Plague World (Ashley Parker Novel) Read online

  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 z
ombie crap, and be just fine.

  Blerg. Why my brain consistently came up with mental images like that, I knew not.

  Oh, well, I’d wait until after I’d finished my job to page Dr. Freud.

  Our kills were punctuated with the sound of Nathan’s rifle. He had some sort of fancy-ass firearm from his private collection. It could be dismantled and stored in its own plastic butt. With it he calmly and efficiently took out the incoming zeds without wasting a single round. If anything rattled Nathan, I had yet to see it.

  Well, except Simone.

  With every cut, every thrust, every kill, I pictured the asshole who had tried to shoot me, the one who “had a present for me.” He’d missed, thanks to Lil’s intervention, but the resulting ricochet damaged our team in a way that could never be repaired. He deserved the business end of my blade far more than the poor blue-rinse elder tottering in front of me.

  Snick. Sword point in.

  Schlorp. Sword withdrawn.

  Sorry, Zombie Granny.

  It didn’t take long for Tony and me to respectively smash, slice, and dice our way across the roof. Meanwhile, the number of zombies coming through the door on the far side trickled down to a slow stagger. Tony gave a war-whoop as he put down a zombie in scrubs, half of its face already missing before the rest of it was obliterated.

  I took out a male zom wearing blood-crusted jeans and a blood-spattered white shirt that screamed GAP. It had several chunks of flesh missing from its neck and face. Maybe a son, visiting his sick father in the geriatric ward when the shit hit the fan.

  I really needed to stop looking at their faces, and just do my job.

  With this thought in my head, I heard footsteps behind me and spun around with my katana, using hip torque to generate enough momentum to do the job with one blow, just like any good executioner.

  Instead of chopping through flesh and bone, the edge of my blade connected with a barrel of an M4, the impact sending painful shockwaves up my arms.

  “Careful now,” an amused voice said. “I like my head where it is now.”

  Crap. Normally I would’ve been delighted that it was a living, breathing human being, but in this case, I think I’d have preferred another zombie.

  Griffin—or Griff, as he liked to be called—had been one of the people already at the DZN lab when our group had arrived, bloodied and battered. The people at the lab had viewed our struggles on video, like some sort of sick reality show, yet done nothing to help. Including the guy standing in front of me. I resented him, even if he was another wild card. He wasn’t one of our group. And more importantly, he hadn’t helped when we needed it.

  If not for the fact we’d been losing wild cards like Spinal Tap drummers, I’d have refused to work with him.

  “Sorry,” I said, sounding anything but. “Next time you might want to announce yourself.”

  He grinned down at me, his hazel eyes amused under ridiculously long lashes the same dark brown as his hair. He typified the whole gender unfairness bullshit illustrated best by peacocks. The males get the brilliant jewel-toned feathers, while the peahens get the drab brown colors. And for some reason, this particular peacock had been trailing his tail feathers in front of me ever since we’d been introduced.

  “No worries,” Griff replied with an indefinable accent that spoke of foreign lands, but was probably just pretentious. “Worth it to see you in action.”

  I stifled an undignified snort; so not buying what this dude was selling. Don’t get me wrong. Griff was definitely what most people would consider hot. Angular cheekbones, strong straight nose, and firm lips, the guy looked as if he should be gracing the cover of Esquire or Details.

  Then again, Kai had been just as hot, and he knew it, but his hotness had been more… well, innocent, for lack of a better word. Irritating at times, but never predatory.

  Griff had a self-awareness that saturated every gesture, every expression. His internal theme song was probably “Magic Man,” throbbing drumbeat and all.

  I trusted him as much as I did rattlesnakes and frat boys.

  “You actually do anything down there,” I asked, “or did you just watch the action on video?”

  Griff held up his M4.

  “Barrel’s hot.” He dropped it down low and added, “You’re welcome to touch it and see for yourself.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “Not interested.”

  “Afraid of getting burned?”

  “Oh, please.” I snorted. I couldn’t help it. Then I gave him a quick once-over, noting the lack of gore and goo on his clothes and armor. “Awfully clean for a zombie killer, aren’t you?”

  “Hey, I get the job done,” he said with a shrug. “I’m not interested in getting up close and personal with dead people.” Then he repaid my once-over with one of his own, albeit a slow, lingering travel up my body to my face. “Guess you don’t mind getting down and dirty.”

  “Not with the zombies.”

  Griff’s eyes narrowed just enough to tell me I’d scored. Gotta love a cheap and easy shot, right?

  Tony joined me, Thor’s Wee Hammer dripping with zombie goo. I could feel the dislike for Griff emanating from him with the uncomplicated black-and-white emotional range of youth. He started to say something, then paused as what could have been the corpse of the Oldest Confederate Widow emerged from the roof access door. About six feet away, it didn’t moan, and its slipper-clad feet barely made a sound on the cement. Its mouth opened and closed, blackened tongue wriggling in the confines of its toothless gums.

  “There’s a zombie behind you,” Tony said casually.

  Griff rolled his eyes.

  “Sure there is.”

  His eyes stopped in mid-roll as a rotting hand clutched at his Kevlar-clad shoulder. The zombie’s gaping maw dripped black drool next to his face. To give him credit, though, Griff didn’t yell or jump in surprise. He just rammed the stock of his weapon into the zombie’s midsection, then spun around and delivered a blow to its head with enough force to smash the skull in.

  “Guess you didn’t get the job done as good as you thought,” I observed.

  “Better watch it next time, or you might get gummed to death.” Tony delivered the line totally deadpan, something I couldn’t have done if my life had depended on it.

  “Funny,” Griff replied, unamused.

  “Dude,” Tony said, “I tried to warn you.”

  “Dude,” I echoed, “He totally did.”

  Tony grinned. Then I jerked a thumb toward the open door as a zombie MD lurched into view, looking like it’d been used as a chew toy.

  “Incoming.”

  Griff looked at me with an odd little half-smile, and nodded as if reaching a conclusion. Then he turned and dispatched the zom with the same move as before. He made it look easy, almost balletic in its grace.

  A blob of decaying brain matter landed on his sleeve. He eyed it with distaste, flicking it off with one finger. I fully expected him to start grooming himself like a cat. Instead he stepped into the roof access shed and peered down the stairs, turning back with a smile of satisfaction.

  “Now it’s clear.”

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs below.

  “You sure about that, dude?” Tony asked.

  The top of a helmeted head appeared and Gentry—one of our wild cards—appeared at the top of the stairs. He’d originally been a member of the ZTS (Zombie Tactical Squad), one of the more obscure branches of the military’s Special Forces. A lucky reaction to an unlucky encounter with a zombie in Redwood Grove had upgraded his status to that of a wild card.

  Gentry grinned and gave us a thumbs up, his babyface making him look like a teenager playing soldier, instead of a sergeant in his twenties. I had to restrain myself from pinching his cheeks like my grandma used to do to me, when I was a dumpling-faced toddler. Somehow I didn’t think he’d appreciate it.

  “Looking good, people!”

  Griff smirked.

  “Like I said… all clear.”

&n
bsp; SHEFFIELD, ENGLAND

  “So,” Indiana said. “What do you want to do first?” Brushing back his shoulder-length hair, he smiled suggestively at Hannah, who gave him a coy look from heavily lashed brown eyes as they walked away from the platform at Sheffield railway station.

  In a red ruffled skirt, cream-colored peasant blouse and thick leather belt, Hannah looked like a fair-skinned steampunk gypsy. The leather belt had bits of brass thingees on it, gears and such. She wore a matching black leather collar similarly embellished, and black motorcycle boots. A cozy fleece shawl in a rich red completed the outfit.

  The entire effect was guaranteed to turn him on.

  “I thought I’d let you decide,” she said demurely, brushing a heavy lock of black hair out of her face.

  “I have some ideas.” He noticed her struggling a bit with her overnight bag, and held out his hand. “Here, let me take that for you.”

  She handed it over with a grateful smile. Once he hefted it, he understood why.

  “Christ, this is heavy. What do you have in it, barbells?”

  “You’ll find out.” She smiled again, only this time there was nothing coy about it.

  Oooh, boy.

  He’d met her at a mate’s fetish night a few weeks ago—the kind of party where most of the attendees were there to play. Hannah hadn’t played, but she’d watched with avid interest. Upon meeting Indiana, her first question hadn’t been the obvious, “Were your parents fans of the film then?” but rather, “Are you good with a whip?”

  “Oh, yes,” he’d replied, and he’d asked for her email. She’d given it to him without hesitation. Over the next few days, as they’d gotten to know one another online, she’d shared her mobile number and several social media handles. Certain photos she’d posted on Facebook and her Twitter ID “kinkykitten1313” prompted him to invite her to Sheffield for the weekend.

  He still wasn’t sure if she was a top or a bottom, but while Indiana tended to lean toward the submissive side of things—he did so love to be spanked—he wasn’t averse to administering a good paddling, as well.

  Either way, the weekend promised to be a good one.

  They reached the covered bridge over the tracks and headed toward the stairs that led from the station itself, sparsely populated at this relatively late hour. The few people who were there all seemed to be hoisting tissues, some of them looking like they’d be better off in hospital than thinking of traveling. A particularly ill-looking fellow about Indiana’s age erupted in a coughing fit as they passed him. Indiana winced as the man spat up a wad of black phlegm onto the station floor. He hoped Hannah hadn’t seen it.