas.”

“I don’t think this can wait until tomorrow. You said yourself it’ll take a couple days to set things up. Sooner the better. Besides, Brantley knows how to play the game. If anyone can cut through the bureaucratic bullshit the feds can generate, the chief can.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is? Face facts. We’ve got a potentially catastrophic situation about to erupt here. Okay, there’s going to be red tape, there’s going to be politics. But do you really think they’re going to drag their feet if hundreds of people could die? If nothing else, they’d be crucified by the news media. It’d be the Hurricane Katrina fiasco all over again.”

“And what do you think,” Theo asked quietly as his friend voiced the one downside he’d overlooked and now feared, “the news media will do to Jorie?”

Zeke’s mouth opened, then closed quickly.

“A freak show, Ezequiel. It’d be a fucking freak show.” Everyone would want a piece of Guardian Commander Jorie Mikkalah. The
National Enquirer. The Jerry Springer Show.
And worse. Bile rose in Theo’s throat. How could he have been so stupid as not to realize what would happen? All this time he’d seen the Guardians’ reluctance to reveal their presence as a selfish act. And he’d ignored what Jorie told them the Guardians learned from experience: nil-tech worlds routinely acted illogically—sometimes even violently—when faced with someone from another galaxy. “I’m not putting her through that.”

“The feds will never let that happen. They’ll put her under lock and key.”

Another scenario he’d come up with and feared. “I’m not letting
that
happen either.”

“Theophilus. I don’t think you have a choice.”

“Like hell I don’t.” Theo spun away from him and resumed pacing.

“What are you going to do, risk hundreds of people’s lives because you don’t want a bunch of scientists in some basement room of the Pentagon asking Jorie questions? I think she can handle that. She’s probably been trained to handle that.”

Theo could see the tight, pained expression on Jorie’s face as she told him about her captivity with the Tresh. He could feel her shivering against him. He could see her fingers trace the rough scar on her shoulder.

He could see her getting into a black government sedan with darkened windows, knowing he’d never see her again.

His breath shuddered out. This was the only scenario he’d agree to. And it too had flaws. “I’ll give them the zombie, the weapons.” They had both Guardian and Tresh now. “I’m not giving them Jorie.”

“You can’t hide her in your spare room the rest of her life. She has no Social Security number, no ID. She can’t even get a job.” Zeke raised his arms in an exasperated motion. “Talk about an illegal alien!”

“I’ll get her an ID. A whole identity.”

Zeke stared at him. “Be serious.”

“I am.”

“You know what that costs, a good fake identity?”

“I can take equity out of my house to pay for it.”

Zeke barked out a harsh laugh. “Brilliant, Einstein. Traceable funds. There goes your career.”

“I’m not going to write a fucking personal check.” Theo glared at him. “I’m not that stupid.”

“Then listen to yourself, damn it! You’re talking felony jail time. Your life down the shitter. You
do
know what they do to cops in the Graybar Hotel, don’t you?”

“You’re assuming I’d get caught.”

“No,
she’d
get caught, suddenly surfacing in all the databases.” Zeke ticked the items off on his fingers. “She’d have to get a job, buy a car, rent an apartment—”

“Not if she’s living with me, she won’t.”

“Living with—what’re you going to do, Theophilus? Marry her?”

Theo raised his chin and met Zeke’s question with a hard stare. This was one of the decisions he’d made driving through the bright Florida sunshine in the middle of Christmas Day with Jorie by his side. And a dead zombie behind them. “Yes.”

“You’re—
Ay, Jesucristo.
” Zeke dropped his head in his hands, then lifted his face slightly and peered up at Theo. “You got a thing for women with fake identities?”

The not-so-veiled reference to his disastrous marriage hit him like a sucker punch. Theo looked away, keeping his temper in check. But he couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice when he turned back. “I’m sorely tempted to kick the shit out of you for saying that.”

Zeke straightened slowly, eyes wide then narrowing. “You want to take it outside, Theo? We can take it outside.”

Theo needed to hit something. He really did. But Zeke Martinez wasn’t whom he needed to hit. It was Rordan and Lorik and Jorie’s captain and all the Guardians who, by their reluctance to consider the threat of the Tresh, got him and Jorie to the point where they were now, backs against the wall and nowhere to go. And it was the Tresh and this guy Prow. Oh, how he needed to hit Prow. Get him in a choke hold and watch the life drain from his iridescent eyes.

But Zeke wasn’t Prow or Rordan or the Guardians. Zeke was his partner. His best detective. He ran his hand over his face.

“You got your fancy clothes on,
amigo.
” He looked at Zeke out of the corner of his eye. “Suzanne will kill me if you get them dirty.”

Zeke studied him for a few heartbeats, then snorted. “You ’fraid of my old lady?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“Me too.” Zeke brushed invisible dirt off his thighs. “I probably should have changed after Mass this morning, but when Barrington—we were talking in the parking lot after church—when he told me about these weird mummy bodies one of his deputies had found, all I could think of was getting to the SO to see what they had.”

On Christmas.
The bad guys never take a holiday,
Uncle Stavros always said. Theo nodded. “Thanks. And, hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t—”

“She’s got you all wrapped up in knots, doesn’t she?”

Actually, his feelings for Jorie were one of the few things he had no problems with. “This situation has me wrapped up in knots. It’s not only Jorie. There’s Tammy. Jorie’s more worried about her than she says, and I know she feels responsible for what happened. Both of them are suffering in their own ways.” He shook his head. “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and it’s all a bad dream.” Except for Jorie. He wanted to wake up and find her beside him.

“There’s only one way to end the bad dream, and you know it. We contact the lieutenant and he contacts the chief. Bring ’em here to see Big Butt-Ugly—”

“Baby Butt-Ugly,” Theo corrected.

“—and we go in loaded for bear.”

Theo’s brain knew Zeke was right. But Theo’s heart was afraid he’d lose Jorie in the process.

It was a damning discovery. One made possible, Jorie told Theo and Zeke as they stood in the doorway of the brightly lit examining room, only because Lorik’s final report had pinpointed what she needed to do to find proof of the mutations. Doing that had taken Jorie and Suzanne almost two hours.

Theo listened intently as she went down the list: a zombie with an embedded personal shield. A zombie with an accelerated growth rate, a maturity beyond its stated numerical age. A zombie that not only took data and guidance from the C-Prime but was now able to regenerate a portion of what it used and send it back.

Making the C-Prime stronger. Making the C-Prime able to control a megaherd.

No longer a parasitic relationship, with the herd draining the C-Prime until the herd was forced to split, but almost trophobiosis: a feeding, a mutual protection.

Jorie put her scanner down on a nearby metal table. “Questions?”

From down the corridor, Theo could hear Suzanne’s soft voice and a low squeal of excitement from Tammy. Suzanne had said she wanted to try something to help Tam focus, and judging from the glimpse of fluff a few moments ago, she’d brought a kitten out of the kennel and placed the creature in Tammy’s arms.

Just as well. Tammy didn’t need to hear about these new and improved zombies, anyway.

“How many are there, total?” Zeke was asking.

“Last count was three hundred eleven,” Jorie told him, “but we terminated a few. If they’ve regenerated those, they’re still in the egg stage.”

Egg? Theo did not want to see what zombie eggs looked like.

Zeke nodded. “How long from egg to zombie?”

“In your planetary terms?” Jorie closed her eyes for a moment. “Two weeks, your time, egg to hatchling. They grow quickly after that. Three weeks to primary juvenile. Another four to six, depending on availability of foodstuffs, to full juvenile.”

“But that’s the old zombies,” Theo said, remembering information she’d given him over the past few days. “Not the new and improved.”

“I have no idea of the time line now, other than it would be faster. And I don’t know if it accelerates all stages or just one. Egg to hatchling, maybe. Or juvenile to drone. I’d need time to determine that answer.”

And time, Theo knew, they didn’t have.

Zeke caught that as well. “In another two, three months there could be a hundred more of these things.”

“At minimum. There are no sexes. All zombies can replicate and can do so every six days when needed to expand the herd or to populate out a new one.” Jorie motioned toward an adjoining room, where the corpse of the zombie lay. “I can show you—”

“No thanks.” Zeke closed his eyes and waved his hands in front of his face. “Pass.”

Theo pushed away from the wall. There was something they were all missing here. Another factor. “The Tresh know we know this. They have to know we have the zombie.”

“They also know I have no ship here, minimal weapons. They must know what I figured out—your projectile weapons can easily pierce their shields. This isn’t a flaw they’ll fix by tomorrow. But three, four days to design a correction?” She shrugged. “Another three or four to recalibrate their tech? I wouldn’t discount it.”

She’d been elated when she’d realized a Tresh shield couldn’t stop a bullet. He had too, still thinking of some kind of small, private army. Nothing official. Nothing that would put Jorie’s face in the news. Just cops he could trust. With the full understanding that if something went wrong—if the brass or the media found out about his band of zombie vigilantes—he would take the fall. No question. He accepted that.