Cordyceps Trilogy (Book 3): Cordyceps Victoriosis Page 4

  She stood in the open door with her head resting against the truck frame, wiping her nose and sniffling. Cole stopped the hand he had nearly laid on her back. “Look, I’m sorry, I—”

  “You what?” she said without turning.

  “I’m just thinking, you know, it would be a good idea to stay in the truck, keep moving.”

  “I just saved your fucking life.”

  “You did. You did. Any other day I would probably appreciate that a whole lot more.”

  “I just killed”—her voice broke—“all those people.”

  “They were just Cord zombies. They were already as good as dead.”

  “I just, I just—”

  “Trust me, I know, all right? You did the right thing.”

  Cole laid his hand against the down-filled vest on her shoulder. She tensed but turned just enough to see his face.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She looked away.

  “If you don’t mind, um, I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

  “Lindsay.”

  “Lindsay, I’m Cole. If you don’t mind, let’s get back in the truck and we’ll sort of take stock of where we’re at, okay?”

  Across the parking lot, Cole heard a door open. The sound of voices.

  “HEY!”

  They both looked up. Cole reached into the bag.

  The voice carried across the parking lot from the entrance to a vape outlet. Cole saw him now: middle-aged, white, waving a hand over his head. “Hey! Are you guys okay?”

  “Get in the truck,” Cole told Lindsay in a low voice.

  Lindsay hesitated but climbed in.

  The man was starting across the parking lot.

  Cole motioned toward the steering column. “Keep it running.” He stepped away from the truck to meet the man halfway, scanning the lot and trying to keep his options open. He did not draw the AR from the bag, but kept his hand on the grip.

  “How’s it going?” Cole said.

  “Have you seen them?” the man asked breathlessly. His dark eyes were almost wild and he shifted on his feet in a state of obvious agitation.

  “Who?” Cole played dumb. He heard the truck’s engine turn over behind him.

  “The infected! We saw them run by—twenty, maybe thirty of them, not five minutes ago.”

  “Yeah, we saw them.” Cole looked around them again. A car was moving in the distance.

  “You sure you’re okay, bro?” The man was looking up and down Cole’s bloodied clothing. “I think there might be a first aid kit in the store here. You look pretty torn up.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  Cole began backing away. He could feel it even before it happened, an impending electricity or a sixth sense, though he could not have explained, in that moment, precisely how he knew, whether it was by some sound that had come to him, almost imperceptibly, unregistered in his conscious mind, or the slightest noise that breached his damaged hearing: a muffled cough or raggedly drawn breath, but he drew the AR pistol from the bag nearly at the same moment the coughers burst from the vape shop behind them and the man himself lunged for him, a murderous severity suddenly overtaking his face and hardly changing as the rounds stitched up his chest and over his shoulder, kicking up a spray of shattered concrete at the feet of the coughers, but not deterring them in the least. Cole stumbled back from the man’s falling body, turned, and sprinted for the open door of the truck.

  “Get over get over get over!”

  Lindsay had lunged for the driver’s seat at the sound of gunfire. Cole shouldered her out of the way, dropped the AR pistol in his lap, and slammed the door behind him.

  “Lock the doors!”

  Cole was reaching for the gearshift when the first cougher yanked open the driver’s side door. Cole found the gearshift and the gas pedal at the same time, peeling out, a terrible hesitation in forward progress as the wheels spun and the cougher’s hand came within an inch of Cole before the truck rocketed away and the door slammed shut on its own.

  “Oh my god, they’re in the back!”

  Cole saw the movement in the rear view mirror. He braked hard and jerked the wheel, careening over the curb into a grassy median, running a decorative sapling down the side of the truck and tearing off the rear bumper before the truck dropped from the opposite curb with enough force to throw them both into the dash.

  “Shit, are you all right?” Cole found the gas pedal again and accelerated, reaching for the rearview mirror to glance behind them. The truck bed was empty, but a hundred yards back he could see several figures running in the street.

  For a moment Lindsay didn’t say anything. She looked behind them, too.

  “You just shot that guy?”

  Cole glanced at her and swung through an intersection, veering right. The streets were surprisingly empty. “He was a manager.”

  “How can you even know that?”

  “He jumped me, the same instant they came from the store. It was a trap.”

  Lindsay’s mouth was slack. “He was helping them. Like a, like a, fucking handler of some kind?”

  Cole just looked at her.

  “I just—I don’t even. This is just so fucked up.”

  “Look,” Cole offered, “things are going to happen that will be hard to understand, okay? It’s just the zone. That’s all it is.”

  “I mean, I’ve seen this kind of thing on TV before,” she said, “on shows about Cordyceps, but I never—I mean, when it happens right in front of you, it’s just—”

  Cole gave her a minute to process it all. He was choosing streets at random, and truthfully had no idea where they were or where they should go.

  “I’m tougher than you think,” she said after a long silence.

  “That’s good.”

  “I’m not a wimp.”

  “I know you’re not. You wouldn’t have rammed the shit out of those coughers back there if you were a wimp. That was a hell of a thing.”

  Lindsay almost smiled. “Grand Theft Auto.”

  Cole managed a grin. “It shows.”

  They both watched the roadsides for a minute. Shops flickered by, only a smattering of cars parked here and there, no other sign of life.

  “I’m kind of surprised there aren’t more people around, for at least a while, anyway,” Cole said. “Everything looks pretty shut-up.”

  “Well, it is Christmas,” Lindsay said.

  “Christmas? Shit.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  Cole only shook his head. It was easier to explain a zombie outbreak than his life up to that point. “Well, Merry Christmas.”

  They looked at each other and laughed, and then Lindsay grew quiet and began wiping her eyes and Cole felt a black void open up in his stomach like a cavern and he knew the feeling all too well for the simple thing it was called, for the lives that were ended by it and the men that were rendered useless in the face of it. It was fear.

  Nine

  LINDSAY TRIED DIALING 911. It got her nothing but a busy signal. Every frequency on the truck’s radio seemed to be playing the same emergency broadcast: it began with an unnerving tone, followed by a synthesized voice, as though the world had been overthrown over by emotionless droids.

  “A widespread outbreak of an infectious pathogen has occurred,” the synthesized voice announced. “Do not attempt to migrate. Repeat, do not attempt to migrate. Residents of the following cities and surrounding metropolitan areas should be prepared to shelter in place for up to forty-eight hours: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C.”

  Cole slowed the truck in the middle of the biggest parking lot he had seen and glanced at Lindsay’s face. She was listening, glassy-eyed.

  The synthesized voice continued, awkwardly enunciating each word: “Residents of these areas are strongly advised not
to attempt travel by interstate. Local authorities and National Guard personnel are working in these thoroughfares to conduct operations critical to public safety. Residents should tune to local media for instructions specific to their municipality.”

  Cole eased the truck to a stop, made certain the doors were locked, and turned off the engine to conserve fuel. He got out his phone and propped it on the dash, adjusting the volume while the feed buffered, glancing at Lindsay to gauge her readiness to hear the news.

  When the talking heads appeared, mid-sentence, they were saying that the scope of the outbreak seemed inspired by the worst-case scenario of a perfectly coordinated terrorist attack. There was no swift and certain federal response to such an event, they admitted, not even under the old vanguard exemplified by General Nicolaus Trubilinski himself. This new outbreak could not be bombed; it could not be quarantined any more feasibly than five of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation could be encircled and contained simultaneously. This was no mere peninsula to be cut off from the mainland; this was the Big One, the Extinction Level Event that perhaps not even the oceans themselves could stop from spreading around the globe.

  At this point, one anchorwoman said, authorities didn’t know when the outbreak had started or where it had first appeared. It seemed to appear in all five cities at once. Early warnings had been disregarded as a hoax, since the public’s fascination with Cordyceps had long since made such calls to the emergency dispatch commonplace, and public rescue services had, for a time, even suffered a phenomenon known as sporing, whereby friends and enemies alike were reported to show signs of Cordyceps as a means of calling down the government upon them in full biohazard regalia.

  It did not seem to occur to the media that the zenith of hysteria had already been reached, a summit from which every direction led precipitously downhill. That their profession, via their favorite livelihood and the most extensively covered news story of all time, was about to eat itself was not a thought they seemed prepared, philosophically, to consider. Cole supposed that until the very moment the lights blinked off, the anchors would continue preening themselves and reading the news with their brave and perfect faces.

  “Joining us now is Congressman Hal Stevens, who served as the acting Director of Homeland Security during the first outbreak. Congressman, what advice can you give the average American, at a time like this, when so many are wondering what they can do, and what they can expect their government to do?”

  Cole squeezed a button on the side of the phone to turn up the volume. A solemn and heavily-lined face appeared on the screen, not the hard, square face of Trubilinski, but the soft and moony face of an old administrator whose distinguished career had only proven that no amount of political infighting or mudslinging could dislodge him.

  “Well, Leslie, this certainly comes at a time when federal resources are already stretched thin fighting wars abroad and conducting clean-up operations in the previous quarantine zones. We have a military on the rebound from the lowest levels of enlistment—and in some cases, funding—that we’ve seen since the Second World War. And a scenario like this is precisely why I’ve always been a champion of a strong military. But here’s the one thing that every American needs to remember: At the end of the day—”

  The politician’s face was replaced by a rectangle of static, then the scene cut back to the anchor, who stared at her viewers with placid vacuity for three seconds before she blinked hard and recovered.

  “We seem to be having some technical problems with the feed.” She shuffled papers on the desk before her, or at least made a perfect pantomime of it. “Let’s go now to—” The anchorwoman’s face seemed to suffer a digital seizure, her eyelids half closed and her lips pursed as though caught in the formation of a vicious epithet, and then she disappeared altogether.

  A wheel spun in the center of Cole’s screen. Buffering…

  A moment later an error message appeared: The server is not responding.

  “It’s about to start,” Cole muttered.

  Lindsay glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

  Cole retrieved his phone and turned off the screen. “What show did you say you watched?”

  “About the outbreak?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cordyceps Nation.”

  “Well, we’re basically in that show now, you understand?”

  As though to emphasize his point, a siren began to wail in the distance.

  Lindsay’s eyes widened. “Are you trying to make me even more scared? Is that what you want? To just freak me out totally?”

  Cole drew in a long breath and exhaled against the glass beside him, fogging for a second before it vanished. “No, I just—I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Forget it.” He could sense her studying his face and for a moment he wished, more than anything, that she would look away.

  “Oh my god!”

  Cole jolted and looked out the driver’s side window, reflexively grabbing for the AR. Nothing. The empty parking lot. He looked at Lindsay. Her mouth was open and she was half-smiling.

  “I just realized where I’ve seen you!”

  “Oh, god.” Cole closed his eyes and collapsed slowly against the steering wheel.

  “You were on that show!”

  “Yep.”

  “No, it was an interview!”

  “Yep.”

  “You’re that Cole? Cole McGinnis?”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh my gosh,” she said. “This is—wow.”

  “Yep.”

  “There was a lot of buzz about you. Everybody was like, ‘Cole McGinnis, he’s so savage’.”

  “Yep.”

  “And then you just…”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “I guess this happens to you all the time.”

  “Thankfully, no.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Cole straightened and scanned the parking lot. “It’s okay, really. I’m glad we got it over with.” He reached for the keys hanging in the ignition and turned the engine over. The gauges jumped to life.

  “Look,” Cole said, feeling they needed to start over. “I know I don’t know you, and you don’t know me.” He looked at her. She had raised her eyebrows and her eyes were almost pained—none of the mirth he was afraid he would see there.

  “All I’m saying is, I’ve been through this before, but that doesn’t mean I can get either of us out of it alive.”

  Lindsay leaned forward and Cole realized she wasn’t looking at him at all; she was squinting to see something beyond him.

  “What is that?”

  Cole swiveled, searching the parking lot and the road beyond, half expecting to see an approaching crowd of Cord zombies or a carful of looters. “Where?”

  “No, up there.” Lindsay pointed into the sky above a steakhouse.

  Cole saw it now, a dark object seemingly no bigger than a bird, but the manner in which it flew belied technology, not nature. It stopped and hovered, seeming to falter in an air current, and then it grew larger without moving, making straight for them, he realized.

  “That’s a drone,” Cole said. He shifted the truck into drive.

  “Wait! What if that’s someone trying to find survivors!”

  “What if it’s not?”

  “Just wait a minute!”

  The drone stopped only fifty feet from the truck and hovered over the parking lot. Its vertical rotors were a blur of perpetual motion, and even with the windows rolled up they could hear the high whine of the blades, like a storm of angry bees.

  Lindsay reached across Cole and waved her hand frantically at the glass. “Put down the window!”

  The gadget hovered darkly, though Cole was sure he saw light reflecting from a tiny glass eye. He pressed the power window button and the buzzing of the drone intensified. The machine drew closer and low
ered, bits of debris kicking up beneath it and scuttling across the parking lot.

  “Alright, you’ve had your fun, now watch this.” Cole brought the AR pistol up over the doorframe and lined up the sights on it. The drone immediately tilted, banking like a hummingbird before it zipped away.

  “What are you doing?” Lindsay said. She craned her neck to see where the drone had gone. “Why the hell would you do that? That might’ve been our only chance at making contact with someone!”

  “Oh, we made contact, all right.” Cole drew the pistol back inside and rolled up the window. “Who with is the question.”

  Lindsay gripped her head with both hands. “Oh my gosh. You do want to be rescued, don’t you?”

  “Rescued?” Cole looked at her. “You think somebody’s gonna try to rescue you? Are you a senator’s daughter or something?”

  Lindsay’s shoulders seemed to deflate. “No.”

  “I think we’re on our own out here.”

  “Then what—” Lindsay’s voice broke and she stifled a sob with her hand, sucking air between her fingers. “What are we going to do?”

  “I’m working on it,” Cole said. He let off the brake and turned the wheel, going through the motions of driving without a specific destination. One thing was certain: he knew enough about nights in the zone to know he didn’t want to spend one out in the open.

  Ten

  THE LAST RAYS of sunlight were casting long shadows when they drove past a liquor store in the process of being breached by looters. A U-Haul box truck with smoke rolling off the tires was connected, by means of several taut chains, to the security gate barring the front door. Five men with black balaclavas over their heads stood at the ready at either end of the sidewalk, only one taking note of the passing pickup truck and turning his head, the holes in his mask revealing pale skin around his eyes and mouth, a look belonging more to a stereotypical terrorist from an 80’s action movie than your run-of-the-mill looter, Cole thought.