Zombie Attack! Rise of the Horde (34 page)

“Where am I?” The words came out of my skin like an exhaled
breath.

“Nowhere,” the sky answered back. “Everywhere,” the echo
replied.

Round red bubbles began to form at my feet from out of the
sand. I leaned over and picked one up. It looked like a shiny red pool table
ball. I put it in my mouth and felt its smoothness on my tongue. It tasted like
chlorine and bubble gum and Tuesday afternoons. I didn't know how that was even
possible.

“The world is nothing more than a child's dream,” a voice
said. It seemed to come from all around me at once, from the sky and the cactus
and the bubbles popping at my feet.

“How do I get home?” I asked.

“Everywhere is possible if you desire it enough,” the voice
sang, revealing a shimmering trail in the sand that seemed to lead off to the
horizon. I put down the red bubble ball and began to follow the trail, feeling
light and calm. “Every when is possible too.”

I walked for what seemed like days, coming across an old
chair at one point, a singing grandfather clock, and a book with no words that
spoke in riddles when you cracked it open. Each time I reached the ridge of a
sand dune, I was back where I had started.

Days passed. When I was hungry, delicious food appeared.
When I was thirsty, the sky parted and poured sweet juice into my open mouth. I
never saw another soul. I just kept walking and talking to myself and the voice
in the sky.

Finally, after what felt like months, the desert began to
fade away behind me, sand whooshing past in fluffy white blurs, leaving clean
white walls. I sat up and stared at my brother Moto dressed in his military
gear. He was as real and solid as anything I had ever seen, smiling down at me
with kind brown eyes.

“Welcome back, solider,” he said.

“This is a dream,” I said. “It has to be. I'm dead.”

“No,” he said, nodding his head side-to-side but still
smiling. “You're not. Sorry to be the one to break the bad news to you. You're
going to be just fine.”

“I was bitten by a zombie,” I said, shaking my head in
disbelief. “You don't come back from that. Do you?”

I reached down and pulled up my shirt. I had gauze taped to
my ribs. I ripped it back, not expecting to be as painful as it was. I winced
in pain, closing my eyes as I let out a gasp. When the pain subsided I took a
good look at the wound. A crescent shape bite mark the size of a small child's
mouth perforated the flesh of my abdomen just below my rib cage, but it had
scabbed all the way over. To the casual observer it might have looked like I
got tangled up in something, or was peppered with broken shards of glass in a
fight.

“You see?” Moto pointed to the wound. “It's almost healed
already.”

Despite my mind arguing that it wasn't possible, the
evidence showed he was right. The injury was now nothing more than a tiny
island chain of hardened blood ringed by puffy, pink flesh. It appeared to be
no more life threatening than a cat scratch.

“In no time at all you'll be as good as new,” Moto assured
me. “Which is first-rate! I've got a lot to tell you. Gotta get you caught up
to speed.”

“How is this possible?” I was still having a hard time
wrapping my head around the fact that I wasn't one of the living dead.

“Apache radioed to us,” Moto said. “We got there as fast as
we could.”

“He said you'd been looking for me?”

“I sent choppers up to Vandenberg after I found out,” he
informed me. “There were no survivors. None of the deceased matched your
description. I knew you'd make it out. I believed it in the pit of my stomach.
It's been all that's kept me going since, the thought of seeing you again. You
have no idea how happy I was to hear from Apache.”

I thought about the black helicopters that passed over us
when we were on the road to New Lompoc. How different would things have been if
Benji and I had stayed near the base?

“He told me that you had been asleep for about five
minutes,” Moto continued. “We administered the antidote before moving you so we
wouldn't lose any time.”

“Did you just say
antidote
?” My head was spinning.
“Does that mean that the outbreak was caused by a virus?”

“Yes,” Moto said. “We know that now for sure. We even know
who created it. It was one of our guys, not some terrorist attack like we
originally suspected. What we don't know is how it got out. We are still
working on that.”

So much for Felicity's fast food theory
, I thought.
Not that I would be having Arby's any time in the near future, the way things
were going.

“So there is a cure for it?”

“Yes and no,” he said, looking around the room nervously. He
looked up and over my head, holding his eyes on something for several seconds
before returning them to me. “It's complicated.”

I turned and saw he was looking at a camera with a red
flashing light on top. I had been so out of it, I hadn't seen that there were
several cameras recording our conversation.

“If there is a cure then why are there still zombies?” I
wasn't trying to be difficult or ungrateful. I really wanted to understand.
“Why can't we just give a dose to everyone that's been infected and end this
whole nightmare?”

Moto sighed and rubbed his temples.

“First of all,” he started, “there wouldn't be enough of the
antidote to save everyone. It's not easy to make. Many of the ingredients were
hard to come by before Z-Day. Now they are virtually impossible to get.”

“Like what?”

“Spider venom for one,” Moto said. “One of the side effects
of a bite from a brown recluse is that the tissue around the wound dies.
Doctors have to cut the dead skin and tissue away from the wound and a lot of
times people end up needing plastic surgery to cover the nasty looking scar.
The way in which the healthy cells go necrotic is similar to the way the zombie
virus functions, in part. There are a lot of parallels. So we figured out how
to isolate the chemical that does that and reverse engineer it as part of the
antidote. The problem is that it requires plenty of actual spider venom—or
an equally rare synthetic compound that takes weeks to yield small batches
under absolutely perfect lab conditions.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said, “you're saying that I'm
gonna be like Spiderman now?”

Benji is going to be so jealous
, I thought.

“Will I have super human strength and be able to swing
through the air and shoot webs to slow bad guys down?”

“Not that I've ever seen,” he said. “But you've always had a
supernatural ability to annoy people. Looks like you've retained it. That
should come in handy around the base. Really help you win new friends over.”

Moto grinned from ear to ear as he teased me. Things were
getting back to normal in some small way. It felt good to have my brother back,
even if he was reminding me of what a bossy know-it-all he usually was.

“And you've kept your killer sense of humor,” I fired back.

“That's just one part of the recipe,” Moto said, finishing
his explanation. “There are a ton of very complicated steps that go into
creating the cocktail. The vast majority of the ingredients are as dangerous to
use as they are to locate or whip up.”

“I lost all track of time and space,” I said. “It's weird,
because I am sitting here talking to you but I don't even feel like the same
person that I was before. The truth is that if the walls melted right now and
you sprouted butterfly wings and began singing opera, I wouldn't be all that
surprised.”

I half expected him to argue that I had been through a
traumatic experience, but instead the smile slid off his face and his demeanor
grew darkly serious.

“One of the other ingredients is Ibogaine,” he said. “It's a
powerful natural hallucinogenic derived from a root. It's banned in the United
States, or it used to be, but you can easily get it in Mexico, if you don't get
butchered by surviving cartel members or devoured by hordes of zombies with
over a million people in them.”

“So it makes you trip out?” That would account for the wild
visions and out of body experiences I had undergone.

“Shamans used to take it,” Moto said. “It's about a hundred
times more powerful than LSD or mushrooms. They were giving it to junkies the
last I heard because the trip was so heavy it scared them off ever using drugs
again, that's if they lived through it. The dose you received was cleaner and
more balanced than just eating the plant version, but it was also much
stronger.”

“How long does it last?”

“Usually not more than a couple of days,” he said. “We were
starting to get worried about you.”

“How long have I been out?”

“Seven days,” Moto said.

Seven days? Is he kidding? How could I be high and locked
in a room for a whole week and not know about it?

“I'd like to argue with you but I kind of lost track of time
where I was,” I said. “Am I still on it now?”

I turned my hand over in front of my face several times and
waved it in the air. Moto laughed at me.

“No,” he said. “You'd know. You were pretty incoherent when
you were juiced up.”

I looked around the room again at all the cameras. They'd
been monitoring me like a lab rat. I knew it was a small price to pay to not be
a mindless zombie, but it still made me uncomfortable. I didn't want to sound
ungrateful so I kept my thoughts to myself.

“Will I feel any side effects?”

“It's possible,” he said. “A few people reported feeling
mild aftershocks so to speak after being given the antidote—like flash
backs, but nothing serious. Walls breathing, people melting, losing track of
time, that kind of thing.”

“Oh,” I said. “So nothing too scary like people around me
transforming into flesh eating demons that want to kill me . . . or delusions
of grandeur.”

“No more than normal for you,” he said, raising his finger
to his temple and making a cuckoo bird gesture. “You've always been a little
Loony Tunes, if you know what I mean.”

“How did I get here?” I asked, ignoring his taunt.

“You were strapped down and transported in an armored
Humvee,” he said. “You were too close to consider air lifting. We only have one
chopper and our fuel supplies are limited. Apache caught us up to speed on your
condition and your friends filled in the blanks.”

“Apache?” I shook my head more. “He told his name was
Simon.”

“Really?” Moto couldn't hide his amusement. “We never could
get him to tell us his name. Not even to me in private. We took to calling him
The Apache because he lived in a teepee and talked like a crazy Indian. It's
like the guy speaks in riddles or something.”

I smiled as I remembered thinking the exact same thing. I'd
almost forgotten along the way what it was like to have real family that I grew
up with. It made the end of the world that much easier, knowing he was with me.

“It's amazing what people will open up and tell you when you
are about to die,” I said sarcastically.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “Believe it or not I've
been where you are right now.”

“What?”

My mind reeled. My brother had been bitten by a zombie? He'd
had to go through all of this alone? It was more than my mind could comprehend.

“I'll tell you all about it later,” he said, “or at least as
much as I am allowed to tell you. In case you haven't noticed we're not alone.”

“Who is watching us?”

“I asked the General for permission to debrief you,” he
said. “He's been kind enough to give us some leeway considering the unusual
circumstances around your discovery. He said only a Macnamara would try to kill
a horde of zombies with a toothpick carnival sword to defend his two pals, more
or less. I'm paraphrasing. Basically, I think you impressed him.”

“So what aren't you telling me?”

I knew my brother's 'poker tells' from growing up with him.
He was definitely keeping something from me, and it was big.

“Let's just start with what I
can
tell you,” he said.
“You are not allowed to tell anyone about being bitten by a zombie or about
receiving an antidote. That's the big one. It's not as hard as it sounds
though. No one in the outside world would believe you and no one here has the
clearance to ask about it.”

“What about the civilians on base?”

“Good question,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “It
brings me to my next debriefing point. There are no civilians at Port Hueneme.
If civilians were allowed I would have brought you here from the start. The
only non-military personal here are doctors and the wives of enlisted men. This
is an advanced military base, the last one on the west coast. If you decide to
remain here, you will need to enlist. Otherwise, you will be shipped to a
controlled civilian population area, most likely the clean zone out near Las
Vegas.”

“I'm not old enough to enlist,” I said. “I'm only sixteen.”

“Age is no longer a consideration for those who wish to
serve their country,” he explained, sounding like a recruiting commercial.
“America needs all the able-bodied trained soldiers it can get to fight this
war.”

“I don't want to be separated from you again,” I said. “Will
I get to stay here?”

“The General has assured me that if you are so inclined, I
will be allowed to personally oversee your training. You're already temporarily
assigned to my unit, just in case.”

“I'm in,” I said without hesitation. Moto smiled, but there
was sadness in his eyes.

“Glad to hear it, soldier,” he said. “I assured them that
you would react this way. It's gonna make things a whole lot easier for a lot
of jumpy people. Now the first thing we got to do is get you changed out of
those hospital scrubs and into a proper uniform. After that, we're gonna shave
off those curly locks of yours.” He ran his fingers through my hair and messed
it up. “If you need a moment to say goodbye to your Justin Beiber fever hairdo,
I'll understand.”