52 Project #16: Norris and the Plague Doctors 2/3

[alara]

Norris had been with the doctors for two months by the time he made his first full costume. Jessie had made him a suit of leather armor because you needed to have that here, and a mask – he’d gotten one that looked like Spider-Man but colored like Venom because it was black with white lines – but she’d had him working on making one of his own for himself.

His costume was lumpy and it pinched in some places and it was too loose in others, but he’d made it himself and it would protect him from being bitten by a deader. He went to the lab where the doctors he knew were working. “Hey, Sarah, check out my armor! I made it myself!”

Sarah looked up from her microscope and smiled. “Nice. You’re getting good at this.”

“So how are things going?” He leaned on the wall in an elaborate pose of being cool.

“Pretty good, actually,” she said. “We’re going out to collect some more specimens in a couple of days; we want some fresh deaders who we can do some brain scans on.”

“That sounds scary. The brain scans, I mean.”

“Not really. We fasten them down with plenty of rope. We can’t use metal because the MRI machine would just pull it off, but the nylon rope we use is practically unbreakable.”

“Can I help?”

Sarah sighed. “Norris, we’ve been over this.”

“I’ve been studying biology and chemistry online! There’s a computer someone left in my room! I could be like your nurse and help you out.”

“We have actual nurses,” Sarah pointed out. “Who are adults, and went to nursing school. What’s wrong with helping out with the leatherworking? Are you having problems with Jessie?”

“No, no! Jessie’s great. She’s fine. But you guys don’t get a lot of new recruits; she says my armor was the first all-new piece she’s made in months, and mostly she’s just repairing what you guys use. I wanna do something that’s more help.”

“I just don’t think—”

“I could wash your petri dishes, and organize your slides,” Norris said desperately. “I bet you’ve got a lot of dishwashing you need to do. I’m great at washing dishes.” He glanced at the lab sink. There were, in fact, a good number of petri dishes, flasks, and other glassware sitting next to the sink waiting to be washed.

“You are, huh?” Sarah lifted her eyebrows, but she was smiling. “Well, tell you what. Why don’t you wash up those dishes and show us what you can do, okay?”

So over the next few days, Norris washed dishes. He fed mice and cleaned their bedding, which was a euphemism for changing the shredded newspaper in their cages that was covered with pee and poop. He swept. He cleaned off counters with a bleach solution. And he talked to the doctors, asking them about what they used to do before the zombies, did they have families, what did they enjoy doing in their spare time. Sarah used to work as a researcher for the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, but the government had cut CDC funding in less than half, a year before the zombies, so she had moved back to Baltimore, where she’d grown up. Aaron Weiss, the older fellow who’d been driving the van when Norris had arrived, used to be a researcher at Johns Hopkins. He had a wife and two adult kids, who lived on the campus but not in the main building, and they raised goats and made soap, and grew tomatoes. Vinay Narayan had come to the United States when he was a baby, and his parents had saved all the money they made from the restaurant they ran to send him to medical school, but they’d been very disappointed when he decided to go into medical research rather than a practice, because medical research didn’t pay as well as being a practicing physician. Aileen Walsh had been a practicing doctor, but had joined the plague doctors because her husband had been bitten. Raoul Alvarez continued to be an asshole and wouldn’t tell Norris anything.

There were many more doctors than this group of five, but they all worked in their own labs. Dr. Weiss was sort of the leader of this lab, kind of, but they all had ideas and argued with each other and made suggestions. No one just listened to Dr. Weiss unless they thought he was right.

When he was done cleaning up, most days, Sarah and Aaron praised his work and Vinay praised his work ethic. Aileen was usually concentrating on something and probably didn’t even notice him. Raoul, of course, had nothing good to say, but Norris didn’t expect differently.

The night before the doctors were going out to collect specimens, Norris went to the cafeteria and got dinner. And then he went to the garage and concealed himself behind a van that was in a state of partial repair, with its axles up on concrete blocks instead of having wheels.

Norris tried to stay awake, figuring that if he was awake when they came in, it would make it a lot easier for him to sneak into whatever van they took. It was a lost cause, though. He worked too hard during the day to be able to stay up late anymore. At some point, his eyes closed and his head nodded.

***

Norris had always been a “gifted” child, singled out in school as one of the smart kids. It had enabled him to get away with shit that none of his friends could have. His parents trained him to clearly enunciate and speak standard English around white people and anyone in authority, and he got a reputation as the kid who would stand up and challenge the teacher for bullying students, using excessive punishments, or acting racist… and would win, a lot of the time. His dad was a college professor and his mom was a doctor, and they made sure that the school authorities knew them as Professor and Doctor Wilkins, not Mr. and Mrs. They were both active in the PTA, they bought from school fundraisers, they chaperoned and drove for school field trips, they donated a lot of school supplies. It got them considerable credit with the school, as did Norris’ high scores on standardized tests.

In truth, Norris had never been all that good at language arts – he’d learned to read early but he couldn’t care less about diagramming a sentence or figuring out analogies. His parents had drilled him on that stuff back when school was a thing, to make sure he could get high scores on the tests, because high scores on the tests, for a black kid, meant being treated by the school as valuable and therefore if the school gave him shit for standing up for his rights, the threat of pulling him out and putting him in private school was one the school had taken seriously. In math and science, his subjects of interest, he had been a genuine prodigy. Dad had taught him set theory at the kitchen table when he was 4, and the basics of algebra when he was 7. Mom had watched science documentaries with him since he was 5, about black holes and bacteria and animal behavior and the physics of bridge building.

When the zombies had come, they’d all gone on the run, all three of them. They’d moved into a nearby store that had the rolling metal covers to put over the windows, because the store owner had been attacked by zombies in the very early days and no one else had come to claim the place. It had been a convenience store, so there was food, but the food had eventually run out. Mom and Dad had gone out to scavenge more food and watch each other’s backs against zombies. They hadn’t been careful enough about humans. On one of their trips out, some white guy shot Dad and then claimed he thought he was a zombie. Mom didn’t say what had happened after that, but Norris strongly suspected she’d shot the guy.

After that, Mom and Norris would go out together. Norris already knew a little about how to shoot, because Dad used to take him to a range to teach him. Dad had been big on knowing how to use weapons to defend yourself and having legal guns. He’d drilled Mom and Norris in how to shoot, because it was the best way to take out deaders. They didn’t always die when you hit them in the head, but if you hit them with enough shots in the torso, you could destroy enough of their bodies that they’d fall down and be unable to walk, and if you could make leg shots you could cripple them even faster. Crippled zombies would still crawl or slither, so they weren’t helpless, but you could cover them with lighter fluid and set them on fire if they were crawling. He and Mom used to carry water guns full of lighter fluid, and matches.

On the concrete floor of the garage, he slept badly, waking up several times. Memories of Mom and Dad standing up for him, of the things they’d taught him, haunted him as he tried to sleep. Most nights he worked until he was exhausted, and then he collapsed into bed and let everything go black, and he slept so deeply that when the alarm went off in the morning he never remembered any dreams. He kept the grief at bay by keeping busy, like he’d kept the grief about Dad at bay by focusing on helping Mom to keep them both alive. But he was much too uncomfortable to sleep deeply right now, and he couldn’t stop memories from spooling through his head.

Several times during the night, tears pricked his eyes, and he sniffled, but he managed to keep from breaking into full-on sobs. Men didn’t cry, and if he had no mom and dad then he had to be a man, right? He had to be tough and strong if he wanted to survive… and if he wanted to help the doctors save Mom, despite their resistance.

All his life, Norris had gotten anything he was passionate about wanting. He hadn’t gotten every video game he’d ever wanted, he’d never gotten the puppy he’d asked for, but any time he’d wanted something really, really badly, and had shown he was willing to work hard for it, his mom and dad had moved heaven and earth to make it happen. Including going to teachers or the principal and demanding he be allowed to do that thing – like join the other three kids who were doing independent math study, when he was in fourth grade, because it wasn’t fair that he was excluded when he had the best grades in the class, and the fact that they’d been in a different teacher’s classroom than him last year and had been assigned then, and his new teacher hadn’t wanted to “rock the boat” by adding any more kids to independent study, should be irrelevant. His whole life had taught him that if you work hard, you do everything right and present yourself as well-dressed and clean and you talk mostly like a white kid with an advanced vocabulary rather than how you’d talk to your friends, you make yourself important and invaluable through your hard work, and then you make demands, you get what you want. He’d tried all that. Now it was time to be really, really pushy.

Despite being hungry – he hadn’t had breakfast – and exhausted because he’d slept so badly, he perked up as soon as one of the doctors came in and unlocked the van they were taking today. While they went around the side to check the tires and make sure there was gas and stuff like that, Norris climbed in through the back doors that had been left open, and hid under the specimen table, where normally they kept the box of ice water. When they came in with the box of ice water, he scooted out from under the table and made himself very small, between the specimen table and the barrier closing off the front seats from the back. Once the box was in, he crawled back under the table. If he lay very flat and he kept his head turned sideways, he could just barely fit between the lid of the box and the bottom of the table.

The doctors on today’s mission were Sarah, Raoul, Aaron driving, and Aileen in the front seat rather than Vinay, who’d been there on the mission where Norris came in. They weren’t looking for a stowaway, so they left the back wide open with no doctor anywhere around it, multiple times, as they got the stuff they wanted to load. It wasn’t hard for Norris to stay clear of them. He was wearing the leather armor Jessie had made for him, not the one he’d made himself, because it was better made and fit better, but his mask was balled up and stuffed in a pocket. That was lumpy and uncomfortable, but Norris was relying on his black leather and black hair and dark brown skin to make him nearly invisible under here. His mask was black but painted with reflective white stripes in the pattern of a Spider-Man mask; it was designed to make him easier to see in the dark, so he couldn’t wear it right now. Deaders went by smell more than sight; their sight usually started failing them as the fungus invaded more and more of their brain. The idea was to make him easier for humans to see, and right now, he didn’t want humans to see him.

The van started. He could feel the engine rumbling through the box of water he was lying on. The speed bump actively hurt, making him hit his head on the bottom of the bed he was lying under. He managed not to yell. They needed to be a lot farther away from their base before they found him. Norris drifted off, despite his discomfort, lulled by the rumbling of the engine and the fact that he’d had so little sleep the night before.

***

“Shit!”

Norris woke with a start and banged his head on the bottom of the bed again. There was a white beaked mask peering under the bed, staring at him.

“Goddamn it, Sarah, your little fanboy’s stowed away!” Norris couldn’t see the doctor’s face under the mask, and the voice modulator made it hard to tell his tone, but it wasn’t hard for Norris to tell it was Raoul, and he was pissed.

The van pulled to a stop. “Get out from under there,” Sarah snapped at Norris. Yeah, she was pissed too.

Norris scrambled out. “Why were you even looking under there?” he asked.

“Kid, this is no time to ask smart-ass questions,” Raoul said.

“What’s going on?” Aaron yelled from the front. “The kid’s in the van?”

“Not for very much longer,” Raoul said, pulling open the side door. The smell of deaders – earth and rot – wafted into the van.

Norris backed away from him. “Oh, that’s just great,” he said. “You’re mad I stowed away so you’re going to kill me?”

“What the fuck. No one’s going to kill you.” He couldn’t see Raoul’s eyes under the goggles of the plague doctor mask, but the way Raoul moved his head, dismissively, he was pretty sure Raoul was rolling his eyes. “But you’re getting out of the van. Now.”

“What did you think was going to happen here?” Sarah asked. “You thought we’d get to our destination and then you’d pop out and we’d be grateful for your help once there were actual deaders to deal with so we wouldn’t be angry that you’d disobeyed?”

“Kind of, yeah,” Norris said. “I figured you’d be angry, but I thought I could be helpful anyway.”

“Well, you can’t be. You’re in the way and I want you out of this van, now,” Raoul said.

“I thought you said you weren’t gonna kill me?” Norris looked Raoul straight in the goggles. “Because what do you think’s gonna happen if you throw me out of this van in a city full of deaders, without any gun or supplies or anything? You took my mom, who do you think’s gonna help me survive?”

“We didn’t take your mom, you little shit! She was turning! She would have bitten you if we hadn’t grabbed her when we did, because you’re the dumbass who kept acting like she was going to be just fine, like she had a bad cold or something and not that her brain was being taken over by a fungus!”

Fuck you, Norris thought, but didn’t say. Mom and Dad had taught him what swearing actually meant, when a kid did it, instead of just telling him those were bad words he should never use. Swearing was for when he needed to present as tough or adult, or when the situation was very serious and he needed to shock someone into listening to him. When he was trying to present as the child he was, or express that he needed help, or he was talking to authorities with direct power over him, he should never swear. He might not have exactly followed the rules when they’d first taken Mom, but they hadn’t had authority over him then, and now they did.

“Ok, fine. My mom was turning anyway. I’ve been trying as hard as I can to do anything I can to help you guys, because you’re the only hope my mom has. That’s why I came here, because I thought maybe I could help.”

“How is this helping? All you’re doing is getting in the way,” Sarah said.

Norris rolled his eyes. “It wasn’t my idea to stop the van and make a whole big thing of this,” he said. “That’s on you.”

In the front passenger seat, Aileen laughed. “He’s got you there.”

“The hell with this. Get out of the van!”

“No,” Norris said, again looking Raoul in the eye, or where his eyes presumably were, anyway. “If you want to kill me so bad, you’re gonna have to pick me up kicking and screaming and throw me out to the deaders yourself.”

“No one is going to leave you to the deaders—” Sarah started.

“Do you guys even have noses?” Belatedly Norris remembered that they actually didn’t; the beaks of their masks had filters in them to keep potential spores out, and a lot of the doctors put things like lavender sachets in the beak so they didn’t have to smell the deaders. “Look, I don’t have a bundle of herbs shoved up in front of my nose. I can smell the deaders. That’s how you stay alive when you live on the street and try to stay one step ahead of them; you gotta use all your senses, not just your eyes and ears.”

“We don’t need to use smell to find them,” Aileen said. “We have drones and cameras.”

“Yeah, but you aren’t using them right now, so I guess I’m the only one who’s noticed that there’s probably a whole lot of deaders moving in on this van and you should probably close the door and start driving!”

“He’s not actually wrong,” Aaron called. “Shut the door, folks, I’m going to get back on the road. We’ve got a mass of deaders coming in behind us.”

Raoul sighed. “Yeah, all right. Whatever the fuck.” He pulled the door shut. “But as soon as we get to someplace where it’s safe to ditch you, you’re out of here, kid.”

“Nowhere’s safe except for your base,” Norris said. “And I think it’s pretty rude to threaten to throw someone out just because they wanted to help. I haven’t slowed you down; you stopping the van to have a whole long thing about are you gonna throw me out or not is what slowed you down.”

“We can’t take the filters out of our masks,” Sarah said. “But you should be wearing your mask, Norris. It has a filter in it.”

“If the deaders are close enough that we can see them, then I could wear my mask because I wouldn’t need to smell them.” He patted the pocket his mask was stuffed in. “I brought it with me in case it comes in handy.”

The van suddenly lurched to a halt with an explosive sound. Norris, Raoul, and Sarah, all of whom were standing in the back, were thrown into the grate that separated the back from the front seats. Aaron yelled “Shit!”

“What just happened?” Aileen shouted.

“We blew a tire. More than one, I think. I need to get out and take a look.”

“You can’t get out and take a look if there are deaders in the area!” Sarah said, getting to her feet. “Raoul, Norris, you two okay?”

“Just peachy. I get thrown around the inside of a van all day long. For fun,” Raoul growled. “Fuck that hurts. I think I hit my head.” The hats the doctors wore, which were fastened to their masks with snaps and under their neck with straps, were of stiff enough leather to provide some cranial protection, but they weren’t nearly as good as a bicycle or football helmet.

“I’m okay,” Norris said. “Green bones!”

Sarah’s masked gaze fell on him for several seconds. “Oh, wait. You mean ‘greenstick’ bones, don’t you?”

“Yeah, that. Like my bones are flexible ‘cause they still have a lot of cartilage in them, because I’m not grown up yet?”

“Greenstick,” Sarah said.

“Deploying the drone,” Aileen said.

“That is a much better idea than Aaron going out to look,” Sarah said fervently.

The drone was mounted on the top of the van. Aileen had the controller out and the screen she was using to monitor its camera – it looked something like a Nintendo Switch. “Oh, wow, this is bad,” she said.

“What do you see?”

“Caltrops,” Aileen said. “More specifically, there’s strips of wood across the road that are black, and hard to see, but there are nails sticking out of them.”

“Damn. Who would do that?” Aaron said. “Don’t people have enough problems with the deaders that they’ve got to make problems for other people?”

“What if it was the deaders?” Sarah asked.

“Huh. We’ve seen deaders use rocks as tools, but not anything as sophisticated as caltrops,” Aaron said. “Shit. Are they getting smarter?”

“I think we have other things to worry about,” Raoul said. He was looking out the back window. “That’s a lot of deaders.”

“Grenades?” Sarah said, and then corrected herself as she peered out the window. “No, the range is too close. We can’t drive out of here.”

“We need to get out of the van with the guns while we can. If they get too close, they’ll mob us,” Aaron said.

“It’s a little late for that,” Aileen said, sighing. “I’ve got deaders moving in on the sides as well. Someone’s gonna have to go up on the roof.”

“Shit. I hate this,” Raoul said. “All right, goddammit it.”

He reached up and opened the sunroof, wobbling visibly. “Fuck, I hate this.”

“What are you doing?” Norris asked.

“I don’t have time to explain shit to you,” Raoul said. “I’ve got deaders to shoot.”

“He’s going up on the roof,” Sarah said. “It’s dangerous; if the recoil knocks him off the roof, he’ll fall in with the deaders.”

In the background, Norris could hear Aaron on the CB radio, calling for backup. “How quick is whoever Dr. Aaron’s calling going to get out here?” he asked Sarah.

“Probably not fast enough to keep deaders from finding a way in if we don’t shoot a bunch of them.”

Raoul had knelt on the floor to open the weapons trunk, which was bolted to the floor. He pulled out a rifle, but when he stood up he stumbled and nearly fell. “Shit,” he mumbled.

“What’s wrong?” Sarah asked.

“Just a little dizzy. I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not.” Sarah walked over to him. “You’re wobbling on your feet, after you hit your head. You cannot go up on the roof.” She sighed. “I’m going to have to do it.”

“Fuck no. I can manage.”

“If you get dizzy and fall down while you’re on top of the van, you will fall into a mob of deaders. That’s not acceptable. Aaron and Aileen can’t get onto the roof from where they are, so it’s got to be me.”

Norris didn’t think a middle-aged woman with bad knees was a much better choice than a man with a concussion. “Let me do it instead,” Norris said.

Raoul was plainly glaring at him, though Norris couldn’t actually see his eyes. “How the fuck is that going to help?”

“I know how to shoot,” Norris said. “My mom and dad made sure I knew how.”

“You couldn’t handle the recoil, kid.”

“I can if someone down here is holding one of my feet or something,” Norris said. “I’m short. My center of gravity’s lower. And I’m lighter than any of you guys, so you can hold onto me and keep me anchored.”

“You’re ten.”

“I actually turned eleven a week ago.”

“Can you even handle the recoil? At all?”

“You gotta show me your guns before I can tell you that. But I’ve shot a bunch of different kinds of guns.”

“Take your pick, Mr. Expert Marksman,” Raoul sneered.

Norris looked over the guns. Handguns – no. The ones that were powerful enough to be sure of taking down a deader had too much recoil for him. Shotgun – no. It was a very short-range weapon, and you could either fill it with buckshot, which usually wouldn’t even annoy the zombies, or slugs, in which case the fact that it was really hard to aim it made it a problem. The issue with deaders was that they didn’t feel pain, they didn’t seem to really need to breathe and they didn’t seem to really need blood circulation all that much, so guns usually needed to hit zombies in the head to stop them. Or, technically, the kneecaps; they couldn’t keep coming after you if you destroyed the structural integrity of their legs, but that was a lot harder of a shot than a head shot, most of the time.

He chose the 9 mm rifle. “From the roof of the van, I ought to be able to hit heads better than anything else, and if I use a rifle, I can brace it to get a better shot and get less recoil,” he said.

“How long have you been shooting guns?” Raoul asked. It was the first thing he’d said to Norris that Norris could remember that didn’t sound sarcastic or sneering.

“Two years. My dad thought that it was really important that I understand guns and know how to shoot them because if you’re black, you don’t want to call the cops if you get in trouble; they’re just as likely to kill you as help you. He wasn’t expecting a zombie apocalypse, but I’ve done a lot more shooting since the deaders came than I used to do at the range.” He looked down at his feet. “If we hadn’t lost most of our weapons because deaders got into our camp at night and we had to run, Mom probably wouldn’t have got bitten, but we were down to a shotgun and Mom had a .22 and then we ran out of ammo for it and that was when she got bit.”

“Now see, I always used to tell my brother not to carry a gun because the cops are even more likely to shoot you if you have one,” Sarah said. “Did your parents tell you about Philando Castile?”

“They’re coming up the hood,” Aaron reported. “I’m electrifying the body before you guys climb up there. No one touch the walls of the van.”

There was a zapping sound. Norris could see, through the windshield, deaders twitching and jerking before they finally fell off the van.

“Ok, clear. All the ones that were touching the van are stunned.” Electricity didn’t typically kill deaders, but their muscles ran on electricity just the same as humans did, so it could stun and paralyze them. “Whoever’s going up on the roof, you need to go up now.”

“I’m going!” Norris said. “Hey, Sarah, can you help me up? I can’t reach the sun roof.”

“I’ll do it,” Raoul said. “Come on, kid.”

Norris gave Raoul a suspicious look, but accepted the boost up to the roof. He crouched on the roof. Deaders reached for him, but the van was eight feet tall; none of them could reach. They might start climbing on each other’s bodies or trying to climb up the hood again, though.

He sat himself down on the edge of the sunroof gap and dangled one foot down, The positioning was a little awkward, but it would let someone spot him. “Okay, hand me up my rifle.”

“It’s not ‘your’ rifle, kid, it’s ours,” Raoul groused, but handed the rifle up. Norris took a few moments to get himself situated, put the rifle up against his shoulder, sighted through the scope, picked out a deader who looked like what if his social studies teacher was a lot heavier and her face was rotting off, and fired. The recoil knocked him back slightly, but he was braced for it and Raoul was holding onto his ankle, so he couldn’t fly off the van.

“Got one,” he crowed proudly. “Straight in the head.”

“Yeah yeah, stop congratulating yourself and get as many of the others as you can. They might not all be that easy.”

“It’s hard to miss their heads from up here,” Norris replied.

“We can roll forward,” he heard Aaron saying. “With two flats I don’t wanna go faster than 15 mph, maybe 20 max, but that’s a lot faster than deaders can move.”

“What about the other two tires?” Aileen was asking, but Norris didn’t hear the response because he was shooting another deader, and the gun was loud.

His accuracy rate was about 80% -- it was a good rifle, not too heavy, and the deaders were a lot closer than he would normally use a rifle against. The misses generally hit a deader, because they were packed in so closely he couldn’t miss, but if it wasn’t a head shot the deader would keep trying to get into the van or to climb up and drag him down.

Deaders tended to congregate near where there were gunshots. They were too stupid to recognize danger to themselves, but they could recognize that the sound of a gun meant a human, and it was humans they were driven to bite. Norris’ activities had caused the deaders to bunch around the back and sides; he’d shot the two that were still trying to climb up the hood. So Aileen opened her passenger side door, ducked down, grabbed the piece of wood with nails in it that had popped the right tire, and got back in before any of the deaders toward the back managed to reach her. The one that got closest, Norris shot.

When the magazine was empty, Raoul told him to come back in; they were going to try to move, now that he’d thinned the deaders out considerably.

Aaron drove forward very slowly, front rims turned sharply so the van eased out of the way of the board with nails that had popped the left tire. Some of the deaders hung on to the door handles. One managed to get onto the front passenger door handle, and was hanging there. Aileen rolled down the window, just a crack, and while the deader was trying to get its fingers in, she pulled up a pistol, placed the barrel in the window crack, and fired point-blank at the deader. Its head exploded, probably due to the extreme short range; Norris hadn’t gotten any of his targets’ heads to explode.

“Backup’s on the way,” Aaron said. “They’ve got two spare tires for us, and a lot more guns than we brought. Gonna be another ten minutes or so.”

“I could go up and shoot some more,” Norris offered. “We’re not moving fast enough for me to fall off if someone’s holding my leg.”

“Think you’ve done enough, kid,” Raoul said gruffly, but not meanly like he’d been doing most of the time Norris had known him.

“Everyone get onto the rubber mats if you’re not in a seat, and don’t touch the walls,” Aaron said. “I’m electrifying again.”

The zap knocked all the remaining deaders off the door handles, and the van rolled slowly away from the cluster. “So here’s our problem,” Sarah said to Norris. “We can’t complete the mission without changing the tires, but we can’t stop long enough to change the tires with all those deaders out there. We can roll on the rims faster than they can walk, but you know that with all those gunshots, every deader in range to hear is going to be coming our way, so even if we outrun the ones behind us, we’ll encounter new parties of them before long.”

“So what’re we gonna do?” Norris asked.

“Roll on the rims and wait for backup,” Aaron said. “If we get into a big cluster of them, electrify, shoot from the roof, all the stuff we’ve been doing.”

“We try to avoid killing them,” Sarah said. “If we can. The oldest ones, the ones that are rotting, are obviously too far gone to save, but the ones that recently turned… if we can catch them and put them on ice, we might be able to save them. Protecting ourselves is more important, of course, but if we can avoid a confrontation, we will.”

“Not much we can do with two flat tires, though,” Aaron said. “Except hope we don’t run into another cluster before backup arrives.”

They did, in fact, run into another cluster before backup arrived, but only by a minute or so. They electrified the outside, and then a van full of plague doctors showed up. Doctors in their leather costumes and masks poured out of the van. One of them pulled off his mask. “Hey! Uglies! Over here!”

As the cluster of deaders moved toward him and the other new doctors, he hastily put his mask back on. As soon as most of the mass of deaders was far enough away from Norris’ van that friendly fire wasn’t much of a risk, the new doctors lit up the mass with assault rifles. Norris watched from the back window of the van, the one on the door.

“Cool,” he said. “Hey, how come we don’t have any AR-15s?”

“You wouldn’t be allowed to use them anyway,” Sarah said.

“Why did that one guy take off his mask?”

“Deaders operate by smell and sight, mostly. And sound, but there are so many imitation human sounds out there – tv, movies, music – that what gets them to really focus in is smell and sight. We don’t look human to them; they’re, well, too stupid to figure out that we’re human beings in costumes. It’s one of the reasons we wear these outfits.” He could hear a grin in her voice even through the distortion. “And they can’t smell us through the leather and the scented herb sachets. So if we need to lure them somewhere… one of us has to expose their face, so they can smell a human and see a human head.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Yes. But in this case, not very; he was surrounded by other doctors with guns.”

“I’m gonna help polish them off,” Raoul said. “You guys gonna take care of the tires?”

“Yeah.” Sarah got a piece of equipment Norris didn’t recognize out of the weapons trunk. “I’ll bring the tire jack up front and we’ll get the van up and take the flats off. Norris, you can’t be in the car when we do that. Put on your mask.”

“Okay.” Norris pulled it out of his pocket and put it on. He’d modeled it kind of after Miles Morales, but with Venom’s color scheme. Now all he could smell was leather. “Can deaders tell I’m human?”

“Your body shape is a lot closer to human than ours, so… maybe? It might slow them down figuring you out, but don’t bet on it saving you.”

Outside, Raoul was leaning against the back of the van, his own rifle in his hands. He fired, braced against the van, and shot down a straggling deader who seem to be confused about which direction it wanted to go. “I’ll give you this, kid. I didn’t expect you to be any good with that gun.”

“Uh, thanks?” The rifle fired again, and another deader dropped. “Do you want me to get the gun I was using and help out?”

“Naah, I’m good.” Raoul turned his head to the left and right. “Actually, do me a favor and tell me if there are any deaders approaching from the front or sides of the van. We’ve got to keep them away from the others while they’re changing the tires.”

“Sure.” Norris walked around the van. Aileen and Aaron were pumping the tire jack to lift the van. Sarah was unscrewing the things that held the tires on – Norris’ parents hadn’t taught him anything about fixing cars, so he had no idea what any of the car parts were named except the obvious ones, like tires and windshield. There were no deaders that way. There was, however, one wandering deader approaching from the right side of the van. It was one of the more decrepit ones. Norris told Raoul, who came around the side and shot it down.

“So, we cool now?”

“You know, this shit we’re doing, it’s not a game. It’s deadly serious. I didn’t want some kid getting in the way or getting hurt.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t been in your way.”

“You’re ten—”

“—Eleven—”

“—Point is, you’re a kid. Kids aren’t exactly famous for being great at staying out of the way.” Raoul glanced over at him. “You know a lot of shit for a kid.”

“My mom was a doctor and my dad was a college professor. They made sure I knew a lot of stuff.”

“I’m a doctor and I didn’t know any of this shit when I was your age.”

Norris shrugged. “I guess I’ve always tried really hard.” He grinned. “And I’m pretty smart, so I learn fast.”

“Haven’t seen you at the range, though. Back at the base.”

“Yeah, I’m not allowed to go by myself, and Sarah and Jessie are always busy.” He looked at Raoul sideways. “Maybe sometime if you’re going, I could tag along? I could get some practice, and maybe, pick up a few pointers from watching you? I bet you know a lot.”

“You always have an angle, don’t you, kid?”

“Yeah,” Norris admitted, “but you know it’s all about helping you guys, right?” He glanced around, looking for deaders. “My dad’s dead. All I’ve got is my mom, and you’re her only hope. I tried studying biology and stuff so I could get good enough to help you with the research.”

Raoul snorted. “I don’t care how smart you are, kid, we all graduated high school, and then four years of college, and then seven years of medical school and residency… you’re not gonna be able to duplicate that when you’re ten. Doogie Howser MD isn’t actually a thing.”

Norris had no idea what that meant, but he nodded sagely as if he did. “I know. But I figured it out. You guys aren’t doctors when you’re in the field. I can’t help you in the lab more than washing dishes and stuff for you. But when you go out to get specimens for your tests, you’re, like, I don’t know. A squad of action heroes or something like that.”

“Don’t think I’ve ever heard us described like that.” Raoul shook his head. “We’re not heroes, whatever you might think.”

“You are, though. I mean, yeah, you don’t go around rescuing people. But you capture deaders and study them to try to save all the deaders. That’s heroic. If you were spending your time rescuing people, you couldn’t be working on your research, and that’s more important. If you can cure the deaders, you can save everyone at once.” Norris looked up at Raoul. “So yeah, I got angles. I figure out how to work the system. But it’s all so I can help you, because I want you to save my mom.”

All the deaders were down. The doctors from the other van brought over the two spare tires, and one of them helped Aileen and Sarah get them on the van. Aaron was an old guy, and getting the car up on the jack had apparently winded him.

“Well. I guess you’re not actually useless.” Raoul looked away. “It’s not my call, but I’m not gonna keep arguing against you helping out if you want. I just don’t want you getting hurt.”

“Zombies are going around eating people. I don’t think you grownups can do the whole ‘oh, you’re a kid, we’ll wrap you up in bubble wrap to keep you safe’ thing anymore. I’m fighting for my life and someone I love, same as you and everyone else.”

***

The tires having been changed, they moved on. The other group of doctors was out on their own mission; they headed off in a different direction as the team Norris was with drove south, deeper into the city, but still within the relatively wealthy north side.

“We’re looking for any factor that might cause a variation in response to the fungus,” Sarah said. “Race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, age, gender… anything we can find. Also, there might be environmental factors that vary depending on where they lived. So we pick up fresh deaders – as fresh as possible, and if we can get them right before they turn, like your mom, that’s ideal – from every part of the city, and out in the suburbs, and occasionally we go out to the Eastern Shore or the mountains out west or north into the more rural counties – those areas have a lot fewer deaders in general because they’re a lot less populated, but deaders hide in the woods or the swamps, out there.”

“Do you drive into swamps, then?”

She laughed. “Hell no, this poor van couldn’t handle that. We use bait. One of us takes off our mask and ostentatiously walks around the van yelling or singing. Deaders hiding in underpopulated areas are a lot hungrier than the ones around here; city deaders will sometimes ignore potential prey because their biting urge is temporarily satiated, but rural deaders will come out any time there’s any evidence of a human anywhere near them. They fall for it every time.”

This was an area with big houses, lawns that were overgrown but probably had been well-kept once, and lots of trees. “You looking to grab some rich white people today?”

“I don’t care if they’re white, black, or green, but yes, we want to grab some people who had wealth before they became deaders. See if good nutrition and health care in their time as living humans made any difference to the spread of the fungus, for better or worse.”

“I don’t see anybody on the road.”

The whole region appeared – not necessarily dead, but certainly turtled up. Many houses had boarded-up first floor windows, a thing Norris did not generally see on houses as nice as these. Some of them had bars on the windows – so they’d either gotten that before, or they’d had the resources to get them quickly put in after the deader plague had started. There were fans running in some of the second or higher floor windows; did these guys actually have electricity? Norris’ family had lived in a big, beautiful brownstone down near the art college, but their neighborhood had been primarily black, with a lot of their neighbors being renters, and they’d lost electricity early on.

In most of the city, you could see deaders stumbling along on the street, or humans traveling together in groups, heavily armed, because the only way to get food in the city was generally to loot grocery stores or to pick up food packages from the government air drop. No matter what anyone had stockpiled when things started to get rough, it had run out or gone bad by now. These folks probably mostly had cars, up here; they could drive out to rural areas where things weren’t as dangerous and buy food from farmers, the way the plague doctors did, Norris figured. They never needed to leave their houses and walk down the street, carrying their weapons, glancing around nervously and constantly, using every sense they had to try to pick up on deaders before the deaders could converge on them. At least not before all the gas in and near the city ran out.

Part of him hated them for that. Another part reminded himself that a lot of these people, it probably wasn’t their fault that other parts of the city were so poor. He shouldn’t begrudge them the relative safety they had, he should just want that safety to be shared with the entire city.

If this was still going on when he was old enough to drive, Norris vowed, he would go out to the countryside and buy fresh food and drive it down into the city and hand it out for free to anyone who was still alive. Although, what were the odds that anyone could survive another five years of this? Maybe he needed to start learning to drive now. Who was gonna give him a ticket? The doctors’ vehicles ran on stuff they could make out of corn, not standard gasoline, so they had plenty of fuel he could use.

“If there are any around here, they’re hiding in bushes or behind trees or inside abandoned commercial buildings. They go slightly dormant when there are no people to prey on; they enter a kind of torpor state until they sense prey, and then they go into action.”

“That’s where the zoomers come from,” Raoul said. “Normally deaders can’t move quickly; their metabolism is kind of shit. But when they’ve been in torpor and they sense prey, those fuckers can move their asses.”

“So we’re going to use the drones to try to find them,” Sarah said. “In an area with a lot of deaders in torpor, we can’t risk luring them out; they move too fast to handle them if there’s a large number. Fortunately, most deaders are still somewhat warmer than their environment, even if they’re all colder than human, now that the fall temperatures are coming in, and the ones who are at straight environmental temperature are far gone enough that they can’t zoom anymore.”

“What does being warm – Oh! You’re using, like, infrared scopes?” Some of the video games Norris had played in his life had featured infrared scopes, where if you found a scope and equipped yourself with it, you could see enemies by their body heat. “Those are real?”

“Yup.”

Aaron parked the car, and Aileen released the drones. She was piloting and monitoring two of them; Aaron was working another, and both Sarah and Raoul had one they were working with. Norris spent a lot of time looking over Sarah’s shoulder as she used her drone to hunt for deaders.

“Looks like there aren’t a lot,” Sarah said. “I’m getting three hiding in the bistro across the street, and wow, one managed to get into a tree. I wonder how he’s getting down.”

“He can’t climb down?”

“He can, but he won’t, because he’s too stupid to think of it. He’ll probably jump, which will likely break a leg. Still, for him to have enough intelligence to think of climbing a tree in the first place means he’s probably fresh, and if he doesn’t smash his skull open when he gets out of the tree, he might be ideal.”

“Got a bunch milling around in a house,” Raoul reported. “I’m guessing one got in and turned a whole family. Looks like three adult size and three significantly shorter.”

“Too many to take,” Sarah said regretfully. “It’s too bad, we could use some more children, and if they haven’t gotten out of the house yet, they’re probably fresh.”

Norris knew what she meant, but “we could use some more children” still sounded creepy to him. “We can’t take six deaders?”

“Nope. We don’t even have capacity to put that many on ice. We’re out to collect three specimens, and then we’ll have to head back.”

“Not seeing any northbound,” Aileen reported. “Southbound, there are some roaming the street about a dozen blocks south, but there are police cars and net barricade blocking the street, so we can’t get down that way.”

Norris’ lip curled. “Yeah, figures. The rich people decided to block the poor people from being able to get up into their neighborhood.”

“That area was pretty gentrified. Not exactly poor. Not as wealthy as here, but they had money. And tourism dollars; their neighborhood was in several cult classic movies.” Aileen sighed. “There are men wearing police armor, with weapons, manning the barricades. I suggest we don’t go farther south.”

“The deaders could just go around, couldn’t they? I mean, they aren’t walling off the whole city…”

Sarah shook her head. “Again, they can but they won’t; deaders aren’t that smart.”

“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “One might have managed to think of setting down nails in boards as caltrops. One climbed a tree. I don’t know if they’re so fresh they still have a lot of their minds, or if the fungus is adapting to use more of the host’s intelligence capacity.” He put down his drone controller. “Someone just shot my drone. I’m out.”

“Hmm.” Sarah looked over her own controller and Raoul’s. “Tree guy, and maybe a couple from the bistro if they’re fresh?”

“Yeah. Who’s doing the luring today?”

Norris put his hand up like he was in school. “I will!”

“Norris, no. This is dangerous work,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, but whoever’s doing the luring isn’t gonna be able to help the others with the poles,” Norris pointed out. “You have to take time to put your mask back on, and if they’re zoomers, that’s dangerous. And what if we go lure them out of the bistro and the family from the other house comes out? If there’s a lot of them, it’d be a good idea if all of you doctors were ready to catch them or shoot them. That means none of you should do the luring, I should, because I can’t help with the poles.”

“How are you going to outrun adult zoomers?” Raoul asked.

Norris smirked. “How’d I do it before? I can run faster than any deader long as I got good sneakers, and Jessie just got me a new pair. These are sweet.” He showed them off. Velcro straps, no chance of shoelaces tripping him, with springy arches and a lot of bounce. Also they looked cool, black with green slashes and a little bit of silver highlighting. “Can’t keep it up; they’ll catch up with me if I’ve got to run a whole block, but for a short sprint even the zoomers can’t keep up.”

Aileen pointed out, “Children have a lot more available metabolic energy than adults, and even zoomers have a lower metabolic rate than any human. He’s probably right.”

“Yes, but what if he’s wrong? The risk is unacceptable,” Sarah said sternly.

To Norris’ surprise, Raoul spoke up. “The kid wants us to treat him like he’s adult, or close enough to be valuable to the team, anyway. He survived on the streets. Let him try with the Tree Guy; that one’s probably gonna break a bone on landing. We’ll get a sense of how fast the kid can move without him being at a lot of real risk.”

“Since when do you advocate for Norris?” Sarah asked, plainly surprised.

“Since he turned out to be a good shot.”

“That was all it took for him to earn your respect, huh?” Sarah sighed. “Okay. We can try it, but I want Aaron or Aileen on standby to shoot the deader if he does look like he’s going to overtake Norris?”

“I’m ready,” Aileen said. She opened her door. “Pass me a rifle.”