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Rise (Book 3): Dead Inside

Page 17

by Gareth Wood


  The rain began to fall more heavily, splashing in the puddles already accumulated on the road. Dim light from the few working streetlights, all several blocks away, reflected off the distant wet ground, shining like stars. It was quite beautiful. He had ridden only a block when the white pickup truck sped out of the alleyway he was passing and slammed into him.

  Hothi had only a moment to see the vehicle coming, then felt the impact shatter his left leg. The deputy and the bicycle were thrown in different directions. Hothi felt the ground hitting him like a series of hammers as he rolled through puddles of ice cold water, eventually coming to a stop on his back.

  Pain flooded in from too many injuries to process. Agony flared in his left leg, and he gasped as he tried to lift his arms. The right wrist was sprained at the least, and the left felt like it was on fire. He became aware of a spreading warmth under his head, and a curious softness in his back, and he knew then that he was dying. Rain fell on his face, a cold contrast to the warmth. Somewhere there was a bell ringing.

  Not like this, please, he thought.

  Nearby an engine shut off, and a door opened and closed. Then, footsteps, coming toward him. It was too much effort to turn his head, and the waves of crashing pain receded a little when he lay still. A figure, obscured in the darkness, appeared above him, and hands began to touch his torso, pulling his coat open.

  Hothi tried to speak, but blood filled his mouth and he could only choke and cough. The hands continued to press against him, but then he felt something being lifted away. His notebook. There was light then, stabbing his eyes with its brightness. It moved away from him to dance across the pages of the notebook, then shut off.

  Is it getting darker? His vision was receding to a blurred oval above him, but his ears worked fine. He heard a cold voice speak as the figure moved more into his field of vision.

  "Theft? Is that all you have on me?" The hands again, pushing and prodding. Hothi felt lighter somehow, and the sounds of the rain were receding now. Blood burbled through his lips, and he coughed again. Sharp spears of pain shot along his ribs, making him cough more, only stopping when the agony was so great that his breathing simply ceased.

  "It seems I probably didn't need to kill you after all. These things happen, though. I think I'll just leave you here," the cold voice said. "I wonder if you'll awaken? How many do you think you'll eat before they stop you?"

  All the light was gone now, his vision failing utterly as the sounds of rain receded as well. Cold rushed in as he tried to breathe, but his lungs refused to cooperate. He heard the bell again, distantly. Then nothing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  Ruins of Aldergrove, September 11, 2013

  Amanda

  Our day had ended yesterday in the camp of one of the smaller groups. Marquita's Marauders had welcomed us after deciding we weren't the festering undead. That was nice of them, and it meant we got to eat well and sleep securely after we assured them we weren't after their salvage. They were busy securing an old 7-11 on the outskirts of Abbotsford when we rolled up on our bicycles, and I found out the stories about the Marauders were true.

  The Marauders, except for Marquita herself, were all male. Tasty, tasty males, in fact. All tall and strong, looking like they rolled off the pages of a firefighters calendar. Marquita walked among them like a lioness, proud and commanding. She came out to meet us and ask what we wanted. This all led to a conversation over dinner about the serial killer, the missing women, and if the Marauders had seen anything out here in the ruins that might be considered more unusual than anything else. It turns out they hadn't. The zombie apocalypse kinda resets everyone's definition of unusual.

  They invited us to stay the night, so we camped with them. I took a turn on first watch with a pleasant fellow named Mark, who was smart and well educated and extremely easy on the eyes. He asked me questions about my bow, and about what I'd seen farther east when he found out I had been a salvager in Cold Lake. It was a pleasant way to spend a cool, rainy night in a ruined convenience store, watching the streets outside for cannibalistic corpses. Robyn stayed up talking to Marquita and her second-in-command, a dark haired man named Sherman. After a while Robyn and Sherman took the second shift while I curled up on my bedroll and slept.

  This morning we said goodbye to the Marauders, thanked them, and went on our way. Looking at the manifest, we decided to try the Abbotsford International Airport, the airfield manned by a permanent staff from the Safe Zone. It sat a stone’s throw from the border of Washington State, less than two kilometers from 0 Avenue, the long road that ran along the southern edge of Canada here in the Lower Mainland region. On the other side was the American counterpart, Boundary Road. The airport was manned all the time now. Flights still moved between some settlements farther south, though not often. About a year ago one small plane had come in to Abbotsford carrying three people. They were from Spokane, and had escaped in the plane when their compound was breached. As far as they knew everyone else there had died. The three survivors had settled for a little while in Mission, then moved on to Seattle.

  As we approached the airport we saw more of the dead walking around. If they saw us they pursued, but there were not enough of them to worry about except for once. A small pack of four was standing on the road in our path, and turned toward us. We slowed and stopped, conscious of the five others in the fields nearby. Robyn and I both drew our sidearms and screwed home-made silencers onto them. It was a few moments’ work then to kill the four on the road, and I felt the familiar rush as they died. Before the five in the fields managed to get close we moved on.

  We quickly came to the airport, a small terminal building and several outlying hangars and maintenance structures surrounded by trees and farms and chain link fences, patrolled by armed guards. A small outpost of safety and civilisation in an otherwise savage world. The rain had stopped by then, but the skies remained grey and gloomy.

  Our time at the airport was fairly short. They let us in long enough for us to talk to the administrator, a greasy-looking lecherous bastard named Jack Lawry. He stared at either Robyn's chest or mine for the entire five minutes we spoke to him, rarely looking us in the eyes. He couldn't help us either, though he implied more than once that we could help him, nudge nudge, wink wink. Ugh. We got away from there as soon as we could. Outside the airport gates we decided where to go next. It was still before noon when we returned north toward the highway, a destination in mind that made me nervous. We found our turn and changed direction, and despite the empty roads and fields around us I broke into a mild sweat.

  We rode west along the broken asphalt of the Fraser Highway toward 272nd Street. My purloined copy of the manifest said that Jeremy Mahan's group was doing a run on the Aldergrove Centre Mall. We were getting further west than either of us was comfortable with. The number of the dead in the area was low right now, but it could spike any time. The closer we got to the cities, the worse the danger. Thus my nervousness. Neither of us relished the idea of coming face to face with the kind of swarms that wandered around in Surrey or Burnaby or Vancouver.

  "What have you heard about Jeremy?" Robyn asked me. She was riding to my left, keeping a watchful eye to the south side as I did to the north. We were riding along a more developed section of highway now, with houses and shops. Abandoned vehicles and lots of trash littered the area, but there were none of the undead in sight.

  "Not a lot. I heard he came up from the States."

  "That's true," she said. "I know him a little. We've, uh, talked a few times."

  Something about the way she said it made me think there was more to the story.

  "He came up from Washington a couple of years ago," she said, "and joined the Gun Runners right away. He was running them within six months."

  "So, what's he like?" I asked.

  "Has a reputation for hard drinking when he's back in the Safe Zone, and he's a bit of a ladies’ man," she said, "but on a run he's all business."

  "Ladies’ man, h
uh? Like that asshole Lawry?"

  Robyn shuddered in revulsion. "No. Not even a little."

  We found them right where the manifest said they'd be, in the parking lot of the Aldergrove Centre Mall. It was a favourite spot of theirs, and they'd apparently been clearing it out for the better part of a year. The Gun Runners were a dozen strong, drove three small trucks and a one-ton flatbed. They were an even mix of men and women, apparently some of them married couples. They were professionals and knew what they were doing.

  A sentry spotted us as we approached the parking lot, and blew her whistle twice. All of the Gun Runners stopped what they were doing, whether it was loading cargo onto the flatbed, eating a meal, or hauling a few bodies to a well-used burning pit, and took up weapons. As we rode through the abandoned and empty cars and minivans in the parking lot they all took up positions among their four trucks, ready to defend themselves if needed. They had the politeness not to point guns directly at us. There is a way salvagers do things, and we were breaking a couple of traditions.

  What it came down to was a wariness of claim jumping. The Gun Runners had a claim on this mall, and we were intruding. Maybe. It's kinda complicated. If we had been invited along it would be okay. Showing up like this unannounced? That's where it could get a little hairy. The Marauders were far less formal than the Gun Runners about this, too.

  We stopped in the cleared area between the mall and the wrecks, within easy shouting distance. I figured it was Robyn's turn to do the talking since she had, uh, 'talked' to Jeremy before. I had suspicions.

  "Hi, Jeremy," she called, and waved to show her hands were empty. I wasn't really nervous about this. The chances of the Gun Runners thinking two young women were going to try to take them all on to steal this claim was really remote.

  "Robyn?" Jeremy himself stepped down off the back of the flatbed, and took a few steps forward. "What are you doing out here? You usually run toward Coquitlam."

  He was of middle height, and had dark hair and a trimmed beard. He wore mirror-shades and looked like a cop from the nineties. His crew members were all dressed in clean work clothes, with a few military vests thrown in.

  "We need to ask some questions. It's important. Can we come in?"

  "You recognise our claim?" he asked.

  "Yes, of course," Robyn said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Come on in, then," he said, and the Gun Runners got back to work, just like that. We had just agreed that it was their claim we were visiting, and we wouldn't try to salvage anything valuable from here while they were present.

  He came to Robyn and took her hands and kissed her cheek. Aha! I knew it. I might have smirked. She turned red, but turned to me.

  "Jeremy, this is Amanda Martin, my new partner."

  He offered his hand and I took it. His eyes did the once-over of my scars, but didn't linger.

  "Where's Nick? I thought he was your new partner?" It was then I realised that the Gun Runners had been out here this whole time, and had missed hearing about Nick's death. Robyn filled him in quickly.

  "I'm sorry to hear that," he said. He seemed to mean it, too.

  He led us toward the flatbed, and just as we reached it we heard a whistle blow once from the sentry to the south. Incoming.

  Five of the undead were walking across the parking lot from the 272nd Street entrance, staggering through the maze of rusting vehicles. Four of the Gun Runners took hammers and axes and went to meet them, silently killing them with a minimum of fuss or concern. When it was over they began to haul those corpses to the burning pit.

  "Lots of activity on this run," Jeremy told us. "Lots more than usual."

  "How much more?" Robyn asked.

  "About twice," he said.

  "Any idea why?" I asked.

  "No," he said, "but they're getting worked up by something. They're way more aggressive than normal."

  Salvagers, being experts on zombie behaviour since we interact with them all the damn time, have noticed some patterns. First, aggression changes a little bit over time. As they age, and the brain inside presumably deteriorates, they get less aggressive. It's subtle, and your average inhabitant of the Safe Zone wouldn't notice it, but a fresh zombie, or one that's just fed on something alive, is absolutely more hostile to the living than a starving, years old undead.

  Second, some of them are smarter than others. Again, not by much, and it's like comparing between types of insects overall, and not something you'd notice unless you really paid attention.

  Third, speed and coordination can vary quite a bit. I first noticed that back in Cold Lake. Most of the time they stagger around at something approaching a walk, but right after death they can almost run. Almost. They mostly flap their limbs around and seem like they have neural damage, but some are better able to control themselves. Maybe they aren't quite as decayed?

  "How aggressive, exactly?" Robyn looked pale asking that question, probably thinking of Nick again.

  "They seem hungrier, I guess. More determined to get to us." He shivered a little. It was probably because of the cold breeze.

  "How many?"

  "Hard to tell for sure," he said, "but about half of the ones we've killed on this run so far. About thirty, maybe."

  "I wonder if this has anything to do with Nick's rapid reanimation."

  "God, I hope not," he said. We could all agree on this point.

  We sat down on some folding chairs and he handed us some hot chocolate in thick plastic mugs. Mine had little flowers painted on it.

  "So, what brings you ladies out this way?"

  Between us, Robyn and I laid it out for him. We told him about the Sheriff's theory that there was a serial murderer in Mission. We told him about the missing women (and I saw him look at Robyn with concern once he heard the description), and about our theory that the killer was leaving Mission to dump the bodies. When Robyn asked him if he'd ever seen anyone outside the Wall who wasn't a salvager, it seemed to spark a memory. He waved at one of the sentries.

  "Yvonne! Come over here a minute!" he called. Another of the team went to relieve the woman, who climbed down off the top of one of the trucks. Yvonne, a blonde with what looked like an old knife scar across her cheek, walked over to us, hanging her rifle over her shoulder.

  "What's up?"

  "Yvonne, this is Robyn and Amanda. Can you tell them about the white truck?"

  Yvonne looked at us curiously, then pulled another chair over and sat. I realised I had butterflies. As she spoke I got more and more excited.

  "It was about four months ago. We were coming back from a run out east, along Highway Seven. It was pretty late, around twilight, and we were passing an old logging road. It was about ten or fifteen clicks from Mission. I was sitting in the back on the passenger side, looking at the forest as we passed the logging road. I was looking straight up it, and I could have sworn I saw a white pickup truck stopped about a hundred meters up. I told the crew about it, but we didn't stop. Lots of abandoned vehicles out there."

  "Tell them what happened after that," Jeremy prompted.

  "Next time we were out that way, a few days later, I looked up that road again as we passed. The truck wasn't there."

  Oh, hell yes. That must be it.

  "Could you point that road out on a map?" Robyn asked hopefully.

  "Probably not, sorry," Yvonne said. "It's been months. Maybe if I went back there, saw the landmarks again. We've been working south since then."

  "That's okay," I said to her, only a little disappointed. I had a map of that area at home, and there weren't many logging roads out there. I then turned to Robyn, trying to bury my excitement. "It's a place to start, at least."

  We thanked her, and she went back to her sentry duty.

  "Most of the Safe Zone vehicles are white pickups, aren't they?" I asked Robyn. I was grinning. We might actually have a chance at stopping this bastard!

  "All the Council ones, yeah. There's a few of other colours that are privately owned."


  I looked at the sky, then at my watch. "If we leave now we can get back to Mission in a few hours," I said. "I'd love to tell the Sheriff about this." I was ready to go right then. Hopping with energy.

  "I can do you one better, if you like," Jeremy said. "I'll take you back in one of our trucks."

  "Are you sure," Robyn asked, "I mean, aren't you needed here?"

  "They know what to do. This won't take long and it'll be safer."

  So we loaded our bikes and the trailers into the bed of a pickup and climbed in with Jeremy and another of his crew, a quiet man introduced to us as Colin. He didn't speak much, just looked out the window as we sped down the road back to Mission. This trip out had turned out to be far shorter than I expected.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Mission Safe Zone, September 11, 2013

  The zombie that had been Deputy Mannjinder Hothi reanimated about an hour after midnight on the 11th of September. Its eyes fluttered slowly open, limbs twitching with impulses fired from deep in the reptilian center of its brain. It lay still on the wet ground, rain falling steadily onto its face, limbs, and torso. It neither felt nor cared about the cold that had leached all warmth from its body.

  Instinct made it try to stand, a task that failed at first. It pushed itself into a sitting position, careless of the wrongly bent elbow on its right arm. There was too much damage to the shattered right leg to allow it to stand on that side, but it eventually managed, after several attempts, to push itself up on the one leg that worked. The undead thing ignored the grinding of the shattered bones, feeling no pain or discomfort.

 

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