The Hallowed Cure, page 27
“Zombie swarm!” Lincoln all but shouted. “Oh man, this isn’t good.”
Hahna hopped for the exit without ordering us to follow her, but we did so. We dropped out of the plane just in time to spot a large group of people in the distance. Every last one of them looked to be sprinting toward our location.
The sight of all those bodies sprinting at us absolutely reminded me of an oncoming Mute swarm, which was not a mental image I wanted to deal with right then. It sent my creeped-out factor right through the roof again. At least these folks all seemed to be wearing clothes.
“High ground,” Hahna said. “Go.”
Those people might be sprinting and crazy, but they didn’t have jump boots. I jogged for the nearest building and activated my jump boots the moment I was close. I rocketed upward at almost the same rate Frank climbed.
Hahna wasn’t far behind him, climbing the side of the building despite her stolen armor. Lincoln landed beside me. I looked over the side and immediately regretted it.
The people who’d sprinted at us earlier had arrived, and they were even now flooding around the building on both sides. They absolutely moved like a Mute swarm, like a single entity made of
multiple arms and legs. They didn’t move like humans, though they looked human.
Mostly. The eyes staring up at me might be human, but there didn’t look to be any sign of human intelligence. All I saw in those eyes was hunger. Was there really no way to save them? If so, Doctor Sharpe had yet one more atrocity to answer for.
“Oh man,” Lincoln whispered. “They’re doing the ant pile!”
I recognized the danger the same moment he had. The zomb—
the crazed people below couldn’t scale buildings as easily as we could, but they were now in the process of stomping all over each other with purpose. Some of them were piling up against the wall as others climbed on their shoulders, heedlessly crushing those below as the whole mass rose above.
“Follow me,” Hahna ordered. “Stay close.”
I glanced her way to see her sprint off toward the side of the building. She leapt the alley between it and the one next door, a floor down, without slowing down. Just before I followed, I saw a person on top of the human pile below grip the second floor fire escape and clamber on.
Given how fast they moved, they’d be up here in a few moments.
I didn’t want to be here when they arrived. Time for some more building jumping.
Lincoln hurdled the gap with a brief blast of jump boots, and Frank leapt over it Mute-style. I was the last to leave the roof, but my sprint gave me enough momentum to clear the gap and land on the next building without wasting any more jump fuel. After flying to the roof I was already below 40% on fuel, and I wanted to save it for real emergencies.
I glanced back to see more people clambering off the fire escape and flooding the roof we’d just vacated. I looked ahead to Hahna. I didn’t have the luxury to look back because we were about to leap to another building.
This one was several stories above our current rooftop, but Hahna hurdled the gap and slammed into the wall. She gripped it without issue and clambered up. We moved rooftop to rooftop for longer than I cared to estimate.
Unfortunately, we were limited by which buildings were with jumping radius of the prior buildings, so we had to all but double back several times. Still, the people chasing us soon fell behind, though I doubted we’d lose them for long. Assuming they were anything like Mutes, they could likely sprint until they actually died.
Finally, we were safe ... or felt safe. There were no crazy swarming people around, at least. We hunkered down in the shadow of another rooftop stairwell entry and waited to see if anyone was after us. After a minute or so, I allowed myself to relax. Just a little.
“That was interesting,” Hahna said.
“The zombies?” Lincoln asked.
“They weren’t like this before I left the city a week ago. This is new.”
“What were they like a week ago?” I demanded. “More polite?”
“This city was like any other city, so far as I could tell. For the past two weeks, I’ve been moving only when necessary. I also stuck to the northern tip of the island. That’s where the entrance to the facility is located, though it’s surrounded by open ground and high fencing on all sides. There’s no cover to be had. Short of the ability to turn invisible, I had no clear approach.”
“Right, but back to the zombies,” Lincoln said. “Sharpe made them? With gas?”
“I’m not sure if she has that capability,” Hahna said. “I only noticed the odd absence of people in the city when I returned last night to resupply. I assumed a mass evacuation or shelter-in-place had been ordered while I was gone. I didn’t know any people remained in the city.”
“So it hasn’t been like this for weeks,” I said, which was a bit of a relief. At least our intelligence on Neo Tao Payoh hadn’t been so bad as to miss all this. “So did Sharpe make them crazy as another part of her trap? Or did we just have the dumb luck to get shot down in the city while she was in the middle of one of her large scale human experiments?”
“Sharpe wouldn’t zombie bomb the city at random,” Lincoln said.
“Word would get out. Someone in another city would have a relative who lives here who goes off the grid. When they don’t answer any
calls, they’ll investigate. Then the government will investigate and find a bunch of zombies.”
“So we’re just using the Z word now?” I asked. “That’s a thing we’re all doing?”
“It’s as fine a word as any,” Hahna agreed. “And Lincoln is correct. Turning a whole city into zombies isn’t a move one makes unless one is planning to pull up stakes. That suggests Doctor Sharpe may have concluded her research here, which suggests we only have so long to make a move. If we delay, she may go to ground elsewhere. It could be years before we find her again.”
“Could turning everyone into zombies have been an accident?”
Frank asked.
I frowned at him. “Like, Sharpe spilled some coffee on her zombie button?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time an experimental toxin was released by accident,” Hahna said thoughtfully. “But that seems clumsier than I’d expect from someone like Doctor Sharpe. Also, one would expect an accidental exposure to spread more slowly. This one covered the entire city.”
I was growing frustrated by our lack of answers. “Sure, okay, this is all very interesting. But let’s get back to the cloning facility we need to infiltrate and blow up. You said it was surrounded on all sides by open ground and fencing. So how do we get past that?”
“A frontal assault would likely lead to us encountering Sharpe’s entire security force,” Frank said. “What if we stole a local aircraft and dropped into the facility from above?”
“AA cannons on the perimeter,” Hahna said. “I had considered stealing a plane and going in from above, but I’d have been shot down the moment I approached the facility.”
I thought back to my time in Dios. “Is there an underground sewer system we could use to sneak in from below? They have to dump their waste somehow, right?”
Hahna offered me a look that was halfway amused and halfway dismissive. “Do you mean a large, human-sized tunnel conveniently blocked off by a single metal grate? One that leads straight to a basement or another unguarded staging point?”
It did sound pretty stupid when she said it like that. “I’m just asking questions.”
“They do have a waste disposal systems exiting the facility, but those are multiple pipes barely large enough for a rat to squeeze though. No entry through the sewers.”
“What if we steal some more suits of Hallowed armor and sneak in?” Lincoln asked.
Hahna glanced at him. “I’d considered that as well, but I doubt even Sharpe has enough Hallowed clones that she can’t keep up with who is who. They move in squads, so sneaking in alone wasn’t an option. Now that I have you there, we could attempt to sneak in as a full squad, but I know nothing of their verification protocols.”
“If their security precautions are anything like Cloud Nine’s,”
Frank said, “we’ll be found out and shot pretty quick. They aren’t going to let us waltz in without questions.”
“Hey,” I said. “What if we snuck in as part of a zombie horde?”
Lincoln’s eyes widened. “That’s brilliant!”
“Just like Pillars of the Dead,” Frank said in monotone.
“Is that another zombie movie?” I asked. “You all get I’ve never seen a zombie movie, right?”
“So we ditch our armor and find some way to blend into a large horde of zombies entering the facility,” Hahna said thoughtfully. “I didn’t observe any large groups moving in or out of the facility when I was surveilling it, but that was before zombie groups took to the streets. Assuming the zombies are being somehow controlled by those at the facility, that might work.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “I just threw it out there.”
“Given the number of zombies they’ve created, and assuming they move large groups into and out of the facility at a time, I doubt they have the manpower to check the identification of each individual zombie,” Hahna continued. “Properly disguised, moving in with a zombie horde could get us past the outer security perimeter, but what then? We’d be placed in some sort of secure area, like a pen.
We’d also need a way to ensure the zombies don’t try to eat us.”
“Have we actually seen them eat anyone?” I asked. “How do we know they’re cannibals? I haven’t seen any of them eating each
other.”
“True,” Lincoln agreed. “We might be relying a bit too much on fictional depictions of zombies.”
I worked hard to keep the sarcasm from my tone. “You think?”
“But we need to see the zombies up close,” Lincoln said. “So we need to capture one.”
“And not kill them,” I added. “At least not until we know there’s no other choice.”
Hahna tilted her head. “You think we can save a city of forty thousand zombies?”
“I don’t know we can’t. They’re still civilians, remember? We don’t know what Sharpe’s done to them or how she’s controlling them. It’s possible it’s not permanent, and it might even be reversible once we destroy the facility. Is everyone cool with randomly murdering a bunch of civvies only to find out we could have hit the zombie off switch twelve hours later?”
“There’s no cure for zombies,” Lincoln said. Yet before I could protest, he raised one hand. “But again, it’s just a word. We don’t know what they are. So we’ll capture one, interrogate it, and figure out what makes them tick. We’ll need to know if we’re going to disguise ourselves as zombies anyway. Once we have a zombie to examine, we can decide on our next move. We can see if they can be saved.”
Hahna glanced at Frank. “Vega, you up for it?”
Frank simply nodded, like being asked to capture a zombie was a completely normal request for a Mute soldier. “You want me to bring it straight here?”
“Let’s head back to my safehouse,” Sato said. “So far as I know, it remains secure. If these zombies are anything like Mutes, they’re far too strong to restrain with rope, tape, or zip-ties. Fortunately, I have a large cage available.”
“Which you just have lying around?” I truly believed Hahna would just have a zombie cage lying around. She had a plan for everything.
But I still wanted to know why.
“We’ll come up with something,” Hahna said. “Now, let’s move.”
Given the circumstances, I couldn’t come up with any reason not to capture a zombie.
[ 26 ]
THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT MY FAULT
After Frank left and we all settled in to wait for him to capture a zombie, I got a brief tour of the rest of Hahna’s little safehouse, the stuff beyond the dead clone body and the storage room. It was the bottom floor of an unoccupied office building. No one lived here.
I learned then Hahna had purchased this empty building using the spending account Caitlyn had set up for her. She’d actually been living here for a couple of weeks before she went dark. And apparently, while the huge crate she’d purchased was supposedly for big dogs, she’d planned to use it contain Doctor Sharpe after she captured her. As you did.
I was surprised to find the place mostly bare of furniture and any creature comforts. Hahna had an e-reader, a couple of boxes of instant noodles, a basic hotplate and pan with a single metal fork, and a bedroll. And, of course, a Prescott clone’s headless corpse.
I wasn’t sure why she kept that around, and though we kept our armor on, I suspected it was going to smell. Still, there was no good way to dispose of a body right now, and eventually, we might need it for ... research, or something.
The crate and the body I could handle. What stressed me out was we still had no line on Mia or Caley, and only my flickering hopes that Caitlyn, Reese, and Amber were all out there alive somewhere. I had nothing to do save sit and brood, and brooding, despite the grief my squadmates gave me back during the war, wasn’t something I enjoyed.
Mia could be dead already. She could be getting eaten up by zombies right now, and I couldn’t find her or help her or even say goodbye. If this mission kept going as bad as it had been, I might end up leaving this place with no idea what happened to my fiancée.
I decided right then I wouldn’t leave without her. I’d kill Doctor Sharpe, of course, and get Caitlyn and her crew and my squad out safe, but I wouldn’t leave this island. Not without Mia.
I knew she’d be angry at me for making a decision like this. She’d be angry I’d even thought about it, but she wasn’t around to yell at me. Which was the whole problem.
As we waited, Sato had Lincoln help her out of her stolen armor.
He popped off his helmet too, and then the two of them heated up boxes of instant noodles. I wasn’t hungry, but I could eat. I’d just popped my helmet off when a quiet knock sounded on the door.
Hahna raised one hand to freeze us both, then moved for the door in utter silence. She drew Despair without a sound. It gleamed blue as she settled by the door. She held it with one hand as she opened a slit in the door and peeked out.
Hahna sheathed Despair and unlocked the door. Frank walked into the safehouse far more calmly than I’d expect someone carrying a whole damn person with their third arm to be. He hoisted a
“zombie” with the strength of his third arm alone, and it—or she—
wasn’t moving.
The zombie was a woman in casual office attire, and she looked like a human woman, though petite. She wasn’t a Mute. And she was—
“Still alive,” Frank assured us as he shoved the woman inside the large crate. “Just passed out due to a blocked airway. I didn’t have a chance to interrogate her when I found her.”
Hahna closed up the crate and snapped the lock on it. It was just big enough for the petite woman inside, if she crouched, which was more than a bit fucked up. Lincoln stared at the woman in the cage with wide eyes, holding his steaming bowl of soup.
He didn’t eat anything. Suddenly, he glanced at Frank. “Hungry?”
he asked.
Frank popped his helmet off. “Sure.” He set it aside and offered a hand.
Lincoln handed off the soup. I’d forgotten that Mutes could eat the same food we did, though their bodies processed it differently.
They also, according to Chen, had absolutely no sense of taste, at least for human food. The Mute food Cloud Nine now made was supposed to taste good to them.
Frank quietly slurped noodles as Hahna slipped Despair inside the cage. She lightly poked the woman with her sword’s tip once, then again. At the third poke, the woman slammed into the top of the cage. She cast about in what I could only describe as slack-jawed terror.
Yet her wide eyes and horrified expression soon melted into something approaching a smirk. She knelt, eyes blinking, and looked at me. It was the creepiest stare I’d ever received.
“Mister Riven,” the woman said, in perfect yet slightly slurred English. “It’s about time.”
“What the flip,” Lincoln whispered. “A talking zombie?”
I pushed down my shock at having a random zombie woman speak my name and got right down to the interrogation. “We know each other? Or am I just that famous?”
The woman glanced down at herself, then up at me. “Forgive me if I slur my words. It’s a bit difficult to focus when controlling a body, and this one never spoke English.”
“And that means?” I asked, because she sounded just a little insane.
The woman turned to face Hahna. “I know you too, Captain Sato.
I’d say you and I have a score to settle, though honestly, what you did for me almost makes me want to thank you. In the grand scheme, you saved me. I wouldn’t be who I am today without you.”
“What are you talking about?” Hahna said calmly. “Speak plainly, unless you’d like me to remove your head and ask the next zombie.”
“Do whatever you like to this body. I have thousands more.” The woman’s smirk widened as her creepy, distant gaze returned to me.
“I don’t see your lovely fiancée, detective. Did something happen to her? Did you lose her?"
Detective? Nobody called me that anymore. Did this woman know something about Mia, or was she just trying to get into my head? Either way, I was done playing games.
“I literally have no idea who you are,” I said. “So yeah, like Captain Sato said. Speak plainly or we kill you right now.”
The woman offered only a rueful shake of her head. “You remain horrible at bluffing. But if you seek answers, ask. What do you wish to know?”
“Are you one of Sharpe’s spies?” I asked. “Some old lackey of Jack’s? One of Lindsay’s people?”
“You know exactly who I am,” the woman said. “You simply don’t want to face a hard truth, yet that was always your problem, Mister Riven. Never willing to face a hard truth. It’s why you went to work for me instead of ending it all with a single bullet.”
Every hair on my body simultaneously freaked the fuck out. I remembered a smirking gray-haired piece of shit sitting on a ratty old mattress in a building basement and smelled the stench of his disgusting cigars. I remembered the year I lost working for an asshole.
