The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (5 page)

The people in the quarantined zone fought or hid and in some desperate cases they ran. The streets were deadly. Cars seemed to attract the creatures, drawing them out of every nook and cranny in town. Cars were swarmed and people were dragged out into the streets and eaten alive. A few, like Benjamin Olski, were lucky to get out of Poughkeepsie without actually hitting a zombie. Many who made it out were forced to plow through the undead, crushing them under their tires and covering their vehicles in black blood and spores. The drivers and their families all succumbed, eventually. The disease turned most of them, but a few held on only to be riddled by bullets from law enforcement officers on the verge of full-blown panic.

All night, state troopers had trickled into the area and were directed by Courtney Shaw to fill the holes in the perimeter. The main roads were her first priority and she was stretched thin just to cover those. At 5 a.m., when her eyes were rimmed red, her task force of eight women were yawning and slumping over their keyboards, Courtney had only managed to reach 70% containment. There were simply too many firebreaks and logging roads and fishing trails that spider-webbed outward from the epicenter at Walton.

Fearing the spread of the disease, Governor Stimpson, had used the arbitrary distance of twenty miles as the radius of the quarantine zone and General Collins had tasked her with putting a cork in every road out of the area. Courtney had to use a calculator to figure the circumference of the circle she was expected to cover. “Holy shit,” she had whispered, seeing the number. “A hundred and twenty miles? Are you sure?” she had asked the general. “There’s no way we have enough troopers.”

By her count she had approximately two hundred and forty one men in and around the area, not realizing that twenty-three of them had already been infected or killed in the staging area just outside of Poughkeepsie and another fifteen had been killed or wounded in desperate shootouts with frightened and sometimes diseased citizens.

Collins sighed into the phone. He hadn’t needed a calculator to realize they were likely screwed. “You’ll find a way to do this because you don’t have any other choice. Button it up tight until I get the guardsmen in place.”

“But…”

“Just do it,” he growled, before hanging up on her.

She had done her best but she knew it wasn’t good enough. Having grown up in Pleasant Valley, she was familiar with a good chunk of the land. Her father and brothers had hunted there, her uncle grazed sixty Holsteins on 20 acres there and she had tromped along half the dirt roads as a kid going to and from friends’ houses or to school. She knew there were more ways in and out of the area than that she could count.

There was only one way to button an area that big and that was simply not to. She straight up lied to Pemberton and told him they were guarding a seven mile radius. This cut in half the number of places that needed to be guarded, allowing her to double the number of men at each, and yet the line still did not hold.

The men guarding the road into Titusville stopped answering their calls at just after one in the morning. It was a scramble to replace them. Hell, it was a constant scramble all night long. When the six men holding the main highway south, ran out of ammo in the face of a colossal horde of undead, they fled, leaving the five thousand people of Wappinger Falls to fend for themselves. Unfortunately, they were almost all fast asleep and the first inkling there was something dreadfully wrong, was when they heard the screams; screams so loud that some people thought they were storm warning sirens.

For Courtney, it was hours of work without let up, directing men here and there, hoping to God they were plugging every hole.

Her little crew worked the phones and they worked them in fear. Courtney spent a good chunk of her time listening to a dozen police nets simultaneously. She was deathly afraid that there would be a suspicious call in Albany or Hartford or White Plains, somewhere outside the circle that represented the quarantined area, somewhere so far outside the circle that she would find herself stuck in a new and ever widening quarantine zone, unable to get out.

Although they didn’t have time for it, Courtney wasn’t the only one listening to these far-flung police calls. The entire staff was listening and second-guessing every domestic violence call, every drunk pulled over for crossing a yellow line, and every false alarm called in by overwrought housewives when their men were out trucking the big rigs back and forth across the state. They listened to those calls and were afraid.

“We should get out of here,” Renee Bilton whispered.

“And abandon our troopers?” Courtney shot back. “No, we stay until the National Guard shows up.” Had Courtney known the state of readiness in the 42
nd
Infantry Division she might have changed her mind. She had begun the call-chain for the 27
th
, the 50
th
, and the 86
th
infantry brigades, however without her focusing squarely on it, things had ground to a halt. The commanders of the 50
th
from New Jersey and the 86
th
from Vermont called their governors instead of instituting the call chain. With both governors completely ignorant of the situation, neither was given authorization to proceed.

The  27
th,
from New York had proper authorization from the governor, however three key personnel in the chain never picked up their phones; one was Lieutenant Colonel Guy Lawler, commanding officer of the 1
st
Battalion, which just happened to be the closest infantry battalion to Walton. He was vacationing in the Bahamas and sleeping off three too many pina coladas from the night before. His executive officer, Major Renwald had let his phone’s battery die and slept through the night like a baby, and the battalion’s operation’s officer, the “S-3”, Captain Mason had simply left his phone in the car. He didn’t see the message until after five that morning when he was about to drive to work.

The 1
st
Battalion was the closest unit to Walton and they were one of the last to get their call-chain functioning, which meant the thin blue line was all that stood between the zombie horde exploding in size and engulfing America.

In desperation, Courtney found herself calling police stations hundreds of miles away, but what she really needed was the damned army to show up. She assumed things would get better when they finally made it, and she assumed they had been trained to handle situations like this, and she assumed they had better weapons. These assumptions weren’t based in reality.

Anna Holloway, spread-eagle and naked as the day she was born was lashed to the bed. She had to piss like a mother, her hands were purple and numb, and she had an itch on her belly where Eng’s semen had dried, but did she complain? Hell no.

Her watchword was compliance, and it had been all night long. For two long, miserable hours she had been used in the most sexually demeaning ways imaginable by Eng. The perv had flipped her like a pancake, bent her over chairs and stuck his ridiculous thing in her in every conceivable manner and yet it was hard to call it abuse, especially since she had more than asked for it, she had begged loudly for more.

A shiver went up her spine at the memory, causing her to discover another itch in the small of her back. She tried to wriggle it away and as her only triumph of the night beyond not being killed, the itch left her.

“Hoo-fucking-ray,” she whispered. Even though she had insisted it wasn’t necessary, and that she wouldn’t try to run away, or stab him in his sleep, or take his gun and shoot him in the face, Eng had shredded up one of the sheets and had tied her in place because, of course, given the opportunity she was going to do one or all of those things. And why? She knew he would probably kill her… No, he would definitely kill her. It was just a matter of when. After all, she was a loose end. As far as she knew, she was the only person left alive who could point the finger of blame at him.

Her worries ate at her, but he seemed just fine. When he had finished living out every one of his sick fantasies with her, he fell asleep on the floor with just a pillow and blanket. It was strange and creepy as hell. For five hours he had slept, and in all that time he hadn’t moved once. Worse, for Anna, who was desperate to escape, his eyes had remained cracked. Here was a guy who couldn’t open his eyes wide enough to fit a quarter in sideways when he was awake but in sleep she could see his damned pupils.

It made an escape attempt dicey as hell. Slowly, ever so fucking slowly, she twisted at her bindings. She strained in agonizing silence, pulling as hard as she could until her limbs shook. Eventually, after an hour of stifled grunts, she felt one of the sheets start to give away. It was the one clamped around her left ankle.

Fuck!!
she screamed in silent rage. What good would a loose foot do her? Sweating harder than she had during Eng’s pathetic rutting, she laid-back to stare at the ceiling. Tears wanted to come. Now that she wasn’t fighting the sheet, fear over her terrible situation had her close to blubbering. The cold reality was that by letting the damned
chink
go to town on her, all she had done was hold off her death by a few hours.

There was no question, he would kill her. He would need to move and fast. He’d need to get out of the country. And he didn’t need her. He was an actual spy with the complete backing of his government, while she was just one woman who was now too petrified to go near an ATM for fear that her bank accounts were even then being monitored by the FBI. And who could
she
turn to? Certainly not Rhonofis, the French pharmaceutical company she had been spying for. They weren’t stupid, they would disavow all knowledge of her. She would bet her life on it.

So where did that leave her? In all likelihood she was even then being hunted by the police or the FBI, which meant there was no way she could go back to her apartment. And her car was back at Walton surrounded by zombies. She couldn’t go to her bank or to her mother’s or anywhere.

The only thing of real value that she possessed, the only bargaining chip left to her was the vial of Com-cells. It still sat in her lab coat. Eng had torn the coat off of her and had thrown it haphazardly to the side, not batting an eye when it made a “clunk” sound. Anna had nearly choked. How quickly would she have died if the vial had broken? Or would she have died at all? Another shudder ran down her back as she remembered the walking horrors around Walton.

Now, with the dark beginning to turn, she still didn’t know why she had kept the damned vial. It was, after all, direct and irrefutable evidence of her guilt.

She fell asleep and dreamed about a prison where all the other inmates were zombies. She found herself outside her cell with a chance to run away but there were more zombies out in the real world and so she ran back to the one place she was safe, her cell.

For his part, Eng slept like a baby. He couldn’t have been happier. Although it had been touch and go for a while there, he had accomplished every one of his goals: Thuy was dead, the Com-cells were now a catastrophic failure, and his supervisor in China was about to disgrace himself. Eng had heard through the grapevine that his superior back in China was about to begin testing a version of the Com-cells that could only end in a fiasco.

Even the fire had worked to his advantage. It had destroyed every scrap of evidence that linked Eng to whatever was happening around Walton. Really, the only evidence left was right there in the hotel room tied to the bed. Yes, things were looking rosy for Eng, and man if his balls weren’t aching in all the right ways.

He had dreamed about Anna. First about fucking her and then about killing her and, in his dreams, it had been easy. He had taken her lab coat, wrapped it around her throat and pulled until her face was purple and her eyes bulging black.

Eng came awake with the gray dishwater of morning light in the air. He gave the girl on the bed a look and thought about fire. One more blaze should do the trick. It would take away, not just fingerprints, but also fingers and every drop of Eng’s DNA he had left either on or in Anna. The one thing a fire wouldn’t take care of however, were dental records and Eng figured a chair leg applied thoroughly and ruthlessly would confound any dental expert.

These were the happy thoughts that had him smiling. He saw Anna pretending to sleep and that was just fine—in fact it was better than fine, it was perfect. Who needed to hear her whine and beg for her life? That sort of thing became annoying, fast.

He flicked on the TV, expecting to see the fire at Walton leading the news and he wasn’t disappointed. A few hundred deaths, a building going up like a bomb, a respected pharmaceutical company at the bottom of it all; this was what made for good television. But what was being displayed was more than he figured, a lot more.

This was Defcon 2. This was the National Guard being called out. This was a possible terrorist attack on American soil. This was the airports being closed and roadblocks thrown up over half the state. This was the President being briefed. There was even a shot of the old geezer stepping off
Marine One
, looking “concerned.”

It was a moment before Eng realized that it was canned footage. It was full light around the President in the shot and yet Washington DC was in the same time zone as the dinky motel where the sun was still twenty minutes from cracking the furthest horizon. Eng breathed a sigh of relief but it caught in his throat as he saw the crawl at the bottom of the screen:
Travel restrictions are in place in the following counties: Putnam, Duchess, Orange, Ulster
…

Eng had no idea what county the cheap roadside motel was in but he had a sinking feeling in his gut. Thinking that there was no way anyone would be looking for him for at least a week, and feeling his dick throb every time he had looked over at Anna, he had pulled over, the night before, at a motel ten minutes from Walton.

Now, he yanked out his smart phone, and gritted his teeth as he looked up a map of New York only to find... A second later, he spat out, “
Cao ni ma!
”

“What is it?” Anna asked, coyly, from the bed. She wasn’t stupid. She could read the scrolling words at the bottom of the television screen and knew what was happening. For her this was a golden opportunity. They were surrounded.

She envisioned searchlights and sirens, and barbed wire across every road with police cruisers sitting nose-to-nose as a secondary barrier. She pictured men in camo skulking in the tree line carrying big guns, and barking dogs going through the bushes, sniffing out anything with a pulse. There was little chance that Eng could get past any of that, but she could. If there was anyone on the face of the earth who could sweet-talk their way out of a bad situation it was Anna Holloway.

Eng needed her still, but neither of them knew just how much.

A world away at the Siangou Research and Development facility in Shanghai, China, the very place to which Eng was hoping to flee, a disaster was brewing on an epic scale.

From all outward appearances, the Tiesu Research Facility of Shanghai was state of the art. It boasted the finest western-made equipment money could buy and all the top researchers had either been trained overseas or at the Tsinghua University in Beijing, easily China’s top college.

Tiesu was a tall building and new; less than five years old. It gleamed wherever there was the least bit of glass or metal, and was a brilliant, stark white practically everywhere else. Its security rivaled the Pentagon’s both in depth and breadth, with checkpoints and armed guards on every floor. It seemed like the least likely place for a plague to originate and yet within six weeks, three billion zombies would be able to trace the source of their affliction back to one person. 

Jiang Xiao, the facilities third highest ranking researcher strode through his labs with a blue mask held to his face. He wore latex gloves but nothing else in the way of protective gear, not even a lab coat. Ergot Alkaloids weren’t harmful in the tiny amounts being used in the preparation of
his
Com-cells. Just as Eng had predicted, Jiang had been stealing all the information that Eng had stolen from Dr. Riggs.

“Let me see the results,” he snapped, in sharp Mandarin, at one of the junior researchers the moment he came through the heavy steel doors of the number “9” room.

The labs were numbered with the most important projects quartered in the first three labs. There was a reason he’d stuck the Com-cell research so far in the back where only the newer scientists worked. As the chief scientific liaison, he had done his own manipulation of Eng’s findings, adding nitrogen and a tiny amount of sodium borohydride—a reducing agent in the bleach family—to the mixture. He inserted just enough to ruin it and he wanted the researchers who were too new to question a thing.

And really, who would question a thing? Any negative issues would be blamed on Eng or the Americans, or one of the many underlings that were constantly under foot, and any positive outcome would be claimed by Jiang.

The junior researcher, one of the meek little ones he liked to brow beat, but which one it was he couldn’t tell behind her mask, smiled at him with her eyes in a way that made it seem as though she was in pain, and then pointed Jiang toward her station where she had the latest stats already on screen. The tenth round of testing showed results that were as dreadful as the first nine had been. Basically, nothing was happening.

“May I recommend changing one of the variables within the Com-cell, Dr. Xiao?” the junior researcher dared to ask. “It makes no sense to continue replicating the trial, endlessly.”

She was wrong, there was one perfectly good reason and that was to thoroughly discredit Eng and the American Com-cells. Jiang looked down at her, his face held in rigid lines that came to a sharp part in his neat black hair. “I don’t remember asking your opinion,” he said. His tone was haughty and his eyes hard. As always, he was snappish and exceedingly quick to offer harsh criticisms; at best it could be said that he treated his underlings as though they were his personal chattel and yet, if asked, he would describe his leadership as “fatherly.”

Dismissing the girl with the Ph.D., he clicked the mouse, bringing up the lab results of the unofficial research project, what he had told everyone was his own personal concept, when in truth it was the exact formula Eng had sent him—Riggs’ formula, the one that turned people into monsters. Behind the mask, a smile cracked Xiao’s generally humorless face. The tumors in the test rats had shrunk forty percent in three days.

“Excellent,” he whispered.

The junior assistant cleared her throat and he shot her a look from his coal-black eyes. She blanched at the look but steadied herself before saying: “There may be a problem with this project. I am so sorry, sir, but the anti-social behavior that we noted two days ago has increased.”

“And what did I say then?” he demanded.

“Uh…uh, you explained that the neurotropic activities of the ergot alkaloids may cause temporary hallucinations and attendant irrational behavior, but that the end result is worth the risk. That’s what you said, Dr. Xiao, however this is worse than that.”

“Show me,” he ordered, striding toward the kennels so quickly that the tiny junior researcher had to jog to keep up. As he waited for the researcher to punch in her door code, he fitted his mask on properly over his face. If there was a problem he was sure that it was the fault of one the young idiots working for him and there was no telling what they might have done.

The door opened and the girl stepped back, drawing her lab coat closer about her thin shoulders. She was afraid and for good reason. The noise in the room was surprising; there shouldn’t have been more than the occasional low squeak of the caged rats but it sounded, instead, as though there were a hundred snakes hissing in anger.