Flight or Fight – A program Eve used for her three-mile run when she was up early in Payback in Death, not having adjusted to the time difference from being in Ireland for a week, and Europe for two weeks prior.
It was set in New York: Silence fell on Fifth Avenue under a blazing summer sun. Old flyers, takeaway cups, mangled shopping bags scuttled or fluttered along the empty streets. Display windows in the Midtown shopping mecca showed frozen-faced mannequins in sparkly dresses and sleek suits. Or, behind shattered glass, they lay broken, naked, and some eerily splattered with blood.
She didn’t mistake the dead body half-in, half-out of a broken window as a mannequin. The blood looked fresh and plentiful and, as she jogged closer, she noted the right shoulder - or more accurately, the lack thereof. A cop was a cop, even in a hologram workout program, so she ran over to investigate. Urban War era? she wondered. But she saw no signs of bombing, heard no sound of street fighting, no military or paramilitary presence.
What she did see when she reached the body was what had once been a man greedily chomping on the DB’s leg. The dead woman’s eyes snapped open. She growled. And what was snacking on her rose up from his hands and knees to shamble forward. “Seriously?”
Eve reached for her weapon. Instead of a stunner, she held a handgun. Resisting the instinct to aim for body mass, she remembered the weirdly entertaining zombie vid she’d watched with Roarke and went for the head shot. When he dropped, the dead, mostly devoured woman began to crawl out of the broken window. Mindless hunger glowed in her eyes. Eve shot her between them. And they came, shambling out of broken windows, climbing out of manholes, dragging themselves over the sidewalk. She said, “Well, shit.” and ran.
By the time she got back upstairs, Roarke sat, the cat across his lap, a pot of coffee on the table. “Why were there zombies?” He smiled at her. “Some say it comes from a virus.” “I figured on a three-mile run since I was up, pulled a program that fit the timing, and zombies are chowing down all over Midtown and up to the Upper West.” “Which did you choose?” “Both. Zombie doorman over on Fiftieth nearly had me, but I mostly decapitated him with the revolving doors. I just wanted a run.”[1]
References:
- ↑ Payback in Death, Chapter 11