The Infected Dead (Book 3): Die For Now by Bob Howard Page A

said.
    “So,” said Tom, “you’re saying it isn’t necessarily the bite that’s killing everyone. The bite is just something that the infected do after they come back to life. And you’re saying anyone that dies is going to have the infection, and when they get back up they’re going to start biting?”
    “That’s a fair summary,” said Bus.
    Kathy said, “Let me get this straight, Doc. If we sneak up there at night and kill one of them, he would turn into an infected dead and start biting people?”
    “Seems to me that we might have a plan B after all,” said Kathy. “We don’t have to kill everyone. We just have to get it started. Now let’s find the door that opens to the surface.”

    ******

    There were two hidden doors leading from the shelter to the surface. Not surprisingly, they were both located in the rooms behind the doors in the corridor that had reminded Bus of the White House. When we looked down the corridor, it just looked like a series of doors, ten on each side. That was why it looked so much like a hotel to me. The surprise was that each room opened into a much larger room, and each of them had ten more doors. When I did the math, it was two hundred rooms.
    We were worried at first when we saw so many doors. Some opened into storage rooms, and some into living quarters. I opened one door and found myself in a stairwell that went downward. I didn’t bother to go down because I knew I was just going to find more rooms. It was a maze of doors and rooms, and it could take days to search them all.
    Kathy said she was going to go back to the control room to see if she could come up with a floor plan of the shelter. She caught up with the rest of us only thirty minutes later, and she had a printout for each of us.
    “Keep these so you don’t get lost,” said Kathy. “The exits go to the surface through secure areas. It looks like there are checkpoints and living quarters for the Secret Service just inside each of the checkpoints.”
    We each took one, and we were amazed by the number of rooms. The government apparently thought there would be more time to establish a command and control center in this shelter.  
    “Why do you suppose they didn’t make it here?” asked Tom.
    Bus said, “When the infection started to spread, did you think the stories were true?”
    “No, not really,” said Tom. “I kept saying to myself the military would get it all under control. I guess the military kept saying the same thing.”
    “Exactly,” said Bus. “And the government thought the military would stop it, too. I can’t say I really blame them, either. Can you imagine if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had sat down around a table and one of them suggested they develop an emergency response plan for zombies?”
    As soon as Bus said it he regretted it. It made them all think of the Chief. He looked at them in with a helpless expression.
    Kathy said, “If it makes you feel any better, I’ll go ahead and say it for the Chief, Bus. They aren’t zombies.”
    In a weird sort of way it did make me feel better. As the Chief had explained to us numerous times, zombies are under the control of someone, and the infected dead were reanimated by an infectious virus. No one really knew enough about it to say how it worked, but it certainly wasn’t giving someone control over the infected dead.
    “Back to your point,” said Kathy, “if someone had proposed to the President of the United States that the government needed to be prepared to deal with a virus spread by dead people biting healthy people, that person would have found themselves working in a small government office at the South Pole. So, when everything hit the fan, they kept looking at the military expecting them to stop it.”
    Bus said, “It’s a time honored tradition in the military that no man will be left behind. It’s not hard to guess what that means. They had wounded men and women who they tried to treat, and that spread the infection