Z Children (Book 2): The Surge (4 page)

It
arced across the space in front of me; I watched as it bounced onto the top of
the fence and rattled to the ground—directly into the pool of fuel that had
been leeching from the tank.

“Burn,
bitches!”

Not
waiting to see the results, I yanked the heavy door open and disappeared into
the darkness. The concussive force and radiating heat from the explosion told
me that I hadn’t missed.

* * *

VIRGINIA

“Oh,
my God!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, not the middle-aged doctor, but every
bit the scared-out-of-my-mind inner child.

“What!”
Bonnie leapt from the couch and scrambled toward me.

I need
to keep it together, for her at least. “It’s fine. I’m sure it’s okay.”

I felt
her body brush up against mine and we watch what appears to be the whole
hospital going up in a massive explosion. The tendrils of flame are reaching
skyward, spreading away from a vehicle near the back of the building. Z
children are racing away from the fire, their bodies burning. From this distance,
they look like they are just tiny bits of ash and spark floating away from the
large mass of yellow and orange.

But
they are not bits of spark.

They
are the monsters.

And
even with the window closed and the distance I can hear the chorus of their
screams. That should not be possible, the hospital is so far away, yet, I do
hear them. They are muted shrieks that make my body tense with terror. I can
imagine the way it smells as the flesh burns and blackens. I’ve smelled it before,
more than once—human flesh burning is distinctive.

The
memory of it sends bile and acid creeping up my throat from my stomach.

Ranger
is against my other side, growling low, no doubt worried for his master—who is
in trouble while he is stuck in safety.

“I’m
sure he’s okay,” I say the words, one hand on the scruff of Ranger’s neck, the
other hand on Bonnie’s back. I hear myself speaking, but inside my head I’ve
come to a very different conclusion.
He is dead. Chris is dead. We’re on our
own.

“Gin,
shouldn’t we go check on him?” Ranger growled in agreement

“JW
said it was too dangerous for us to leave and that truck thing we got from the
guard unit…”

“Hummer,”
Bonnie’s voice is confident, but there is a tendril of fear lowering her voice
a fraction. “It’s called a Hummer.”

“Right,
the
Hummer.
”

I
can’t stop the distaste from seeping into my voice when I say the word
‘Hummer.’ I know that this vehicle is strong, made to fight wars and protect
citizens. But it’s the war thing that really curdles my stomach. I don’t
believe in war. Now I’m living in one. And to think of all those Guard men and
women…their inert bodies and how we’d had to drag them away from the vehicle so
we could drive it away. I could only imagine how many from the reserve unit
were not dead on the ground, how many had been turned into Z adults.

“It’s
really low on fuel and it uses diesel. We can’t make it to the hospital on
foot.” Ranger butts his head against my side as if to say
‘I’m here. We can
make it together.’
“Even with you helping us, Ranger, we have to have fuel.
We have to go in the truck or it’s just not possible.”

“Commercial
trucks, eighteen-wheelers. Those use diesel, right? There’s got to be one of
those nearby.” Bonnie leans down and strokes Ranger’s head. His ears flatten
slightly and his eyelids sink and rise towards one another until he is peering
through skinny slits. A dog in heaven.

“Are
you sure? I mean, don’t any of them run on regular gas?” I don’t like the
prospect of going out of the hotel, hunting for something we might not find to
prepare for an objective that is daunting and fear-inducing. I’m not the action
hero. That’s JW’s role. If saving him depends on me…

“I’m
not a kid!” Bonnie responded with a frown “I know things, more things than some
adults.” The tone of Bonnie’s voice made it obvious that she included me in the
lump of ‘some adults.’ “Besides, everyone knows big trucks use diesel.”

“I
know you’re not a kid, not a typical kid at least. But this is huge—us trying
to go out there without JW. He’s military. He’s got training. If he can’t make
it, then we’ve got to be as smart as possible or we’ve got no chance at all.”

“You’re
a doctor. You’re smart.” Bonnie lifted her fingers away from Ranger and the dog
grumbled, pushing his head into her thigh greedily. “That’s enough, Ranger.
We’ve got to be serious.” As if the dog understood her every word, he snapped
to attention and was at once every bit the trained hunter he was.

“I’m
smart in different ways. The kind of ways that heal people, not kill kids.”

Bonnie’s
face turned red and her eyes became hard and angry. “They.
Aren’t.
Kids.” 

“They
still look like children, sweetie. I can’t block that out. I just can’t.” I can
see her mind working at a rapid pace, memories of what has happened to her
flashing through her brain.

“You
just have to.” She’s so matter-of-fact that I’m saddened. So jaded. So young.

“I
won’t lose my humanity. You should do your best to hang onto yours, sink your
nails into the fabric of it. Don’t become so blackened by all this that you
can’t see good and feel hope.” I paused, wondering if I should say more. I
decide I need to, I need to repeat my first sentence and make sure she has
heard my words and absorbed them. “I won’t lose my humanity, Bonnie.”

“Then
you’ll die.”

I
squirmed inside a little bit at that comment. She is so blunt again, so
rock-solid and unwavering that I fully understand (in that moment at least)
that she’s not a twelve-year-old kid. She’s faced enough in her young life to
be eighty and retired with nothing to worry about but prescription refills and
stool firmness. But she’s not eighty. She’s young—and the life in front of her
isn’t going to be a worry-free one.

“Maybe
you’re right. Good thing I’ve got you to keep me in reality.”

“Good
thing we’ve got each other.” My hand is joined by her hand. She grips my
fingers firmly. We stand for a moment, until she squeezes my hand, lets it go,
and we both refocus on the fire, which is beginning to die down a little.

“So,
we need to find a tractor-trailer truck.”

“Nope.”

“Yes.
We need fuel and you just said—”

“Look
down.”

Frowning,
I appraised her self-satisfied expression and let my gaze follow her pointed
finger. Leaning forward towards the window and looking down, I see (right
across the damn street, which seems too good to be true) an eighteen-wheeler
bearing the logo “National Foods Delivery” in front of the Original Market Diner.

Good
for us that the world went to shit on the restaurant’s restocking day.

“Good
eye.”

“Wasn’t
that hard.” But the young girl looked immensely proud of her find.

“It’s
still across the street, out in the open, and we have no way of getting the
fuel out.”

Her
face fell, and I instantly felt like crap that I rained on her well-deserved
parade; but I also felt a little satisfied that I’d taken her
know-it-all-about-the-diesel-self down a notch (not very adult of me).

“One
time…Dad forgot to fill the car. It was empty, he was late for work. Typical
Dad really.” Her voice sounded so young now, and I could see dampness in her
eyes. She cleared her throat and rubbed her eyes roughly with her shirt sleeve.
“We had to use a busted garden hose to siphon some fuel from our lawnmower. It
was just enough to get him to the convenience store.”

“Siphon.
Okay.” I looked around the hotel suite, wondering what the hell we could
substitute for a garden hose. After some searching, my eyes fell on the kitchen
sink and the spray head. Striding over, I yanked the sprayer until the hose
wass fully extended. At least three feet—which seems absurdly long, but I’m
grateful that the maker thought an owner might want to wash dishes in another
room.

“Gin,
that’s perfect!” Bonnie is beside me again, rocking on the balls of her feet
with nervous energy.

“I
don’t know about perfect, but it’ll have to do.”
What would JW do, what
would he take?
“Let’s get everything together in case we don’t come back
here.” I know what JW would do if he were here—yell at us for being so stupid,
for leaving the hotel when he specifically told us to stay put.

God,
he’s going to rip us a new one. If he’s still alive.

Ranger
barked as I thought that last like he knew what I was thinking and wanted me to
know that JW was alive. Period.

But I
can still see the Z kids burning. I can still smell them in my head.

And
part of me still thinks JW is dead—even though we are about to risk our necks
to go save him. Our skill-less, stupid, never-follows-instructions, female
necks. Girl power.

Shit.
Holy ovaries-of-glass-and-not-brass shit.

* * *

JW

Darkness.
Absolute darkness.

Can’t
even see my hand in front of my face. Quiet too. It makes me feel unsettled; it
makes me feel actual fear—not the memory of fear resurging, the product of a
different time and place when being in the shit was daily. This fear, new and
blood-curdling, was threatening to overcome even my intense training. I couldn’t
let it. Or I’d be dead.

Once
the explosion died away into nothing, I sat. Sat, focused, listened,
smelled…waited. No mistakes; I couldn’t afford them.

Chomp.
Chomp. Chomp.

Lunch,
that’s what I would be, lunch for the little bastards with the bloody faces;
the ones that I could not see in the dark. But I couldn’t stop my mind drifting
a little within the black void, because I still didn’t understand why I had
volunteered for this mission. Ranger and I were survivors and capable of making
it on our own. We didn’t need anyone else. If it got too bad, too bad for us
alone, I would have headed to Hurlburt or Bragg or maybe even Coronado and linked
up with my own kind, not a woman and a girl.

Being
with my own—that would be interesting. The first multi-service anti-Z child SOF
team. Call it ZOLOF—ZOmbie Liquidation Operations Force. I had to chuckle to
myself. It was defiantly something the Pentagon would come up with. Mostly
because it sounded like Zoloft and half those political assholes were on some
happy drug or another. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to operate in the PC,
backasswards country they ran.

I sat
for a few more minutes, relishing the peace of the darkness—that was constantly
interrupted by a far-off snarl, a high-pitched scream—before I clicked on the Photon
microlight; it shone brightly, sending pale blue illumination to pierce the
blackness of the large room I was seated in. No movement here in the expansive
area with two entrances that was so obviously a non-civilian area with all its
steam pipes, electrical conduits, and air ducts. A mechanical room. My starting
point. My back rested against the door I’d come through and across from me is
that second portal. There is a desk, in the middle of everything, partially
blocking my review.

For a
moment, I wondered if the space behind that opposite door was bathed in
darkness also; there was no light bleeding through cracks.

So it
must be.

Past
this mechanical area, hell is a total eclipse of the sun. Nighttime in daytime.
There’d been training like this—small spaces and zero light. Most of the time,
I’d fallen asleep. Once, isolated in a covered pit in the hard earth (where I
was supposed to be internalizing and dealing with the effects of sensory deprivation),
I’d fallen asleep and I’d slept for two days.

Best
damn sleep of my life.

My
superiors hadn’t been amused when I’d crawled out of the hole, stretched, and
smiled.

“I
need more intel. Going in basically blind. I’m smarter than this,” I grumbled
out loud, moving the microlight to once again check every nook and cranny.

Then I
began to move. Point A—here. Point B—a department and a man’s name. I was going
to need a damn map. I’d never felt so underprepared for a mission.

I made
short work of cutting across the room. Walking around the desk cautiously, the
toe of my boot rammed into something firm, yet pliable lying on the ground. It
was a man’s calf. His upper half was beneath the desk, his stomach against the
ground. The back of his shirt was torn, exposing large chunks of free-hanging
flesh tethered to his body by thin sinews of ragged skin. He was “alive”, but
not—his body moving jerkily. I bent over to see him more clearly. His right
hand was reached out in front of him, his palm slapped against the floor.

He was
trying to retrieve a pencil.

And,
each time his hand hit the tile, it would roll away and then, as if drawn by
some magnetic force, roll back towards his fingers. Because he was dead, a Z
adult, he could not move his fingers the way they needed to for success.

 An
existence like that,
I thought, as I screwed the can onto my pistol,
is
no life.

Miracles
of miracles, the poor maintenance man had gained his prize. I backed away as he
crawled from under the desk awkwardly and pulled himself back into his seat. It
rolled, threatened to drop him unceremoniously onto the ground again, but he
managed. I wondered if this awareness would deteriorate or if the dead adults I
could not give final death to would continue to retain some semblance of
understanding while their bodies rotted away into stench and decay. The thought
sent a cold chill up my spine.

He—his
name used to be Garth—was leaned over, pencil gripped in a tight fist like a
child just learning to write, scribbling randomly on a legal pad. Was it
programming or consciousness? If a Z kid were around, would he have to follow
orders? How did that work?
That Z adult in the window warned me about the
kid. It’s not just programming. The personality fights through as best it can.
That’s fucking…disturbing.
I’ll put a bullet in my own goddamn brain before
I become like this.