The Apocalypse Crusade 2 by Peter Meredith

pharmaceutical company she had been spying for. They weren’t stupid, they would disavow all knowledge of her. She would bet her life on it.
    So where did that leave her? In all likelihood she was even then being hunted by the police or the FBI, which meant there was no way she could go back to her apartment. And her car was back at Walton surrounded by zombies. She couldn’t go to her bank or to her mother’s or anywhere.
    The only thing of real value that she possessed, the only bargaining chip left to her was the vial of Com-cells. It still sat in her lab coat. Eng had torn the coat off of her and had thrown it haphazardly to the side, not batting an eye when it made a “clunk” sound. Anna had nearly choked. How quickly would she have died if the vial had broken? Or would she have died at all? Another shudder ran down her back as she remembered the walking horrors around Walton.
    Now, with the dark beginning to turn, she still didn’t know why she had kept the damned vial. It was, after all, direct and irrefutable evidence of her guilt.
    She fell asleep and dreamed about a prison where all the other inmates were zombies. She found herself outside her cell with a chance to run away but there were more zombies out in the real world and so she ran back to the one place she was safe, her cell.
    For his part, Eng slept like a baby. He couldn’t have been happier. Although it had been touch and go for a while there, he had accomplished every one of his goals: Thuy was dead, the Com-cells were now a catastrophic failure, and his supervisor in China was about to disgrace himself. Eng had heard through the grapevine that his superior back in China was about to begin testing a version of the Com-cells that could only end in a fiasco.
    Even the fire had worked to his advantage. It had destroyed every scrap of evidence that linked Eng to whatever was happening around Walton. Really, the only evidence left was right there in the hotel room tied to the bed. Yes, things were looking rosy for Eng, and man if his balls weren’t aching in all the right ways.
    He had dreamed about Anna. First about fucking her and then about killing her and, in his dreams, it had been easy. He had taken her lab coat, wrapped it around her throat and pulled until her face was purple and her eyes bulging black.
    Eng came awake with the gray dishwater of morning light in the air. He gave the girl on the bed a look and thought about fire. One more blaze should do the trick. It would take away, not just fingerprints, but also fingers and every drop of Eng’s DNA he had left either on or in Anna. The one thing a fire wouldn’t take care of however, were dental records and Eng figured a chair leg applied thoroughly and ruthlessly would confound any dental expert.
    These were the happy thoughts that had him smiling. He saw Anna pretending to sleep and that was just fine—in fact it was better than fine, it was perfect. Who needed to hear her whine and beg for her life? That sort of thing became annoying, fast.
    He flicked on the TV, expecting to see the fire at Walton leading the news and he wasn’t disappointed. A few hundred deaths, a building going up like a bomb, a respected pharmaceutical company at the bottom of it all; this was what made for good television. But what was being displayed was more than he figured, a lot more.
    This was Defcon 2. This was the National Guard being called out. This was a possible terrorist attack on American soil. This was the airports being closed and roadblocks thrown up over half the state. This was the President being briefed. There was even a shot of the old geezer stepping off Marine One , looking “concerned.”
    It was a moment before Eng realized that it was canned footage. It was full light around the President in the shot and yet Washington DC was in the same time zone as the dinky motel where the sun was still twenty minutes from cracking the furthest horizon. Eng breathed a sigh of relief but it caught in