“Take my gun,” Phineas said. “I think I dropped it in the hall.”
Miranda tapped her holster, where his gun already resided.
He smiled weakly. “That’s how it’s gonna be?”
“Half a mile, you said?”
“I didn’t, but yeah.”
“Sit tight. I’ll be back with help as soon as I can.”
Phineas looked scared and confused but was trying so hard not to show it. She remembered being his age. Wanting to prove herself, pretending she wasn’t afraid in situations where fear was the only sensible emotion. He had so much life ahead of him if he was lucky. And if she was.
“You don’t have to do this for me.”
Miranda shook her head. Why were young men so dumb?
“That is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard,” she said. “Try not to do anything stupid, like move. Or go outside. I’ll be back.”
“Don’t die trying, Miranda.”
For a second she thought he was teasing, but he looked too serious.
“Okay,” she said. “No dying.”
Phineas grinned faintly. “So it’s a date?”
Miranda laughed despite herself. “Not in your lifetime, kid.”
19
Miranda ducked as low as she could in the overgrowth and still move at a trot, grimacing with every step. She cut through the yards of the next four houses before doubling back to the road. Moans came from every direction. She knelt between a rusting truck and minivan, both permanently parked in a driveway, and peeked around the truck’s tailgate.
A steady stream of zombies shuffled toward the house where she had left Phineas, but just as many were wandering in every other direction, including near her. She could not stay here long.
Okay, think, she said to herself. If I’m looking north, then LO is east of here.
In just the past minute, she had counted over forty zombies coming from the east. As she had already suspected, going east immediately was a nonstarter. There were more zombie snacks east of here at LO, but she and Phineas had attracted a lot of attention locally. Zombies didn’t make decisions about where they might get the most to eat because they didn’t make decisions at all. They just responded to the stimulus at hand.
She could fall back again, but Phineas needed medical attention now. There was a small woods behind the houses on the other side of the street that would offer better cover. Woods were usually good at slowing down if not stopping most zombies if they were thick enough.
A loud moan ahead. At the end of the driveway, a zombie with no legs that dragged itself along the road had noticed her. It was so weathered and worn that she could not tell if it had been a man or a woman. Long, stringy hair dragged on the ground, and its clothes were so threadbare that it was impossible to tell what color they had once been. Its fingernails were long gone, the ragged stubs of its fingertips embedded with dirt and grit around nubs of bone.
Miranda tensed, her muscles coiled with energy. She unsheathed her machete and stood up straighter, taking in the street at a glance. There were a lot more zombies than she had realized. This little road had a lot of trees growing through the decaying asphalt that she could use as cover.
She jumped over the dragging zombie. The moans started immediately, loud and mournfully agitated. She zigzagged around a zombie that had turned around, alerted by her footsteps, then ducked behind a slender tree. She left the shelter of the tree, and the ground rushed up at her. Her foot had caught on a root. She landed on her side, barely getting her arm up in time to shield her head as she hit the ground. The impact sent shockwaves of pain through her bruised frame.
Before she could scramble up, a zombie grabbed her foot. Rolling onto her back, she kicked at it. It latched on to her boot, holding her foot in the air while it tried to bite through the sturdy leather. Miranda thrashed her leg, trying to shake it off, but with her foot in the air, she couldn’t get any leverage.
More zombies closed in. Miranda wriggled toward the zombie that had her. She whipped her machete behind its ankles, the flat of the blade against them. She caught the other end of the machete in her hand and pulled. The zombie lost its footing and fell, pulling her along with it. Miranda whipped up to sitting, tugging the machete out from underneath the tangle of hers and the zombie’s legs. She stabbed at its eye, finally hitting the mark on the third try.
Stumbling to her feet, she ran, hacking blindly. A cold chill of fear shot through her when she realized she was almost completely surrounded. Zombies closed in, hissing, arms outstretched. She ducked low and tackled a small zombie, perhaps a child once, with her shoulder. It toppled over, knocking into the zombie behind it.
She sprinted through the gap, crashing through the scrub of an overgrown lawn. Ahead, she saw a low chain-link fence. Not much, but something. She could hear the zombies pursuing her, their moans deafening. She quit hacking at branches. Zombies didn’t care if branches slapped their faces and ripped at their clothes. Neither could she.
What felt like a freight train crashed into her from the left. She fell to the ground, a massive zombie next to her. She rolled away, but a hand closed over her shoulder. Miranda looked for her machete, but it must have been jarred from her hand.
The zombie dragged her backward. Zombies don’t breathe, but it seemed she could feel its rank breath against her neck. Unable to get away, she rolled into it, catching the elbow of her captured shoulder behind the zombie’s arm. She pushed, using her elbow and hand as a lever to roll over it.
The zombie’s grip never loosened. It hissed, almost sounding angry at such unruly prey. Her other arm now free, she shoved her fingers into the zombie’s eye. Her fingers slid through, the chill of the mushy, dead flesh penetrating her gloves. Her fingers were jammed up to the palm before the zombie let go of her shoulder.
Miranda leaped to her feet and crashed through the scrub. There was a chain-link fence, and woods just beyond it! She jumped the fence at a flat-out run.
She fell into a decaying cement staircase and tumbled down, smacking every part of her body that might have come through the motorcycle crash without injury. She hit the bottom face-first, tasting blood in her mouth when her teeth cut into her lower lip. She rolled over and looked up the staircase. Zombies were stacked against the fence above, unable to figure out how to get over it. She reckoned the fence was four feet high. Eventually the pressure from the zombies at the back might knock it down, but right now, it was enough of an obstacle to offer a reprieve.
She pushed herself to her hands and knees. The cement might be cracked and falling apart, but what was intact was still hard as hell. Drops of blood dripped from her nose. She wiped it with the back of her hand. Only drops, not the geyser that meant her nose was broken. She pushed up to standing and stumbled into the woods.
This must have been a park—no need for steps otherwise. She set off, following the faint remnants of a path as the gully descended. The temperature dropped a few degrees, enough that her breath began to mist. Her sweaty clothes stuck to her skin, chilled and clammy as the air grew heavier with suspended moisture. She stopped, cocking her head to listen. There was noise ahead…a low, slow gurgle that was almost musical.
Water.
She picked her way carefully through trees and overgrown ferns, her muscles beginning to stiffen. The loamy soil felt springy under her feet, decades of accumulated pine needles and leaves the first soft surface to cushion her body in what seemed hours. Ten minutes later, she stood on a bank above a stream.
“This has got to be the stream that flows through LO,” she said aloud. “I just have to follow it upstream.”
She couldn’t be too far now. The ride to Station Eight had taken perhaps twenty minutes. They had been on the motorcycle almost that long when they crashed. She didn’t know how the route there compared with the one back, but Phineas had said they were almost there.
Her body sagged with weariness. The idea of deliverance banished the last vestiges of adrenaline, amplifying
every bump, cut, scratch, bruise, and wrenched joint.
I just need to get back, she told herself again and again. I’m close. I just need to get back.
She was so focused on keeping herself moving that it took her a few minutes to realize that the canopy of the trees—most of them deciduous—had climbed higher. These trees were older and blocked most of the sky. The undergrowth had thinned. She stopped, then turned around.
“Oh shit.”
She took in the wide, open spaces between the trees. Even the pines and redwoods grew more sparsely here. There were logs and rocks, but zombies could move here with relative ease. She tried to jog, even walk faster, but everything was seizing up. It was easier to count what didn’t hurt, which was exactly nothing.
She smelled them first. A moment later, she heard the moans. Above on her right, and on the far side of the stream, too. She peered through the trees, the light filtering through the tree canopy from the overcast sky more like twilight than midday. How did they get so close, she wondered, realizing that the zombies coming down the hill above her were only a hundred feet away. The soil, she realized. The soft loamy soil that felt like a caress had masked the sound of the zombies’ approach. Now they were almost on top of her.
She had just passed a section of high creek bank. She turned around and forced herself almost to a trot, gritting her teeth against the pain. When she reached the stretch of creek, she inspected the bank. Three feet high, with a boulder jutting out over the water, creating a foot of overhang.
The water pooled below the overhang. She looked at the trees again, but the lowest branches were twenty feet from the ground, and she could not outrun them.
“If they walk into the creek… Fuck it.”
She faced the bank as she slid her legs over the edge and into the water. Like a snake, cold water slithered between the tongue and lacings of her boots. The shock of the stream’s icy temperature sucked her breath from her lungs as she sank into the water. She felt along the bank below the surface until she found a tree root she could hang on to in order to keep herself in place, then lowered all but her head into the water. Already, she shivered. When she could almost see the faces of the zombies approaching the far bank clearly, she slid all the way under, keeping only her nose and mouth above the water’s surface.
She didn’t know the temperature of the water apart from fucking freezing. The first minutes were excruciating as her body heat was whisked away by the current. She tasted blood again as she bit her lip to keep from huffing her breath out or chattering her teeth. Then, slowly, it got better. The aches and pains subsided, soothed by the water’s chill. A full body ice bath, sans ice. The water between her torso and the leather jacket felt not warm, but not as cold, the jacket acting almost like a wet suit.
On the far bank, the zombies shuffled and groaned. Seventy-five, maybe more, it was hard to tell. The contours of the far creek bank worked in her favor. Instead of walking into the creek, its rise fed the zombies west, paralleling the creek.
Above her, what was left of a gnawed face swayed into view—the first zombie on this side of the creek. It inched toward the edge of the creek bank.
It’s going to fall in.
Despair welled up in Miranda’s chest. After all she had endured, all she had lost and been lucky enough to find again, they were going to fall in. When she was too cold and stiff and tired to run. The struggle to survive, do the right thing, not hurt others when she couldn’t help hurting herself, would end right here.
Miranda waited for the zombie to take the final step. But it didn’t. The zombie swayed in place, moving neither forward nor back. She gripped the root holding her in place tighter. The first zombie was joined by another, then another. She couldn’t hear them, but their mouths opened and closed. They shuffled in place, those that wandered off replaced by others, or maybe the same ones circling back.
They know I’m here, she thought, panicked. For a split second she almost burst out of the water to make a doomed break for it.
Calm down, calm down, calm down.
The hammering of her heart didn’t seem to lessen, but she managed to stay put. The zombies above shuffled almost at the edge of the creek bank. They could tell something was here, but being almost completely submerged in the creek was confusing them.
Shivers racked her from head to toe now. She felt her feet rise and tightened her abdomen, fighting to keep them in place. If her boots splashed out of the water, it was over. She knew she had gripped a tree root to stay in place but couldn’t feel her fingers anymore. She wanted to turn her head to look, to make sure she really was holding on. Her toes had gone numb, too. She sucked on her lower lip to keep it between her chattering teeth. It ached faintly… Had she bitten it? She was too cold to tell.
Miranda opened her eyes. Had she drifted off? Who were those figures above her? She squinted through the two inches of water sliding past her eyes. Were they people? Had someone come looking for her? One of the figures lurched into another, and they both stumbled out of sight. They’re zombies, she thought, her brain struggling to fit the pieces together. A person would never bang into another like that. She didn’t think so, anyway. She couldn’t remember how long she had been in the water, just that she couldn’t stop shaking. She was so, so tired. If she could just go to sleep—
I’m hypothermic.
The thought swelled inside her muddled brain like the reverberation of a bell. If she fell asleep, it wouldn’t matter if there were zombies nearby.
She had to get out of the creek.
She waited for what seemed like forever, but no more zombies came into view. It took every ounce of strength she had to lift her head out of the water. She heard a clacking sound she could not identify. She let go of the branch she thought she still held and struggled to her feet. The water splashed. It was so loud. She looked up the bank. One look at how high it was and she wanted to slip into the water again.
Wade down the creek.
She lumbered forward, splashing back into the water when her foot did not follow. She tugged it free of whatever it had stuck on and let the water’s buoyancy push her up. She splashed through the water, stumbling and falling, the faint moans of zombies behind her. After forever, she saw the bank turn into a gentle rise. She was supposed to do something, she thought. What the hell was it?
“Get out,” she muttered through her numb lips and aching teeth. “Supposed to get out.”
She flailed out of the water and fell, gasping on the bank. She could see the far bank. There were no zombies on it anymore. She realized she had not even thought to check before now.
She crawled to a nearby log, water running out of her jacket, her sleeves, her pants. Freezing, wet clothes clung to her skin. The chain mail, cement heavy, pulled her down. The loamy soil felt soft against her hands and knees, its pungent scent of decaying pine needles, leaves, and earth filling her nostrils. She could see the dirt and pine needles clinging to shaking fingers, but she couldn’t feel them. All she wanted to do was lie down, hug her limbs to her body, and sleep.
She was supposed to do something, she just couldn’t remember what. She couldn’t think with her teeth making so much noise. She couldn’t keep going, she couldn’t—
A thought bubbled to the surface.
Get. Up. Get up or you’re dead.
She climbed the log, then pulled herself up the tree beside it. She leaned against the tree, spent and trembling.
Just try for a minute. A minute, and then you can rest.
She stumbled and tripped and staggered. She had never been so cold, so tired. She had never wanted to give up as badly as she wanted to give up right now. There weren’t any zombies, but if they showed up, it would almost be a relief. The shivering, the ice in her veins, the titanic effort it took to put one numb foot in front of the other, would stop. She could lie down and sleep until they gobbled her up. She was so tired and numb she didn’t think zombies devouring her flesh would even register.
From so
mewhere, she dredged up a chuckle. “T-that’s s-s-so f-fucking m-m-m-morbid.”
Her feet squished wetly inside her icy boots. She could hear zombies moaning but could not tell how close they were. She would never outrun zombies if they were nearby. Since she couldn’t do anything about it, she ignored them.
I should count, she thought. It might keep her awake, even if she couldn’t remember why that was important.
One, two, three, five, eight? No…one, two, five, four…
The sob welled up, rushed past her lips. Cold tears slid down her cheeks.
The creek veered to the left, but there was something straight ahead. She squinted, trying to see what it was. It was almost like a void, an absence, rather than a presence, except for the glow along the top. She kept following the creek. She had to keep moving, follow the creek, get to LO.
Miranda jerked to a halt.
“It’s the p-p-palisade.”
She turned back, trying to hurry but failing. She stumbled blindly toward LO’s wall.
I have to tell them about Phineas.
The groans of zombies seemed louder. She tumbled through the tree line, then reared back, arms pinwheeling, and fell on her ass. A foot past her toes was a trench that she had almost stumbled into. Zombies writhed in it, snarling and snapping at the sight of her. Across the trench was a strip of land and a chain-link fence. And beyond that, the log palisade that bordered LO.
The zombies were louder on her right. She looked to see. A mob of zombies, hundreds perhaps, were coming toward her. Some fell into the trench, but those that didn’t had seen her.
The Undead Age Series (Book 2): Damage In An Undead Age Page 17