John hefted the completely evil gun and gave it a once-over, trying to figure out at a glance how to load it or cock it. He completely failed, but he was also totally sure that this gun was nowhere near legal. John gently laid the gun back onto the bed of the battered Ford truck, and considered the scene before him.

              Michael Jackson turned out to be an extremely handy guy to know. In addition to owning a gun store, he also seemed to know every single paramilitary nut in Northern California. That was his first assessment though. What he saw now made him think again.

              After loading a truck full of crates onto Michael Jackson’s Ford truck, John and Mike had driven about 30 miles south to a field adjacent to an abandoned restaurant. The restaurant had a giant peach on a steel support in front of it. It was boarded up, but there were acres of fruit sorting sheds in the field next to it. Corrugated tin roofs on stilts were all they really were, and a third of them had men under them, in various stages of checking equipment.

              Mike had made exactly 5 phone calls, and the result was this:

              “Holy crap,” muttered John.

              Pointing at the first set of drying sheds, Mike indicated a group organizing into parade rest.

“Most of these boys are National Guard, waiting for deployment. They’ve been waiting around for the government to call them up,” said Mike.

              “You mean the government hasn’t even gone in there yet?

              “Nope,” said Mike. “The government wanted to manage the ‘catastrophe’.”

              “What the fuck does that mean?”

              “They wanted to try to find a way to reverse it,” Mike said. “There’s a theory in Washington that this is all some kind of disease, that these people are still alive.”

              “But they can’t be, I am sure it’s something to do with that book,” said John.

              “All of these guys are with you,” said Mike. He pointed at the third set of drying sheds, at an extremely motley group sheltering underneath the corrugated metal.  “Some of these guys helped build that wall of barbed wire across the peninsula. They had to fight the fuckers off while tackling a major construction project. Granted, it wasn’t very often that they attacked en masse down there, but these guys know what was going on. They felt sick when the government just left that whole city there to rot.”

              “How do you know all these folks?” asked John.

              “They gotta get their guns and accessories from somewhere,” replied Mike. He sighed a little. “We’ve always known that the Feds never could get it together in the event of a disaster, but this is totally beyond their comprehension. Everyone knows what’s going on, but it seems to be under control with that fence across the peninsula and the rest of the country doesn’t want to unleash the zombie apocalypse. All those TV preachers are going on about that now.  So the President is just staying on the fence, so to speak, watching the situation.”

              “What are they waiting for?” asked John.

              “Well, it’s contagious,” said Mike. “Transmitted through bites, just like in the movies. They eat the entire bodies, not just the brains. They can’t talk at all. They are pretty fast. If just one of those got out and bit one or two people, and they bit two people…”

              “And so on, and so on, and so on…” finished John.

              “Yeah,” said Mike.

              “So anyone living in there would pretty much eventually die, right?” asked John.

              “It’s not really so much a question of ‘if’, as it is a question of ‘when’,” said Mike.

              “I dunno,” said John. “You don’t know Lloyd.”

              ###

              Lloyd was sitting in the kitchen cleaning a few guns when the doorbell rang.

              The house had solar panels and a huge bank of car batteries in the basement. This kept the power going, and Lloyd found it to be about the same as Before Zombies. He didn’t use many lights in the evening, so it kept the freezers going. The basement had several freezers in it, and Lloyd had collected a lot of food in the weeks After Zombies for storage in the freezers. The power never faltered, and Lloyd never thought about it unless something unusual happened like the doorbell ringing.

              Even though Lloyd knew that zombies didn’t use doorbells, he picked up a gun anyway. He moved to the steel reinforced front door, and slid aside the metal peephole cover.

              “Come on Lloyd, open up. It’s me,” said a female voice.

              “Shit, I thought you were all dead,” said Lloyd.

              “The rest of us might be, for all I know,” said Sam. “Open the door.”

              “How do I know you’re not a drug induced hallucination?” asked Lloyd.

              “Can you get drugs that good nowadays?” asked Sam. “I want some.”

              Lloyd opened the door and scoped his former roommate out as she walked in. Much like himself, the problems of surviving in a city full of zombies for the past couple of years had chiseled her body into granite. She was wearing leather from head to toe, which was something he didn’t regard as too farfetched. He looked at the motorcycle out on the street before he closed the door and wondered how he hadn’t heard her drive up.

              “Riding a motorcycle now?” asked Lloyd. “That’s not a bad way to get around.”

              “The Duc is fast,” said Sam. “Besides, it’s hard for them to bite through the riding suit.”

              “Bite?” asked Lloyd. “You’ve let them get that close to you?”

              “Not after I saw what happened to Charlie,” said Sam.

              Lloyd didn’t react, but inside he was pretty shaken up inside. Out of all his former roommates, he figured Charlie would be the one most likely to survive this madness. He wasn’t complaining about Sam ringing his doorbell, though. He looked her up and down, from her motorcycle boots, padded leather pants and then the tank top. Her hair was a lot different, closely cropped to about three inches long, in a mohawk.

              “Hey Sam, remember what you told me about not even if I were the last man on Earth?” asked Lloyd.

              Sam smirked. “It still applies. Got any food?”

              ###

              After dinner, Lloyd and Sam sat around the living room drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels and catching up. Sam, Charlie, Cathy and Derwood had all gone off in different directions. The new family had headed for the Marina, trying to find a boat to get out of the city. Sam and Charlie had decided to look for other living people in the city. Charlie had seen signs of people being alive in Chinatown and discovered that the zombies were affected by his little trick with sutras. She’d heard about the hopping vampires from the rest of the roommates, but had scarcely believed it when she saw dozens of them in Chinatown. Charlie seemed to love fighting them until he got bitten.

              He’d turned into one of them pretty quickly, in less than thirty six hours. Lloyd suspected as much, but he’d never tested his theory.

              “So, why did you come to me?” asked Lloyd. “Overwhelming desire for my charming face?”

              “I want to find out if it’s reversible,” said Sam.

              Slowly, it dawned on Lloyd what Sam’s plan was.

              “You’ve got him chained up?” asked Lloyd.

              “Let’s just say that there’s no way he can escape. Do you still have that book?” asked Sam.

              “It’s upstairs on a disk,” said Lloyd.

              “Have you read any more of it?” asked Sam.

              “I really don’t want to,” said Lloyd. “It’s nothing but trouble.”

              Sam snorted. “That’s rich. You can’t step outside the door without a lot of trouble these days.”

              “Yeah, and these days a Satanist is the voice of reason,” said Lloyd.

              “That’s what I love about you, Lloyd,” said Sam. “You’re sarcastic to a fault. That and the fact that you always have the good drugs.”

              “I get all I want from the pharmacies these days,” said Lloyd. “Although I’ve been itching to get some opium. I know where some poppies are growing though.”

              “Isn’t that hard to make?” asked Sam.

              “It’s just a matter of scraping sap from nicks on the seed pods of the poppies. That’s raw opium,” said Lloyd.

              “As usual, your encyclopedic knowledge of drugs has impressed me, Lloyd. Now go get that book.”

              Lloyd felt a little manipulated as he stood up and headed for the stairwell.

              ###

              Sergeant Joe Sparks of the 129th Rescue Wing of the California Air National Guard checked his equipment for the last time. The jump coordinator gave the ten minute warning about five minutes ago, and the sergeant was going through the checks in his head. HALO jumping was pretty easy to screw up. He looked at the vital parts of his MT-5 high altitude precision parachute system. His oxygen was correct, his mask was fastened properly, altimeter was working, and he had a good feeling about all of this. He looked around at the other members of his ten-man rescue personnel group, and then considered the other twenty-five members of the team.

              He’d been briefed about them for this mission. They were part of an elite fighting force that his superiors refused to name. Their equipment was a lot more high tech than his. They all carried machetes in addition to their Heckler-Koch MP5N submachine guns. He recognized the guns, and knew that they were probably Navy SEALS or something even more shadowy. Somehow he doubted they were Navy – they all seemed to carry themselves like Marines. He was still thinking about this when the jump master lit the jump light and opened the back of the airplane.

              HALO jumps were not normal jumps. They were designed for stealth. The parachutes were designed to be hard to be seen from the ground. They left the airplane at about thirty thousand feet, in thin oxygen and freezing temperature. They opened their parachutes below ten thousand feet. The mission, as he understood it, was to parachute into Golden Gate Park and rendezvous with live people inside San Francisco. He thought that was rather far fetched, considering the events of the past few years. He wasn’t exactly happy about the job himself, because his armament was rather light. He was a member of the parachute rescue forces, commonly referred to as the “Rodney Dangerfield of Special Operations Forces”. He had a couple of nine millimeter pistols, but his team also carried HK UMP 45 submachine guns. They weren’t really expecting to fire weapons – they had strict orders to let the spooky guys do the fighting. Their duty was to be an escort in case anyone needed medical attention when they got there.

              Before Joe knew it, he was on his feet and out the door, sailing through the freezing black night. The lights from Oakland and the rest of the Bay Area emphasized the blackness of San Francisco. Powerful searchlights illuminated the fenced in border along the peninsula. Joe drifted towards the darkness and checked his altimeter. Twenty-three thousand feet. He was falling way past terminal velocity now, probably close to two-hundred and fifty feet per second. At this rate, he had about sixty seconds before he had to pull his chute open, and he watched the altimeter and spread his arms and legs out to try and slow himself down. He didn’t want to rip the chute off his back when he pulled the ripcord.

              He quickly looked around him, and blinking lights around and below him alerted him as to the positions of his teammates. He turned attention back to his altimeter, and hit his ripcord when the dial hit 7500 feet. That was the first indicator of trouble, when his chute snapped him back into the air. He had barely an instant to comprehend what happened.

              Two of his jump partners shot past him on the way to the ground. Their chutes hadn’t opened, and the blackness was so complete that Joe could follow the blinking lights on his teammates all the way down to the ground. He felt a little bit of apprehension as he felt himself drift earthward. He opened his chute a bit to speed his descent.

              Joe and the rest of the team hit the ground about five minutes later, falling into the hundreds of zombies that had gathered to investigate the remains of their teammates splattered across the floor of the buffalo pen in Golden Gate Park. They didn’t stand a chance.

Chapter 3: Coming 2/27/06 >>