Monsterland by Michael Phillip Cash Page B

to play ball with me.” He looked at the coffee cup. “I thought we weren’t allowed food or beverages in the park.”
    “We
are
considered in a safe zone,” Jessup said with a smirk.
    “I know,” he stated, as if that was all that had to be said. They had worked together for close to fifteen years and could pretty much read each other’s thoughts. “I don’t like it either.”
    “Too many important people here. I heard the ambassadors for both China and Russia just landed.”
    “Not to mention the president, a clutch of senators, and a bunch of military.”
    Carter nodded to a brace of suited men obviously in the secret service. “They’ve brought their own guns.”
    “Not enough for my taste. The way I see it, we’re outnumbered at least a hundred to one.”
    “That only counts if the shit hits the fan,” Carter said. “Conrad keeps assuring everybody he’s got it under control. The inhabitants are heavily sedated.”
    “I’m not comfortable with it.” Jessup threw his cup into a garbage can.
    “I read the playbook. They have protocols in place. The wolves are behind impenetrable glass, they keep the vampires sated with blood, and the zombies are in a walled-off village. Visitors wear special suits.”
    “It seems Dr. Conrad thought of everything,” Jessup said.
    “Yeah,” Carter laughed. “And they said the
Titanic
wouldn’t sink either.” There was a bite of sarcasm in Carter’s voice. “What could go wrong? Have you talked to them?” he gestured to the secret service.
    Jessup inclined his head. “Seems they dance to their own drum. They don’t want to expose any plans on how they protect the president. We appear to be on our own.”
    “Sometimes it’s better that way.”
    “I still don’t like it,” Carter said with a shake of his head.
    “What, in particular, is bothering you?” Jessup asked.
    “Well, start with the fact that we are surrounded by a hostile population…”
    “He seems to have it under control. He has security in place. You saw the wall of guns.” They had been given a tour of the park earlier and shown a room with mounted shotguns loaded with silver bullets.
    Carter shook his head. “I don’t understand why he keeps his arsenal under lock and key.”
    “He explained it all.” Jessup shrugged. “The park is filled with silver axes behind glass doors every ten feet, for emergency use. The silver works on all three groups, the axe on anybody. He didn’t want armed guards in the park. I get that. The whole place is under surveillance. He looks like he’s got a good security team here. Created a lot of jobs.”
    Carter laughed. “Yeah. They’re an odd bunch.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He shrugged. “Just a feeling. I can’t quite put my finger on it, Dan. I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”
    “Well.” Jessup put his hand on Carter’s shoulder. “Keep your feelings to yourself.”

C HAPTER 11
    Zombieville
    Z ombieville was set up like a bizarre television or movie set, with tree-lined streets and pastel-colored bi-level homes. They could have been in a small suburban town anywhere in the states. Maintenance people patrolled alongside guards dressed in metal armor not unlike chain mail. This prevented the zombies from biting and infecting them. It was only through the exchange of body fluids that the disease traveled. Their faces covered, they walked through the byways, cleaning blood and guts from the pristine streets.
    There were a total of twenty homes, each filled to capacity with pus-covered, rotted wrecks of humanity that dozed in a drugged stupor all day, roused by their keepers with the tantalizing smell of meat when the sun slipped behind the mountains. They would wake each other, moaning with desperation to get to it, climbing over each other to find a way out of their four-wall confines to the large tube that brought the food into the development. They didn’t talk to each other; their brains had lost the ability to communicate