Apocalypse: The Savior with System

32 Quinn Vega

Judith, Eric, Eli, and Andie arrived outside the arsenal Rahu wanted to be infiltrated, parking another of Paul’s self-made vehicles well away from the base’s security cameras. Eric had tried disabling them from his laptop but the security was tight. They really needed the access codes from Phelps.

Judith wondered how Paul and Rahu were doing.

“I don’t know much about Rahu Knight but I know Paul,” Eric suddenly said to her, as if he’d known her worries all along. “He’s a hard one to catch. They’ll be fine.”

She nodded through her anxiety was not wholly gone. Once they had the arsenal, she knew what she needed to do to get her answers. What could happen afterward, she was not sure. She’d run many simulations in her mind, many paths that could appear, and Judith had a sinking feeling that she wouldn’t even know which to choose.

She envied people like Paul who even with their doubts never second-guessed themselves and did what needed to be done with an open heart. Judith realized she was never that way for anything. Everything she’d done in her life since childhood had been planned and routine. There had been no time for play or having fun, no moment left for decadence and pleasure. She hated surprises. She always had to be in the know of a hundred years from a single event.

And where has that led her?

In a stake-out.

“To be honest, I’m more frightened of having to deal with humans than zombies,” Eric told her openly. “Zombies are zombies. Sure, they were once humans, too, but there’s nothing left of that in them anymore. But when I am faced with the choice of shooting another human being who can still think and regret their actions, in a split second I have to decide to let go of that fear or else I regret because I ended up getting killed instead.”

In a way, Judith understood what Eric said. Back during her time in Ormara, she had begrudgingly followed Pearse-Sachly’s directives in dealing with the sufferers. It was difficult to see the isolated transition from Phase One to Five, her and her team’s efforts to race against time, and the virions that slowly destroyed a human being’s body inside out. It was even more difficult to know that by Phase Three they were both fighting a losing battle, the infected and the scientist, powerless against an invisible and insidious enemy.

And because she had to know everything, it grated on her that Moira Sachly knew far more and deliberately withheld information for reasons unknown. Judith could only assume it had all been because of the nanotech she herself implanted in Paul, an action that she didn’t know if she should regret or simply put as her professional duty.

Fire destroyed the zombies. Or, rather, the temperature did. The higher Paul’s capacity to store insane amounts of thermal energy, the more potent those fireballs will be.

But to what end? If Pearse-Sachly wanted to develop a weapon—which was entirely anathema to the company’s code of ethics—why stop at Paul? Was it their intention to mass-produce such a weapon? And will that weapon be solely for killing zombies…or something more sinister? In Judith’s mind, to kill who can be killed was a hopeless act. And she refused to lose hope.

The fire did not truly kill the virus; it only destroyed the vessels that contained them. For as long as even a single virion escapes undamaged and lodges onto a human host, the pandemic will never be over. The only effective weapon against it is a vaccine—a project now halted. And no one in Pearse-Sachly can restart it—Judith had taken all copies of her research with her during the attack on the institute. It was a blind act of self-preservation, she had to admit. But at the same time, she’d taken them to protect the data. If their theories about the corruption in Pearse-Sachly were true, then she’d done the right thing.

If the institute is destroyed, then she would find a way to keep going at the vaccine project.

And that way had to be through the arsenal they were waiting to get inside of.

The sound of something vibrating cut through the silence. All eyes turned to Eric as he opened his smartphone.

He looked up at Judith.

“They have the codes,” he said.

Judith nodded, trying to will her heart to calm down.

Almost there, she thought.

Almost there.

“You must know DeeDee McAllister or she knows you,” a waiter remarked to them after serving them their beers, looking curiously when Paul and Rahu used drinking straws instead of gulping the beverage from the mouth of the bottle.

“DeeDee McAllister?” asked Paul.

“The white lady,” the waiter said. “She’s a regular here, though I think that’s because she’s recently provided our house and VIP wines from the McAllister Vineyards in Arkansas. Old money, if you know what I mean. She never talks to anyone but the manager and maybe some of the girls and definitely has never danced with anyone until this night.” The waiter eyed Rahu and Paul for some information. When they said nothing, the waiter shrugged and left them alone.

“So, who is she, really?” Paul asked Rahu, turning away from a very sordid scene going on two tables to the front. “Your lady friend. The look on your face tells me she’s no DeeDee or a McAllister.”

“Quinn Vega,” Rahu answered quickly, staring dispassionately at the ménage a trois happening onstage. “She’s among the higher-ups in the underground. They called her The Queen.”

“So if you’re the King…”

“As I said, we were never together,” Rahu firmly said. “But I have to admit that in the art of killing, I consider her an equal. She’s very…clean. She’s a long-range weapons expert, a sharpshooter.”

“You can say that again,” Paul murmured.

“There was talk that she’s the daughter of a highly-placed government official and Quinn did not waste her time silencing them. I’ve had my theories but Quinn knew better than to fight me head-on. And then she disappeared. She’s most likely invented a new identity or stole one and I don’t doubt she could pull off either of the two. Quinn can be a chameleon when she wants to and she’s good at hiding. It must be why I haven’t seen her for a few years until today.”

“Doesn’t seem like a happy reunion,” remarked Paul.

“Not happy but a nicely timed one,” said Rahu, nodding towards the side of the stage. Paul saw a flash of white and then the woman called Quinn Vega sauntered over to them.

“Ten minutes,” were the only words she said before handing Rahu what looked like an ID and exiting Braxton’s.

Rahu dropped a few bills on the table and stood, followed by Paul, leaving the club. From the corner of his eye, Paul saw a flash of white disappear between several parked cars. He and Rahu went to their own vehicle and started a course for the arsenal, with Paul taking the wheel this time.

“Ten minutes meant she’d give us a head start,” Rahu answered Paul’s unvoiced question. “In ten minutes, they would know Phelps is dead. As the new faces in the area, we’d both be blamed for it.” Rahu took out a small device and plugged the ID in. In a few minutes, Rahu’s phone pinged and received a message from Eric.

“Eric has the codes. By the time we get there, the security would already be irreversibly down and we can go in.”

“But won’t that also alert their actual guards?” Paul asked. “Or do you mean to just enter with force? We don’t have an entire garrison of soldiers to storm a definitely stocked up arsenal.”

Paul just could not imagine Judith and Eric’s two friends involved in the dangerous melee. He didn’t want to use the fireballs on human beings and preferably, he didn’t want to have to kill anyone. Rahu would have no objections to it and neither would Eric if their survival hinged on fighting back. He gave Rahu a sideways glance and somehow managed to communicate his worries.

Rahu grunted, as usual. Even that gave Paul some measure of comfort.

“Don’t worry about our chances,” Rahu said with confidence, taking out a gun from the dashboard and checking is body before detaching its full magazine. “If you have Quinn Vega—” Rahu added, “—she’s just as effective as a platoon of soldiers.”

He slammed the magazine back inside the gun with a loud click. Paul swore he almost saw the man smile.

 “They won’t see her coming. In fact, they won’t see her at all.”