“There is always the possibility,” the doctor admitted. “We just need to keep him under close observation.” He took a long draw on his pipe and exhaled blue smoke through his nostrils. “Have you considered what you will do… if he does turn?”
Levi said nothing. His hand absently rested on the butt of the Blackhawk holstered at his hip, then dropped away.
After a couple of minutes, he spoke again. “What happened today… on the park road… was that normal?”
“The animal attack?”
“Yeah. The way they ambushed us. It wasn’t a random attack. They were lying in wait… and they weren’t acting individually.”
“Yes, very disturbing… but intriguing, too,” admitted the scientist. “I’ve been a biologist for nearly forty years and I’ve never seen different species band together and purposely attack in such a way. It is against their basic nature to do so, but they did it nonetheless. And it was a calculated attack, too. The deer served as a distraction, while the bear and boar took the right and left flank, and the bobcat attacked from the rear. The possum… well, that was just a fluke.”
“And it did the most damage.” Levi considered something for a moment. “What happened out there… do you think it was due to a collective intelligence?”
Abe was surprised that the man would use such a term. “No… it’s tempting to believe so, but no, I don’t think that was what motivated them. The way the parasites invade the brain—the damage implemented and the remaining areas overstimulated—are nearly identical in all the hosts. Therefore, they tend to act likewise. I’ve seen human Biters work in tandem to gain access to a living victim, much like ants methodically picking apart a scrap of food abandoned from a picnic lunch. It is not unthinkable that organisms of a different species would act in a similar way.”
“In any case, I think it’d be better if we took to the main highway or the back roads on our way to Hendersonville,” Levi told him. “And steer clear of the woods.”
“I agree,” the old man replied. “No need to take unnecessary risks.” Abe sat there for a couple of minutes, staring into the night, then shuddered.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, looking uneasy. “It’s just that I…”
“Feel like you’re being watched?” asked Levi.
“Yes.”
“We are. We have been since we drove into town. Someone’s out there, but it’s not a Biter. If it was, it would’ve attacked us by now… or tried to.”
“Perhaps they mean us no harm,” mused Abe. “Or they are waiting for the right opportunity to harm us. Either way, we had best be on guard. I’ll be glad to take a watch tonight. Agnes says that she will, too.”
Levi smiled appreciatively. “Do you think she’s up to it?”
Abe’s face grew grim. “I saw her take down three Biters back in Oak Ridge… all big, strapping Marines… from three sides with scarcely fifteen feet between them and her. Her back to a concrete wall with nowhere to go. She put a bullet between their eyes so skillfully that the measurements would have corresponded precisely. She will do what needs to be done, when the time comes. I have no doubt about that.”
“Makes me thankful that she’s on our side,” said Levi.
Abe chuckled. “You’d better believe it.”
“You and your lady take the first shift,” Levi told him. “Avery and I will relieve you at two AM.”
“Sounds good.” Abe hopped off the tailgate, knocked the burnt tobacco from the bowl of his pipe, and went into his motel room to prepare for his watch.
Levi sat on the tailgate a while longer. He smoked and thought and did some watching of his own. You’re out there. I know you are.
He stared intently into the night. Seeing nothing more than motionless darkness between the moonlit buildings and trees, he grew weary of his suspicions and, leaving the truck, went inside to check on Jem and the others.
Chapter 11
The following morning, they went scavenging.
Cherokee was beautiful that time of year. The surrounding foothills, steep and covered with tall stands of maple and oak, were ablaze with autumn color. Still it seemed strange and surreal, a picture postcard frozen in time. None of the customary crowds were present, and the souvenir shops and gambling houses that had once operated so briskly were now locked and deserted. The place was a ghost town and it felt like it.
Levi and Kate took the western end of town, while Abe and Avery took the eastern. Nell and Agnes stayed behind to tend to Jem. The two bands of scavengers broke into restaurants and stores, taking only what they needed and leaving the rest. The process was an uneasy one. The businesses had once been the Cherokee people’s livelihood. Stealing from them felt like looting a graveyard.
Avery and Abe were picking through the aisles of the Walgreens, gathering various over-the-counter and prescription medicine, first aid supplies, and basic toiletry items, when the boy posed a question.
“What do you make of this town, Mr. Abe? Why was it locked up and deserted? Like no one even lived here to begin with?”
Abe considered it for a moment. “The Cherokee are a proud people,” he said. “A persecuted people with a troubled past, much like the Jews were in Hitler’s Germany. They are survivors, though. Perhaps they saw what was coming and decided to cut their losses. Left it all behind and took to the forest before it could arrive and strike them down.”
Avery nodded as he crammed a pack of Stayfree pads into his sack, a personal request from his sister. “Yeah, sounds like a bunch of redskins.”
The old man’s eyes flashed. “Native Americans!” he corrected sternly. “It takes no more breath to honor a man than it does to tear him down.”
Avery’s ears reddened. “Yes, sir,” he said respectfully. “Who said that? Abraham Lincoln… Martin Luther King?”
“No,” Mendlebaum told him. “Me.”
They worked in silence for a few minutes. Then Avery spoke again.
“Can I ask you another question?”
“Certainly.”
“Is it just me, or does this place—this whole damn town—give you the creeps?”
Abe regarded him through the lenses of his spectacles. “More than any other place I’ve visited on the face of the earth, and believe me, I’ve been all over.”
Avery turned his head sharply as a small noise echoed from the back of the store, near the pharmacy. “What was that? A mouse?”
“Hopefully,” said the elderly man, looking as uneasy as the boy.
“Let’s speed it up a little, okay? Grab what we came for and get back out into the sunshine.”
“I’m with you, young man,” Abe agreed. “This is no place to linger.”
Together, they finished procuring what they had come for and hastefully left the place.
The few restaurants that the reservation boasted turned out to be a bust.
The food in the freezers, which had stopped working when the country gradually lost power, was spoiled, and so was much of the bread, fresh fruit, and vegetables. Only the canned food seemed alright and even that was chancy until they checked the manufacturing lot numbers against those that Abe had gathered at Oak Ridge.
They loaded what they found into the bed of the Ram and drove toward the outskirts of town, to the avenue of newer hotels built there about the time that Harrah’s had come into the picture. As Levi drove, he pointed skyward. “Look.”
Kate peered through the windshield and saw a dozen or so buzzards circling lazily at a distance. “Maybe we ought to turn around,” she suggested. Her freckled hands nervously caressed the Uzi in her lap. “There might be Biters heading this way.”
“If they are, they’re the first ones we’ve seen since we got here,” her father told her. “But something isn’t kosher. Let’s check it out.”
When they reached the double row of moderately-priced hotels, they found that the buzzards were circling, not over a crowd of zombies, but over a single building. It was a fi
ve-story Best Western, tall and bricked, with tinted windows that revealed absolutely nothing from the inside. Only a small percentage of the buzzards were in mid-air. The rest roosted on the edges of the roof, the ledges, and on the hoods of abandoned cars in the parking lot surrounding the structure. Some craned their slender pink necks, eyes glittering hungrily, while others preened lazily, digging into their oily feathers with hooked beaks, scratching an itch or two.
The sight—the sheer volume of the gathering—caused Levi to shudder. It reminded him of an old Alfred Hitchcock movie, with hundreds of crows perched upon swing sets and seesaws, waiting for the schoolhouse doors to open for recess.
The hotel looked as it might have looked months before, except for the birds… and something else. The main entrance in the front and three secondary ones around the other three sides had been blocked off by vehicles. A large brown UPS truck was parked flush with the double doors in the front, while pickup trucks and panel trucks blocked the other entrances.
“What’s going on here, Papa?” asked Kate.
“I’m not sure,” he said, parking the truck. “Let’s take a look.”
The moment they stepped outside the cab, they smelled it—the putrid stench of death and decay, not overwhelming, but strangely muted.
“Oh my God,” Kate said in amazement. “They’re all in there.”
She was right. They could hear the milling of a multitude of Biters beyond the windows and doors of the Best Western. Not only on the ground floor, but all floors. Levi and Kate stepped up to one of the first-floor windows and peered past the dark tint of the glass. Biters shuffled and roamed in the lobby and down the halls, behind the registration desk, through the dining area, and in and out of the open elevator. They moaned and hissed, ravenous, but with nothing to eat or sink their infected teeth into.
“How did they get in there?” his daughter asked.
Levi saw the scattered remains of several animals lying across the lobby carpet. He smiled and shook his head in admiration. “You mean who put them there.” He couldn’t help but laugh. “The clever son of a bitch.”
Katie looked at her father. “Papa, I’ve had the strangest sensation…”
“That someone has been watching us? They have, since the moment we rolled into town.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, “but maybe we’ll come across them before we hit the road.”
A loud bang on the window made them jump. Several zombies had noticed them standing outside. Their presence was beginning to agitate the trapped creatures.
“Let’s go, before we start a stampede,” Levi suggested. “That glass looks sturdy, but not sturdy enough to hold two or three dozen if they decided to tackle it all at once.”
Quickly, they climbed back into the truck and headed out, leaving the frustrated Biters to nibble and lick the panes of the hotel window, disappointed that their intended meal was swiftly driving away.
Jem was conscious, but had grown quiet and morose. He refused to speak to anyone… wouldn’t look at anyone. He just lay on his bed in the gloom of the hotel room with his face turned toward the wall.
Earlier that morning, before leaving, Abe had pulled Levi and Nell aside. “I’ve done all that I can do,” he had told them. “The rest is up to him.”
Around noon, Nell knelt next to his bedside, holding a bowl of chicken noodle soup she had warmed on the camp stove. “You’ve got to eat something, son,” she told him. Nell attempted a smile, but failed miserably. “If not for yourself, do it for me.”
The left side of his face was bruised and discolored, while the cauterized area around his missing ear was covered with gauze and surgical tape. His left eye was swollen shut, but the right stared past his mother’s head, focusing on some unidentifiable stain on the wall.
“Go away,” he said emotionlessly. “Don’t look at me.”
Defeated, Nell stood up. She set the bowl of soup on the nightstand between the two beds and started for the door.
Agnes Mendlebaum stood in the doorway. With a sympathetic smile, she laid a comforting hand on Nell’s shoulder. “He’ll be alright,” she assured her. “Just give him time.”
“I don’t know,” said Nell. “I’ve never seen him so low. Like he’s given up… or knows something that we don’t.”
“We’ll have Abe check him again when he gets back.”
Nell shook her head. “But what if…?”
Agnes squeezed her shoulder gently. “There has been no indication of an infestation so far. If anyone knows the signs, it’s my husband. A lot of people turned at the facility at Oak Ridge. Jem has shown none of the symptoms.”
Nell was about to say something in reply, when a sound came from behind them. Startled, they turned to see a Biter stumbling across the parking lot of the Tomahawk Motel toward them. It was the park ranger they had seen on their way down the mountain road the day before. The woman with the hiking boots and backpack was several yards behind him, closer to the road.
As the zombie grew nearer, Agnes stepped outside and took the .22 Ruger, which lay in the seat of a chair she had been sitting in. “I’ll take care of him.”
She extended the pistol at arm’s length. When he was no more than twenty feet away, she squeezed the trigger. It only moved halfway and then stopped. The gun was jammed.
“Damn!” Agnes attempted to work the slide, but it wouldn’t budge.
Nell looked over her friend’s shoulder at the front stoop of the motel, which she had turned into a makeshift kitchen of sorts. Both her Winchester and the Magnum revolver were sitting on the concrete, next to the cook stove… twenty feet away.
The ranger was scarcely three yards from them now, his arms outstretched, his black teeth snapping and gnashing like an angry Pit Bull.
The Biter was nearly on the stoop, when a gunshot rang out. It was crisp and precise—a rifle shot—echoing through the empty streets like a crack of lightning. The left side of the zombie’s head imploded, while the right side exploded. Blackened brains and fragments of skull splattered against an overhang post nearby, clinging there for a moment, then slowly dribbling toward the ground. The ranger stumbled forward a couple more steps, then fell flat on his decaying face.
Almost immediately, a second shot rang out and the hiker suffered the same fate. The entire top of her head gave away and a flood of brackish blood and blackened brain matter fell across her face like a curtain. She fell onto her back, the weight of the backpack drawing her down, and, for a moment, she laid there, kicking and struggling, like a turtle on its back. Then the damage caught up with her and she slowly grew still.
Frightened, Nell and Agnes looked up and down the street in front of the Tomahawk Motel. There was no one in sight.
A moment later, Levi and Kate pulled into the parking lot, tires squealing as they braked to a halt.
“What happened?” asked Levi, stepping out of the truck. “We heard shots.”
“We had visitors,” Agnes told him. “Someone took care of them for us. We didn’t see who it was.” Her tiny eyes scanned the trees and the hills just beyond. “A sniper, I would say.”
Levi looked at his daughter. “Maybe it was our mystery man.”
A mischievous grin crossed Kate’s freckled face. “Or woman.”
“Well, whoever it was, they got us out of a jam,” Nell told them.
“Maybe in more ways than one,” her husband said. “Let me tell you what we found.” He then proceeded to tell them about the Best Western that had been turned into a makeshift prison.
“Sounds like we have a guardian angel watching over us,” said Agnes.
“Maybe so,” allowed Levi. “But then I get to wondering… how would I react if strangers came into my town and began breaking into stores and stealing stuff? I might not prove to be too accommodating… would you?”
“I reckon we’ll see.” Nell cast her eyes on the supplies in the back of the pickup. “Now what did you bring us? It’s nearly sup
pertime and I’d like to cook up a nice meal that will stick to our ribs, before we hit the road tomorrow.”
Chapter 12
Levi woke in the middle of the night, startled, feeling like something was horribly wrong.
He had been keeping watch in front of the motel, alone, and had fallen asleep. Where he had once sat on the edge of the Ford’s flatbed, he now lay there, with the twelve-gauge shotgun forgotten beside him. He couldn’t believe he had drifted off, but then it had been a busy two days and he reckoned that it had finally caught up to him.
The nagging sense of disorientation and alarm hit him again and he hopped off the flatbed onto the pavement of the motel parking lot. He looked around, searching for something out of the ordinary. He found it a moment later. The door to Room 3 stood partially open.
Quietly, he walked to the room and, taking a flashlight from his hip pocket, directed the beam inside. There were two queen-sized beds. Katie slept on one, while Avery slept on the other. The spot where Jem should have been lying was empty.
Did he go to the bathroom? Levi wondered and then ruled it out. The door of the room wouldn’t have been open. The toilet in the bathroom still functioned, so there would have been no need to have gone outside.
Silently, he shut the door and surveyed the street in front of the motel. It was dark and choked with shadow. The sky was cloudy and, if the moon was out, it was completely concealed. Levi walked to the Ram pickup, which was backed into its parking space, its nose pointed toward the road. He opened the driver’s side door and turned on the headlights.
It didn’t take him long to find Jem. The boy sat beneath a maple tree across the street, between a gas station and a souvenir shop. His head hung low, nearly to his knees, and he held something in both hands.
It was that something that bothered Levi. He walked across the parking lot and stopped at the edge of the road. From there, he clearly saw what the object was. It was one of his brother’s .357 Magnums.
“Jem,” he said softly. “What are you doing?”
The boy didn’t look at his father. “I’m going to do it, Papa… so you won’t have to.” He lifted the gun, with the muzzle pointed toward his face.
The Buzzard Zone Page 7