“What have you been eating?” Dr. Boyle asked into Kent’s com.
“You don’t wanna know, sir.”
“Can you make it back to base?”
“Uh, that’s a negative, sir.”
“You said you are in a pack. Just to be specific—are you in a pack of zombies?”
“That’s affirmative, sir. Ziggy is in the house.”
Danton chuckled. He heard a couple others.
“Cargill—tell me, other than accepting you into the group, have you noticed any other altered behaviors?”
There was patch of static and when it cleared he was saying, “—over on the hill. They’ve been following us.”
“I’m sorry, Cargill, you broke up a moment. Who’s following your group?”
“Another pack. A large one. They smell like—”
“Come again. They smell like what?”
“Wood chips. Dammit,they smell like wood chips.”
Boyle fixed his mouth as if he were about to repeat what Cargill had said. He was confused.
“I don’t understand,” he said to himself.
“What’s not to understand?” Klingerman said. He was a civilian. Could run like hell and cleave the crap out of a ziggy skull. “He said they smelled like wood chips. So what?”
“Well, none of our boys was equipped with a spray with that scent.”
“So somebody else is doing it,” someone Danton couldn’t see chimed in.
“Some other group of scientists,” Mary said. She was seated next to him. Danton used to dig her until he found out she was into chicks. Now he was just about ravenous when he looked at her. He forced himself to keep facing forward.
“No,” Boyle said. “Not possible. We’re the only facility capable of any such things in at least a hundred mile radius. Any scientific group wouldn’t have ventured this far to experiment. The danger from traveling all the way here and traveling all the way back to their lab to monitor their subjects would have been too great.
“So it was something else.” Danton made it sound like a statement, hoping he sounded smart for Mary. The chick she got down with was one of the brains.
“What?” Boyle said, addressing Danton directly. “The rain? It hasn’t done that in well over a month—well beforewe began our own experiment. And if it were any other natural phenomena I imagine it would have manifested well before now. There is no legitimate explanation for this, Danton. There is no ‘something else’ unless you have some factor none of our dwindling scientific community has considered and would like to posit that theory now.”
Danton didn’t. Mary coughed behind him. Like she was covering up a laugh. His cheeks burned.
“I know what it is.” Kenton stood up and stretched his long body. Everyone turned to him. He was a civvie too, but most people thought he was pretty smart. “Cargill’s wrong. Whatever he’s smellin’ is wrong. Hell, how do we know that lemon stuff he got on him didn’t affect his brain? How do we know the zigs didn’t turn him and that stuff somehow preserve his brain and he’s trying to lure us out or something?”
Boyle nodded. Danton looked around, everyone seemed to agree. Shit.
“Cargill,” Boyle said into the com. “Have you noticed any changes with your own body?”
“You mean other than being tired as hell? I haven’t slept in four days. This other
pack—”
“Yes-yes, Cargill, we’ll come to that in a moment, but about you…” Boyle looked around as if trying to pull his question from the air. “Have you had any scratches, bites, cuts, scrapes—anything?”
“No, man, I’m fine except for my aching tootsies.”
More nervous laughter.
“I think Kenton has a point. We can’t trust anything Cargill says. But I don’t think we can disregard it on the off-chance he isn’t infected. For now he’s considered compromised.”
People were nodding. What was worse was other dogs were nodding too. This wasn’t right. ‘Compromised’ meant no rescue. If Cargill was got—and that was a bigif—then they owed it to him to put him down. Maybe he hadn’t been able to go on the thirty minute plan, but that didn’t mean they could just leave him that way. If Boyle thought he was an idiot, fine, but he was an idiot who wasn’t about to let a brother be lumped in with Ziggy.
If Cargill was got he would do him himself. That probably meant sneaking out and never making it back. Danton knew that wasn’t smart, but his mind was set. Besides, he was pissed Boyle had embarrassed him. Danton didn’t know anything about calculated threats and risk assessments, but he wasgoing to go out there and find Cargill. It would be worth it to prove that brain wrong.
Unless Boyle called him ‘compromised’ too.
For half a second Danton thought he was fixing to make a mistake.
Then he imagined he was stomping on that lizard part of his brain, the coward part of him would never win. Never. He was going.
***
When Danton felt stubborn enough he moved fast. At two the next morning he was in the arsenal, zipping up a duffelful of weapons. It was about to be shock and awe time. He had his sidearm on his hip and a half dozen magazines in his belt and twin machetes crisscrossed on his back for when the guns went out. He even had a grenade on his belt loop. If he ever had to go on the thirty minute plan he would take a hell of a lot of ziggies down first.
Now came the hard part: getting out of here with all this shit.
Danton peaked out into the hall. Nelson was on patrol tonight and likely half inside a bottle and/or asleep. But the doors were all alarmed now that Ziggy had successfully broken inside. Danton had to find a way out without setting off the alarm and without leaving an opening for Ziggy to get in. Despite all the lemon and strawberry-scented zombies that weren’t eating people anymore there were singles about and they were more dangerous than a single zig from a pack in close quarters. Singles were smarter and more adept at catching people. Danton would be outside in the dark, meaning he’d have to use a flashlight. Singles would zoom in on the light.
He was past the mess hall when he heard someone’s slippered feet slapping on the linoleum floor. Danton ducked around a corner and held his breath as Hargrove, another brain, yawned and came out with a fruit cup. Hargrove was a sleep-eater. The pudgy man shambled right past him like he was invisible.
Packs were like that sometimes. That’s why they were easy to avoid. It’s the singles you had to worry about. They wouldn’t just shuffle past. If you hid behind a car they tended to look around. A lot of them could even open doors. Danton would rather come up against a pack any day.
There was a row of plexi-glass windows in a room they’d converted to storage not long after they’d moved everyone into this building. In the early days there was a tremendous amount of shelling going on in every major city. Humans had probably killed more of their own than Ziggy did. Danton had noticed one of the panes was a little loose. It’d be a tight fit, but he could manage his way through. Unlike a lot of the other dogs, he’d maintained himself and he should have been able to shimmy his hundred sixty-two pound frame through.
The tricky part would be when he removed the pane. He’d have to do everything in the dark and if Ziggy was right there he and everyone else would be done for. The storage room locked, but from the inside. There’d be no problem with them getting in the main corridor and once that happened everyone would be dead.
Danton made his way down the hall to the storage room. He felt giddy for just a moment—he was actually going to make it. He slid into the dark room and zigzagged around bulky sheet-covered pieces of equipment and furniture, heading for the loose panel. A slice of moon shone through and at first it wouldn’t budge. Panic clenched his gut, but then the window slid an inch, then another. A thin column of cool air lapped his face and he pulled the pane the rest of the way out, resting it in the opening.