by Joe McKinney
As we pulled to a stop in front of the hotel, I said, “Looks like you guys have got room for what, about five, six hundred people here?”
“Do yourself a favor,” one of the guards told me. “Don’t ask no questions. You ain’t gonna be here long enough to worry about it. Now get out of the Jeep.”
§
A few minutes later, I was standing in what had once been the hotel’s lobby, waiting on Heather, checking the smell of my breath in my palm. I’d cleaned up as best I could, but that wasn’t saying much. When you live in the Zone, in the rubble between the compounds, it shows. A lump of coal is still a lump of coal, no matter how hard you try to polish it.
I didn’t even bother to make small talk with the guard in the corner, watching me.
Eventually, Heather came down the stairs. I watched her descend, my mouth agape. She was wearing a short denim skirt that showed about a mile of bare leg and a tight black camisole that got my Adam’s apple pumping in my throat. Her eyes were gray as smoke, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail that made her jaw and throat seem delicate as spun glass.
And she was wearing makeup. You never see that anymore. Her lips were so red they actually glistened. I couldn’t look away.
She dismissed the guard with a wave.
“Hey,” she said to me.
“Hi,” I said. The word came out as a cracked, high-pitched sound. I coughed, lowered my voice, and tried to sound cool. “Hey,” I said. I couldn’t stop looking at her lips. They were so bright, so shiny, like wet candy. “You look great,” I managed to say.
She blushed.
“They didn’t give you any trouble at the gate, did they?”
“No,” I said. “Well, maybe a little. No big deal.”
“You sure?”
“Really,” I said. “No big deal.”
She smiled. “My dad wants to see you before we go. You don’t mind, do you?”
Mano a Mano with Big John Ashcroft. Christ, I thought. “I guess I don’t get to say no, do I?”
“Um, not really.”
I watched golden light scatter from her hair and said, “Sure, why not?”
She led me back to her father’s office.
“Daddy,” she said, “this is the boy I told you about.”
John Ashcroft wasn’t the giant I was expecting to meet. You hear stories about these guys, the barons, when you grow up in the Zone, and they’re like gods, reshaping the world in their own image. You expect them to be six and a half feet tall, neck like a beer keg, arms like a gorilla. But John Ashcroft, he was just a normal-looking guy in a white work shirt and khaki slacks, a crescent of gray hair around the back of his head.
He didn’t offer to shake my hand. Without saying a word, he pointed me to a chair opposite his desk and ordered me to sit.
After an uncomfortably long silence, he spoke. “What kind of name is Andrew Hudson?”
“Uh, it’s just a name, sir.”
“Yeah, but I know it from somewhere.”
“My dad, probably.”
“Who was your dad?”
“Eddie Hudson. He was a San Antonio cop in the old days.”
That got him interested. “You mean the one who wrote that book about the Fall?”
“That’s right.” I get that bit about my dad from some of the old timers. Dad wrote a book about the first night of the outbreak, about how he had to fight his way across the city to get to my mom and me. He left off a few weeks after that night, at a point when it looked like we were actually going to contain the zombie outbreak. Well, he was wrong, obviously, and sometimes the old timers who remember my dad’s book look at me, and I think maybe they’re remembering what it was like back then, back when it seemed we might win this thing. I think, at least for some of them, the memories make them angry, resentful, like they blame people like my dad for the naiveté that allowed the Second Wave to happen. But there are others who recognize my dad and they tune out, they become distant, like they’ve gotten over the anger and now they’re dealing with something else.
Big John Ashcroft—he was one of the ones who just got distant.
“What happened to your dad?” His voice had grown quiet.
“He and Mom died in the Second Wave, sir.”
“You would have been what, about six when that happened?”
“Yes, sir. Four, actually.”
He nodded. “Did they turn?”
“Mom did. Dad got swarmed trying to stop a bunch of them from breaking into our house. Mom got bit, but she managed to stash me in a hall closet before she turned.”
“And you’ve been on your own ever since, living off the streets?”
“That’s right.”
He said, “So what do you do now? How do you live?” But I could tell the question he meant to ask was, How the hell did a Zoner like you meet my daughter?
“Special deliveries. I take private packages all across the Zone. I’ve even done some work for you, sir. That’s how I met your daughter.”
He frowned.
“Where do you plan to take my daughter, Andrew?”
“Dinner, sir. And dancing. On the Starliner. On the lake.”
He looked impressed, though I could tell he didn’t want to be impressed.
“The Starliner’s not cheap,” he said. “Special deliveries must pay pretty good.”
“Business is fine, sir.” I paused, then said, “But that’s not really what you’re asking, is it?”
He raised an eyebrow and waited.
“Listen,” I said. “Heather’s a special girl. That’s not something you have to convince me of. You want me to know how much she means to you, how special she is.” I gestured at the old-world luxury around us, the books on his wall, the horse-and-rider bronze on his desk. “She means more that all of this. I get it, sir. I may be a Zoner, but I know a class act when I see one, and I intend to treat her accordingly.”
I’d guessed right. That was exactly what he needed to hear. He knew as well as anybody the dangers waiting for his daughter outside his compound’s walls, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep her from them forever. Sooner or later, with or without his permission, she was going to brave that world. Maybe sending her out with me, somebody who had proven his ability to survive, was his way of hedging his bets.
But whatever his thoughts, he gave his consent. He called in his senior security officer, a slender, bowlegged man named Naylor, and Naylor drove us out to the main gate in an air-conditioned utility vehicle. He told the guards to give me back my gear and my motorcycle, and while they were doing that, he pulled Heather aside and gave her a little talk.
After that, Naylor said to me, “She has a portable radio equipped with a GPS tracker. My people will be monitoring it all night. We’ll be close.” Then he fixed me with a meaningful glare. “All she has to do is call.”
The message came through loud and clear.
“I’ll try to be on my best behavior,” I said.
Heather jumped on the back of my bike and pressed her breasts into my back. I could feel the hard pebbles of her nipples through our clothes. “You better not be on your best behavior,” she whispered into my ear. “Now drive fast, Andrew. Get me out of here.”
§
In the days after the Fall, when the necrosis filovirus emerged from the hurricane-ravaged Texas Gulf Coast and turned the infected into flesh-eating, human train-wrecks, the old world collapsed, and men like John Ashcroft stepped up to fill the power vacuum. To protect their interests, they built compounds like the one Heather and I had just left, and everywhere outside their walls became a wasteland known as the Zone of Exclusion.
After my parents died, I became one of the fringe people, a Zoner, too young to be of any use to the bosses who were just consolidating their power and building their compounds, and no way of becoming anything else. But these days I know the Zone better than most, and what I know I learned the hard way, fighting every day with the infected in the ruins of San Antonio. I survive
d that way for ten years.
Then, right after I turned sixteen, I stole a motorcycle. And before long, I’d worked up a reputation as someone who could get packages delivered anywhere in the Zone.
That’s how I met Heather. About two months before our first date, I brought her a package from a dying woman out in the Zone. How that woman got the money to pay me I don’t know, because I don’t come cheap, but she did pay me, in gold, and I made the delivery.
Heather opened the package in front of me and took out a badly worn pink blanket with her name stitched on it. There was a note attached, and she read it four times before she asked me about the woman who sent it.
“She’s not doing so hot,” I said, which was being charitable. The truth was, the effort it took her to tell me what she wanted nearly killed her.
Heather nodded quietly, and then the tears came.
She told me her parents divorced when she was little, before the Fall, and when the world turned upside down, her father took her away because he could protect her better than her mom.
She didn’t have many memories of the woman, but from the looks of that blanket, I figured her mom had plenty of memories of her.
Heather gave me a long letter to take back to her mother, and though she could have paid my fee ten times over with what she carried in her pocket, I didn’t charge her.
I took the letter to her mother, and because she couldn’t see well enough to read, I read it for her. She died a few days later, but I think she was happy during those last few days. Happier than she’d been in years.
Heather and I got close after that, though we had to steal the moments we spent together.
At least we did before tonight.
Now, sitting on the back of my bike, she squeezed my waist and put her lips to my ear. “I love the wind on my face,” she said. “Go faster.”
§
Dinner was the best thing I’d ever tasted, roasted mutton with wasabi mashed potatoes and asparagus. To this day I have no idea what the hell wasabi is, or where you get it, but I sure loved the bite it gave those mashed potatoes.
And the scenery was fantastic. The stars dappled the surface of Canyon Lake. On the shore, the tops of the hills were silvered with moonlight. There was music, a few older couples dancing on the open air deck, glimpses of a world long gone.
The conversation, on the other hand, lagged. At least at first.
I’d never really talked to a girl. Not like you do on a date, anyway. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, how I was supposed to act. She knew little about weapons, or the Zone, and that pretty much exhausted what I knew. She was into growing vegetables and had plans for building schools.
But I told her dad I was going to treat her like a class act, and I did. The thing is, deep down inside, I am, and always will be, a Zoner. Life, as I had known it, was short and mean and cheap, and I spent a lot of time wondering if it was really worth the effort I put into it. When you think about it that way, when you’ve watched more lives than you care to remember come and go like they’re nothing more than a crowd passing through a revolving door, it can be hard to look at a girl and think the two of you have a chance at romance.
She asked me if there was anything wrong.
“No,” I said, trying to sound bright, happy, fun to be with. But then my smile wavered, and I said, “Yes. It’s me. Sometimes, when I start feeling like I could be happy—like this—with you—I don’t know. It’s like I lose my nerve or something. I don’t know. Maybe it’s frustration with my life, with everything. Who knows? I just wonder what the point is sometimes.”
She thought about that for a second.
And then she surprised me.
“There may not be a point,” she said. “I don’t know if there has to be. I mean, whether or not there’s a point to all of this, we’re here just the same. You and me. That should count for something, shouldn’t it?”
“That’s true,” I said, marveling at her practicality. “I guess it does.”
§
After dinner we danced on the open deck of the Starliner. A cool, late spring breeze was in the air, carrying with it the thick, marshy smell of lake water. I held her body close to mine, the first time I’d ever held a real girl, and lost myself in the warmth of her green eyes and the clean girl-smell of her skin.
That feeling, that comfort of absolute privacy, the romance of it, was why the Starliner cost so much. The infected were everywhere, and not even the strongest compound was completely safe from them, but when the Starliner was off her moorings and out on the lake, it was its own world, untouchable by the harsh realities of the Zone.
As the evening drew to a close, and the Starliner began her slow cruise back to the wet dock, Heather and I stood on the bow and talked about the future, about the stars, about anything and everything except the past. It was our night, and though our bonds had been forged in the heartaches of the past, we wanted our night together to be about the future. We wanted our own happy memories together.
There were no other boats on the lake. At least there hadn’t been during most of our date. But as we rounded a final elbow of land and entered the cove, we saw a large cabin cruiser waiting for us, the vague shapes of men ringing the rails of the deck.
Heather broke off in the middle of a giggle and watched them.
“What is it?”
“Not good,” she said. “I think that’s Wayne Nessel. Daddy warned me he might try something. Daddy didn’t think he’d do it out here though.”
I knew of Wayne Nessel. I had delivered packages to his compound. He was Ashcroft’s biggest rival, and a man with a lot of resources at his disposal. People in the Zone called him “The Bull.”
“He couldn’t know you’re here.”
“He knows,” she said, and then she guided me to the far side of the Starliner.
“But how?”
“He’s got spies everywhere, Andrew.”
She crossed to the opposite side of the deck and climbed the railing.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Where are we going?”
She looked down at me. “Can you swim?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” She waited until Nessel’s boat lit up the Starliner with its spotlights, then she gave me a wink and dropped herself over the edge.
I went in after her.
I thought we’d cling to the side of the boat and wait it out, but that wasn’t what Heather had in mind. She went under and kept swimming beneath the Starliner’s Hull.
I followed.
Above us, through the green murky haze, I could see the glow of the spotlights and the shimmering outlines of men running on both decks. There were a lot of muffled popping sounds that I took to be gunfire, but none of that was directed down at us. It was all boat-to-boat.
We surfaced on the far side of Nessel’s boat and swam to shore. Out of habit, I’d hidden my motorcycle in the brush next to the Starliner’s docks, and now I was thankful for my instincts. As we swam, we decided it’d be best to come ashore a little ways from the dock, just in case Nessel had men covering his back on land.
We crawled ashore, and Heather pulled her black hair back with both hands, her camisole clinging to the curve of her breasts like wet paint.
There were voices nearby, just on the other side of the bushes.
“That’ll be Nessel’s men,” I said.
She nodded.
We spotted them a moment later. Four men, all armed with AR-15s. They were lined up on the dock, looking out at the boats, pointing and laughing.
“Amateurs,” I whispered. “Look at that. They’re just watching the show.”
“Can you get them all?”
“No,” I said. “Not all of them. Maybe one or two, but not all of them.”
“What do we do?”
The switchback road we’d taken to the docks led a short distance up a steep hill behind us before curving out of sight. Low, scraggly oaks and cedars lined the sides of it. I told Heather t
o go up around the curve and wait for me.
“What are you going to do?”
“Try not to get shot,” I said.
She frowned at that, but she made her way to the road just the same, careful to stay in the shadows.
When she was safely out of the way, I made my move.
My bike was hidden in a clump of cedar behind an old rusted truck. I crossed behind the guards and made for the bike, praying they didn’t turn around.
I got most of the way there before I heard one of them holler something. The next instant, they were firing at me. Little chunks of concrete exploded around my shoes as I made for the truck, but they didn’t hit me, and if their lack of attention on the shoreline hadn’t convinced me they were just hired goons, their shooting certainly did. At that range, professionals would have killed me with ease.
I got down beneath the truck, pulled my Glock, and waited. They were running up the slope of the lot, straight for me. I steadied my sights on the lead guy and dropped him with my first shot. My next three shots weren’t aimed. I just sprayed the crowd to make them duck for cover.
It worked. They dived behind an old boat trailer, giving me enough time to pull my motorcycle out of the bushes, start it, and race up the road. They fired after me, but they never got close.
I slowed long enough for Heather to jump on the back, and then we sped off into the night.
§
We were still wet from the swim, and it was cold on that bike. What had been a lovely cool breeze while we were dancing was now a fierce cold snap, biting through us to the bone. Heather wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed, and I could feel her body trembling.
I slowed the bike down enough for her to hear me. “Are you okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why is he after you?”
“Anything to hurt Daddy,” she said, her voice coming in quick, breathy stabs. “His people are always ambushing Daddy’s shipments. Maybe he’s upping the ante now to kidnapping. Or assassination.”