Plague World (Ashley Parker Novel) (2 page)

Shit.
He looked dead. A nasty smell hit Stavros’s nose.

The Dutchman recoiled, coughing as he hunkered back against the other side of the car, as far from his seatmate as possible. The two women in the middle seat, also coughing, turned around to see what the fuss was.

“Jan, what is wrong?” A thick South American accent matched the brunette’s exotic Salma Hayek good looks.

“It’s Danny. I think—” the Dutchman coughed again, a wracking, rattling sound like marbles in a can filled with phlegm.

The pneumatic blonde opened her eyes and Stavros winced as he caught sight of her in the rearview mirror. The whites of her eyes were yellow and streaked with red, a counterpoint for the almost startling blue of her corneas.

“Danny?” Her voice was weak and gravelly after all the coughing.

The man in the back gave a sudden convulsion, more foul-smelling fluid leaking from his eyes, mouth, and nose.

The Dutchman next to him vomited.

“I’ll get to hospital,” Stavros said to no one in particular, hitting the “open” button on the driver’s side window in an attempt to cut the thick smell of sickness—a mixture of blood, shit, and rot—which filled the car. He fought the urge to vomit, concentrating instead on finding an exit off the M4 and to some medical attention.

The nearest exit was for Brentford. Stavros didn’t know if there was a hospital, but at the very least they’d have a police station, someone who could help. He didn’t care. He just wanted these people out of his car so he could take it to a car wash and get it detailed, vacuumed, aired out, fumigated, for Christ’s sake, and maybe snort some bleach to get the smell and possible infection out of his nostrils.

Then the bloke Danny opened his eyes. The corneas were now bluish-white, the color of fat-free milk and all the more eerie set against the red-tinged yellow of the his whites. More black fluid dribbled from his mouth, the smell thick and vile in the enclosed car.

“Danny?” The blonde leaned over the seat, relief obvious in her voice. He reached for her, grabbed her head, and pulled her over the seat back on top of his lap, teeth sinking into the soft flesh of her neck before anyone could react. Blood sprayed over the leather seats, splashing all of the passengers.

The Dutchman recoiled in horror, only to go into his own convulsions, the same black viscous liquid spewing out of his mouth.

Stavros stared in horror as the sick bloke ripped chunks of flesh from the blonde’s neck, the other passengers recoiling in horror, fingers scrabbling for the door handles. His only thought was to get the hell off the road, out of the car, and away from whatever was wrong with his passengers. So he didn’t bother looking in his rearview mirror when he swerved into the right lane over—directly into the path of an oncoming tanker.

Bad things happen to good people. Never forget that. The world is not always a fair place. And the dead really do walk the earth. And let me tell you—

That part really sucks.

“How many do you think there are?”

I glanced over at Nathan as I tried to count the rotting corpses shambling toward us on the rooftop of a University of California, San Francisco medical building. Most of the figures heading our way had been octogenarians—and some septuagenarians—when they’d died, which wasn’t surprising, since the building held the geriatric ward. But damn, they were spry for their age.

“No idea.” Nathan took a shot with his M4 and one of the zombies collapsed onto the roof. “But now there’s one less rotting geezer.”

I snorted. “You know, that’s like something Tony would say. I expect better of you. I mean, aren’t you too old for that?”

“You’re never too old for sarcasm.” Nathan nailed another zombie in the head with a well-placed shot. “Ah, make that
two
less.”

Okay, Nathan wasn’t all that old. Somewhere in his late forties, early fifties, with one of those lined faces that made it hard to guess his actual age. He also had a “screw you” attitude toward authority that made me predisposed to like him. Well, that, and the fact he’d pulled my ass out of the fire a couple of weeks back, saving me, Lil, and two cats from becoming zombie chow. So I tended to forgive his “hermit with shitty manners” attitude.

This particular building had the only rooftop in the facility with the room to accommodate a helicopter. There were two access doors, one each on the east and west sides of the building. One of them accessed the glass-covered catwalk that led to the Center for Regenerative Medicine. The catwalk also held the James Bondian elevator that went down to the super-secret lab.

We were there to secure the roof and its makeshift helipad with a sloppy red H painted on the concrete, so incoming helicopters carrying the core personnel from Redwood Grove could land safely.

Besides, when it came time to clear zombie infestations, who you gonna call? That’s right. The few, the proud… complete with enhanced strength, agility and senses.

The wild cards.

Although the enhanced sense of smell wasn’t necessarily a gift when dealing with decomposing cannibals.

“Man, this is
boring
.”

Tony looked at the incoming zombies with dissatisfaction. A nineteen-year-old punk-ass gamer with multiple piercings—most of them empty now due to a particularly painful close encounter with a handsy zombie—he had an attitude that often screamed “Slap me, I’m a jerk.”

Nathan and I both looked at him.

“Boring?” I raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Tony said. “If this were a video game, it’d be all like ‘Plug a Granny’ and totally made for five-year-olds.”

“Plug a Granny?”

Nathan snorted, although whether from disgust or amusement I couldn’t tell.

Me? I had to smother a laugh. I mean, it
was
funny—kind of, in a sick and twisted kind of way, and these days I needed to take humor where I found it. Considering the truly fucked-up state of pretty much everything.

I mean, the Zombie Apocalypse. Who’da thunk it?

How many survivalist types were creaming their jeans at the chance to put their years of anal-retentive planning into practice, all those zombie preppers who’d had their brief moments of fame on reality TV. Most likely they were cowering in their reinforced bunkers, listening to their loved ones pounding on the door with rotting fists…

Okay, brain, that’s enough of that, thank you very much.

I gave myself a mental shake. The horror show in front of me was more than enough. I didn’t need to create another one in my imagination. Drawing a bead on a target, I pulled the trigger.

At least the movies hadn’t lied about how to permakill zombies. Shoot ’em in the head. Destroy the brain. Or the stem, or the whatever-the-heck portion controlled the reptile functions. It would have totally sucked if that had turned out to be bullshit, while the rest of the zombocalypse proved to be true.

But it
did
work, and if you were creative, there were many ways and many weapons you could use to put them back in the grave, once and for all. Luckily for us, the more zombies we killed, the more creative we tended to get.

Thus ended the upside to the zombie outbreak.

“Why are there so many of them up here on the roof?” I wondered aloud. As soon as I spoke, I shot Tony a look and said, “If you say ‘because this was once a very important place to them,’ I will hit you.”

Tony smirked, but kept his mouth shut.

“They were probably attracted to the sound of the helicopter when it took off yesterday morning,” Nathan said as he put a round through the head of a Ruth Gordon look-alike. “Guess nothing better came along to distract them.”

My jaw tightened.

We’d survived a chopper crash, fought our way through a zombie-infested San Francisco to UCSF, and found the hidden DZN lab. We’d lost five people along the way, but we’d made it—only to be ambushed upon our arrival. Gabriel had been hustled off at gunpoint by the proverbial men in black, and I was pretty sure they were the same bastards who’d sabotaged our helicopters, plus raided and burned down our lab at Big Red.

Whoever it was, they didn’t see a problem with the spreading plague—and if our suspicions were correct, they were spreading it deliberately.

Why anyone would do that was beyond my comprehension… but then again, I have difficulty with the concept of fracking and GMOs in the food supply, so I probably wasn’t the best person to analyze the motives of psychopaths.

What really bugged me was that someone involved had a personal grudge against yours truly. When someone points a gun at you and says they, “have a present for you from a old friend,” you can bet your ass it’s not a candygram. Plus they knew my name.

That’s never a good sign.

More senior zombies stumbled through the door across the rooftop. I heard shots coming from the interior of the building, the comforting sound of the rest of our team doing their jobs. The bastards who’d ambushed us had wedged as many stairwell doors open as they could on both sides, making sure we’d have plenty of walking dead to play with.

Bastards.
Did I mention that?

Luckily we had plenty of ammo. We couldn’t clear the entire medical center—it would be suicide to try—but a few floors? Piece o’ cake.

At least that’s what I kept telling myself, because my spirits couldn’t afford to sink any lower. Losing Kai had been bad enough, but when Mack died, it had ripped the heart out of our team—especially Lil, who was conspicuously absent from the current bout of zombie carnage. It was the sort of thing that typically made her dance with glee.

And Gabriel… it’d been like a punch in the gut when that helicopter took off, and when we were told we weren’t going after him, well, I hadn’t exactly handled it gracefully. Having to cool my heels was a special circle of hell.

Right now, though, I had a job to do. A messy, smelly, and totally cathartic job.

“Um, Ash?”

Tony’s voice brought me back to the present—which included a frail-looking octogenarian in a hospital gown, pieces of flesh caught in its dentures and bite marks oozing black fluid from its arms. I capped it right away, the barrel of my M4 only a foot or so away from its head. It dropped in its tracks, falling forward. The hospital gown flapped open to reveal a naked, withered, greenish zombie butt with a chunk taken out of one cheek.

I could have gone my entire life without seeing that.

Nathan eyed me sternly.

“Keep your head in the game, kiddo,” he said. “We can’t afford to lose anyone else.”

I nodded. “Yeah… sorry.”

He gave me a rare, comforting pat on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry—we’ll get him back,” he said. “Both Gabriel
and
Dr. Caligari.”

Nathan’s obscure but accurate film reference made me smile, but it only lasted for a moment. The same creeps who’d taken Gabriel also snatched Dr. Albert, our pet mad scientist. His vaccine for Walker’s Flu was supposed to be the next big thing for pharma. Yet because he’d ordered his ego super-sized, he hadn’t bothered with trivial details like clinical trials.

Unfortunately, his vaccine came with one whopper of a side effect. In laboratory lingo, it “reacted to a dormant variant of a retrovirus in about ten percent of the population, causing a mutation in the DNA.” At least that’s how Simone had explained it. In plain English, it turned its victims into the walking dead.

If only Dr. Albert had just stuck with prostate exams and yearly physicals. To think as a kid I’d accepted lollipops from that man. Now, however, he was our best hope for figuring out a cure. Otherwise I’d have been happy letting the megalomaniacal bastard rot wherever he’d been taken.

A new influx of zombies came shuffling through the far door, doing their best Moe, Larry, and Curly.

“What the hell?” I said. “Is Gentry herding them up here on purpose? Does he
want
us to get eaten?”

“It’s ‘cause you smell so tasty, Ash,” Tony said.

I flipped him the bird.

“Where are Davis and Jones when we need ’em?” I grumbled, even though I already knew the answer.

The Gunsy Twins were two out of the original four snipers who’d survived the trip from Redwood Grove. Their shooting skills bordered on mystical, but they weren’t wild cards, and unsuited to close-quarter encounters with extremely infectious enemy. So they were perched safely above the loading docks, picking off zombies with carefully placed headshots. Once that area was sealed off and we’d finished on the roof, all entrances to the DZN lab would be secured.

While I was a decent shot, thanks to my oxymoron of a liberal gun-nut father, I wasn’t good enough to keep up with the numbers pouring out the roof access. At this point, I’d infinitely prefer close-quarter fighting. I could slice and dice faster than I could aim, fire, and reload.

“Let’s conserve ammo,” Nathan said, as if he was reading my mind.

Tony grinned, slung his M4 over one shoulder, and pulled a small but effective sledgehammer out of the loop on his belt. I followed suit, drawing my modified katana from its scabbard with what was now a fluid motion, almost as if I practiced in front of a mirror.

Okay fine, I totally do.

My faithful tanto—see what I did there?—remained patiently in its crossover sheath over the left side of my chest.

Cool accessories? I haz them.

“Go play, children.” Nathan waved us toward the zombies. “I’ll stay here on cleanup duty.”

Tony and I exchanged a quick fist bump and dove in with enthusiasm. Blood, viscera, brain matter, and black goo flew with abandon as Tony swung Thor’s Wee Hammer into zombie skulls, with deadly results. He might be an annoying punk-ass kid at times, but he was a kick-ass zombie-killing machine.

Myself, I practiced the fine art of decapitation, mixing it up with sweeping cuts and sharp thrusts through the eye sockets. We didn’t have to worry about becoming infected. Hell, Tony, Nathan and I could swallow all manner of zombie crap, and be just fine.