The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(94)

“If there’s any still in the woods, they’ll be on us in two seconds, sir. I don’t see much chance.”

Jacobs stood up, brushing impatiently at his fatigues. “There’s a way, though. There’s always a way.”

He started down the ladder, his boots clattering on the wooden rungs. There was a smear of blood on the back of his shirt. Grace squashed the cigarette under her toe and wondered again if they were only prolonging something inevitable.

It didn’t matter. With a purpose, a mission, the blackness of recent days did not seem so close. They would go to Rosewood and test his theory. Jacobs was not Whitaker, but he was capable. He knew things. And a short-term itinerary was better than none at all. They would go to Rosewood and find a brilliant solution. After a minute, Grace rose and followed Jacobs down.

In the bathroom, she found him standing over the body of Knotts, legs splayed to avoid the mess. He had opened the medicine cabinet and was rummaging along the shelves.

“What are you after?”

“DEET,” he said, flinging bottles and tubes from cabinet haphazardly. “Why don’t these rednecks have any f*cking DEET?”

“You said it before, sir. There’s no bugs up here.”

The floor at his feet was littered with adhesive bandages, aspirin, a topical antibiotic.

“Knotts was up from Florida,” she said.

Jacobs gave her a distracted look, then turned back to the cabinet.

“They got bugs in Florida like you wouldn’t believe. I bet he carries it in with his personal effects. A thing like that, it just gets to be a habit.”

“Check him then, check his things if you think he’s got it.” Another bottle hit the floor. The cap flew off and a cascade of white pills rattled across the linoleum, washed up against the motionless form of Knotts, got stuck in the congealing blood.

“And you think we could keep them off us? With mosquito repellent, sir?”

“It doesn’t repel, it interferes. It corrupts receptors.”

The logic was mysterious. Grace was not much in the way of parsing scientific theories, but he seemed to be missing a vital link, some key component. A person is not a mosquito, she thought of saying, but in the end, she knelt over Knotts’s body and began to pick through his satchel. The bottle of bug spray was very small.

“Give it to me,” Jacobs said, peeling his shirt over his head.

“Is this enough?”

“It’ll have to be, won’t it? It doesn’t last more than an hour, hour and a half, anyway. We just need to get beyond them.” He was already smearing the stuff down his arms. “Take off your vest.”

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“Take it off. And your shirt. We need it thick, all over. Put it in your hair.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“Does it matter, then? We’re dead anyway. Everyone’s dead eventually.”

And that was logic she couldn’t argue with.





They reached the Rosewood complex shortly after midnight. The moon was pale and heavy in the sky, fat as a dogtick. Their progress went undetected, although Grace had no position as to whether it was due at all to the DEET.

They crossed the perimeter of the complex. The west entrance already stood open, a dark gaping maw. Jacobs lit his xenon lamp, holding it to the doorway. Somewhere beyond the halo of light, a shape was moving.

Grace loosened her gun in its holster. “Something’s there.”

“Good,” Jacobs said. “We just need one. I want one alone in the lab for fifteen minutes.”

Grace nodded and didn’t answer. There was never just one.

From far away, a shrill giggle rose. It echoed back and forth in the corridor, trickling down the walls. Another came from somewhere in the northern sector.

At the reception station, they paused to examine the attendant signs of disuse. The control panel was coated in dust.


Jacobs indicated a bank of monitors. “See if you can bring the lights up while I find the medical bay. I need to get some supplies together.”

Grace nodded again. Her skin was prickling with adrenaline, but this was not the time to go jumpy. There would be warning. There always was.

When she accessed the backup system, the lights came up sluggishly on the generator, hazy and dim, like being underwater.

She stood in the reception area and waited. The time that passed was deep and faceless and full of sound.

When an unwieldy figure came toward her down the hall, she raised her pistol, but it was only Jacobs. He wore a biohazard suit, fitted with a portable respirator and a curved Plexiglas face-mask. With one gloved hand, he gestured her to follow.

He led her through a maze of corridors to the medical wing and ushered her into a glass-fronted observation room. Grace maneuvered between counter tops and stasis chambers to peer through the long window into an adjacent exam room.

The girl was in bad shape, skin discolored, covered in welts and scratches. She was smiling the smile, gleeful, manic. Grace watched her make a circuit of the room. Eight or nine years old. Must have belonged to one of the technicians, maybe a project manager. The girl had been someone’s daughter.

Jacobs turned from a cooler at the far end of the room. Cupped in his hands was a white rat.

“Is it dead?” Grace asked.

Jacobs shook his head. He had to spit out the mouthpiece before speaking. “They’ve got hundreds in there, in stasis. I’d say we’ve got five, maybe ten minutes before it revives. I need to see what she does.”