Zombies! (Episode 10): State of Emergency (10 page)

Where had it all gone wrong? Was this his fault? He felt as if he should have known better, should have been able to lead them all to safety. Though Shawn had done little more than follow the pack, he had this overwhelming sense of responsibility.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a pair of wool gloves and slipped them on over his fingers. He told the girls to do the same. Then he wrapped his scarf around his head. When they were done, they were covered from head to toe except for their eyes and their scalps. Shawn led them away from the army, still walking. They were just taking a casual stroll in the snow. Although it was
really
anything but casual. Their adrenaline levels were so high that they barely felt the cold. As they walked, the zombies moved in to surround them. Janise started making small sounds in her throat.

"Do what I do," Shawn said as if he knew what to do. But he had been watching and he had been learning.

A zombie got close enough to reach for him. Without reacting too aggressively, he batted away its arms and pushed it hard. It stumbled back and fell down, bringing another zombie down with it. Shawn kept walking.

Behind him, Dawn did the same thing. The zombie she pushed did not fall, but it did give her some distance. They went on like that down the block, just shoving aside the zombies that moved close enough to touch.

"Where are we going to go?" Janise asked.

"The school," said Shawn. "It’s the only place I can think of."

They weren't exactly headed in the right direction, but they weren't exactly headed in the wrong direction either. Shawn mapped out a route in his head and figured it for nine blocks. Hopefully, in that time, they'd be able to shake off their zombie pursuit long enough for someone to open the doors and let them in. They had a real advantage in the snow. If the weather had been pleasant and the ground dry, they probably wouldn't have been able to negotiate a path through the small groups of the undead. But they finally broke clear of all zombie presence a couple of blocks down and began to breathe a little bit easier. At that point, Shawn picked up the pace.

"I can't believe we just left them," Janise complained.

"There wasn't anything we could do."

"We coulda tried."

"They were bit."

"So what?"

"They were bit, Janise," Shawn said to her. "Now keep quiet or you'll draw more of them to us."

After that, they walked in silence, seven blocks until the school building came into sight. Only then did Shawn fully understand. The army that they had seen at the park had come from the school. It had been released in this area specifically
because
of the school. Someone had wanted to kill and turn a lot of kids. The doors were wide open and if you looked hard enough, you could see the blood. The snowfall in the last few minutes had covered up a lot of the signs of the battle, but it had been fierce. At some of the entrances were bodies and body parts. They were mostly destroyed beyond even the ability of the infection to reanimate them. Here, the zombies had feasted.

Janise threw up in the snow.

"What do we do now, Shawn?" Dawn asked.

He didn't know. He just stood there in the middle of the street staring at his school and thinking of all of the people who were now either dead or undead. He wondered if Mrs. Hummingbird had survived. There were probably survivors holed up in classrooms and bathrooms and closets. There were probably scores of zombies roaming the building in search of the next meal. He didn't care about them. He didn't care about any of them. All he could feel was empty. He was utterly dejected.

"Shawn?"

He looked at Dawn. She was a pretty girl. That's what he was thinking. Even covered as she was, he could see how pretty she was just by looking at her eyes. And he'd been so close to spending the afternoon and maybe the night with her. And Janise? Where was Janise? Looking around, he saw her walking up the street.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"I'm going home," she said.

"By yourself?"

"I'm safer without you."

He didn't say anything after that.

Dawn stared at him. "Shawn? Shawn, aren't you gonna go after her?"

He shook his head.

"She shouldn't be alone."

"You go on ahead," he told her. "I think I'm just going to stay here for a while."

Dawn didn't understand what he meant at first, then looked up at the school. "What if one of them comes out? What if they find their way back here?"

"You go on ahead," he repeated, motioning toward the receding Janise with his head.

Dawn hesitated only a moment more, completely put off by his attitude. She didn't want to be with him anymore. She thought he had either snapped or he was just crazy. So she took off at a run and shortly caught up with her friend. Shawn watched them go and noted, as they turned the corner by the pizza place where they had started their afternoon, that they didn't bother look back at him even once.

When he was alone with the snow and the wind and that gathering dusk, he went inside the school. There were some stairs leading up to the first floor and a chair at the top of the stairs. It was where the school safety agent sat when she was on duty. The chair was empty now. Shawn went up the stairs and poked his head through the doors at the top. In the hallway he saw some blood and a couple of bodies. Down at the other end, milling about a single door, were three zombies. They turned and saw him and started toward him. He should have been afraid but he wasn't. He spied a length of wood on the floor. It looked as if someone had snapped off a piece of a window pole. He didn't know how it could be done; those things were thick. But it was heavy and would make an effective weapon so he picked it up. Slipping back through the door, he grabbed the chair and carried it down the stairs and back into the snow. Once outside, he set it down on the street and sat himself in it.

Let them come,
he thought.
I'm ready. I'm done. Let them come.

***

It wasn't too long after her meeting with Yuan that Luco heard about the zombie attacks. It was both a blessing and a curse. With armies of zombies wandering the city, Kraemer and his soldiers would be tied up for the entire night. However, it also meant that the ER could get busy with victims despite the snow. That might cost her Yuan and she couldn't afford to lose him. She couldn't worry about that, though. She had two other problems that she had to consider.

The first was Naughton. He was coming at five o'clock. He expected her to be ready to go to his apartment and spend the snow-in there. While that idea was appealing, she felt bound to try and help Zoe. She knew that there were a million unforeseen circumstances. What she was doing was probably the most dangerous thing she had ever done and that didn't even take into account the possibility of going to jail. She would have to run. There was no other alternative. The cameras in the facility were still operating and the door locks would record her key card. As soon as she moved Zoe out of her cell, there would be no turning back.

And that brought her to the second problem. Moving Zoe. Since bringing Yuan down into the
Zoo
was unacceptably dangerous for him because of the cameras, they had to bring Zoe up to the ER. She could, of course, restrain her. But restraints on a sick little girl would get noticed. She didn't want to get noticed. Maybe Naughton would have some ideas.

He showed up early and came right down to her office. Her three computer monitors were showing screens of various web sites. A lot of the information had to do with resuscitation but there was one on the vascular system and auto-transfusion. Naughton was no doctor but he was no fool. He was also a policeman and, while he'd never been the most meticulous investigator, he always gave a glance to see what was interesting to his girlfriend.

"Are you ready to go?" he asked dubiously.

"Are the streets safe?" she asked, having practiced her responses to his obvious questions.

"We'll be all right. I've got a police radio in my car, remember?"

"I remember," she said, still looking at the monitors but not really reading anything on them. "Aren't you going to have to work?"

"I called Kraemer to ask if he wanted me in the field. He said I could work if I wanted to."

"That's a funny answer," she said.

"Yes, it is," he agreed. "I told Kraemer I was opting to screw my girlfriend over and over in my snowbound apartment rather than fight zombies."

"About that," she began before he cut her off.

"You can't bring her back to life, Denise."

She spun in her chair and looked up at him angrily. Naughton, however, remained calm. His way was one of composure. Even though he wanted to yell at her for her lunacy, he didn't.

But Denise Luco was not one to hide her anger. "Who the hell are you to tell me what I can and can't do?"

"We both know who I am. If Zoe helps you find a cure, then great, but you can't revive her. She's dead."

"She talks, Lance. She has coherent thoughts. She called me…" she trailed off.

This admission surprised him. Denise Luco had actually been moved by a child that thought she was her mother. And now she was exhibiting a classic reaction to this poor zombie orphan. Naughton asked, "What will you do if it works?"

"I'll take her with me?"

"With you? Where are you going?"

"I'll have to leave. Kraemer won't ever approve it so I'll have to go off on my own. It's a felony."

"What’s a felony?" Naughton asked. "Is there a law against reviving a zombie? Is that a Constitutional Amendment?"

"It doesn't matter whether it is or it isn't," Luco told him. "It's going to piss Kraemer off and he'll invoke some little known vagary of the Patriot Act and have me sent off to some foreign prison."

"Then why are you doing it?"

"Because she's a person!" she shouted. "I've spent months looking at her as an
it
but she's not. No one here has ever felt bad for her. They're all just disgusted and want
it
destroyed. But
it
talks, Lance.
It
has coherence and memory and I want to make
it
a
she
again. Am I doing the wrong thing?"

"No," Naughton admitted. "But I don't know that guilt is a legitimate motivation."

"Really? Isn't it? Lance, I've carved up dozens of them and drawn blood from dozens more. I never looked at them as people. They were the giant size version of an infection. But now I'm forced to see something else. Heron was right all along. When I close my eyes, I can suddenly see the faces of every last one of those people." She laughed a little bit. "They went from being zombies to being ghosts." Which was to say that they were haunting her.

Naughton sat down in a chair and tapped his hand on his leg. His choices were very clear in his mind. He could either walk out the door, go home, and forget that he had ever met Denise Luco or he could stay and be part of her very unpredictable future. Of course, as a police officer, he was duty bound to stop her from doing what she planned. But that wasn't really an option. He loved her and that superseded his duty as a policeman. It also meant that he would never forget her. So there really wasn't any choice at all.

"When are you planning on doing this?"

She told him about what she had arranged with Yuan. He did some mental calculations, asked her how long it would be before they could move Zoe after the procedure. Luco had no way of knowing. Of course not. No one had ever brought a zombie back to life before. They were most likely safe from Kraemer while there was snow and zombies across the city. Naughton figured that it would take all night to clean up the mess and most of Saturday to put things back in order. The Mayor would want the city up and running again by Monday which meant a busy weekend for Homeland Security. Naughton wasn't sure if that was going to make it easier or harder to sneak out. Their best bet was to get out of New York tonight during the confusion. Naughton took out his cell phone and started making some phone calls. Luco watched him for a few minutes. She understood that he was making arrangements for their escape but most of the language was lost on her. If it wasn't for the fact that he had to take the phone away from his ear and redial, she wouldn't have known where one conversation ended and another began. All the while, though, what she really didn't understand was why he was doing it. She had fully expected him to say goodbye. After all of the pandering over whether or not to move to Atlanta and leave him behind, she had made a decision which she thought would put him out of her life forever. But it hadn’t. Without even a hint of hesitation, he had made the decision to stick with her. He was making the arrangements as if they were doing nothing more than going on vacation.

It made her doubt.

It was one thing for her to make a decision that affected or even damaged her own life, but she wasn’t so sure that she could drag Naughton down with her. Maybe she was making a mistake. Maybe… But, no. If nothing else, Denise Luco was strong enough to stick to her resolution. If Naughton was coming along, then that was his choice. She was no less glad to have him, but she wouldn’t allow him to add to her guilt.