The Zero Dog War (16 page)

“Deal.” He grinned. His grins took the edge off him. Made him seem less like a hyper-trained soldier and more like an impish boy. I liked those grins, but I’d never tell. “Look at us. First-date stuff in a firing range.”

“What would Mother say?”

“Maybe she’d say we’re better cut out for each other than you realize.”

I said nothing and looked away down the range.

“Ah,” he said. “More of that command stuff getting in our way.”

“We’ve known each other less than a week. Let’s be real.”

“Let’s be real then. I’m not a complex man. I’ll tell you everything you need to know in under five minutes. A lightning briefing.”

I snorted. “Go for it.”

“I want to keep people safe. Nothing more complicated than that. I want to carve out a slice of the world that can be as free from the violence, the suffering and despair as I can. Yeah. I’m a starry-eyed idealist with a pistol.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But if nobody ever tries it, there’ll never be hope for it.”

“I’ve never failed a mission. I won’t let this be the first, either. I’ll do whatever it takes to stop that necromancer. So I understand you. Very well, in fact. This isn’t about us. It’s about duty.”

Duty. That about summed it up.

The PA system speaker overhead crackled. Gavin’s voice blasted over the com. “Captain to the bridge. The Klingons are attacking!” He cut off and the gentle strains of Muzak started to bleed through. The elevator-music version of Metallica’s “Kill ’Em All”. I was surrounded by comedians.

I walked past Jake toward the range exit, grateful for the chance to escape.

“Hey,” he called before I’d gone ten feet.

I glanced back.

He leaned against one of the shooting-station walls, his arms folded across his chest. “When this is over. I’ll have something else to prove to you. Like how I don’t love ’em and leave ’em, as you want to believe. And I damn well mean to prove it, Captain Walker. Prove it so well, you’ll never forget.”

Dozens of witty and caustic replies flashed through my mind, but I held my tongue.
Bit
my tongue to keep it from running on its own. Only when I felt certain I had it cowed did I risk an answer. “Better train up, Captain Sanders. I’m no easy opponent.”

“No. No, you’re not.”

“And you can start proving it by cleaning my pistol.”

I walked out on him. I could feel his gaze burning on me as I left, but I didn’t look back. My lips still tingled from our kiss. I smiled a little. My good mood lasted until I reached the top of the stairs, where the weight of duty crushed down on me again, heavier than ever.

Chapter Twelve: The Jungle Part II (Or Eating the Man Who Moved Your Cheese)

Undead Army of the Unrighteous Order of the Falling Dark

Bokor Gelzonbi Manufacturing Facility

SE Holgate Boulevard
, Portland, Oregon

2:45 p.m. PST April 15th

Supreme Zombie Commander Jeremiah Hansen surveyed his domain with a jaundiced eye. Running a start-up company was hard, the way teaching cats to march in step was hard. Zombies continually had to be brought back to task. They remained easy to distract, prone to zoning out, and ever ready for a lunch break. Time to face facts. His factory had become a disorganized, underproductive mess since he’d gone full-scale production. He really, really needed a Master Scheduler.

Or Darth Vader.

Speaking of Darth Vader, Blake Delaney, his right-hand man, was out of the office today, trying to round up a respectable mage to build them a golem to help with the loading and unloading of freight. Of course, a golem would cost an arm and a leg and a left testicle, so Jeremiah would likely have to knock over another bank to pay for it.

Perhaps he needed a Controller as well.

With Blake gone, it fell to Jeremiah to crack the whip and oversee the timely completion of production orders. Along with a Master Scheduler and a Controller, he needed a foreman or floor manager. Maybe a foreman in an armored power suit, like Iron Man, to protect him from hungry zombies. Hell, if they went that far, Jeremiah wanted a power suit for himself, something uber-cool…and a kick-ass gun. It was nothing but a travesty he didn’t already own a good gun or a Sentient Sword of Soul Drinking or something. He didn’t even have a wand made out of Dryad dermis with a dodo feather inside. How lame was that?

Jeremiah grabbed a clipboard and pen and headed down the catwalk stairs to the production floor. After only a few minutes of creative rearrangement, he pulled three zombies off the packaging line to work the grinding mills. To increase throughput and reduce production time, Jeremiah had linked several shredders, crushers and massive stainless-steel rolling pins that turned the extracted gelatin into a fine granulated powder. However, the lack of guards and auto stops meant every so often a zombie operator ended up pulled into the machinery and also turned into powder. He’d lost another one this morning, so now he’d try the union thing and have three operators instead of just one. With zombies, redundancy came cheap. Downtime, however, was an entirely different kettle of fish.

He stood off to the side of the machine with his zombie trio. Two of them were tall males, one older, bald, with a walrus-like face and wearing a battered tracksuit, the other looked college age, pasty, sagging skin, dull piggy eyes, wearing a bloodstained button-down shirt. The third zombie was a woman, thick limbs, rather hunched forward and missing her lower lip. She kept staring at Jeremiah’s mouth, which unnerved him. He got the impression that she wanted to kiss him, and maybe tear off a flap of his own lip in the process.

“You guys are on the grinders today,” he told them. “I don’t want a lot of problems this time. A while ago one of you drones got sucked into the teeth and ended up in the gelatin, and I don’t want it to happen again. Workplace accidents are the bane of productivity,
comprende
?”

The zombies stared at him in their unnerving zombie way—faces blank, but deep in their listless eyes, a spark of undying hunger. He made certain he kept a tight mental grip on the cords binding them to his will.

It took twenty minutes of good old necromancer focus to get his three trainees up to speed on what buttons to push, how to regulate throughput speeds and clear jams. He watched them work, his mind running over better ways to automate the process, identify the slow down and snag points, and engineer out the flaws. He just about had everything up and running smoothly enough with his trainees to risk leaving them alone when the bell at the loading dock clamored. All the zombies in the factory paused and looked around as if God had started performing interpretive hand puppetry in the clouds. One of the newly trained zombies—walrus-face, in fact—left a hand dangling too close to the grinder and it ripped off his entire arm. Walrus-face stared at his shoulder, his mouth making a dull O of surprise.

Beautiful. “Get back to work, people!” he yelled. “This shop isn’t union. No breaks.”

General discontented moaning broke out, but lacked the articulate and inspired bitching of normal workplaces. One zombie lost his balance staring at the overhead fluorescent lights and fell over with a surprised grunt. Jeremiah sighed.

The loading-dock bell rang again, and the same exact thing happened. Another zombie, staring upward and searching for the noise, ran right into one of the waist-high barriers he’d installed to direct undead traffic flow. The zombie toppled over the barrier and crashed to the linoleum tiles. He heard a bone snap even over the machinery noise.

Jeremiah hurried to the loading dock before anything else could go wrong, glancing at the clock on the wall. The damn truck was early. Four zombies stood in the loading dock, all staring unblinking at the bell above the steel door. Clearly, zombies had a slacking off-to-work ratio worse than teenagers with cell phones.

He shooed them back into the factory before he opened the steel exit door. The driver was a short, wiry guy with a mullet, dust-smeared jeans and cowboy boots worn down at the heels. He held a clipboard in a hand decorated with wiry black knuckle hairs and scowled at Jeremiah.

“Got a pick-up order for ten pallets of freight. Sign here.” He shoved the clipboard at Jeremiah.

Jeremiah signed and handed back the clipboard.

The driver flipped the top sheet to reveal a new pink sheet full of miniscule text and long chains of numbers. “And here.”

Jeremiah signed there.

“Initial here.”

Jeremiah initialed.

The guy flipped to a yellow page. “Initial here, here and here. Sign here.”

Jeremiah pulled off a triple-twist initial with a half-gainer signature.

The guy flipped to a white page. “Signature and printed name here on the X.”

Jeremiah suppressed the urge to attack the shipping company with zombies. He signed and printed his name.

The driver tucked the clipboard beneath his arm. “All right, show me what dock you want and I’ll back her in. Hope you got your own pallet jacks cuz I don’t do loading-unloading.” He chewed on a thumbnail and spit out a chunk. “It ain’t in the contract.”

It took two hours of herding zombies in and out of the truck and one forklift accident (one of the forks impaled the torso of a greasy-haired zombie sporting several bite wounds and a bit of fungus growing on his jowls) before they finished loading. At last, he shut all the bay doors, herded the zombies away from the docks again and went out to let the driver know they’d finished.

The driver pulled the semi-trailer forward and sealed up the truck. He wrote down the control number on the seal and handed Jeremiah a wad of paperwork. “Lucky you guys didn’t damage the truck. Sounded like you didn’t have a fucking clue what you were doing.”

Jeremiah took a deep breath. First rule of effective leadership: Don’t kill people you couldn’t easily replace. He needed the guy to drive the truck, so Mullet-Face got a free pass. Though maybe he could get himself a driver of his own—a vampire maybe? Somebody the zombies wouldn’t go after, anyway. He was probably opening himself up to a HR nightmare, since he’d always heard zombies bitterly envied their undead cousins, the way a garden slug envied a sea cucumber.

Finally, the truck rumbled off with Bokor Gelzonbi’s first-ever shipment of gelatin to the distributor hub. Jeremiah had just started across the dock on his way back to his office when the damned bell clanged again with its strident, obnoxious clamor. All zombie work production stopped as they looked toward the sound. He stomped back to the steel door and opened it. A large, bald guy stood there wearing a Harley T-shirt. He frowned and glanced at a clipboard whose bottom edge appeared to have been chewed by a dog.

“Got a delivery for Bokor Gelzonbi Foods, care of J. Hansen. Two hundred and ten frozen sides of beef. You guys’ll have to unload—that damn ’frigerator truck gives me freezer burn. Oh, almost forgot.” He thrust the clipboard at Jeremiah. “You gotta sign for it first.”

Chapter Thirteen: Apocalypse Tomorrow

Mercenary Wing Rv6-4 “Zero Dogs”

The Zero Dog Compound

Office

1939 Hours PST April 15th

I finally got the chance to put my boots up on my desk and steal a few minutes for myself after another full day of training. We’d finished a second simulated assault on the training grounds, with Mai again filling the role of necromancer and her pets playing zombies. This time things had gone with flawless precision—practically the synchronized swimming version of a full-frontal military assault. I hated to admit Jake had been right, but when we pushed into the buildings with two teams in close support we hammered back the press of tiny, furry faux-zombies without losing any people.

At least Jake had been professional enough not to appear smug.

After that, I’d ordered pizza delivery for the crew, snagged a few pieces for myself, and escaped to the office to check my email and procrastinate about crunching numbers for the upcoming live-fire mission by playing solitaire. But after losing my seventh straight hand, I powered down the computer and reached over to click off the desk lamp. In the darkness, the slashes of moonlight fell across my sombrero cactus pot and across one of my legs. The hush in the office seemed very deep, though I could hear faint music from the hallway. I turned the blinds so I could see out into the yard and took a moment to stare into the night. I felt restless. Uneasy. Yet I couldn’t say why. I shook my head and trooped back downstairs. Maybe company and laughter would drive off my disquiet.

Music drifted down from the hallway PA system speakers mounted in the ceiling—Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier”. We had a year-long free subscription to a satellite music service, and any time we used the PA, some glitch allowed a flood of random commercial-free music over the speakers and would continue until someone reset the control switch. One time the damn thing had come on of its own accord at two in the morning, blasting Frank Sinatra’s “Very Good Year” into the darkness of the house. The hair on the back of my neck had stood straight up and gooseflesh had writhed on my arms. If Frankie’s voice echoing down empty, shadow-filled hallways in the middle of the night didn’t creep a person out, that person had nerves of titanium.

When I reached the first-floor landing, the walls trembled with a sudden bass rumble, and gunshots and screams filled the air, drowning out Bob Marley. My heart lurched. I reached for my magic before realization crashed home. The gunshots, screams and moans came from Gavin’s contribution to our training schedule, namely, watching every zombie movie ever created to get a feel for our opponent. The rest of the crew had been game and agreed to start with the classic
Night of the Living Dead
, but after that things had grown a little heated. Rafe and Gavin had started to argue whether the zombies from
Dawn of the Dead
held the mantle of true shambling undead or if the “Braaaaains” zombies from
Return of the Living Dead
held more pop-culture appeal. About that time I’d pulled up stakes and headed for my office.

Glass shattered in the television room as I walked toward it. I frowned and walked faster. That had sounded
real
. A flurry of shouting filled the air, followed by a blast of high-pitched screeching that made me grit my teeth. What the hell was going on? I couldn’t leave for five damn minutes—

A silver monkey jumped onto the doorjamb and launched itself off again. Actually, it only resembled a monkey in passing, but it had thick silver fur, an unnaturally long tail, and a wizened, pale face with creepy jade eyes and a lizard tongue. Ear-splitting shrieks blared out of its mouth as it scurried past me and rocketed up the stairs.

Gavin crashed through the doorway after the strange creature. He gripped the replica
Lord of the Rings
sword in one hand so tightly his knuckles were white. “Stop that monkey!”

The sad state of affairs I lived with every day meant I didn’t find requests for monkey chasing the least bit surreal. Still, I’d be damned if I’d run after one of Mai’s pets. Filthy thing probably had weird microscopic bugs, and I wouldn’t touch the monkey with a twelve-foot pike unless somebody autoclaved it first.

Mai charged in, right on Gavin’s heels. Her summoner robes billowed out behind her in folds of yellow silk. Her dark hair had slipped free of her barrettes and stuck out in spiky tufts, and her brown eyes shone with wild desperation. “Don’t you stab him.
Don’t you touch him
!”

I held up my hands. “Whoa! Whoa, people. What the hell’s going on?”

Gavin and Mai slid to a halt in front of me. I suppose I should’ve been grateful Gavin hadn’t inadvertently stabbed me in the process of stopping. The silver monkey swung along the stairwell railing. It hung upside down and whooped at us.

The bottom of the main stairwell began to fill up with people following the commotion. Everyone stared at the monkey. I caught sight of Jake, who leaned against the wall with a beer in one hand and a grin on his face.

I scowled at him. “A little help, maybe?”

His grin only widened. “Wouldn’t want to interfere with your command.”

I was still trying to come up with a suitable retort when Mai spoke. “Gavin provoked my pet, Captain.”

“I didn’t do anything—”

“Don’t lie. Every time a zombie came on screen you’d point at my tiny friend and yell, ‘Thar she blows me. Zombie monkey off the starboard bow.’
Every
time.”

“That monkey’s a mouth-breather with squinty eyes. And he ate all the popcorn.”

“Enough,” I said. “Gavin, put that sword down and try acting like a man—”

A cell-phone ring interrupted me. Everyone went phone fishing to find out whose had gone off. Jake came up the big winner. He flipped open his phone, glanced at it and paused. I saw his mouth tighten, and his face turn all business. He hurried out of the room without another word.

“What are we going to do about that monkey?” Rafe asked. Mai’s demon monkey still hung upside down from the balustrade by its feet, peering at us with wide alien eyes and sticking out its lizard tongue in defiance.

“Mai, send that thing home. I’m sure it’s not housebroken, and I’ll take the carpet-cleaning bill out of your salary.”

“Yes, Captain.” Mai stepped to the side and began to chant a string of strange, liquid-sounding words. A breath of wind pushed against me, stirring through my hair. A spark appeared, floating in midair. The spark flared outward into a shining ring and expanded into a portal hovering unsupported in the air. Through the portal I could see an alien jungle of strange white plants, ridges of red ground veined with gold streaks, and waterfalls of a silver liquid, maybe mercury.

The alien monkey made purring sounds. Gavin lurched forward while the rest of us peered at the alien world. He seized the monkey by the back of the neck and flung it toward the portal. The demon monkey sailed past my face, screeching its outrage all the way into the portal, which snapped closed behind it and vanished.

The descending quiet struck me as a step short of ominous. The intermixed smell of popcorn, bananas and ammonia reached my nose and I grimaced. God, that was foul.

“That little bastard crapped on me!” Gavin yelled. Sure enough, the smell came from greenish-purple goo spattered across his right leg from the knee down and the top of his shoe.

“You deserved it.” Mai folded her arms and glared at him. “You manhandled him and you deserved it.”

“Few people deserve to be shit on by a monkey…” Rafe said, “but you’re one of them, Gavin.”

“Hey, dog breath, blow it out your ass with a brass tuba.”

Satan’s sizzling goat balls, I just couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Gavin,” I snapped, “leave Mai’s pets alone or next time I’ll let them eat you. Mai, stick to furry monsters with a sunnier disposition, will you? Cut me some slack here people. I’m out of antacid.”

I’d just finished shooing everyone (except Gavin, who had to go change his pants) back to the movie still sending out scary music, groans, screams and the occasional gunshot when Jake walked up to me. I’d never seen him look more serious, and my stomach did a slow twist and flop in my gut.

“Captain Walker,” he said. “I need to talk with you. Immediately.”

Formal again. Before I could say anything, he turned and headed down the hall leading to the kitchen and the back deck. I followed behind, my stomach feeling as though it were a water balloon sloshing acid from side to side. Outside, the air held a touch of fading winter bite. I shivered and heated the air around my skin. I hated the cold.

Jake started to walk, and I fell into step beside him. The suspense shredded my nerves like a cheese grater. I had to chew on the inside of my cheek to hold a flurry of questions in check.

We walked down toward the large garage bays on the west side of the compound. The buildings were locked up tight and the windows dark. I thought he might want to review the Bradley’s combat readiness, but he walked on past the buildings, toward the hangar where Chilly Willie the V22 Osprey lived. The sight of the hangar made me frown. We were still paying back the loan on the hangar’s construction. The Osprey we didn’t even own—we rented it month to month from the Hellfrost Merc Group.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I pulled up short and turned toward him. “What the hell’s this all about?”

He hesitated and stared off at the hangar. “Can we use that Osprey in an assault?”

“Not unless you want to take your life in your hands. We don’t have a mechanic. Haven’t had one for six months since Merkle went crazy. Certifiable crazy, not just the normal crazy you see around here.”

Jake didn’t laugh, which bothered me more than a little. “Do I even want to know?”

I waved a dismissive hand. “Convinced he was secret royalty. Believed his parents were killed by an evil sorcerer. Gave his two weeks and went trekking off to find some Object of Power.”

“You still have a pilot though?”

“Gavin has his wings and he’s fully certified on it. Hanzo could copilot in a pinch, but that leaves us short a medic.”

“Do you take heavy losses on operations?”

“I’ve never lost anybody in four years. Before I took over as captain, we lost a few. One time an ogre ended up head-shot with an antitank missile on an op in west L.A. Why? What’s this all about?”

Jake glanced at me again but ignored my questions. “An ogre?”

“He was a real hard charger. Not exactly housebroken, but he was highly skilled at opening jars with stuck lids and killing weird bugs. It was a shame, but shit happens.”

“Yeah.” Another hesitation. “You guys are seriously understaffed. I just wondered about the churn.”

“You brought me out here to talk about turnover? I wasn’t born with a lot of patience, Jake, so why don’t you tell me the real reason we’re out here? Who called you?”

Again, he didn’t answer right away, but instead stared back at the house. I felt a scream of frustration building while alarm bells and air-raid sirens sang “Apocalypse in D Minor” inside my head. My teeth clamped together so hard my jaw muscles started to ache. If he were just trying to fucking manipulate me…

“Orders from Homeland Security,” he said. “I just got the call. We go live tomorrow with the assault.”

“And you didn’t tell me that
first
?” Goddamn it. I knew I’d been wrong to let him slobber all over me in the shooting range. Men. You give them an inch and they break the goddamn ruler.

He shrugged, and I could’ve happily kicked him in the shin. “I needed to gather my thoughts.”

“Must have been a daunting prospect. So don’t stop now. Give me details.”

“The Oregon State Police, under orders from the Governor and backed up by a National Guard unit, stopped a semi-trailer on I-84 headed toward Boise. The truck had come from the Bokor Gelzonbi Foods plant. The Department of Defense and DHS decided to move on it. The truck and driver were quarantined for possible exposure to RCTs. The CDC’s onsite lab tests determined the powdered gelatin had traces of human DNA—maybe some zombie fell into the machinery, or maybe something else. Word just came down the pipe to DHS to terminate this problem before a nationwide recall of every box of gelatin hits stores and further undermines consumer trust in the Food and Drug Administration.”

Ugh. Chalk up lime-gelatin shooters as something else I’d never look at the same way again. “And our orders?”

“We’re to deploy tomorrow and neutralize their production capability, exterminate all zombies, and kill or capture Necromancer Jeremiah Hansen. I didn’t say anything inside because I wanted to set it up with you. Let you drive the pre-op briefings and be the front man on this.”

“Mighty kind of you. Since I
am
the front woman on this.” I paced back and forth, thoughts flashing through my mind like lightning. “I’ll need a check on the Bradley first thing tomorrow morning. Same with the equipment and ammo. Also, we’ll have to settle on the best assault plan based on recent satellite photos and new estimates on the number of hostiles.” I looked at him again. “I want to call in Sarge on this and sit down to review our operation plan. Will we have a real-time satellite lookdown during the op?”

“Not real time, but a spy sat passes over the plant tomorrow morning and the NSA has orders to send over the images.”