Ringers had tried both of those things with Crosica. And ringers had failed. The people in there were ready for anything. The last of humanity was determined to survive.
Once his belongings were piled up at the hotel’s back door, he roved around the first floor and peeked out windows on each side. This area was a ghost town. Going into the employee kitchen, he bypassed whatever was rotting in the fridge for the cupboards. Crackers. Sugar packets. Coffee! That was going back to Oregon with him. He took it and the packets for tea as well.
A purse was sitting on the counter. Inside was a wallet with a few bucks and a license for some woman named Augusta Romero. He pocketed an alcohol wipe and looked for a quiet moment at the picture of a woman hugging two kids. Odds were that they’d all become deadheads, scattering to the wind since they didn’t recognize each other any longer.
When it was time, he slipped from the hotel and loaded up the back of the van. Then he got underway, rumbling from street to street and finally going back to the freeway. That burger was seriously calling his name. Beef wasn’t plentiful, but hunters got a fair supply at the diner as gratitude. No one else wanted to do what hunters did. Quade didn’t want to do it himself. But if he stood still in that safe place, he was going to think too much about where Dad and Grady were.
Dead or deadheads. It was almost certain. He could still entertain the fantasy of happening upon them as survivors if he was out here driving. That was getting harder with this trip when he hadn’t found a single normal person.
Hope. He wished he knew who had placed that rock. He wanted to know what it meant.
The van paced the desolate streets of another city. Sometimes he did circles, other times grids. Today he just wandered. No matter what he did with this trip, he never found a soul. But he did see birds. He was looking at some right now, looping and swooping around the sky. His window was cracked open for air and their cries came in.
Back to the freeway. The lanes were fairly clear, just a few cars on the shoulder. The effect of Wence’s little gift to the world was close to instant, rendering people feverish and hallucinating even as they were driving. Quade had seen massive pile-ups on the freeways. The 405 in Los Angeles had been in one of its twenty-four-hour gridlocks when everything went down, and it was still in that gridlock today. Just without the drivers.
He swung around another two cities and once again returned to the freeway. The sign on an overpass announced another city called Kryton just two miles away. There had to be a hotel there for him to camp out until tomorrow, hunched over the maps and selecting places to crash for the waking hours. A few days of travel would get him to that burger, the meat squirting in his mouth, the snap of the catsup and mustard, the sharp sting of pickles.
The diner was by the memorial garden. He thought about setting down those rocks and then going for a milkshake and burger to accept what little consolation food provided. Sitting alone at that table and knowing for certain that all-elbows-and-pimples Grady wasn’t ever going to take the other side, complaining about school, or his white-haired dad lean back in a chair to snag an extra napkin off another table setting.
Just Quade and his plate, and the cook saying Hey You.
When the exit to Kryton was in view, something caught his eye in a grove of trees along the side of the road. He eased on the brakes to get a better look. It was a woman beneath one of the trees. She was almost invisible when the grayish-brown of her skin was the same as the bark she leaned on. She wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of bright blue panties. The blue was what had alerted him to her presence.
A sleeping deadhead. That was what she had to be. Ringers wore clothes and survivors didn’t go out in public like that, let alone in nothing but underpants to nap under a tree. Deceased and she’d be bones. Quade pulled over to the shoulder, rolled up the window, and lifted one of his guns. Grit crunched under his boots as he walked to the edge of the freeway and down into the yellow grass.
The hem of the panties was ripped under her navel. She reeked of shit. He’d bet the back of her panties wasn’t so bright a blue. Blood stained her from nose to navel, and there were brown streaks on her thighs where she’d wiped off her fingers. Her stringy brown hair was full of foxtails and leaves, and bits of other things he wasn’t going to examine. Filth coated every inch of her skin. Flies buzzed and crawled around her blackening feet, probably laying eggs. Deadheads with rotting feet, that was something Quade saw all the time. This woman also had a black patch on her right shoulder. That one was squirming with insects. He aimed at her head and noticed another deadhead close by. That one was a man.
Once the woman was dead, Quade walked over to get a look at the second deadhead. He came to a halt, his eyes taking in what he had missed before. Deadheads were sprawled everywhere, their bodies camouflaged by the leaf litter of the grove. God! He took an involuntary step backwards at the sheer number of them. When he counted sixty, he gave off and stopped wasting time. Running out of bullets, he went back to the van to get more guns rather than reload the one he had.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. He paced from one tree to another. This was the biggest group of deadheads he had ever come across, meaning there was a ringer somewhere. Quade wasn’t spying one. The guns got their workouts and he pushed through the last bunch of trees to check the other side. What he saw on the other side stopped his heart.
There were hundreds of them on the hillside, going all the way up to the top and presumably over. All deadheads. Bugs nibbling on their black patches, eyes closed, clothes torn and dirty if they had any on. He shot and shot, going back to the van yet again for guns. One deadhead didn’t even have eyes or lids, just holes where they’d once been. Another looked like her friends had been using her for snacks when they couldn’t find survivors. She was missing both of her arms, and had gouges in her thighs. Why that kind of thing didn’t kill zombies, Quade was clueless. He needed that scientist. The flesh was black and ragged at her shoulders, with another black spot blossoming on her throat. When the bullet went through her forehead, a trickle of grayish fluid came out like her brain had liquefied in there.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. He’d fix himself up in a hotel and come back here at the next sleep cycle. Other deadheads were going to be gathered around the bodies to eat and he could kill them then. When he got to Oregon, he planned to ask the other hunters if they had ever seen such an army of zombies. This was unreal.
It was important to find the ringer. He walked up a steep cut in the soil, shooting the deadheads on either side. His breath came fast. It was itching him to bypass other deadheads to get up there.
Once at the top, he looked down on an even crazier sight. They were so thick in some places that they were laying on top of each other. It looked sexual, but he didn’t think deadheads had sex. They couldn’t even pull down their pants to take a shit, let alone get it on. He tried to take an estimate of the deadheads and to spot the ringer’s body in the heaps.
A finger twitched.
He’d stayed out too long. They took only a minute to wake up, a few twitches and back to business. Spinning around, Quade cut straight down the hillside to get to the van. It wasn’t even tempting to kill a few more deadheads on the way. Through the trees and up to the shoulder, grit crunching as he circled the hood and got inside . . .
He slammed the door, locked it, and put his hand to the key. Too late. A figure stepped onto the shoulder about a hundred feet away. Quade ducked behind the dashboard and opened the hatch to the back of the van. Crawling inside, he closed the door and turned the latch. If the deadheads came over for a look through the windows to the cab, they couldn’t get inside and wouldn’t see anything worth getting inside for.
The guys at Crosica had tried to anticipate anything the hunters might need. Smoke bombs to make zombies lose sight of the hunter. A compost toilet in case there wasn’t anywhere safe to bunk for the night but the back of the van. Along the top at each side were peepholes with tinted, reinforced glass. Quade look
ed out of one to the freeway, where that lone deadhead had turned into five. Even as he counted the fifth, a sixth and seventh came out of the trees.
This was a rookie error on his part. He had just been so surprised to find a grove and a hillside full of deadheads. Two hundred and more wouldn’t be rising from this sleep cycle, but that was a drop in the bucket to what he’d seen over the top.
The streams of deadheads turned to floods, all of them coming down the hill to the freeway. Little ones, big ones, young ones, old ones, they were one race now under five months of living this way. Some were stumping along on one foot; others were more rot than flesh. Bugs sprinkled off them to the pavement. A woman pulled a strip of her own rotting meat from her arm and ate it. Quade would have been nauseous if he hadn’t seen that a dozen times in the past.
They filled the lanes. Eerie how it was so quiet when there were so many people there. He counted, his best estimate being eight hundred. Eight hundred deadheads! They shifted and he spotted the ringer. She was a grandmotherly woman, a big bosom under a pale pink sweater and her gray hair washed and pinned back. That was all he made out in the split second she was visible. The deadheads were too thick around her.
One deadhead came out of the grove just in front of the van. The guy looked it over cursorily and lost interest. Quade moved to the peephole along the right side. Those he had killed were being devoured. His stomach roiled from seeing it on such a grand scale. Each body was surrounded by a dozen deadheads crouched over it, feeding furiously and others butting them aside to get in on the buffet action. Others in the lanes saw what was happening and went over for their shares. Quade lost interest in his burger. Some of the bodies were moving, not because he hadn’t killed them, but because they were being jerked around in so many hands and mouths.
Yeah, he didn’t want that burger so much now. Or ever. One deadhead was hunched over the body of a little kid, trying to keep it all to himself. Someone challenged him for it and the guy rose with a crazed look to clobber the intruder. He ended up having to share when more deadheads approached.
Chuckling. It was how the ringers spoke to their deadheads, the only language the latter comprehended. Heads lifted and turned to the source of the sound, which must have been Gramma lost in the gray throngs. The chuckling went on and on, deadheads abandoning their meals to come down to the freeway. Of the woman who had been wearing the bright blue panties, nothing was left of her torso. Not skin, not fat, not muscles or internal organs. Her bones were laid bare between her head and legs. Her toes were gone, too.
Quade wished he had some other hunters here. He tensed to see all of the deadheads standing there together. If they suspected anyone was in the van, they could topple it without effort. His feet froze to the floor at that thought and he silenced his breathing.
Then they turned and walked along the lanes, away from his van. They were going, thank God, although the van thumped from one bumping into it by accident.
“HUH-huh-HUH-huh. HUH-huh. HUH.”
Too stupid to pull off their pants and use a toilet, smart enough to translate what sounded to Quade like a bunch of meaningless huhs. The army of them got onto the off-ramp. Only once did Gramma come back into view on the overpass. Quade was going to stay in this area for as long as it took to wipe them out. But first he had to know where the ringer was leading them. The next sleep cycle was twenty-one hours away, giving them time to move miles.
When the last of the zombies had vanished behind trees on the other side of the overpass, Quade let himself through the hatch. He had a decision to make: follow cautiously in these waking hours or get a hotel room and try to locate them in their sleep cycle tomorrow. He could ditch the army entirely for being too risky to himself and stick around this spot to shoot solos that showed for the bodies. Or he could say fuck it all and go back to Crosica.
Follow.
The van moved slowly down the lane to the off-ramp. At the base of it, he stopped and waited a minute to get more space between them. The vehicle ran smoothly but not silently. The minute ended and he crept up the off-ramp to the overpass. He could have walked at a faster pace.
On the overpass was a deadhead. The rest were out of view. The deadhead was still fighting to get up and follow the group, but his legs were rotted up to the knees. Riddled with pits and seething with insect life, they no longer carried his weight. Only a string of meat kept his left foot attached to his leg. Quade drove over him and slunk down the overpass.
The Welcome to Kryton sign said the city had only twenty thousand residents. This was a little place. Looking back and forth, Quade had to guess at which way they had gone. The first road had businesses to the right and left, and going straight led to one more block of businesses. Past that was residential. If they’d gone straight, he should still be seeing the tail end of the group. Right or left?
The answer was left. There were maggots on the ground in that direction. He followed them like a trail of breadcrumbs down the road. Flowers had been trampled in front of a business at the corner, and the bugs directed Quade to the right. Drive slowly.
They couldn’t have gone straight on this road either, or he’d see deadheads in the distance. There weren’t many streets for them to have turned on. Quade could do better on foot, but nothing was going to convince him to leave the van. Minutes dripped by with him inching down the road, his eyes going from the bugs below to the streets.
He saw them.
Grayish-brown backs were far down a residential road. Quade took a deep breath and steered to it. He hugged the curb, so if anyone turned around, the van looked like it was parked. A ringer was smart, but a deadhead wouldn’t know if it was a van that had been there when they went by or not.
It was excruciating to travel this way. All of his guns were going to get workouts soon. The houses along the road ended and he moved into farm country. He had to go even more slowly here since he didn’t have the houses to provide cover. The back end of the zombie army pressed on into this nowhere place.
Some of the farms looked more like they had been vacation homes than workplaces. A couple of box beds, a few fruit trees, nice homes pushed back from the lane, these were for rich people who wanted to get back to the land. One had a horse corral. Others were less fancy, far more like what Quade associated farm with in his head. A sign on one said ORGANIC AND BIODYNAMIC. Beneath it was a second sign. VOTED #1 IN ORGANIC YOU MAGAZINE. Strawberries were growing wild in the field.
The deadheads had stopped. He hit the brakes, too far away to see what they were doing. Just standing there at the end of this road like they’d been standing in the freeway, waiting for their chuckled orders.
Feeling like he had enough distance to get out, just as long as he stayed near the van, Quade slipped to the ground with his binoculars. Slinking through trees, he lifted them up to get a better look. Gramma was standing on a driveway, her mouth open and lower lip vibrating. Her arm swept up, index finger extended to a white wall with barbed wire along the top.
The deadheads surged forward, passing her in streaks to the wall. Gunfire broke out, a deadhead falling back with the top of his head whipping away into the trees.
People.
Chapter Three
When the deadheads closed in on the property, Scarlett knew all of their efforts had been for nothing. They should have piled into the vehicles and driven out last night, or taken the pain medication and killed themselves.
There were too many. Dear God, the deadheads were everywhere. She watched the approach through the parapet with her stomach sinking into her feet. They just kept coming down the lane, more and more of them, and more behind those. The kid hadn’t gone back only for his deadhead pack. Scarlett counted no less than three ringers among the rotting, vacant multitudes, an old woman, the boy named Baylen, and a scruffy man in his forties that she initially mistook for a deadhead. This was three packs combined, if not more than that. For all she knew, there were more ringers out there where she couldn’t see.
&nbs
p; This was bad. This was worse than her wildest imagination.
The old woman was the only ringer who stayed constantly in sight, although the voices of the others carried over the wall. She looked like a first-grade teacher close to retirement, except instead of A-B-C, she was saying, “Huh-huh-HUH. Huh-huh. HUH.” The zombies understood whatever that indicated, looking from her to the walls, towers, and gate. Marching orders.
The celebrity who may have owned this property should have coveted his or her privacy a little more and splurged on some extra feet of concrete blocks. Scarlett tensed to see even more zombies coming down the driveway and through the trees. She’d been an idiot to stand her ground. Now it was too late to change her mind. Plantation was going down with everyone in it, since she thought she could play at warfare when she was a fucking waffle waitress.
Oh God, what she wouldn’t give to be a waffle waitress again.
The old woman ringer chuckled and caressed the cheek of a man in the crowd. She was looking at him in affection, seeing something other than what Scarlett saw in the rot on his body and missing ear, the chunks of hair ripped from his scalp to leave pinkish-gray patches behind. As Fisher had become Scarlett’s, so had these deadheads become the children of the ringers.
In the movies, the residents of Plantation would have dug a huge trench around the property for the deadheads to fall inside. Filled with oil or something flammable, to which they tossed a lit match. They would have burst out the gate astride horses and lopped off heads with the samurai sword and other blades, coming out the other side with still bodies strewn behind them. Or they would have all had automatic weapons with magically renewing ammunition and aim that never failed.
But this wasn’t the movies. This was real.
“Sweet Jesus,” Fisher whispered in terror. “Scarlett?”
“Get to the bus,” Scarlett said. Fisher had wanted to fight, yet was understandably losing her nerve at this insanity before them. If Scarlett had had a choice, she’d hide on the bus herself in a fetal position.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 6