Shirley over Eamon. It was infuriating.
It was three in the morning when she retreated to bed for a few hours of sleep. That was hard to come by. Unable to sleep either, Fisher slipped into the room and crawled into the king-sized bed for comfort, which Scarlett had to give in short supply. She stroked the girl’s head and listened to the night.
“We’re going to die,” Fisher whispered.
“We didn’t die on the 5,” Scarlett said. “If we were going to die, honey, it would have been then.”
“We’re going to die this time. I feel it. We should take those pain pills the squads collect. Elena keeps them hidden in the pantry, but I know where they are. If you take enough of them, you just go to sleep. Then when they eat us, we won’t feel anything.”
“Oh, Fisher.”
“I don’t want to feel anything,” Fisher said, and cried. Scarlett held her in the darkness. She wished this girl were in her first fumbling days of junior high as Fishie Greenie, her nails covered in pink glitter polish and wearing perfume rather than covered in dirt and smelling like the faint vanilla of lamb milk replacer. She should be thinking about boys, not being eaten alive. And Scarlett would go back to serving waffles, a job she hated but one that paid the bills, and dreaming of where her relationship with Eamon might lead.
Scarlett drifted away at five and came awake with a shock at nine. For one crazed moment, she thought the deadheads had shown and no one informed her. That had just been a dream. Fisher was gone from the room and the house was bright with noise. Rationality returned. It was just the regular noise of the house, thumps and voices and Doug wailing about something.
When she went downstairs, she learned it was because he had been told numerous times not to touch the barbed wire on the windows but did it. Elena was wrapping up his cut hand in bandages and scolding him in a mix-up of English and Spanish. It was a shame the boy’s mother had died from an infection compliments of a zombie bite a week after arriving. They dumped her body a half hour away from Plantation and did their best to raise her son. He had figured in some strange four-year-old logic that Elena was his grandmother since she tucked him in at night. Once it was winter, Bridger planned to form a squad to find a pharmacy and clean it out. They needed antibiotics.
The morning passed into the safe hours, Scarlett walking around outside the entire property to check for loose barbed wire or more branches. The wire was only going to slow a deadhead down, not dissuade them from climbing. Bridger had shot a deadhead ten times in the chest in the early days and failed to kill the creature.
The cows were enjoying their short graze in the field, heads pressed to the earth to munch on grass. Four people stood watch around them, guns at their sides. More people were picking what was ripe or close enough to ripe from the fruit trees and hustling it inside.
Scarlett walked on. They had guarded this place well. Those at the watchtowers and on the ladders would pick off the pack and their ringer until they were all gone. Then the distasteful task began of moving the bodies far away, but once that was done, life went back to its new version of normal.
She hoped.
Chapter Two
Quade was hunting.
Midday was his golden time, when he could bank ten, twenty kills in a day. Once even forty kills in Albuquerque. At first he’d seen the old ladies in torn housedresses, the toddlers in their Speedy Mouse pajamas, the naked men with track marks on their arms. They looked like they were sleeping and he hesitated when lifting the gun to their heads. Now he just saw zombies, blood going brown on their chins and their fingernails packed with filth and skin.
If the people they used to be knew what he was doing, they would be grateful. He didn’t want to be killing them; they didn’t want to be eating him. That was just what it had come to since a disgruntled employee at a chemical facility released BK. Quade didn’t know all the details. He was a Staties truck driver. But he’d talked to a survivor who worked in that same facility, and the dude claimed to have known the guy who did it.
The culprit’s name had been Wence, first name unknown. He was the kind of mental that could be hidden, at least for a time. After ten years of working as a chemist, he’d fought with every last colleague, janitor, and HR person in the facility. The administration had had enough. It was time for Wence to move along. And he did, taking an experimental weapon with him. There were several levels of security to make sure this didn’t happen, but no one knew that he’d been making it. Quade didn’t think that spoke well of the facility’s security, but what did he know? People who worked there were so sick of Wence that they tended to avoid him rather than risk an altercation.
It was meant to be incapacitating. And yes, it was that in the first few days. Quade hadn’t known what the hell was wrong with everyone at the truck stop when he pulled in. People were flat on their backs at the pumps and in the restaurant, having delusions and hyperthermic, unable to control their arms and legs. He called 911 when he found them. No one picked up. When he located the police station, he found all of the cops on the floor twitching and mumbling in the same way. The worst was the high school athletic field two streets over from the station. He’d looked out over two thousand kids lying in the grass. They’d been posing for a picture. The cameraman was dead.
Those with previous cardiorespiratory conditions died almost at once, and those where the fever raced out of control died soon after that. Wence had based his BK research off an old weaponized agent created by the military, who had destroyed it decades later as too dangerous to keep. God only knew what the mad chemist did to change it, or if the resultant zombies were even his intent. No one would ever know, since Wence killed himself immediately upon releasing the gas into the breeze.
The story might have been just the product of that survivor’s overtaxed imagination. Some survivors had gone crazy from isolation and shock by the time Quade met them. True or false, it didn’t change what Quade had to do. Even if it was a lie, it was all the explanation he had. That bothered him in down times. What he wanted was a scientist on a television with a lot of letters behind his or her name. Advanced degrees from prestigious universities. Celebrated researcher and author. Winner of Major Science Award. Using a pointer on a display of a complicated chemical compound surrounded by formulas, the scientist spoke what was gibberish to a lay person like Quade but made perfect sense to the highly educated. Ribosomes. Synapse disruption. Blood-brain barrier. Polycyowhatsis benziwhatnot acid. Quade didn’t have to understand it himself. He wanted the comfort of knowing that someone else did. Anyone.
Just because Quade wanted things didn’t meant he got them.
A lot of zombies moved solo, wandering around the roads in search of food. They didn’t recognize bread or cheese or rice as food any longer, those parts of their mental capacity severed. They didn’t cook what they caught either, but consumed it raw and often alive. They didn’t speak, nor did it appear to bother them that they were walking barefoot on hot cement with their flesh rotting off their bodies. Quade had tracked them to learn their habits. Then, when he’d gleaned what he could, he put them out of their misery in their next sleep cycle. He also studied the packs being led by ringers, although at a greater distance for his own safety. A pack was a completely different beast from a solo.
The people at the haven in Crosica in Oregon had filled up his armored van with food, water, fuel, and ammunition. In exchange, he drove around the States looking for survivors and killing zombies. Twice he’d gone back for drop-offs and refills, each time carrying a load of five people. It was good to see those numbers swell just a little bit more. Every time a hunter came back with survivors, those in the haven practically threw a party to welcome these strangers in.
In Crosica, he could almost pretend nothing had happened. There were over six thousand people there, a real community setting itself up. Crops and animals, schools and industry, it was collecting the scraps of civilization and pressing on with them. Quade hadn’t been able to make himself pa
int the names of Grady and his dad on rocks and find somewhere pretty to put them in the memorial garden. But he’d walked the garden several times. It broke his heart. Missy, age 18. The Wilson Family. Deshawn, age 42. Raina Sprole. Grandpa and Gramma Higgins. MOM. Kameron and Kandace, age 11 months. Rest in peace. The one that tore at Quade most read Hope. He didn’t know if it memorialized some woman named Hope, or hope itself.
There were so many rocks, circling planters and trees, lined up on the walls. He left each time before anyone saw the tears in his eyes. Quade wasn’t ready to add Grady, age 17 and Beloved Father to the garden. Then they were really gone. After he did that, he knew which meaning he would give to the rock painted Hope.
No one in Crosica knew his name. Quade held that back. It was dumb on his part. Like painting those rocks, it was going to make it too real. They just called him Hey You, sometimes Buddy or Big Guy. He liked it that way, not fully brought into this world, playing someone else’s part instead.
A deadhead didn’t have a prayer of getting in to Crosica, not with their level of fortifications. Anyone approaching was assumed to be a ringer and placed in detention until he or she proved normal. Even returning hunters went through an ID process, having to give a password and answer questions. Ringers in that region tried over and over to sneak inside, but they hadn’t once been successful. Intense questioning saw to that.
Quade rested and enjoyed it when he was there, treating himself every evening to a burger at the diner, and then he got antsy and left again. Other men and women were doing the same, armored vans spreading out through America, Canada, and Mexico. Looking and shooting, shooting and looking.
This time Quade did a loop, driving south through Idaho, Nevada, touching into Arizona, and swinging up north through California. He hadn’t found a soul to take back to Crosica, just plenty of zombies to stalk and take down. In Alhambra, he’d stumbled over a ringer asleep in a pack of fifteen deadheads, all of them passed out on a front yard of a two-story white house with a rental sign still in the grass.
Packs were frightening things. He hadn’t see many, but other hunters had told him of packs numbering one hundred with a ringer goading them on. This one in Alhambra was nothing like that.
Quade ended them, making sure to start with the ringer. Once a ringer was dead, zombies tended to go solo again. Their cohesion was only formed through their connection to that fake man or woman.
He cleared up the floors of the house for rent. Drawing the curtains, he waited through the waking hours. Eventually, the smell of decomposition attracted more solos from the area. He picked them off one by one, getting ten more over the next three days. The reek drove him out on the fourth day.
His own home was empty right after Wence went postal on a global scale. Quade had spent two full weeks canvassing the town for his father and stepbrother, but he hadn’t found either of them. On his last date, a blind date set up by a friend for Valentine’s Day, the woman had looked openly appalled that a man at age thirty lived with his dad. It was obvious she was seeking an exit strategy as soon as she learned that about him, and he gave her one. Quade didn’t owe her an explanation that his father had had a heart attack and needed more help than Quade could supply when he lived in another city. Not to mention that Grady was seventeen, still shell-shocked by his crazy, prescription drug-addled mom walking out a year ago and having enough struggles without dishing out his stepfather’s medications and driving him to appointments at the clinic. Grady was a nice kid, if confused, and open to Quade’s opinions about girls and life. But on that date, the woman heard I live at home with my dad and tacked on in the basement playing video games in my underwear. So that was the end of that, for both of them.
Quade’s dad had been a good father. Shitty at picking women, but he’d always been there when Quade was small. It was right for a son to go back home and help out his dad, now that his dad was the needy one. He didn’t see a problem with that.
California was not the place to be driving around in the summer. It was hot as hell and he tried not to use the air conditioning to spare the fuel. He pushed north over the grapevine, coming across solos here and there. With each kill, he stuck around for a while to see if anyone responded. That paid off more often than not in another two or three solos. Then he swung west. He hadn’t done much shooting before March, just a couple of trips to the range with some friends in his early twenties that made no impression on him, due to his particular blood alcohol level. The gun range had incredibly gotten the OK from the city to serve beer. That didn’t mix well with the pain medication he was on, so he’d been loopy at each visit. Whenever the guys asked him what pain he was in, Quade said solemnly, “Existential,” and thought himself clever. He’d been an idiot at that age. Grady liked to hear those stories about Quade being dumb, and Quade liked to think it would keep Grady from being so dumb.
Ironically, Quade and his friends had shot up paper targets of zombies at the gun range. It was make-believe back then. Now he had a whole new language picked up on the road. Glocks. He picked up a lot of those from police stations, where they usually rested beside the skeletons of the cops who once wore them. Ruger P Series. He liked that one. SIG Sauer. Marlin Model 1894. Carbine meant it was shorter than a rifle. When he had to take long-range shots, as happened occasionally, what he favored was the AK-47. It had been modified illegally to automatic, not that anything was legal or illegal in these times. But he had a lot of other guns in the back. He was just limited to what kinds of ammunition he happened across or Crosica supplied. Coming to the end of this trip, he was on the low side. The last six cop stations he’d investigated had already been cleaned out by other survivors, or even by ringers. They armed themselves now and then, not for protection but to shoot survivors and bring home the human bacon for their packs.
For the last few days, Quade had gone north on Pacific Coast Highway. One of the other hunters warned that the 5 passing through central California was a disaster of vehicles. The 1 wasn’t so bad, usually just Quade and the ocean. He missed talking to people though, and it was sad to see all of those abandoned places he would have stopped for meals. That he hadn’t found anyone on this trip was depressing. Maybe those survivors in Crosica were all there were. He wanted to go back there with at least one other person, take that population of 6,251 and make it 6,252. Every one was a triumph.
Landslides had taken out part of the highway and forced him to backtrack, his finger sliding along paper maps when he pulled over to find a route around. Soon it started to smell of fire and he spotted huge plumes of smoke. He traveled east to avoid it. For a while he moved along the 580, going east and east some more, pulling off to poke around quiet cities and spying solos infrequently. Other than those sorry creatures, Quade felt like he was the only man in the world. Once his AK-47 got a workout on two zombies eating one of their compatriots, who wriggled disgustingly on the sidewalk as he tried to get away. Then Quade got himself out of sight. The sleeping hours weren’t set in stone, and he had stayed out just a little too late by accident.
In the morning, he woke up in his third floor room at a Sleep Kingdom hotel. The water didn’t work reliably from place to place, but it was doing fine here. So many cities had gone by in the last months that he couldn’t even remember where he was. Somewhere a little south of San Francisco. He didn’t care. Today in the sleeping hours, he planned to roam around and see what there was to see. Tonight, he’d settle in with his maps and plot a route back to Crosica. He had a hankering for a burger, and a platonic affection for the blowsy old broad of a cook who only knew him as Hey You and gave out extra fries.
Since ringers were smart, Quade was careful when he checked out the window to the parking lot. Ringers searched abandoned vehicles and houses, hung around supermarkets in the hopes a survivor happened along in search of food. Some pretended to know safe places where a frightened person could go. Their only goal was to feed their pack of deadheads, who ate each other, ate survivors, ate the decomposing, maggo
t-ridden flesh of God-knew-what baking in the sun, but never attacked their ringer. No. The safest person in the world at this point in time was a ringer, deadheads obeying them and survivors mistaking them for normal. Quade could have killed his father as a deadhead. As a ringer . . . that would be a lot harder. Dad would know him, the larger part of their shared history still in his head. Quadie! Oh my God, Quadie, you’re alive! Come here quick, son, we gotta get inside.
Quadie, meet my new friends.
No one was in the Sleep Kingdom parking lot, not even a stray animal. That was the silver lining to this whole disaster. Any stray dog or cat around had long ago been consumed, so the Humane Society had no more overflow to shoot sad commercials about and make Quade feel guilty for being allergic.
With time to kill until the sleep cycle, Quade ate breakfast and took a sponge bath. He packed up his things and listened at the door to the hallway. There wasn’t a sound. Opening the door, he checked out first before carrying his belongings to the stairs. The van was hidden in the back, parked among a dozen other vehicles rather than out front. A ringer who worked the area would notice a van that hadn’t been there previously. One ringer in Minnesota had set fire to a building in which survivors were hiding, to flush them out into the waiting embrace of dozens of deadheads. A hunter had told Quade about that, and similar incidents all over. If they couldn’t catch you out one way, they’d catch you out another. Other people were caught when the ringer drove a semi into the locked house in which they were hiding. If the doors and windows had been made impenetrable, they’d just take down the wall.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 5