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

With the grate separating the seating compartment from the back of the van, the driver and passenger couldn’t get the longer guns from the back without opening their door and then the van side door to take the gun. Raoul handed Aileen a rifle, and she got back into the van and aimed it at the tree, while Sarah and Raoul got their grabbing poles ready. “Okay, Norris,” Sarah said. “See if you can get him out of the tree.”

Norris strolled up to the tree, mask off, whistling loudly. “Wow, what do you know, here I am, a human kid, just strolling around totally unprotected because I’m sure there are no deaders up here in this nice rich neighborhood! Boy, it would sure be a shame if it turned out I was wrong and a deader showed up!”

There was movement in the tree. Norris kept the tree in his peripheral vision as he walked around it, starting to whistle again.

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

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.”

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52 Project #16: Norris and the Plague Doctors 1/3

Mom stirred slightly, moaning. “Come on,” Norris said, shaking her. “Come on, Mom, get up! There’s deaders on their way over here! You gotta get up!”

“Go,” Mom slurred. “Norris… run…”

“No, Mom! You gotta get up!”

Some part of Norris’ mind knew that what he was doing wasn’t going to work, and was incredibly dangerous besides. Mom had gotten bit by a deader last night. They’d cauterized the wound as soon as Norris had blown its head off with the shotgun, but cauterizing deader bites only worked half the time. Mom was cold, and clammy, and speaking slowly, and she wouldn’t get up. He knew, deep down, that she was changing, and therefore she was lost.

But he wouldn’t let himself recognize that part. Mom was all he had. “Mom, come on, let’s get you somewhere safe where you can get better,” he said. “We got some orange juice, we got some vitamins. I think we still got some canned chicken soup, I can heat it up for you.” Deaders didn’t like fire. It was dangerous to overuse fire because it told the deaders where you were, and the moment the fire went out, they’d move in, but if he could just get Mom to a place where they had a lockable door they could put at their back and a position to shoot from, he could start a fire and cook something for her. Campbell’s condensed soup wasn’t the best, you needed to add water to it, but he still had a few water bottles, and high salt diets were supposed to retard the spread of the zombie germs.

“Can’t. You… you… gotta… go.”

He tried to lift her, but he was an undernourished 10 year old and she was a full-grown woman. He couldn’t get her up, and she wasn’t helping. “Mom! Come on, we gotta get out of here! Wake up!”

Someone’s drone buzzed overhead, but Norris knew better than to think anyone was coming to the rescue. The drones buzzed around all the time. Norris didn’t know if they were from the government or what, but they never meant help was coming.

The deaders down the street were the slow-moving kind, not zoomers, but if Mom wouldn’t get up and move, that wouldn’t make a difference. He could smell their rot on the slight breeze, could hear their groans and grunts. “Mom!”

A black van – full-size, cargo van, not a minivan like the kind Mom used to drive – came down the alley between Norris and his mom’s hiding place, and the deaders. The passenger side window in the front seat rolled down, and Norris saw a black-gloved hand throw something round toward the deaders. Three seconds later there was an explosion. Most of the group of deaders were ripped into pieces. The remaining ones kept shuffling toward the van. Another two grenades later, and they were all gone.

The van backed into an alcove with small dumpsters. The side door slid open and out jumped two… people? Norris wasn’t sure. They had bizarre masks that looked like a cross between a gas mask and a bird’s face, white with goggles and extremely long beak-like protrusions that covered their nose and mouth. They wore broad-brimmed black hats, and black trenchcoats that covered their bodies, and black gloves, and both of them carried long poles with pincers at the end.
 

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