Zombpunk: STEM

  "Oh, fuck!" Kevin yelled, a backpack slung over each shoulder. He took two steps forward and leapt into the dark, vanishing instantly from view. Prime followed suit, picking up a shotgun leaning against his workstation and leaping out into the night.

  "Go!" Elder yelled to Eydie. Elder bent over to help Beat to her feet. Her pistol was empty, and Elder exchanged his for hers. Eydie dove into the darkness, jumping headfirst down the slide. Beat continued shooting into the roof as Elder stepped to the precipice. She was dancing from foot to foot as she cussed up at the ceiling.

  "Motherfucking son-of-a-bitches!"

  "Let's go!" Elder yelled back. Beat fired her last shot and the slide of her pistol locked open. She removed the magazine from its well just as Elder caught sight of two metal orbs bouncing like tennis balls down the basement stairs. "Now!" Elder screamed, grabbing Beat by the arm and pulling them both out and onto the slide. The flash bang grenades exploded above them as they fell into the black.

  #

  Something soft broke Elder Tull's fall. After the slide, there had been the whipping of sharp branches across his face, the collision with something very solid and unmovable, and then Elder had come to rest on something soft. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Elder came to realize that the cushion was actually the Prime Administrator. The Prime Administrator groaned. Elder joined him.

  Sweet Beat came tumbling down on top of Elder. As they pulled themselves up out of the mud, Kevin and Eydie emerged from the underbrush. Kevin had a nasty gash across his face and Eydie was holding her left arm in pain.

  They could still hear gunfire above them. There was another dull explosion from the Candy Kitchen as another of Prime's booby traps claimed a victim. Prime pulled himself to his feet and led the way, limping along the gully of the ravine, retracing the path back towards the Wagoneer's garage by memory. He found where the invisible path cut up the north wall of the ravine and began to climb, the other Pukes, beaten and battered from their escape, in tow.

  At the summit of the climb, Prime ascended the short flight of stairs that brought him to the rear door of the Wagoneer's garage. Only then did he risk pulling a small penlight out of his pocket and clicking it on. He shined the small light on the door knob and hurried into the shadows of the garage.

  "Those were cops," Beat spoke as she climbed into the front seat of the Wagoneer. Prime pulled himself in behind the wheel and passed Beat the shotgun. "The cops haven't gone crazy. Yet."

  "It doesn't matter," Prime said, firing the bio-diesel engine to life. "If shit's as bad out there as it looks, they'll never catch us. We just got to make it to the I-90..."

  "How the fuck are we going do that?" Beat asked. Kevin, Eydie and Elder were loaded into the back seat, Elder squeezed in the middle.

  "I'll drive," Prime replied, shifting the truck into reverse. "You shoot."

  He stepped on the gas, not bothering to open the garage door. The Wagoneer crashed through it and into the night, showering the street with splinters. Once clear of the garage, Prime worked the gear shift, smoking the rear tires as he pulled away.

  Chapter 26

  What was Jude up to?

  Nathan undressed for bed. He pulled his shirt over his head and looked at himself in the mirror. He marveled at his transformation. He'd packed on at least twenty pounds of muscle, and for the first time since his teenage years, he had six-pack abs. Despite all the craziness outside, Nathan could understand the appeal of the stem: a perfect physique with no effort.

  Nathan shot a glance toward the bathroom where Jude was supposedly in the shower. He could hear water running, but that could easily be a ruse. Outside the penthouse condominium, in the halls and the stairwells and posted at the elevators, dozens of Arnold's city security were posted. No threat on earth was about to get into the building that evening. But what about the threats Nathan had already let in?

  What was Jude playing at?

  Why was she still here? Why had she had Arnold's men attack Peters' men? What was her angle? This couldn't possibly be about that stupid book anymore, not now that society was collapsing outside their window. No, there was more to Jude's presence that just Nathan's PR ranking. What did she want?

  Nathan felt suddenly very alone.

  Dressed only in his underwear, he crept quietly to the master bathroom door. The door was ajar, but Nathan could only see the mirror steamed up from the hot shower. He moved backward on tiptoes, out of the bedroom and down the short hall. He sneaked across the cold tile floor of the pristine, never used kitchen. At the counter, he found the block of kitchen knives. He reached out for the carving knife...

  And found it missing.

  A shot of terror hit Nathan. He drew the next largest knife from the block and gripped it tightly. He moved as silently as he could manage, careful with each step, back to where the kitchen opened out into the hall.

  "Jude?" he called softly. No answer. "Jude?" he called louder. There was no reply, just the constant pitter-patter of the running shower. Nathan crept slowly down the hall in his bare feet, keeping the knife ready at his side.

  "Jude?" he called one last time as he stepped into the bedroom. He turned the knife around in his hand, raising it up and back, Psycho-style. With his free hand, he pushed the bathroom door in. The steam was thick, clinging to the ceiling.

  Jude stood naked in the center of the bathroom, her back to the door. Her body was bone dry, the shower water running down the drain, unused.

  "Jude?" Nathan asked. The sight of her tiny, naked frame stalled his attack. He'd expected her to be lying in wait – to fly out of the shower with the missing carving knife in her hand – but she was just standing motionless in the bathroom, looking at her steam-obscured reflection in the mirror. "Jude, what's wrong?" Nathan lowered his knife.

  "It's the stem, Nathan. It's the stem that's killed us all. What have we done?"

  "Jude, I–" Nathan began. Jude turned to face him. She was still wearing her dark sunglasses – nothing except her dark glasses.

  "Steve?" she said, and held out a hand. It was covered in blood. Nathan looked in horror at the deep gash cut across Jude's small, firm stomach. The large carving knife was in her other hand. She'd sliced herself open from side to side, bisecting her implant. Blood gushed from the wound. "We've got to get it out before it kills us all," she said, and let the carving knife fall to the bathroom tile. She reached into her sternum and grabbed her stem firmly, her fingers pushing aside the gore of her wound.

  "No!" Nathan screamed, lunging forward. But Jude had finished the task before Nathan could reach her. She yanked hard, ripping her stem free from her chest. The metal slug came loose, followed by a torrent of blood.

  Jude collapsed at Nathan's feet.

  Nathan caught her on the way down, dropping his own knife.

  "Jude, what have you done?" Nathan cried. He held her paper-light body in his arms. He put a hand on her chest, attempting to stop the flow of blood. The wound swallowed his hand.

  "Steve?" Jude said weakly.

  "Jude!"

  "Steve, I was–" her voice faded. She stared up at the ceiling, her pupils fixed.

  Nathan laid her down gently on the cold bathroom tile.

  He was covered in her blood.

  A shot rang out in the condominium. The earsplitting sound shocked Nathan back to life. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled out of the bathroom door. More shots, a whole chain of them. There was screaming and a loud thump. Light flooded into the hall beyond the bedroom. They were inside the condo.

  Nathan turned to run, but there was nowhere to go. Jude lay dead in the bathroom, and only closets filled the far wall. Nathan ran to the window and opened the balcony door. Behind him, there were more gunshots, and then a dark-suited figure stumbled into the room. There was a cluster of more shots and the figure staggered, falling to the floor.

  Nathan stepped outside onto the balcony, shutting the glass door behind him.

  He was instantly cold, dressed only in
his underwear and wet with Jude's blood. He looked down at the twenty story drop off the balcony. There was no way he could climb down. He looked across the street at the condo building that faced his. There was a similar balcony attached to a similar penthouse unit there. But the empty space between the two balconies was at least twenty yards wide.

  A shot rang out and a window behind Nathan shattered.

  Something told Nathan to climb over the balcony railing. He carefully slid over the railing and stood facing out at nothingness. He looked down again. Lights of police cars and emergency vehicles illuminated below him.

  Another shot tore through the meat of Nathan's right shoulder. He looked back through the broken window as the cowled SWAT team moved into the bedroom, rifles raised. One was coming toward the balcony door, while another kept Nathan covered. Nathan turned away, again fixing his eyes on the balcony of the adjacent building. Without thinking, Nathan let go of the railing behind him and pushed off with his feet. He didn't fall, but flew. Shots cut through the air around him.

  He hit the far balcony awkwardly, scrambling to grab hold of its railing. He almost lost his grip on the slick metal with his blood-soaked hands, but eventually got his weight over the railing and collapsed in a heap on the concrete slab. More gunfire came from balcony he'd just left, shattering the glass above him. Nathan scrambled through a broken pane and crawled frantically across the foreign bedroom floor.

  Nathan paused before exiting the room, marveling at his feat. Only then, removed from the immediate danger, did the enormity of it all sink in. He had flown. Another burst of rifle fire cracked through the plate windows.

  Nathan quickly found the front door to the apartment. He ran through the hall, grasping his wounded shoulder, and arrived at the bank of elevators. His kicked the down arrow with a toe, and instantly an elevator opened behind him.

  Nathan turned to find the elevator already occupied by three passengers: Peters stood in the center of the car, head bowed, checking his phone, flanked on either side by a gas-masked special ops goon.

  Nathan stood frozen to the spot as rifles snapped to the goon's shoulders.

  Peters raised his head and smiled.

  Chapter 27

  The lights flicked off, block by block, as the power grid of the city blinked out.

  It was either a malfunction, or some smart whip realized what power source had been fueling the mayhem in the city the whole time. Either way, the dying of the lights was met by pained howls from the rioting Stems. Eventually – theoretically – they'd run out of power. A Stem couldn't survive without the power grid. How long it would take for each and every manic Stem's battery to run down, however, no one could hazard a guess.

  The Wagoneer made its slow way through the darkened back streets of town.

  The battle lines between the Stems factions seemed more delineated now: the more screwball, powerful crazies were preying on those Stems that had not yet de-evolved. What factors were affecting the onset of the madness wasn't instantly obvious, but there seemed to be no one fully unaffected by the contagion. Those Stems that weren't actively rioting seemed to be engaged in questionable pursuits – watering their lawns while their houses burned behind them for example, or setting up a table and chairs in the middle of an intersection, complete with napkins and lit candles, and sitting down to a dinner of D cell batteries. No one seemed immune to the phage. At least, no one who'd been converted.

  The rioters mostly ignored the Wagoneer and its cargo of Pukes. Those that ventured close to the slow moving truck were quickly dealt with by a blast from Sweet Beat's shotgun. The freeways and major arterials were completely blocked with abandoned and burning cars, so Prime had little choice but to stick to the back roads. It was slow going, working their way over the hump of Capital Hill and along the ridge towards the I-90 bridge. But as the night wore on, and mayhem grew in its pitch, they closed in on the floating bridge.

  Elder Tull watched the whole city roll away behind him as he sat perched backwards looking out the rear window of the Wagoneer.

  Seattle had always been his home – he'd lived there his whole life. While the others had come into the city to go to the university, Elder had grown up only blocks from it. The sight of his city in flames... the idea that he might be leaving town, perhaps permanently, caught in his craw. When food had started getting short, when Prime had started his excursions out to the hinterlands in search of anything edible, Elder had resisted accompanying him. The fear of leaving Seattle, the thought that he might never be able to return, had been enough to keep Elder within the city limits. Not even his empty belly had driven him to venture much farther than ten or twenty blocks from the familiar comfort the Ave. It was his home.

  But now he had to leave.

  The city receded into the dark behind the Wagoneer. Elder watched it slowly fade. As the wooded avenues of the Mount Baker neighborhood began to envelop the truck, Elder felt like he was already lost in the wilderness. When there was only blackness to look out at through the rear window, Elder turned forward in his seat.

  "We'll dump the Wagoneer as close as we can to the floating bridge and take the footpaths out onto the bridge deck," Prime said to everyone and no one. "The checkpoints will be at the other end of the tunnel, I bet... Or maybe the far end of the bridge... I think we'll have a better shot on foot. This road should bring us out right where the tunnel ends..."

  The headlights were illuminating a quiet line of parked cars and dark, luxurious view homes over the lake. There was no rioting, no violence here. You could easily fool yourself into believing that nothing untoward was happening in the city that evening. The streets were almost serene. But no one in the Wagoneer let their guard drop, continuing to scan the shadows as vigilantly as they had been all evening. Prime brought the truck to a halt, pulled hard on the parking break, and killed the headlights.

  They unloaded from the Wagoneer, slinging the backpacks full of ammunition and what food was left from the Potluck onto their backs.

  As they checked their weapons and secured their loads, Elder was distracted by a rustling in the darkness. As the others stepped off the quiet residential street, following the thin bike path down towards the bridge, Elder paused to investigate. He drew his handgun, stepped towards a cluster of bushes beside one dark home, and held his breath.

  Elder saw a small figure hunched over behind the bush. As he circled it, he kept his pistol level, ready to snap off a shot. The more of the hunched figure he saw, the more he realized it was a child hiding in the shrubbery. Prudence told Elder he should simply shoot whatever he found behind the bush, but he couldn't bring himself to unload on a child, Stem or not. He came around until the stooped child was fully in view.

  The child looked up from its business and growled at Elder.

  The child was a crazy, her face smeared with blood. She had caught a cat and was chewing on its middle, tearing back the fur and feasting on the raw meat.

  The Stem was eating.

  That fact alone was enough to make Elder stumble back in shock. That was when Elder looked around and realized he'd been abandoned. He turned and sprinted after the others along the bicycle path, breaking out of the trees above the expanse of the I-90.

  Elder paused in shock. He'd expected that they'd make the bridge crossing mostly alone – the last of the surviving Pukes in the city making a quiet escape to Drew Arrow's estate. But what he saw in the moonlight, stretching the length of the floating bridge surprised him: a massive congregation of foot traffic, moving silently, peacefully, across the bridge.

  It appeared that more than just Prime had heard Drew Arrow's radio message.

  It was impossible for them all to be Pukes. As Elder caught up to the others, moving down onto the bridge deck, he realized that almost no one crossing the bridge was unmodified. They were Stems, apparently unaffected by the contagion yet, but tired and battered from the rioting. They were fleeing the city towards the only shining light that could be seen in the bleak
darkness.

  Elder, Eydie, Prime, Kevin and Beat merged into the mass of humanity. Everyone was moving with purpose, heads down, carrying on their backs what little they could grab at a moment's notice. Elder and the others simply melded into the crowd, pushing forward across the bridge.

  "So much for the stealthy exit," Kevin commented, as they descended towards the level of the lake's surface.

  "They can't all expect Drew Arrow to help them," Elder said.

  "Where else are they going to go?" Eydie asked.

  "Drew Arrow won't help them," Prime said. "He specifically relayed his message to Pukes." Prime pushed forward, leading the others. His bulk marked him apart, as always. He seemed like an adult surrounded by children. Like the Pied Piper playing his flute.

  "I think they'll take the slim odds of Drew Arrow's mercy over the odds back there," Eydie said as she looked back over her shoulder at the dark city behind her.

  "Fuck this," Prime cursed, drawing a few hesitant looks from the surrounding crowd. "If one of these sons-of-bitches starts flipping out..."

  "Just keep walking, Prime."

  "We're sitting ducks out here..."

  "Just keep walking."

  "I– I saw a kid back there," Elder looked back.

  "A what?" Prime was only half listening. "A kid?"

  "Yeah, in the bushes where we parked. She was... eating..."

  "What? Stems can't eat."

  "Yeah, but she was eating a cat..."

  "That's insane–" Prime was cut short. Simultaneously, they all heard the sound.

  It was the rush of a jet engine, far away, but closing in. All eyes shot to the sky, scanning the stars in the moonlight. A murmur of concern rose from the crowd. Kevin was the first to spot it, and pointed at a black crucifix against the night's sky.

  The thundering of jet engines grew until the sound was almost unbearable. Then it was passing overhead, flying low. So close that it was more felt than seen.

  "What the hell?" Kevin screamed over the roar of engines.

  "We've got to move!" Prime said with sudden urgency.