Conspiracy Theory (The Zombie Theories Book 2) Read online

  Not that it mattered. The pistol slide stayed in the open position, and he dropped it immediately, coming away with his big ass knife in his paw. He dispatched the one latched on to him with the knife, and did this spin-Judo thing, breaking the arm of another one. He propelled himself backward and was on his feet running with me quickly.

  The two of us sprinted down the hall after the orderly, but we never saw where he went. The corridor was maybe two hundred feet, and through a set of big doors I saw the motor pool area. It was full of infected, feeding on the fallen. There were dozens, maybe a hundred or more, and we had just been through a couple of packs of fifty. I have no idea where they all came from or how everybody got dead and then undead so quickly. It didn’t make sense, but we couldn’t go through the motor pool even though the giant doors to the outside world were a mere hundred feet across that cavernous room.

  The dead were halfway down the hallway, and Lynch said, “In here,” and opened a door with a frosted glass window. No way they weren’t going to bust through that in two seconds. He pushed a desk against a wall, and then jumped up on it. He grabbed my HK, and I let him. He had lost his to the zombies someplace. He used the polymer butt of the rifle to smack into a big vent above the desk. Once, twice, three, and on the fourth time it kind of pushed in. Then he pulled it and it came loose. “In,” was all he said. He passed me the HK, and the MOLLE pack of ammo minus the two mags we had used.

  The vent was dusty, but huge, easily big enough to move down on all fours. I turned to look back but didn’t see Lynch. “Come on! They’ll be through that door in ten seconds!”

  He was standing on the desk, and he looked in at me. And the guy smiled. “Can’t,” he said and passed me a knife. He held up his arm, and I could see a very small, semi-circular bite mark just above his elbow that was barely bleeding.

  The first slap of a bloody palm impacted the glass on the door and Lynch looked sad. Then he smiled briefly and was all business. “Live,” was all he said, and he jumped off the desk. I heard it slide across the room, and then the glass broke and the moans and cries got louder. I heard the desk sliding and I knew it was time to go.

  I have absolutely no doubts that Lynch destroyed at least ten of those things with his bare hands before they overran him. The moans and cries of the dead filtered through the duct work, but I never heard Lynch scream.

  I crawled down the vent in total darkness, fully expecting a dead hand to grasp my ankle, but that shit never happened. I went over a couple of grates that looked down, and didn’t see anything below except for floor, but I was so terrified I just kept going. I got to a T junction, and light came from the right. I went that way and came to a grate. End of the line unless I turned around. I looked through the grate and saw a room with a bunch of computer screens. There was a guy in a pair of blue shorts and a yellow T-shirt sitting in a wheeled office chair bawling like a baby.

  It was Tim. I had totally forgotten about him.

  I called out to him and think he pissed himself at my disembodied voice. He looked around frantically, raising his weapon, which I knew to be empty. “Up here,” I whisper-yelled and he did that same head search, coming up empty. I was able to turn around in the vent, and kicked at the grate, which went clattering into the room. He cried harder when he saw my sneakers dangling out of the vent, and I passed him my HK416. He helped me down, and then he hugged me.

  “I thought I was the only one,” he said between sobs.

  I hugged him back, and asked him where we were.

  He looked at the screens, then back at me. “Sat-com relay station. Secure for now.”

  I looked up at the vent I just climbed through. “Yeah, about that…”

  He raised his eyebrows and looked at the vent.

  “The other end of that aluminum death-tunnel has a couple dozen infected slipping around in what’s left of Lynch.”

  “Didn’t like him much. He scared me.”

  “Guy was certi-fucking-fiable, but he did have his merits. Did I ever tell you he shot my friend?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I looked at him. “Nah, he was wearing Kevlar, and to the best of my knowledge is sitting on the deck of an oil platform catching some rays with a margarita and the rest of my friends.”

  “Sounds good actually.” Tim was visually calmed. “Can we block that vent?”

  “I dunno, but we should sure as shit try. Do we have any food in here?”

  “No. There’s a cafeteria down the corridor.”

  I looked at him and we both chuckled. It may as well have been on the moon.

  The door to this set of rooms was simply not to be fucked with. Steel, no windows of any kind, it was more a hatch from a nuclear silo than a door. There was no other way into the room save that damn vent. I looked at Tim’s badge, neatly clipped to his T-shirt. Going back for that badge had saved our lives, even if it had meant the death of someone else.

  But we were shit out of luck on supplies. I had four mags of five-fifty-six, but there was no ammo for Tim’s weapon.

  It was then I realized how thirsty I was.

  Just a Peek

  The world I knew was gone. I had known it for some time. Every major city on the planet is lifeless. Every big town, every small town. Of course there must be survivors. A farmstead, or some folks in the hills. People who were either not in populated areas, or somehow escaped them as or before the plague struck may have survived. There is no doubt that humans are no longer the dominant life form on the planet. I know this.

  Yet when Tim showed me recordings of satellite footage from cities around the world, I cried like a school girl with a skinned knee. It was awful. It was horrible. It was humbling. I felt so small. Insignificant.

  The way I felt right then was probably the total opposite of the truth. The very fact that I am human and alive is a testament to how important I am. How important we all are. Lynch had been right, but he had been wrong; we all need to live.

  Tim was NSA. He wasn’t a trained killer like Lynch; he was a geek who loved computers and basketball and painting fantasy miniatures. I don’t know what that last one is, but Tim liked it. I guess the NSA had need of nerds too. He had been given permission to access certain satellites of questionable integrity, and had been looking all over the globe at whatever either he or the upper echelon had deemed necessary.

  Initially, he had an army of folks with him in both this room and a more secure location in the mountain above us. He had monitored troop movements until all the troops were dead, and subsequently the movements of hordes and swarms of infected, reporting positions to whoever needed to know.

  Tim had shown me how to use the satellite software. He wouldn’t give me his password, citing treason, but he sat and watched me as I pulled up satellite images from last week. The resolution was unbelievable. I could make out the license plate of an overturned tanker truck road train south of Darwin Australia. WRX 110.

  I switched the feed photos, jumping around the planet just picking file names that were cities with dates. Both video and high-definition stills. Hamburg, Germany was crawling with undead. They were packed into the streets, undulating like wheat in a breeze. Delhi was the same, as was Moscow. London was partially destroyed, the Thames full of half-sunk and burned-out boats and vehicles. Kyoto had roving bands of undead searching for flesh. This to me said that there were still living people in that city. San Francisco was the same. Mexico City was burned mostly to the ground, infected shambling everywhere. Beijing was just gone. There were very few large structures, most were rubble, and everything metal looked melted. Nothing moved, not a bird, not a zombie, not even the breeze looked to be stirring in Beijing.

  I had to do it. I had to look. I was from Boston, and I had to know…

  It was a mistake.

  The fires had long since died out, but you could see they had raged unchecked. The Hancock Tower, a Boston icon of blue glass, was dotted with shattered windows, smoke stains and burn marks on the sides. The Zakim
Bridge, a modern marvel, was twisted, bent, and black, its many support cables dangling. The burned-out hulks of cars strewn about on what was left of the bridge proper. The structure was likely destroyed to halt the spread of infection north from the city. I had used this very bridge in my escape from Boston with a bunch of prisoners and guards and their families. I used the software to check out Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox. It had been turned into a makeshift tent city. A tent city that was now home to thousands of infected, stumbling around bloody tents and hastily erected barricades, all pus bags. Boston, like all the other cities I had looked at, was dead.

  I had suspected that everyone I had known was dead. This pretty much confirmed it, and even if by some miracle some of my old friends from the neighborhood had survived, I would never find them. Never see them again. I wish them the best.

  “Sorry man,” Tim breathed from over my shoulder. “I was from a suburb of D.C. D.C. is gone too. I got to watch all of these cities fall. I have all of that footage too. It…it was one of my tasks to catalogue it. I… I haven’t seen a living person in months in any of the cities.”

  The alarm klaxon stopped right then, and I looked at the clock, 0137. That time stuck in my craw for some reason. I thought about it for a moment and had an epiphany. “Tim! How do we move the satellite so we can get a pic of someplace we want to see?”

  He looked at me like I had three heads. “Move Sentinel Three? We can’t move the bird, it’s geosynchronous.”

  He had lost me with the sentinel thing, but I wanted to sound smart and cool. “Oh, that means in a fixed position right?”

  He raised an eyebrow. He looked exactly like Ship when we used to talk about something he thought I should know about. Prick even started to roll his eyes before he caught my menacing glare. I nipped that geek superiority shit right in the damn bud with a look.

  “Uhh…no, that’s geostationary. All our com-sats are geostationary. The spy sat I can access, Sentinel Three, has an orbital period of one sidereal day. It matches the earth’s sidereal day, just under twenty four hours.” I must have looked all kinds of dumb because he continued, “The bird moves with the earth. If I had the access codes, I could adjust its rotation or orbit slightly, but that would be it. I can access the feeds, but can’t control the satellite. Basically, we have to wait until it passes over a portion of the planet’s surface we want to look at, and then we have twenty-seven minutes to take photos or video before it’s out of position again.”

  “When will it be over twenty-seven degrees, eleven-forty-three north by ninety-oh-one, thirty-seven west?”

  “Let me sit.” He took over, and muttering to himself, began some calculations, “Ninety zero one… About zero four forty six. Little over three hours. Why, what’s there?”

  “Atlantis.”

  He was dumbfounded. “Wait…what?”

  “Yeah, my friends are on the drilling rig Atlantis in the Gulf of Mexico.” I had another epiphany. “What about here?”

  He didn’t get me, and this time I rolled my eyes. “When will the spy thingie be over us? Can we see what’s up outside?”

  He swallowed hard. “Moron! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that!”

  He did some more calculations. “Shit, we missed it. It would have been a relay from Sentinel Two, but it passed over us fifty-seven minutes ago.”

  “How many satellites are there?”

  He hesitated, obviously not wanting to divulge that info.

  “Dude, you already let me use the software, and I know about the Sentinels, your treason is complete there, Obi Wan. Besides, who’s gonna throw you in prison? Everybody’s dead.”

  Tim never did tell me how many satellites. We spent the next half hour shoving whatever would fit into the vent, and we were as quiet as we could be. I couldn’t hear any infected or sounds of any type through the vent, but you never know. We had it blocked up for maybe six feet, but anybody who really wanted in was getting in, and that was downright unsettling. I sat in a chair and fell asleep.

  I was dreaming about zombies in a Taco Bell when Tim gently shook me awake. “It’s time,” he told me, and I had no idea what he meant. “Sentinel Three will be in position in three minutes.”

  I hadn’t been asleep long, and woke up pissy about it, but also thankful as the dream had been going badly. What kind of self-respecting Taco Bell has no tacos? I rolled the chair over next to Tim, and we pulled up the feed I wanted. There were different zoom levels, and I was way, way out to start with. Tim used his computer mouse to blow up an area on the map, the center of which was the coordinates I had given him.

  There she was, in all her glory. My home. Atlantis. We were seeing her from a few miles up, through some small clouds. I asked if Tim would zoom and he did. The clouds moved, and I could see more than just a little dot in the Gulf. He zoomed again, and I could see a huge dot in the Gulf. I could make out individual objects, one of which was unfamiliar. A boat anchored off the southern edge of the rig. Must have been a long anchor chain, because that was some deep water. Tim zoomed in again, and I could see guards walking on the deck of Atlantis. I could also see that they were talking, and one of them clapped another on the back. I couldn’t tell who they were, as I could only see the tops of their heads, and one was wearing a hat. It was an old style, tiger stripe boonie hat that you would have seen on a Green Beret in Vietnam. I didn’t know who it was.

  I wanted to see more, but Tim said unless they looked up, we wouldn’t be able to ID them. He had to zoom out a little, and when he did I got a better look at the boat I had seen. It wasn’t a boat, it was a ship. It was gray, and from the angle we were at I could see it was a destroyer. I couldn’t read her designation, but there were people all over it. It was before five in the morning, and she was bustling. These people were alive too, I could tell from their movements and what they were doing. The good thing was that they didn’t seem to want to invade Atlantis…unless they already had.

  Tim zoomed back to the deck of my home, and we watched as people moved about her. One person came out rubbing their eyes. The person stretched a huge stretch, complete with a yawn that could have swallowed a football. I know it was a big yawn because this person was looking straight up with their head back. A sharp intake of breath from me had Tim asking if I was OK. I pointed to the screen. “That’s Kat!”

  Tim smiled. “Good!”

  An exceptionally manly tear may have been shed right then, I will neither confirm nor deny. The two guards I had focused on earlier moved toward Kat and they had a conversation. The one in the hat leaned in and gave Kat a smooch, and I knew immediately, it had to be Alvarez. I smiled even broader, and the smile must have been as contagious as the plague, because Tim was right there with me, teeth bared.

  Where was Ship? No, Dear Reader, not the destroyer, my bestest pal and legendary smarty pants. My buddy Ship. He was an early riser, but I couldn’t catch his massive frame on the monitor anywhere. I stared at Kat for a bit, and the angle of the feed started to change slowly. The change picked up speed, and soon I could barely see what was going on. A minute later and the feed went black.

  “Sentinel is moving off, sorry.”

  “Yeah, I figured as much. Thanks man, I…” I looked past him and noticed something odd. Two of the last things we had shoved in the vent were a couple of sweat shirts that had been left behind in this room during the chaos. They were on the floor. I stood and went to move them back into the vent. Hey, anything that muffled our sound, and stood between us and Lynch’s dinner party was a good thing. There was no chance they could reach that vent anyway. It was a foot over my head.

  I picked up the sweatshirts and moved to put them back. We had shoved a small, wheeled stool into the vent too, and as I put the shirts back on the ductwork, I noticed that the wheels were closer to us than before. Then the whole thing moved toward me half an inch and there was a thump from the vent.

  Fuck.

  I was hoping for rats when I asked Tim for a flashlight. Mayb
e someone else had gotten in the vent from another direction? Maybe that someone was a morally casual, bikini-clad Playboy Playmate who owned a liquor store.

  Tim gave me a little pen-light and I shined that shit into the vent. Behind some of the crap we had stuck in there; a few computer monitors, some paperwork, a seven-tier file holder, a clock and two phones, I saw a few pairs of dead eyes staring back at me.

  Did I mention fuck? Cuz fuck.

  That was when the moaning started.

  Escape

  There were more than just a couple of eyes looking back at me. The damn vent was full of them. How the hell had they gotten in there? Zombie pole vaulters? Zombie ninjas or acrobats? I grabbed the end of the wheeled chair and pushed the pile of crap further down the shaft. Having seen me though, the infected were going ape shit, and fought back.

  I calmly asked Tim for the vent grate, screws and a screwdriver. He complied, but the grate was bent, and we were only able to get three screws in it. Really, all it would do was slow them down some, but some might be enough.

  I checked my HK416 and ammo pouch. Four full mags in the MOLLE and one in the weapon. Tim’s M9 was out of ammo, so I passed him my Sig, with one extra mag and three loose rounds. That was all the .40 cal ammo we had. He looked at the weapon and swallowed.

  Then he looked at me scared. He swallowed again. “What’s happening?”

  “Well Tim, old sock.” I let the charging handle on my rifle slide back into place with a satisfying noise. “We’re leaving.”