52 Project #16: Norris and the Plague Doctors (Patreon)

Art is by my son, Alexander Carpe. Part of this story was previously published for Inktober as prompt #30, "Catch".

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. 

“Looks like we’ve got a live one over here,” one of them said to the other in a distorted voice that sounded almost like a staticky radio.

“Yeah.” They approached Norris. “Move aside, kid.”

Norris tried to grab the shotgun, but before he could get it into position, one of the two weird people swung the pole at him, grabbed the shotgun with the pincers, and tossed it down the street. 

“What are you doing?” Norris yelled. “Get away from my mom!” The other one had used their pole to grab Mom by the upper arm.

“She’s not your mom anymore, kid. She’s a zombie. She just hasn’t turned all the way yet.”

The one who’d thrown his gun swung their pole back around to take Mom’s other arm, and the two of them together pulled Mom to her feet. Her head lolled, her brown skin sheened with sweat and grayish. 

Norris knew that no one who looked like that ever got better, but he charged at one of the two weird people anyway. “Let my mom go!”

“Kid. She’s dead. There’s nothing you can do for her.”

“No! She can get better! We cauterized the wound! She’s just in shock because we had to burn it, that’s all! She’ll be fine!”

The other one, the one who hadn’t spoken to him, said gently, “We’re doctors, young man. We’re going to study your mom to try to find a way to help her, and all the zombies. We can keep her alive, without turning, but we have to get her to our facility now.”

“Then take me with you!” Norris shouted. “Mom and I, we’re the only things we each have in the world. Mom would never want to be separated from me.”

“Can’t do, kid,” the first one said. “No outsiders at the facility, only patients and doctors.”

“Look, you want your mom to get treatment, right? We’ll take care of her, but if you keep getting in the way, she’ll turn, and then there’ll be no saving her.”

“Norris…” Mom mumbled. “Go…”

“Is that your name? Norris?” the kinder one said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, Norris, we don’t have anyone at our facilities who can take care of children, or anywhere for a kid to go, so I’m afraid you can’t come with us. I’m sure that if we’re able to cure your mom, she’ll come back and find you, but you’ve got to be a big boy and take care of yourself. I can see that you’re very capable.”

Fuck that patronizing crap. Norris glared at the weird doctors, knowing he couldn’t do anything to stop them from taking his mom – short of running over and getting the shotgun and shooting them, and if they really were doctors who could cure the zombie plague, and save Mom, that was the last thing he’d want to do. But fuck them.

He stood out of their way, letting them drag Mom to their van with the poles around her arms. It looked cruel and demeaning, like the way you’d treat a wild animal, but he had to admit, deaders were dangerous enough that you’d have to treat someone who was turning like that if you didn’t know them well enough to know how strong they were. Mom wouldn’t bite anyone. Mom was tough. She could keep herself under control. 

The fact that no other deaders could and that Mom herself had warned Norris that anyone who turned would definitely be a threat and there were no exceptions was another thing Norris knew but was deliberately pretending he didn’t.

He waited until the doctors got Mom up toward the van, and they were pulling her in. Then he bolted toward them, and jumped over Mom, squeezing past the one who was up in the van already.

“Shit!” the one he’d squeezed past yelled, but it was too late. He was in.

Inside it was like an ambulance, except that the bed was absolutely covered with straps, including ones that were obviously positioned to hold down a person’s wrists, ankles and neck, not just the kind that kept a person from falling out of the ambulance bed. Norris clambered over the bed and sat down on the bench seat on the other side. It seemed to be designed to fold up so that the door it was attached to could slide open, but it couldn’t fold up if he was sitting in it, now could it?

“Norris!” the second one, the one who was kinder but also really patronizing, shouted. “You can’t be in here!”

“Like hell I can’t,” Norris said. 

If language like that from a 10-year-old shocked them, he couldn’t tell through their masks. 

“I’ve already said—”

“Yeah, you said that I’m a stupid kid who’d be a big burden at your secret hospital or whatever, but I can help. My mom was a real doctor once—” not like you weirdos, he thought, but decided it was impolitic to say so—“and she taught me some stuff. I can maybe help bring you instruments. Or clean stuff! I can keep things really clean! My mom taught me all about keeping a sterile environment—”

“There is absolutely no place for you at our base—”

“She’s my goddamn Mom!” Norris shouted, terrifyingly aware of how close he was to tears. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Only babies cry. They won’t take you seriously if you cry. “First off she’s the only person I have left in the whole world and I’m the only person she has, and if you cure her but you lose me she will be major league pissed at you, and second off, you know you’re leaving me to die if you leave me here, right? You think I’m big and strong enough to fight off deaders? I don’t know anyone in this city who’ll help me out. If you’re doctors and you wanna help people, why you wanna get a kid killed?”

“He has a point,” the second doctor said.

“No, he – what the hell, Sarah? We can’t take him with us!”

They hadn’t stopped pulling Mom in and getting her strapped down to the bed. Mom moaned again. “Norris…”

“Yeah, mom, I’m here.”

She looked up at the doctors. “Heard… you think… cure?”

“Maybe,” the guy in the front passenger seat, who had turned around to watch the whole thing, said. He was wearing the same weird costume as the others. (Or she. None of their voices sounded like normal human voices, all like scratchy distorted robots, and with the masks and cloaks it wasn’t possible to tell what gender they were, but if one of them was named Sarah then probably some were girls.) “Purely experimental stages. We can put you under and retard the spread of the infection, but we can’t guarantee that we can reverse it or undo any brain damage it causes.”

“So the sooner we can get you under, the better your odds are, doctor,” the first one, the one who kept calling Norris “kid”, said. They were calling her “doctor.” Good. Doctors respected other doctors. They wouldn’t just treat her like a piece of meat turning into a deader. “Your kid needs to stop interfering.”

“Just… take him. He’s… too stubborn… own… goo….” Mom trailed off, staring at nothing.

“She’s going further into shock. We need to get her under now,” the first one said.

The second one – Sarah – said, “Ignore the kid. If he wants to ride along with his mother, let him. It’s not going to hurt anything.”

“Secrecy—”

“He’s a kid. He can’t even see out the windows from that position. He hasn’t got a GPS in his head to figure out where the base is even if he rides with us the whole way.” 

“What if she turns and bites him?”

“Then we’ll have a fresh specimen of a healthy child who’s just been infected, without any ethical issues,” Sarah snapped. “And infected mothers who turn will generally go for any available prey who isn’t their child first before going after their kids.”

“Only in 63% of observed cases.”

As they argued, they finished strapping Mom down. She was lying on a metal pan that was about six feet long and wide enough for the average person, and most of the straps fastened her to the pan, while other straps held the pan down on the bed. They put a tube in her mouth where the back part was plastic, flexible and narrow, and the front part was wide and made of metal, and then strapping it to the back of her head so she couldn’t shake it loose. Sarah removed the lid of a small brown medication bottle and poured the entire contents into the tube.

“What’s that do?” Norris asked.

“Kid, quit pushing your luck,” the gruff one said.

“It’s a sedative,” Sarah answered.

“How come you’re giving it to her by mouth and not as a shot?”

“Because deaders have really, really bad circulation if they have it at all, but their digestive system works and things introduced by mouth spread faster to the rest of the body than if introduced intravenously or through injection into the muscle, and Raoul is correct that you need to keep quiet or our colleagues in the front may just decide to stop the van and throw you out.”

After that Norris was quiet.

Mom’s eyes closed and her head lolled, though not very far since it was strapped in place. The doctors wrapped her in something bandage-like, as if she was a mummy, freeing each limb one at a time so they could wrap it and then strapping it down again, and then sprayed some sort of aerosol onto the bandages, the same way. Finally they slid a tub of icy liquid out from under the bed, unstrapped the pan Mom was laying on, and laid the pan down in the icy water. The tube in Mom’s mouth was covered with a plastic lid with a hose attached to the top, and they hooked the hose to a loud machine.

Norris wanted so badly to ask what they were doing, but they’d warned him and he knew that only one of the weird doctors was willing to let him stay; if he bothered them, they’d overrule her and throw him out. He’d ask when they got to their base. He was sure they’d try to kick him out again before they went into it, but he wasn’t going to let them. As long as they had his mom, he was sticking to them like glue.

***

Doctor Sarah was right; from the bench in the back, Norris couldn’t see out the windows. Also, he’d lived his entire life in the city, so it wasn’t exactly like he was going to be able to tell where they were going, anyway. There was a sunroof on the van, and he could see through that, but the only thing to see there was sky. He could tell from the sun that they were going east-ish and then kind of north.

He focused on his mom instead. They’d put her in a tub of ice water with a tube in her mouth, and then they’d put a lid on the tub, where there was a hole for the hose attached to the tube. The loud noise was probably an air thing, then. Things that pumped air, like the compressor at the shop Dad used to work at, or the pump for the air mattress for when Norris had had guests for a sleepover, made loud noises. So they were pumping air into her. That was good. Deaders still breathed, but they didn’t need to; the thing they were infected with could break down their bodies to get energy, so you couldn’t drown or suffocate a deader. They’d just move more slowly if they didn’t have air.

If the doctors were putting air in Mom’s lungs, then she hadn’t turned yet.

There were four doctors. At least, Norris had to assume that anyone wearing that weird costume was a doctor. Three of them were dressed in black; the driver’s costume was brown. Doctor Raoul and Doctor Sarah had white beaks, the guy in the passenger seat had a black one, and the driver’s beak was also brown. Norris could tell that the guy in brown was wearing leather, so he guessed that maybe the black outfits were also leather.

“So… you guys really like leather, huh?” he said. 

Raoul snorted. “I’m not touching that one with this pole,” he said.

“Maybe if we had one that was ten feet?” Sarah said, tilting her head slightly in a way that made Norris think she was telling a joke. He laughed a little.

“How old are you, Norris?” she asked.

“I’m ten. I was gonna be eleven in September. I mean, I guess I still am, if I live that long.” That was a depressing thought. “What’s up with the bird masks?”

“What do they teach them in school?” Raoul groused.

The guy in the passenger seat turned around and said, “Oh, as if you knew about plague doctors when you were ten.”

“Do you know anything about what causes deaders?” Doctor Sarah asked.

“Um… yeah. If they bite you. Then you get infected by the stuff inside them, and you turn into one of them.”

“That’s right, of course, but it’s not the only way.” She leaned forward slightly. “Have you learned about fungi in school yet?”

“Um, like mushrooms?”

“Sarah, what the fuck. He’s ten. And we’re not keeping him around, so why are you bothering?” Raoul asked.

“Why not?” She turned back to Norris. “Yes, like mushrooms, and yeast. The substance inside the deaders that makes them what they are is a fungus. And it essentially takes over their entire bodies, over time; it infiltrates the brain first, and the mouth. They don’t actually need to eat people, but they have a compulsion to bite.”

“Why do they want to bite people if they don’t need to eat them?”

“The short answer is, because the fungus wants to spread. If the deaders bite people, it can infect those people with the fungus. But here’s the thing. Fungus normally spreads by producing spores… and you can breathe spores in. So far we haven’t seen any cases of a zombie who was infected by breathing spores, but the model says it’s likely to happen, eventually.”

Norris’s eyes went wide. “Shit. You saying we could just breathe and get turned into a deader?”

She nodded. “It’d probably happen slower, because it’s not direct to the bloodstream, but it’ll happen.”

“Shit.”

“Our masks are designed to protect us against that. Also against the other diseases deaders carry; they have no immune system, effectively, so they generally carry practically ever human disease possible.”

“But why do your masks look like birds?”

Sarah laughed. “Because it looks cool, mostly. We needed a shape we could put a filter in, that would protect our faces from being bitten by deaders. We needed it to be able to accommodate goggles without fogging up. We needed to be able to make it ourselves, since manufacturing is more or less dead in this country. And none of us are expert leatherworkers or tailors, since, you know, we’re doctors. We needed something with a pattern we could get off the Internet, and maybe a video of how to do it. Turns out this shape – the plague doctor mask – is more popular than any other shape that meets our other criteria.”

“Do you even know what a plague doctor was?” Raoul asked snippily. 

“Um… you are?”

Sarah laughed again. “We are now,” she said.

“In the Middle Ages, 30% of the entire population of Europe died of the Black Plague. The doctors who treated the plague dressed like this. They thought the plague was transmitted by bad smells, so they made masks like this so they could fill them with herbs to block the smell of sick bodies.” Raoul sounded less like a teacher and more like someone who thought you should already know this and that you were stupid because you didn’t. He was almost angry-sounding.

Norris wanted to say something defensive, but he knew that if he got mad at Doctor Raoul, and showed it, they would probably kick him out of the van.

“Give the kid some slack,” the guy in the front passenger seat said. “If he’s ten… I doubt I knew about the Black Death, let alone plague doctors, by the time I was ten.”

“Yeah, well, the school system’s always been shit,” Raoul said.

“So deaders can’t bite through leather?” Norris asked.

Doctor Sarah nodded. “They can, if they’re given enough time to chew on it, but their teeth aren’t any different from normal human teeth; it’s their bite strength that’s greater, since they don’t feel pain and they’re diverting a lot of physical resources to their bite. But human teeth are not ideal for piercing thick leather; we’re more likely to end up with their bite breaking our bones than them getting through the leather and infecting us.” She gestured at herself. “This outfit is really, really annoying right now in the summer, but we can make new ones, we can repair these, and we can disinfect them pretty easily.”

The one in the driver’s seat, who hadn’t spoken yet, picked up something like a microphone and put it near his mouth. “Van 11 to gatehouse. Receiving? Over.” He sounded kind of old, though it was hard to tell with the staticky voice.

A radio crackled. “Gatehouse receiving, Van 11. Situation? Over.”

“Coming in hot, gatehouse, we have fresh goods on ice. Over.”

“Fresh goods on ice, acknowledged. Any medical needs? Over.”

“Maybe crayons and a coloring book. Over.” He laughed. 

“Uh, Van 11, not sure we received that. Did you say crayons and a coloring book? Over.”

“Blake got—”

The other doctor in the front seat interrupted him. “We picked up a kid with the fresh goods. Seems healthy.”

“What, really?” the radio asked. “Uh, over.”

“Oh for gods’ sake,” Doctor Sarah said, unstrapping her seat belt and making her way to the front. “This is Doctor Blake. The fresh goods is a mother; her ten year old son refused to let us leave with his mother without him. And no, he doesn’t need crayons and a coloring book. Over.” The snippiness in her voice on the last word actually came through despite the weird distortion effect they all had going on, and reminded him of Ms. Watkins, his teacher from third grade.

“Gatehouse to Van 11, and we mean this with great respect, but what the fuck? Over.”

“I’ll take responsibility for him,” Doctor Sarah said. “Over.”

At that point, the van turned. Norris looked out the windshield, and saw a metal gate like the kind on a storage unit, opening slowly. Next to it there was a stone house with a walkway going through it, next to the road. The van stopped. “Stopping for checkpoint,” the driver said. “Over.”

“Norris, get away from the doors,” Doctor Sarah said. 

Three more plague doctors – two with long poles, like the ones Sarah and Raoul had used, and one with a gun – came out of the gatehouse. The driver and the passenger rolled down their windows and handed cards that they pulled out of the inside of their trenchcoats to one of the plague doctors outside. The other two disappeared to the side, and then the doors to the back of the van opened. Sarah and Raoul were pulling out their cards as the doors were opening, and they handed them to the plague doctor with the pole, while the one with the gun stood to the back.

“How come he’s got a gun?” Norris whispered.

Sarah spoke at normal volume; maybe the thing that was messing up her voice didn’t let her whisper. “If we had a loose deader in here or an adult who wasn’t a plague doctor who might be holding us hostage.” 

“Is that the kid?” the plague doctor who’d checked the ID cards asked.

“This is Norris,” Sarah said. “His mom is the fresh goods we picked up. He’ll be staying with us for a while until we can find somewhere safe to place him.”

“Why do you keep calling my mom fresh goods?” Norris asked, trying not to sound as angry about it as he was.

“It’s code for a person who’s about to turn deader,” Sarah said.

“Blake, we’ve got nowhere to keep a kid,” the one checking the IDs said.

“Bullshit, we’ve got a ton of rooms and more than enough food.”

“Ok, but we don’t have anyone free to babysit him.”

“That’s the thing. A kid clever enough to slip past us and get into the van while we were moving his mom probably doesn’t need a babysitter. And he had a good point; if we left him behind, the deaders would likely get him. So he’s staying with us until I figure out where he can go.”

The one checking the IDs shrugged. “Your call.”

They closed up the van and drove slowly through the gate. There was a winding path up a hill, with forest on either side. Norris still couldn’t see out the side windows, but when he went up to the front to peer through the grate that protected the driver and passenger from whatever was going on in the back, neither Sarah nor Raoul stopped him, so he was able to watch through the windshield. They drove up a hill, around a bend, over a speedbump. There was a building on the left and a parking lot. The van went past that, around another bend, and then came an orange brick building. It looked like it had four or five floors. The windows on the upper floors were small and narrow. Some of the ones on the first floor were much wider, but covered with bars. There were weird brick bays all around the front of the first floor, some of which had barred windows inside.

“Is this a school?” Norris asked.

“A hospital, actually,” Sarah said.

Norris was used to hospitals having huge glass doors and windows everywhere. “It doesn’t look like a hospital,” he said.

“Great, so the kid’s going to critique our choice of bases,” Raoul groused.

“It used to be a hospital for the mentally ill. We picked it because it was built with security in mind, which, as I’m guessing you’ve noticed, most hospitals are not.”

They drove around the building and pulled in at the back. Two other plague doctors came out and headed to the back of the van, where Sarah and Raoul manhandled the tub with Mom in it out from under the bed. The two additional plague doctors took two handles near the front, Sarah and Raoul took two near the back, and they all marched forward toward the doors to the building. Norris followed them. No one stopped him.

Inside, the building was a warren. Norris had no idea how many corridors they went down or how many times they turned down a different one. Eventually they reached a large and very cold room full of what looked like large chest freezers.

“Are you going to freeze her?” Norris asked, panicked.

“No, that would destroy her cells. We keep them at about 2 Celsius to reduce all life processes to almost nothing, but lower than that and we risk ice crystals forming and tearing her cells apart.”

“Is that going to hurt her?”

Sarah shook her head. “Firstly, we sedated her when we took her, and secondly, zombies don’t feel pain. She was still barely conscious when we picked her up, but by the time we got her into the tank, her consciousness had shut down.”

The doctors opened the tub and used their poles with grabbing claws at the end to lift the metal pan that she was strapped to out. She didn’t struggle or thrash; her skin, normally a deep warm brown, had turned ashen, almost greyish, and she lay limp on the pan. One of them stepped on a lever, and the freezer-like thing opened, revealing that it, too, was full of water.

“Won’t she get waterlogged?”

“No, it’s saline solution. Did your mom ever teach you about osmosis?”

“Yeah.” Norris nodded, as Sarah and the other three lowered Mom into the tank, still with the tube in her mouth. “It’s when water gets out of your cells and goes to where there’s more salt, right? So if you spend too long in the bathtub, your fingers get waterlogged because there’s more salt inside you than in the tub, and if you go to the beach and you’re in the water too long your skin gets all dry, right?”

“Right. So if we match the salinity—the amount of salt in the water—then the water doesn’t leave her cells or enter them.”

“Blake, could you maybe quit being a fifth grade science teacher and help us here?” one of the two plague doctors who’d met them at the door said.

“She’s been doing that since we picked up the kid,” Raoul groused.

“Raoul. He is ten and his mother is in that tank we are closing,” Sarah said. “I took this job to help people, not to be an asshole to kids.”

“You took this job to try to save people from zombies, not to be a kid’s nanny.”

“I am rolling my eyes so hard at both of you,” the fourth, who hadn’t spoken yet, said. “The fresh goods is on ice. Delgado’s coming down to take samples. Let’s get out of here. Unless you really love wearing all the gear.”

“Fuck no,” Raoul said. “I want about six showers.”

“Norris, you come with me,” Sarah said. 

Norris looked around the room. “Are all those freezer tanks full of deaders?”

“Not all of them, yet. We’ve got capacity for several more in here.” Sarah walked out the door, making Norris scramble to follow her. “We’ve also got a couple of other freezer rooms, but those deaders are a lot farther along. Several of them are actually dead.”

“I thought deaders were all dead?”

The corridors continued to be a maze as they went deeper into the building… or maybe they were going back out, Norris had no idea. “Oh, no. Most are still alive, but as the infection spreads within them, we can’t think of them anymore as the same organism; too much of their human body has been replaced. Eventually as the heart and brain are completely overwhelmed, we can safely say the person is actually dead – if we could kill the infection at that point, the victim would also die, because the infection has taken over too many of their bodily functions for their body to continue without it.”

They took an elevator up. As soon as they got out on the next floor, Sarah took off her hat, and then her beak mask. Norris’ eyes went wide with surprise. “I didn’t know you were black too!”

She grinned at him. Now that he could see her face, she was a middle-aged black woman with skin darker than his or Mom’s. Her hair was buzzed very short, a soft carpet of fuzz on her head. It made him think of a gym teacher. The lines on her face could have made her look stern, but her smile was broad and friendly, full of healthy teeth. “You really can’t tell with the mask and the voice distorter, can you?” It wasn’t a question. “I was a little bit leery of the decision to wear these things, but they give us an authority and an intimidation factor you just can’t get if folks can see your face.”

“I couldn’t even tell you were a girl until your friend called you Sarah,” Norris admitted.

“That’s part of what it’s for,” she said. “I can’t afford to have idiots questioning my authority when I’m trying to save them from zombies.”

“Where are we going?”

“Oh. I thought I said. We’re going to the cafeteria. I’m starving and I can tell you haven’t been eating particularly well.”

“That sounds great!” He remembered school cafeteria food, back when he went to school. It hadn’t been great, but it had been a lot better than what he got now. 

***

In fact, the cafeteria food was substantially better than what he used to get at school. There were mashed potatoes, breaded chicken strips, burgers, fries, soups, baked sweet potatoes, steamed broccoli, some kind of bean or pea in a pod, and something that looked like beef and broccoli. And also a salad bar. No soda and only one dessert, some kind of spongy apple cake, though. They had iced water, iced tea, hot tea, coffee, grape juice, orange juice, and milk. “How come you guys still get good food? I thought all the grocery stores had to close?”

“There’s local farms out in the county.” Sarah loaded her plate up with salad. “They don’t dare ship food into the city, but they know who we are and what we do, and they trade with us in exchange for medicines.”

“Medicines to cure being a zombie?” Norris asked excitedly, loading his plate with comfort foods. It’d been so long since he’d had anything that wasn’t in a can. The mashed potatoes were a little bit lumpy, meaning they were fresh, not from powder. 

Sarah smiled wryly. “No, we don’t have that yet. Medicines for their blood pressure, and diabetes, and high cholesterol, and depression. Things like that. We’ll also do checkups. Most of us are scientists more than we are doctors, but we all had to get medical degrees to do the kind of science we do.”

Norris took one dish with two chicken strips out from under the heater, and then glanced at Sarah. Two chicken strips really didn’t seem enough. “Is it okay to take two chicken strip dishes?”

“It’s okay today,” Sarah said. “But only if you also take a salad and eat it.”

“I took the broccoli,” Norris objected. “I got a vegetable.”

“Get salad too. You can put whatever you want on it.”

So Norris got salad, with croutons and cheese and little pieces of hard-boiled egg and sunflower seeds. “Mom and I wanted to get out there,” he said wistfully as he loaded his plate. “We heard there’s no deaders out in the countryside. Like, you gotta leave the county and head up north or cross the bridge and go to the Eastern Shore or something.”

“Oh, there are deaders everywhere.” Sarah poured dressing on her salad. “Places of high population density are a lot worse, of course, but there’s deaders living in the woods. They hide and grab prey that go too near. Some small towns got completely taken over; they’re ghost towns now, since deaders have to stay on the move to get more prey. Farm country’s mostly fairly safe; they’ve all got guns and flat open land and they can see a deader a mile away. But you and your mom wouldn’t have been safe up there. They shoot outsiders; they just don’t wait for them to get close enough to tell that they’re deaders. We get close because they see the masks and the hats, so they know what we are.”

They sat down at a table and dug in. The chicken strips were actually amazing. They were made of real breast meat and they were juicy and tasted like chicken, not like processed chicken-flavored cardboard. The milk was really great, too. Mom hadn’t been able to drink milk without getting sick, but Dad had been able to drink gallons of the stuff, and so far Norris hadn’t lost his milk-drinking ability yet like most of his classmates had even before school had closed forever. “This milk tastes really good.”

“It’s probably a lot fresher than you’re used to.” She speared an olive and a piece of nondescript pale meat. “Enjoying the chicken strips?”

“Yeah!”

“We have a lot less fresh meat here than you were probably used to before all this happened, so the next time you get chicken strips, I want you to put a lot fewer on your plate. There’s canned chicken in the salad, and you can get protein from eggs and mushrooms and soybeans.”

He made a face. “You telling me all I get to eat around here is salad?”

“You can have as much potato as you want,” Sarah said with a smile. “And yes, you can have meat, but it’s rationed. I let you have my ration today because you’re much too skinny. In the future, you can take two of those strips. Or you can have a burger. They’re pretty substantial but the meat’s mixed with some soy and mushrooms to make it go farther.”

Norris sighed. “I guess.” It was better than the canned condensed soups he’d been eating. Mom and he had saved rainwater in discarded water bottles to drink and put in their soups. They’d had to scavenge the soups from empty grocery stores. 

“A lot of the salad stuff, we actually grow here on the campus. Some of us managed to rescue our families and bring them here, and they don’t work as doctors – they do support work, like growing tomatoes, peppers, soybeans and salad greens.” She took another bite of salad and wiped the glob of dressing off her lips with her napkin. “Does that sound like something you’d like to do?”

“Uh, no.”

“I could place you with one of the families here as your foster family and you could help out. Grow food, fix things…”

“Nuh-uh. I want to help you guys.” Norris stopped inhaling his mashed potatoes for a moment and looked up at Sarah. “I grew up in the city. All I know about gardening is my mom killing houseplants. And the one year my dad tried to have a potted tomato on the front porch, and some jerks stole it. But I know a lot about science and stuff! I could help you!”

Gently but with just a touch of exasperation in her voice, Sarah said, “Norris, you’re ten. You’ve had at best a fifth grade education and given what happened to the world and when the schools shut down, more likely fourth.”

“That’s not true! My mom homeschooled me while we were trying to survive and running from deaders. I told you guys she was a doctor, right? She was a pediatrician, and she taught me a lot about medicine and science. I can name all the bones in the human body!”

“So can I,” Sarah said dryly. “Let’s imagine you’re a genius and your mother was an amazing teacher; you still aren’t at the level of people who went to medical school for years, or graduate school and medical school like many of us. There’s really nothing you can do to help with the research.”

“I could help you rescue people, though,” Norris said desperately. 

“That’s really not a good idea.”

“Come on! You’re like, I dunno, knights from the Middle Ages and you want me to go be a peasant.”

Her eyes narrowed. “We’re not knights, Norris. We’re plague doctors. We poke the afflicted with our sticks, and drag them off, and sometimes we deliver a mercy blow. We aren’t here to rescue anyone. When we saw with our drone that your mother was turning, that’s why we went in to get her; if she’d just broken her leg we would have left the two of you to die, because we’re trying to rescue the entire human race, not use up our resources saving one or two people here or there.”

Norris deflated slightly. “Okay. But I still want to help! I can shoot a gun, I can bandage people—”

She sighed. “Norris—”

“Could I at least learn how to make your masks and costumes and stuff? That’s just leatherworking, right? I bet it would make your lives easier if you didn’t have to do that yourselves!”

“Well, nowadays we don’t. The person who makes the costumes is married to a doctor.”

“Okay, but if there’s only one person, I could help them.”

“Fine. I’ll take you to the quartermaster and she can decide if she wants to take on an apprentice.”

***

The quartermaster was also wearing all leather, but her hands and her head were free. She was a heavy white woman with brown hair. “Sarah Blake! I’ve been hearing all about you picking up a little stray, there.”

“This is Norris,” Sarah said. “Norris, this is Jessie. She makes our armor and our masks.”

“Hi,” Norris said.

“Well, hello! Have you brought him to be fitted for armor?”

“We might as well,” Sarah said. “I don’t think I told you this, Norris, but within the compound, it’s a rule that we always have to be wearing our leather armor, and we have to have masks and gloves at the ready.”

Jessie nodded. “You ought to see mine. I went with a harlequin theme, since I’m not a doctor.” She picked up a mask off the table she’d been sitting at. It was a creepy smiling face, all white except for two red spots on the cheeks. “Nice, huh?”

“Kinda… a little creepy, honestly,” Norris said. 

Jessie laughed. “Of course it is! Turns out, deaders have very little ability to react to actual threats, like guns or spears. But they can react to things that hit us in more primitive parts of our brain. The plague doctor masks scare them. So does the harlequin. Only the fresher ones are capable of feeling fear at all, so it’s not like I can drive all the deaders off with a mask, but they’ll back off for a bit.”

“Why do we have to wear that stuff inside?”

“Well, what would happen if a deader got loose?” Jessie asked, but it was one of those questions grownups asked to see if you knew. 

“I guess… you wanna have the armor on so you can stop a deader and it can’t bite you?”

“Bingo!” She stood up. “Let’s take your measurements.”

“Jessie, Norris has asked if he can apprentice with you to help you with the leatherworking. Could you use a kid to help out?”

“I learn real fast,” Norris put in. “My mom taught me a lot of stuff. I know how to sew to fix clothes, if that’s anything like this.”

“It’s… not unlike it,” Jessie said in a considerating tone. “Yeah, ok. I heard from Vin the situation with his mom and all, so if he wants to learn how to help me, I’m cool with that. We’ll see if it works out.”

“Can you get him set up with a room?”

“Sure. I’ll put him in the kids’ ward, all the beds are too small so the only people living up there are short women and we’ve got plenty of space. You cool with that, Norris?”

“I guess.”

He didn’t really want to be left behind; Sarah had been kind and understanding and he didn’t know how this woman was going to treat him. But he didn’t think he was going to be given a choice.

***

As it turned out, Jessie was actually quite nice. She showed him all of her tools, and explained what they did. She took his measurements and began the process of making him leather armor, explaining what she was doing as she did it. She had him practice punching holes with an awl. “You be careful with that. The guy who invented Braille? He went blind in the first place because he poked himself in the eye with an awl, and it got infected, and the infection got into the other eye too.”

“I read a book about that,” Norris said, nodding.

When she was done for the day, she took him to the cafeteria for dinner. There was spaghetti with tomato sauce, which advertised itself as vegan and spicy, and a stir-fry with what looked like chicken, both of which had peppers and mushrooms and onions in them, and there was a baked fish dish covered with cheese. No rice. He would have expected rice with a stir-fry. Instead there were mashed potatoes again, that you could have with the stir-fry or the baked fish. There was salad, but he wasn’t required to take any, so he didn’t. There were a lot of vegetables in the spaghetti sauce, in his opinion. Dessert was carrot cake.

Jessie told him about the foods that could be obtained locally and the ones that couldn’t. “You’re not getting chocolate or vanilla anytime soon,” she said. “They didn’t think to add it to the stockpiles, and they only grow in tropical regions. Same with coffee, but they did stockpile that. Once we run out, though, there won’t be anything but tea. And it’s not very easy to grow tea in this climate.”

Norris made a face. “I don’t really like either one.”

“Well, hopefully the world will be back to normal by the time you’re an adult and need the caffeine to stay awake,” she said. “We don’t have sugar; that does grow in the United States, but not around here, and the longer the distance we have to go, the more dangerous it is for the farmers to ship their products. There’s a lot of corn, so we use corn syrup, and there’s no shortage of bees, so we use honey.”

“Do you really think the world will ever be back to normal?”

“Oh, yeah!” Jessie grinned broadly. “They’re working on a cure. You know it’s a fungus, right?”

“Yeah, like a mushroom?”

“More like a yeast – uh. You wouldn’t know about that. More like athlete’s foot, but it gets inside your brain, and your body, and eventually it takes you over completely. Well, there’s some reason why it’s really hard to make a vaccine against a fungus, I don’t know why. I’m not a doctor. But you can make a fungicide. Problem is that most fungicides we have can’t go inside the body, and they haven’t yet found something that can kill the fungus without killing the person, and you can’t cure it by just grabbing deader after deader and filling them up with fungicide; you might as well just shoot them if the fungicide kills them. But eventually they’ll have a cure that works, and if you can treat people right after they get bit with the fungicide, they won’t turn deader.” She leaned forward. “That’s the whole thing, you know? That’s why we’re doing this.”

“I want to help out,” Norris said.

“Yup. So that’s why you’re going to help me with the costumes!”

***

Norris’s bedroom was in an area where only two other people had bedrooms; each room had its own private bathroom, and there was a refrigerator and a microwave in a common area, where you could store food from the cafeteria and then heat it up. It was more freedom than Norris had ever had, and more loneliness. He had no parents here, and Jessie and Sarah weren’t staying up here with him. The two women who lived up here were doctors and didn’t interact with him much. He could stay up as late as he wanted; there were books here he could read, in the common room. But there was no one to spend time with.

He managed to distract himself from the loneliness well enough, though, because there was a computer, and it was connected to the Internet.

Norris had thought the Internet was gone. Apparently not. Sarah told him that of the data centers run by the big companies that had existed before the zombies came, and at the universities and on the military basis, many of them were still up and running, because they’d been designed to be difficult to break into, and the people inside them had the Internet and could contact military people who also had Internet if the deaders boxed them in and they needed food. Power was still running for the same reason – most of the countryside didn’t have any, aside maybe from generators they ran off propane tanks that they were eventually going to run out of, but there was a nuclear reactor in their state, and some hydro, and the governor had had a whole lot of wind towers put up by the National Guard and energy contractors in a big hurry when this whole thing had started. So there was some power, and it was being routed to places where the people could defend themselves well enough to stay in one place and use the power… like here.

So Norris had a computer, and he had the Internet. There was no social media anymore. No one was posting new videos to Youtube, but all the old ones were still there. Wikipedia was up. Google was up. There was no Netflix, no Hulu, no Disney Prime, but there were a lot of how-to articles, and Google had removed restrictions on Google Books so all of the books were available online now, because it wasn’t like anyone could buy them.

At first, he went looking for the cartoons he used to watch, but he couldn’t really enjoy them anymore; after surviving on the streets during a zombie apocalypse, they felt unreal, unrelatable. He watched videos about leatherworking to try to learn more about what Jessie was teaching him, but it was easier to learn from Jessie, who was an expert he could ask questions of rather than a recording. So he decided he was going to learn medicine, and he was going to learn enough about it that Sarah and the others would let him join them.

There were some field medic videos that had gone up before most people had lost Internet access, when the zombies had first showed up. There were, however, not a lot of videos about actually being a doctor, because that was a thing doctors used to go to school for years about. Also, when he tried to read medical books that doctors learned from in medical school, he understood only about every third word. Obviously he needed to start earlier and simpler than that.

So he studied biology and chemistry and math. The things his mom had taught him had been more like the field medic stuff, probably not useful for finding out how to cure zombies. She’d homeschooled him while they’d been running from zombies; when he took an online test to find out how much math and science he knew, it said he was at a seventh grade level, which was great because Sarah had been right, the last time Norris had been in real school it had been the fourth grade. Mom and Dad had always taught him stuff about math and science and he’d always been ahead of his class in those subjects, but it was nice to see how much ahead he was.

Seventh grade, however, was not college, and apparently doctors had to go to college first and learn biology and chemistry there, after learning it in high school and maybe also middle school, and only then did they get to go to medical school to learn to be doctors. That was a ridiculous amount of stuff to learn, but Norris had the Internet and a lot of free time; Jessie had him work with her as her apprentice about five or six hours a day, the same amount as school had been, but then he didn’t have anyone to talk to. No online games to play, no friends to chat with. No parents. No homework to do. No chores. No zombies to run away from. So he had time.

He found web sites where they talked about the state curriculum and what he was supposed to learn in which grade. Social studies was dumb, he didn’t need to spend time learning that. Reading was important in that he needed to learn new words, but he didn’t need to learn how to analyze a text, whatever that meant. He needed to know how to learn science from books, so he needed reading for that, but he didn’t need to read books about the struggles of other black kids who didn’t happen to be living through a zombie apocalypse, which was pretty much entirely what the state curriculum suggested he ought to be reading for English class. Well, and some books about weird science fiction worlds where nobody could see color or animals took over farms or stuff like that, and some stuff about Asian kids and Native American kids. But none of it was important anymore because none of it helped with zombies.

His mom was in a cold tank downstairs. He checked in on her every so often. Raoul continued to be an asshole, Sarah continued to be nice, and the other doctors continued to mostly ignore him. They took samples from Mom sometimes but they weren’t going to pull her out to experiment with treatments until they had a thing they knew wouldn’t kill people… or mice. They killed a lot of mice, trying out treatments to see if maybe they wouldn’t kill mice, because if they didn’t kill mice then they could test them on monkeys (they did not actually have any monkeys; this was going to involve a long and dangerous trip to Atlanta that they told Norris he absolutely could not go on once they did it) and if the monkeys lived they could try humans.

His mom was in a cold tank downstairs, and all he wanted to do, all he wanted to do, was to do whatever it took to get her out and get her cured. If that meant do nothing with his free time but learn math and science from videos and books on the Internet, on the crappy old desktop in his room that was apparently put together from spare parts and would never have played a decent game but was good enough for what he needed it for, so be it.

***

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.”

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. 

Despite his attention to the tree, he was still surprised when the deader jumped down from a low branch, implying that the guy had climbed rather than jumping, and took off after him. It wasn’t enough of a moment of surprise to slow him down, though. He raced back toward the van. As the doctors had predicted, the zombie was a zoomer, one of the ones who could move at a run, and they were often faster than humans despite their low metabolism because they didn’t feel pain. 

As Norris reached the van, Raoul fired a taser at the zombie. Tasers didn’t hurt them, but they could stun them and knock them down, since their muscles still used electricity. As the zombie stumbled, they swung their poles into position, locking around the zombie’s neck and waist rather than arms like they’d done with Norris’ mom. Norris wanted to know why not, but he figured it was a bad idea to distract them right now.

Aileen came out of the car, with her pole. It had a different attachment on it – they were still pincers, but they were much thicker. She grabbed the zombie just under his left shoulder and pulled the pincers shut. There was a cracking noise, and the zombie’s arm went limp.

She was breaking their limbs, Norris realized, as she did the other arm, and then both legs. The zombie thrashed its body and head, but without working limbs, it had no way to stop them from slamming it down on the table and holding it in place while Aileen strapped it down. They did the same as they’d done to Mom – putting the tube-gag in his mouth, strapping it down, and pouring a sedative in. The zombie did not stop wiggling and struggling. The doctors wrapped his arms with bandages and sprayed them down with the aerosol that hardened it, like they’d done to Mom. Then they pushed the air tube in, pulled out the ice tank, lifted the metal tray the deader was strapped to, and dropped it in the tank. Finally they closed the lid, sealing the zombie in.

Norris shuddered. That was a lot more violent than what they’d done to his mom. He was fine with shooting zombies, but it seemed kind of awful to him to render someone helpless and then methodically break their limbs, even if they were deaders.

“We’ve got two coming out of the bistro,” Aaron reported. “One looks really fresh. The other one’s... not. Recommend you shoot the one that’s more dead and take the other.”

Raoul nodded. “Aileen, you’ve got the gun.”

“Okay.” Both of the zombies were zoomers, running at high speed toward the van, presumably following the sound of human voices. Aileen lined up the shot. One of the zoomers didn’t even look dead; his white skin was pasty and colorless, but some white people just looked like that. The other one’s fingers were visibly rotting and there were blooms of mold on her body. Aileen blew her head off with the rifle. The other zoomer kept coming.

Norris didn’t have to do anything. Raoul and Sarah swung the poles out as the zoomer approached, hitting him in the legs and the head, hard enough to knock him to the ground. Raoul tased him before he could get up, and then they did the same thing they’d done to the man in the tree. Grab him by the neck and waist, hold him up far enough away that he couldn’t reach them with his arms or legs, and then Aileen moving in with the stronger pincer and crushing his limbs.

“It’s... it seems wrong for you to do that,” he said tentatively, after they’d gotten the deader secured in an ice bath. “You want to cure them but you’re breaking their arms and legs?”

“We don’t want them infecting us," Sarah pointed out. “We don’t usually get the ones who haven’t quite turned yet, like your mom. This one was infected within the last week or so, but he’s still as dangerous as any deader – more than most of them, because his body’s intact and he might have some brainpower still.”

“Yeah, but if you cure them, they’ll still have two broken legs and two broken arms.”

“Better than being a deader, though.”

“There’s some motion in the house,” Aaron reported. “I think one of the kids just found the back door.”

“Oh, we can get a kid? That’s great!” Sarah said enthusiastically. “We’ve got so few of those.”

“You want me to lure him in?” Norris asked. “Or her?”

“Sure, but don’t forget. Without prey for a while, they become zoomers, and you don’t have a lot of advantages against another kid.”

“Sure I do. I’m not mostly dead,” Norris said. He pulled off his mask again and got onto the median, trying (and mostly failing) to rap about how much zombies should want to eat him. His rhymes sucked and his rhythm was off, but he doubted the zombie would care.

It appeared finally, coming around the side of the house. A little white girl, younger than him. Maybe seven or eight. She had curly blonde hair and was still dressed in a pink T-shirt that said “GIRLS RULE AT SCHOOL”, with bloodstains on the collar where she’d probably been bitten. For several seconds she just stared at him, as he stared at her. Then she started running toward him.

Norris hadn’t gone far from the van, so he didn’t have far to go to get to safety. The little zoomer ran right in at Sarah and Raoul, who swung their poles into place to grab her.

She dodged.

“Shit!” Raoul shouted, as the zoomer got past him and tried to jump into the van after Norris. “Fuck! Kid, get a gun!”

There really wasn’t time to do that. Norris only had time to get his mask back on before the kid zoomer slammed into him, knocking him back against the divider between the seats in the van and the back area.

“Get off!" Norris yelled. The girl was trying to bite him, while he was trying to hold her away from him. He was taller and had longer arms, but she had deader strength and was forcing his arms back. Her mouth was open and drooling.

Sarah hit her in the head with her pole. The girl went to the ground, hard. As she tried to get up, Sarah pinned her in place. “Aileen! Get the crusher over here, do her legs!”

“She’s a kid!” Norris said. “Can’t we just pin her down with your poles? She’s not that strong; if I could hold her off, you grownups should be able to.”

“Can’t take chances,” Sarah said. “But we can leave her arms intact if we hold her to the floor and break her legs so she can’t use them to squirm free.”

Aileen snapped the bones in the child’s shin. “There you go. She can’t run, but if we do manage to find a cure, those are greenstick fractures and they should knit back together relatively easily.” The zombie thrashed her thighs and knees, trying to move her legs, but the broken part just flopped. “Or maybe not, since she won’t hold them still.”

“I’ll tape them if you take my pole and Raoul adds his.”

“Any reason we’re being so careful with this deader?” Raoul asked.

“The kids are the most likely to come back without brain damage if we figure out how to kill the fungus. I’d rather the kid not have permanently damaged arms and legs.”

Sarah used medical tape to splint the zombie’s broken legs, and a hardening foam all over the splint to hold it together. Then she used the same tape to seal up the zombie’s fingers and thumb, putting them into a ball-like cast where the zombie had no ability to move her fingers or touch anyone with them. She tied the arms to the child zombie’s side with the medical tape, and then used the bandages to wrap the girl like a mummy before spraying the hardening aerosol. “Okay, let’s get her on ice.”

“Two more incoming,” Aaron reported. “Both fresh. Adult from the same house as the kid, and another adult, from the bistro.”

“We can’t take them,” Sarah said wistfully. “No room.”

“Can we drive off without killing them?” Norris asked. “If they’re fresh, maybe you’ll be able to save them?”

“That’s really unlikely,” Sarah said.

Raoul went out with the gun. “We’d have to cure them within a couple of weeks for them to stay fresh. We’re not within a couple of weeks of cracking this. So... no.” He fired the gun, twice. Both zombies toppled over, their heads masses of blood and flesh.

Sarah and Aileen finished boxing the little zombie. “We’re full up,” Aileen said. “Let’s head back.”

“You wanna get back in the front?” Aaron asked.

“No, I want to get going before any more deaders come out of any more houses and we have to shoot them.” Aileen shuddered slightly. “There’s two more kids in the house this one came from and I really hate having to shoot the kids.”

“That does suck,” Raoul admitted. “If they’re far gone it doesn’t matter, but if they’re fresh… I just keep thinking about how we could put them on ice until we’ve got a cure and maybe they’ll recover, but we don’t have the equipment to put so many on ice so we end up having to kill them.”

“Maybe you could come back with more ice boxes and see if you can get the rest of the kids in that house, after you drop these guys off?” Norris suggested.

Sarah shook her head. “We can’t burn fuel like that. We’re not here to rescue anyone, we’re here to collect the specimens we need. That’s all.”

***

Back at the base, there was no role for Norris to help in with unloading the deaders, taking samples from them, and getting them into their permanent cold boxes. So he went to the cafeteria, because he was starving. It was late afternoon and he’d never had breakfast. A few folks gave him a hairy eyeball for the amount of food he was taking, but no one said anything.

After that, he considered going back to his room and taking a nap… but no. He had to keep up the pressure. If he wanted to finagle his way into being able to go out with them and help them again, he needed to remind them that he’d been helpful, by showing up and offering to help now.

They were buzzing around the lab busily. “Hey,” Norris said, strolling in with his leather armor still on, like they did. “Anything I can do to help? Wash dishes or whatever?”

“Norris, we’ve just been talking about you!” Sarah said cheerily.

“Uh... is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Listen.” Sarah squatted on the floor so her eyes were level with his – and then immediately stood up again. “Ow. I keep forgetting my knees don’t want to let me do that anymore.”

“You don’t need to do it anyway, I can look up.”

“Okay. Listen. You were helpful today, even Raoul admits it. But that incident where the child deader attacked you? That was terrifying. I never want to see anything like that again.”

“Oh, come on!” Norris couldn’t control the outburst. “I did everything I could to help you! I got two deaders to come on over to the van, and I shot deaders when it would have been too dangerous for any of you guys, and--”

“Kid, shut up and let Dr. Blake talk,” Raoul said, and Norris shut up. “Dr. Blake” instead of “Sarah” meant things were serious.

“So,” Sarah said, “we’ve decided to formally allow you to apprentice with us, on the specimen capture squads, because a formal apprenticeship will allow us to train you.”

Aaron spoke up. “You’re going to work with Dr. Alvarez at the range to practice your marksmanship and learn a wider range of weaponry. Dr. Walsh will train you on the use of the drones. I’ll be assisting you on learning to drive. Dr. Narayan will train you on data entry so you can help us put our numbers in for analysis. And Dr. Blake will continue to be your primary liaison with the team, but will also be monitoring your overall progress with your education, with us and in terms of your academic progress.”

“Really?” Norris’ eyes went wide. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” Sarah said, grinning. “We recognize that we’re not going to be able to stop you from trying to fight back against the zombie plague, whether we enable you or not, and we believe your chances of accomplishing something positive without getting yourself killed will be considerably better if we train you as our assistant.”

“There’s other teams,” Aileen Walsh said. “One of them came to help us with the tires. They’re not necessarily going to understand why we’re training a kid as young as you are or letting you help out on collection missions. They’re going to be overall too polite to say anything directly to you, but you might hear talk behind your back.”

“That’s okay,” Norris said. “I don’t pay any attention to that kind of thing.” The truth was he didn’t even hear that kind of thing most of the time; his mother had once been furious because she’d overheard children in the hallways at his school calling him weird and an Oreo, but he’d been with her and hadn’t heard a thing. He’d been too busy cataloguing Pokemon in his head.

“I want you to work out, too,” Raoul said. “Shooting’s one thing, but you need to build up upper body strength and stamina. You weren’t in any shape to fight off that deader and she was on you before you could have gotten a gun.”

“So you’re my gym teacher?” Norris said, grinning.

Raoul sighed. “Shoot me now. I’ve become a jock.”

“We’re going to work you hard,” Aaron said. “If you want to be helpful, and you want to come on the missions, we need you up to speed as soon as we can get you there, because we want you to be as safe on the missions as a boy your age could reasonably be.”

Norris thought of his long hours studying biology, chemistry and math, upstairs in his bedroom on the computer someone had left him there. “That’s exactly what I want,” he said. “I’ll go just as fast as you push me, so go ahead and push me hard.”

***

Later, he found his mother’s tank among the other near-suspended deaders. He couldn’t see her – the tanks were not transparent, and he knew better than to open the tank and risk his mom getting loose and getting shot.

“They let me join them, Mom,” he whispered to her. “I’m gonna help them find the cure for this, and we’re gonna save you. We’re gonna get you back to yourself. I promise.”