Dead Man's Hand by Richard Levesque Read Free Book Online

me appreciated her coldness. “It’ll come back
to haunt you.”
    I meant it in the legal sense, but she took
it otherwise. “I’m haunted already, Mr. Stubble. For the rest of my
life and by things you don’t even want to try imagining. This won’t
make much difference.”
    It wasn’t the reply I’d expected, and I
almost felt some sympathy for her. But then I remembered that she
was sending me out to clean up her mess, and I felt glad for
whatever demons she had to wrestle with. I had no plans on getting
myself killed in the next few hours, but if it should work out that
way, I had just decided that I’d join the ranks of whatever else
was tormenting her soul.
    “ Well, wish me luck,” I
said, not expecting her to say anything even remotely
optimistic.
    “ You’ll need more than
luck,” she said. “Take this.”
    From under the counter, she pulled out a
small grey metallic case, about the size of a thick paperback book.
She popped the latch, and the lid sprang up. Inside were an empty
syringe and vial full of an amber liquid.
    In response to my questioning look, she
said, “It’s an antidote. In case you survive an attack. Take it
within twenty minutes and you’ll be okay. Take the whole tube, just
straight into muscle.”
    I’d never heard of an antidote to the zombie
virus, but then again I didn’t know any of the re-animators’ trade
secrets. “Can’t I just take it now?”
    She shook her head. “It’s an antidote, not a
vaccine. It’s a different virus, attacks the one that’ll Turn you.
If you take it now and it doesn’t find anything to attack, it’ll
just go dormant and be useless when you need it.”
    I hated to think of how these things had
been found out and knew there wasn’t any point in asking. I also
wondered why vials of this stuff weren’t on every drug store shelf
and first aid kit in the city, but knew the answer lay once more in
the secrets of the re-animators. If this was publicly available and
open to analysis, it might open doors to the rest of their trade
and put them out of business.
    “ Thanks,” I said with a
nod, then snapped the lid shut and turned to go.

 
    Five
     
    It was easy enough to find the spot where
Drea’s van had stopped sending signals. The driver had taken his
undead passengers from the heart of the city’s industrial zone and
almost to its edge when things had gone wrong. A few more blocks
and he’d have been in a more suburban area. If the zombies were
loose, one or two might have made it that far already, but I
doubted that was the case. If that had happened, there would have
been reports by now. Helicopters with searchlights would have been
crisscrossing the skyline, and the roads would have been blocked by
squad cars and growling German Shepherds barely held back on
leashes.
    As it was, the street was quiet. Nothing
crisscrossed the skyline but wires strung between poles, and the
only growls I heard came from a pair of cats squaring off over
territory in a nearby alley. I parked and got out of my car,
walking along the dotted white line that ran up the center of the
street. According to Drea’s data, her van’s GPS had cut out in the
middle of this block, which made a car accident seem unusual.
Either her driver had been incompetent when it came to strapping in
his cargo or the Grommets had gotten to him and he’d had a meet-up
somewhere along this street, at which point the GPS could have been
disabled, the driver paid off, and the vanload of zombies taken
wherever the Grommets wanted.
    Several yards from where I started, I caught
a glint on the pavement and stooped to get a closer look. A few
dozen fragments of orange or yellow plastic were scattered around
my feet. I picked up one of the bigger pieces, about the size of my
thumbnail, and held it up to one of the streetlights. It looked
like the kind of reflective plastic they use for turn signals on
cars. A closer look at the pavement revealed some pretty fresh skid
marks close by. It