"Hold up," he said to her. He stepped around the edge of a building on a corner and looked down the next street. She came to a stop behind him, wondering what he saw.
A zombie with just a few patches of black hair stretching out of its skull shambled across the street, making an irritatingly grading moan. Its feet, which were wrapped in only the top halves of a pair of shoes—the bottoms had been worn down to the point of being missing entirely—dragged along the pavement, the skin on its soles turned into thick pancakes of leather. It saw Noah standing conspicuously on the corner and its eyelids slid up to the top of its head, baring its big blank eyeballs. Its sporadic motor functions churned into life and it broke into a clumsy trot toward him.
"What is it?" Sarah whispered from behind.
"Just wait a sec," he said calmly, not taking his eyes off the zombie. After another moment he stepped back around the corner and kept his back pressed to the wall. He looked at her and said, "Move back."
She did as he said and backed up a few paces. Her hands tightened around the Sig Sauer and her anxiety made it felt like it had the weight of a bowling ball. She was nervous, but she trusted him.
He had his M16 slung around his chest and kept his pistol in its holster as he reached across his midsection and pulled out his hunting knife, holding it at the ready. The side of his head was pressed against the wall and he stared at the corner, waiting. He could hear the shambling, uneven footsteps get closer.
Sarah watched as the zombie ran around the corner, and in one smooth movement Noah grabbed it by the arm and the back of its tattered shirt, yanked it around, and slammed it face-first into the wall of the building. The zombie recoiled back and he drove it to the ground, pressing his knee down onto its spine and stabbing its brain up through the base of its head. The whole event took about ten seconds to occur, but to Sarah it seemed like it happened in the blink of an eye.
He withdrew the blade from the zombie's head and wiped it on a filthy rag hanging out his back pocket then put the knife back in its sheath. "Now we can go," he said. He smiled at her in response to the stunned look on her face. "What? You never seen someone kill a zombie before?"
He took her by the hand and led her around the corner, and just as soon as he had turned onto the next street, he suddenly shot backward and bowled into her, almost knocking her to the ground.
Sarah regained her balance and before she could ask what the problem was, a voice came from the distance around the corner.
"Did you see that?" it said.
"See what?" another voice said from far off.
"That corner, right there!"
"Is it him?"
"Randy!" the first man yelled out.
Noah quietly backed away from the corner as the sound of the two men's footsteps ran toward their position. He looked at Sarah and put a finger to his lips, telling her to be quiet. He grabbed her by the arm and they quietly moved across the street and retreated around the corner of the next block. They waited behind the building and listened.
The two sets of footsteps came to where they used to be only fifteen seconds ago, then they petered out and staggered around in a confused fashion.
"I swear I just saw something," the voice of the first man said.
There was a moment of silence and then the sound of their rifles rattled, as if they had raised them at the ready.
"Randy?" The first man called. "Are you there?"
Noah was dead still and silent and he held an arm across Sarah's midsection, holding her in place against the wall. The voices of the two men around the corner went silent, as did their footsteps. Only the faintest crunch of gravel betrayed their presence as they moved around the street.
Noah took Sarah and retreated even farther into the doorway of a ransacked bakery.
He peered around the corner from the open doorway, most of his face shrouded in shadow, and he watched. He saw one of the men move into the street in his line of vision with his M4 rifle raised. The man was very stocky and bald, medium height, and when he called out the name of the man who they were looking for again, he had a very distinct Baltimore accent to him.
"You sure you saw something?" the second man said from out of view.
"Yeah," the bald man said, taking offense, "I'm not retarded."
"Could've fooled me," the other man said.
"Shut the fuck up and let's get on with it. I don't think he's here or he would've answered by now."
"What do you think happened to him?" the other man asked, stepping into view and joining the bald man. He was tall and thin, but still well-toned, not unlike Wayne.
"I don't know," the bald man from Baltimore said. "But we should head back... tell Zed we ain't found him."
"Yeah, all right."
They slowly lowered their rifles and turned and disappeared around the corner. Noah waited to make sure they were gone, then he nodded at Sarah and they crept out onto the street.
He leaned toward her and put his lips up to her ear. "Let's follow them very quietly," he whispered. "I want to hear if they say anything."
She nodded and they lagged behind the two men from Zed's camp, keeping a few blocks back and never moving out into the open until the two men had rounded another corner. Their voices were faint, and they talked openly and nonchalantly, but it was mostly just shooting the shit, and Noah couldn't even discern anything from them about the person they were looking for. He figured whoever Randy was, he was just another one of their ilk, and it didn't really matter. Running into any kind of trouble out here and getting separated, injured or killed was par for the course for any group, really.
The two men walked down a long stretch of Rigsbee Avenue and by that point they didn't seem to give much of a care about anything. Noah was about to tell Sarah to follow him a different way, but then one of them said something interesting.
"So what you think the boss is going to do?" one of them said very faintly from the distance.
"About what?"
"You know..." the first one said, being coy. "I heard he was talking about planning an attack."
"Oh yeah? If he does, I want in. All this shit gets boring after a while, you know?"
"Tell me about it. I even heard something about moving in the next day or two. You know, if that's what shakes out."
They went back to small talk after that and their voices trailed out as Noah slowed behind them and changed direction to the east. The men from Zed's camp turned a corner and started heading east, and Noah led Sarah toward Dowd Street, making sure they stayed well north of them.
He knew his way around the area and some of the common paths that Zed's men took near his camp, and he knew just where to go to avoid them. They moved away from the downtown area and cut through the suburbs. Instead of sticking to the streets, he elected to stay out of sight by taking shortcuts through backyards when he could.
As they got closer, he kept his rifle at the ready with his finger on the trigger, keeping a keen eye all around them, and Sarah stayed right behind him with her pistol still in her hands. She was terrified of deliberately going toward the belly of the beast, especially after hearing the stories of how brutal they were, and she started to have flashbacks of two nights prior when Noah had taken her to the pizza parlor. But he assured her it wouldn't be like that this time, and although she was scared, she trusted him and felt safe; she had faith in him.
"It's just past there," Noah said before long, nodding toward a long alley between houses. "Come on, we'll go in here." They entered the alley and made their way across the overgrown backyard of a rundown house to a set of stairs leading up to an apartment above the garage. He moved slowly and looked over his shoulder, making sure she was following him.
"I don't see it," she said.
"It's just past this house. We can get a good view from up here," he said, pointing up the steps. They went up the rusting metal stairs that led to a rickety screen door sitting in the middle of white trim with most of its paint chipped off and rotting wood
showing underneath. But they were in the kind of neighborhood that probably looked the exact same before the apocalypse happened, so there was nothing out of the ordinary.
He opened the screen door and it gave a horrible screech, but he knew they were far enough away that no one in Zed's camp would hear it. Sarah was still eager to even lay eyes on the camp, and her mind had started to run all manner of fantasy through it, trying to imagine what the camp would even look like; Noah hadn't told her anything about it, and she mostly envisioned it as a carbon copy of Noah's Ark.
They both entered the musty apartment and carefully stepped across the junk littered on the floor. Old newspapers, beer cans and garbage were the main debris, and there was a very pungent and almost familiar smell in the air, but neither of them could place it. Light drifted into the room through a small window on the south side, etching a rigid box of light across the otherwise stark floor. They stood at the window looking out at a clearing that was marked on the left by a house and on the right by a row of thick trees. And through the clearing ahead, they could see Zed's camp in full view.
It was a big square building that used to be the warehouse to a trucking company. The garage bay had been cleared out and all the tractor-trailers had been circled around the building from nose to tail, creating a thick perimeter, piles of sandbags stuffed under them to prevent people from crawling through. The only opening between the trucks was a heavy metal gate they had built between two of them right in front of the main entrance to the building. A few guards stood on top of the tractor-trailers and patrolled around, keeping an eye on the surrounding area, and there were beaten-down barrels much like the bandits had on the bridge that they no doubt used for lighting fires at night. And on the roof of the building, there were more guards stationed there, some sitting around in chairs and playing cards just like the bandits had.
The men were all armed and looked a little gruff, but they were far better fed and less scruffy looking than the bandits. If they were just as brutal as the bandits, they at least had a more sophisticated air of brutality to them.
"That's their camp?" Sarah asked.
"That's it," Noah said. "Not what you were expecting?"
"Not really. It's not as big as I thought it would be," she admitted. "I mean, it's still pretty big, but not like your camp."
"It's not," he said. "They've only got about two thirds of the population that we do, but don't underestimate them; Zed's a smart guy, and when you cross smart with evil, you've got quite a force to be reckoned with. Especially when Delroy's camp is a full two thirds the size of ours as well."
"So where's Delroy's camp?" she asked.
"It's west of here, on the other side of downtown." He looked out the window and pointed toward it, and she pressed her face against the glass to try and get a better look.
"What exactly are you looking for here?" she asked, turning her attention to the front doors leading into the building in front of them.
Noah had disappeared across the room and returned with a dirty lawn chair that he dragged across the messy floor. "Well, we're looking for any and all activity. I want to see who moves and how they move, and where they go. If those two guys today were talking about an attack on us, there should be signs of it." He brought the chair in front of the window and offered it to her.
"You mean they might march toward our camp and attack us?" she asked, taking a seat.
"Probably not today," he said, "but Zed seems serious about this, and if that's the case, it's only a matter of time."
"So why did Zed attack Kenny anyway?" she asked. She turned her head and saw that he had left the room again.
He came back a moment later dragging another chair, this one a pretty heavily-battered lawn chair. "I don't know," he said, sitting down beside her. "I'm sure those two have wanted to take me out and take each other out for years, but force of arms is a pretty good deterrent; you can't really rise up against someone else until you have the right opportunity. I don't know exactly what he's planning, but if we give him any opportunity whatsoever to attack us, he'll take it—count on it."
They sat in their chairs and stared out the window, but there was nothing interesting to see. When she began to fidget in her seat, he reminded her that they would be sitting in this unpleasant, foul-smelling room for up to a few hours, and that she should try to make herself comfortable.
She came close to saying that for some reason he always made her feel comfortable, but she stopped herself at the last moment. She realized that she had been feeling certain things for him lately, but she felt guilty thinking about it when they were busy doing something vitally important like this. She hadn't yet decided exactly what she felt for him, but there was definitely something there. He looked so intense and serious as he watched Zed's camp, and somehow he reminded her of her husband.
Ultimately she decided to drop it for the moment and focus on watching for activity. The men on top of the trucks just stood or wandered around, sometimes stopping to talk to each other, as did the men on the roof of the building. There were a few men milling about on the ground in front of the building between the walls and the trucks, but there was nothing interesting to see that would look any different from staring at the high walls of Noah's Ark and watching the guards on the outposts there. Forty-five minutes passed without incident and they made small talk as they waited.
"What do you know about the zombies?" she asked Noah.
"What about them?"
"Yesterday you mentioned something about the 'zombie virus'. How do you know it's a virus?"
"I really don't," he said. "But what else would it be? Black magic? I don't remember how it usually went in the movies, but isn't that usually what it was? Someone's infected with something and they bite someone else, and that person becomes infected and so on?"
"I guess," she said. "It's just that, after it happened, me and my son were pretty isolated, and I never really talked to people much, so I never heard what even caused all of this. You sounded like you might have known, but I suppose it's anyone's guess."
"Why did you think I would know?" he asked.
"Well, it's obvious that you have some kind of connections, otherwise you wouldn't have that huge modern building in your camp or the bunker or all those guns inside it. And the way that you and Wayne move... I've watched you kill zombies, and you make it look like it's the easiest thing in the world."
Noah laughed. "You're right about one thing: being that I was trying to be a community leader and rally everyone under me, I made a few connections in my time and I was able to construct Noah's Ark when all the machines were still working. And as for Wayne, he used to be in the Marine Corps, as a matter of fact."
"I knew it!" she said. "Were you in the Marines too?"
"No," he said, "but Wayne certainly taught me a few things over the years. He's been more than just the best man I have tactically; he's also been a really close friend to me over the years, and even a little bit of a father figure."
"Father figure? He can't be that much older than you."
"Well, not that much. He's almost fifty, and that's ten years older than me, so maybe an older brother, you could say. We've both really looked out for each other, and he's the most loyal person I've ever met. He would die for me if he needed to, and I would do the same for him."
The gate between the trucks in front of Zed's camp suddenly opened and they both craned their necks to see what was happening.
Two men exited as the gate closed behind them, and they headed across the street toward the alleyway leading up to the apartment where Sarah and Noah were.
Sarah became scared and got up to her feet, backing away into the middle of the room. Noah stood up and held out a hand to her, trying to calm her down.
"It's okay," he said, "they're not coming up here."
They stood and waited and watched as the men entered the alley and passed by under the window. Noah moved over to the door and peered down at them as they passed the stairs. Sarah
came up behind him and instinctively held onto his arm as she looked through the door.
The men passed by and continued down the alley, out to the street beyond without giving so much as a glance behind them. They had a couple of pistols on them, but no assault rifles, and Noah could see a pair of binoculars around one of their necks.
"Where are they going?" Sarah asked. "Isn't that the direction Noah's Ark is?"
He was silent for a moment, watching them go. When they were out of sight, he said, "Yeah, it is."
"Then we have to get back!" she said. She looked up at him, her eyes wide, like she was about to plead. "Don't we?" she added.
"No," he said. "There are only two of them, and they don't look well-armed. They're probably scouting us out just like we're doing now."
"What if they attack when you're not there?"
"Sarah," he said. He fully turned to her and put his hands on her shoulders. He could feel her gently shaking under his grip, and he looked her square in the eyes and just held her gaze until he could feel her start to calm down. "I left Wayne in charge. The camp is in good hands. Nothing bad is going to happen. They're just spies, Sarah. It happens all the time."
She let out a long breath and tried to calm herself. He pulled her in and hugged her and she squeezed her arms around the top of his back behind his neck.
"We're going to be okay," he said. "I got you."
His strong arms felt good around her, and she again started to feel that guilt creep up about her personal feelings getting in the way of their mission, but she didn't care. In that moment, she felt better and safer than she had since her husband was still alive. She remembered that moment when he drove her to the hospital to give birth to their son, and she remembered how despite everything around them turning to chaos, she felt safe with him.
Sarah stared into Noah's blue eyes and it was like looking out onto a sparkling ocean. She had been afraid lately to admit any feelings she might have had for him, but she knew that he felt something for her, too. They were both silent for a long time, and finally she opened her mouth to say something. She struggled and didn't know what she wanted to say, but she was sure that she wanted to say it.
Zombie Apocalypse Series (Book 2): A Rising Tide Page 5