Tom threw two more snowballs with the same, silent effect.
Tom slid the shotgun off of his back and cocked it with his hand over the ejection port. The weapon clacked twice and a shell fell into the palm of his hand. He slung the shotgun over his back again, then threw the shell up at the window.
Snap!
It hit with such force and noise Penelope ducked with her hands over her head, expecting the glass from the tower window to shatter and rain down over them. The glass remained intact, but this time something did stir.
A moan rose from within the ground floor office, echoing through the partly open doorway. Penelope held her breath. Tom sank low, pulling Penelope down closer to the snow as he quietly and slowly removed the shotgun from his back once more.
The moan came again, not a hunger complaint or the call of the hunt, but a groggy warning. Penelope grabbed Tom’s arm and shook her head, pointing at the gun. He glared at her until she pointed behind them and nodded for him to move. He nodded in agreement, stepping into his own tracks, crouching the whole time, slowly moving away from the building.
Penelope let him get a few paces ahead then did the same into her own tracks. She watched the door warily, but could see nothing of the darkness inside. She hoped the blinding snow had the same effect on any zombies peering out. Thankfully, it had only been a single moan, a light sleeper.
“Kid, you there?” Hank’s muffled voice erupted out of the radio, startling Penelope and Tom. They both jerked. Her heart froze, throbbed, and began racing all at once.
Tom unzipped his thick jacket and yanked out the radio clipped to his inner jacket. He immediately turned a dial, then pressed a button while holding the device to his mouth.
“Can’t talk,” Tom whispered.
The moaning in the building beneath the tower came again, an inquisitive, questioning tone. It wasn’t a warning anymore.
“Can you listen?” Hank’s voice replied, this time barely audible over the wind and the drum-like beating of Penelope’s own heart.
“Not now,” Tom whispered.
A second moan called out from the shadows behind the partly open door of the building.
“Shit,” Tom hissed.
Penelope closed her eyes and formed a low, throat grating groan. It had been years since she tried anything like it. Her voice faltered, breaking on her first attempt.
“What are you doing?” Tom whispered in her ear, his tone both frightened and agitated.
Penelope opened her eyes and put a finger to her lips.
Tom gripped the shotgun a little tighter as he looked in every direction. Another moan echoed through the snow from somewhere further off.
“Come on,” he said softly, putting a hand on her arm.
Penelope shook him off and groaned once more, her voice coming strong this time, unbroken. Tom reared his head with a look of utter confusion. Penelope’s moan answered the calls. She made a groan of recognition, to tell the things inside that the things outside were their own. Only that wasn’t true. While the sounds were second nature to Penelope, they were mere mimicry. She didn’t know for certain that she spoke the sounds zombies truly understood, but the moans from inside the building faded.
“Penny,” Tom whispered fiercely.
She groaned one more time for good measure, then pushed Tom’s back, making him move again. This was no place to talk, even in sign language.
They walked until the looming tower was no longer a shadow at their back. Everything around them was a blurry, white haze. If it wasn’t for their own trail, they wouldn’t have known which way to go. Tom looked at the device on his arm repeatedly until it showed them in an intersection between four buildings. The wide expanse of the airstrip was still ahead of them, but the buildings were far from earshot.
Tom unzipped his jacket and lifted the radio to his mouth.
“Hank,” Tom whispered.
They waited in the quiet with the snow falling in lumps. Penelope looked in every direction, but aside from their own trail, nothing appeared any different than the rest.
“Kid?” Hank whispered.
“Copy.”
“I found three of them.”
Tom looked at Penelope, his face brightening a moment. Then he scowled. There should have been six.
“Which three?”
“The pilot,” Hank whispered. “He’s bad. Real bad. The doctor’s here, and a handler named Hamilton.”
“Where’s my Dad?” Tom asked softly.
“He went out to find the girl,” Hank replied. “Your sister.”
“Shit,” Tom growled, but not into the radio. From somewhere nearby came another questioning moan. Tom looked at Penelope, who was scanning the edge of her vision in every direction, trying to figure out where the sound came from. “How long ago?” Tom whispered into the radio.
“A few hours,” Hank said.
The moan came again, this time from behind them to their right. Penelope turned to face it, crouching low. Tom crouched with her, his hand covering the radio speaker.
Another voice squelched over the radio, the words slightly muffled. “Should we head for the woods?” the soldier named Jones asked softly.
“Yes,” Tom said. He turned the volume on the radio down and clipped it inside his jacket again before zipping up. “Do you want to do that moaning thing again?”
Penelope shook her head, pushing Tom to make him start walking. It wasn’t a normal zombie that made the last noise.
Fifteen
Penelope followed Tom as he hurried over his own tracks, stepping into the holes he made earlier, back-tracking his way along the blurry trail leading to the airstrip. Penelope wanted to tell him to slow down, but he refused to look back. The zip and swish of his pant legs rubbing against one another sounded like a trumpet compared to the silence of the falling snow. A few times he turned his head to ensure she was behind him, but otherwise trudged forward blindly. The snow dancing in the wind made everything seem alive, so much so that she imagined a hundred zombies emerging from the surrounding buildings, drawn to the crunching of snow underfoot and the rubbing of Tom’s pant legs.
Tom came to a sudden halt. His head turned to the side. Penelope followed his eyes to see a trail carved in the snow that intersected their own path right where Tom stood. Penelope came to Tom’s side and looked along the new trail that led to them from somewhere past the edge of their sight.
The tracks ended into their own.
Penelope swallowed hard.
“What the?” Tom asked softly as he crouched down to inspect the foreign trail. Penelope could tell the new trail came out to join theirs. Where they intersected paths, the new trail appeared to take over Penelope’s toward the snowmobiles, her foot holes now fresh again.
Penelope growled. She knew what did this. Another half-breed, like herself. But what was it doing out here in the snow? Penelope resisted the urge to follow its original trail back to where it came from, and instead nudged Tom.
“Right,” Tom whispered, standing. “We keep going.”
They crunched through their own tracks for several minutes. Tom looked at the device on his arm repeatedly to gauge their progress, showing her each time. The red pin that represented their position hardly budged from minute to minute, but eventually jumped to the edge of the buildings.
“It figured out our new position,” Tom whispered. He kept moving, but unzipped his jacket. He turned up the volume on his radio and held it to his mouth. “Hank, you there?”
There was a moment’s silence as they kept trudging ahead, the crunch of snow underfoot and the wind beating in Penelope’s ear the only other noise.
“Yeah, kid. I’m still here.”
“I found someone’s cross-tracks over ours.”
“A zombie?”
“No. The tracks ended at ours, then they started using our trail back toward the snowmobiles.”
“Zombies don’t do that,” Hank said with surprise.
Tom didn’t answer. H
e trudged through the snow with Penelope following him.
“Half-breeds,” O’Farrell’s voice announced at a whisper over the radio.
O’Farrell’s statement echoed Penelope’s own thoughts on the matter. She remembered using existing tracks to get through the snow easier when she lived here. It made things easier when hunting.
“Where are you, kid?” Hank asked softly through the radio.
“On our way to the snowmobiles to get one and take it to the woods.”
“Good idea. Be careful, though. Goddamned half-breeds—”
The radio squelched mid-sentence. Tom looked at Penelope, shaking his head to tell her Hank didn’t mean her, but she knew that if she were still out here alone, still wild, his sentiment would have included her. Yet another reason Penelope had to find Doctor Kennedy.
“You know what I mean,” Hank finally said, his voice apologetic.
Tom didn’t stop even as he tucked away the radio into his jacket. If anything, his pace quickened, causing him to stumble and fall forward. Penelope crouched beside him to help him up, then she pushed him forward again. Not enough to cause him to fall over, but enough to get his attention. He looked back at her.
No fast, she signed to him irritably. She pointed to her head, telling him to think. Then she waved all around her. Look where we are.
Tom sighed and nodded. He let Penelope set the pace by taking the lead, but stayed only a step behind her in his own trail. Penelope smelled the crisp air, untainted by the scent of zombie, half-breed, or otherwise. She scanned the sea of white, yet saw nothing but their own trails. The prints in her holes were wider than her own boots, but the snow was no deeper, so Penelope knew this intruder was about her own size, at least by weight. Of the male half-breeds she knew lived here, several were much bigger than her, one so big even the soldier named Jones would have trouble with him. These tracks weren’t his, thankfully.
The thought of running into the half-breed brute made her shiver, just as the thought of finding any of the bigger, normal zombies—that feeling of helplessness in knowing that her own strength at its fullest was no match for even one of its arms. They were so physically imposing that there was nothing she could do but run and hide.
Dark shapes began to take form ahead of them and Penelope slowed, crouching and squinting to discern what they were. Tom crouched beside her and showed his device on his arm.
“Snowmobiles,” he whispered, pointing at their red dot on the screen, how it indicated they were at the very middle of the runways.
She didn’t think so. The snowmobiles looked taller or wider or something seemed out of place. Was someone on top of each of them? She shook her head.
Tom unshouldered his shotgun and aimed it ahead as he took several steps forward. Penelope followed closely, looking in every direction, smelling the air for signs of anything out of the ordinary. The wind gave her nothing except a buffeting in her ears.
They broke through the falling snow’s shrouding veil to find a different scene than how they left the snowmobiles. All the seats were turned up, which made their shape from a distance more square than sleek, and explained why Penelope didn’t recognize them.
Penelope looked at Tom, her brows scrunched to ask him how the snowmobiles got like this.
“I didn’t leave the seats up,” Tom said softly.
It wasn’t only the snowmobile seats. One of the rescue sleds also had its side compartment wide open. Tom stepped up beside it and looked in, then closed the compartment. He pushed the seat of the snowmobile down before moving to the next vehicle. Penelope walked into the center of the vehicles and counted out what had been taken. Two packs—the pack in Hank’s snowmobile, and one from the compartment of the rescue sled. Penelope figured that meant only one half-breed came scavenging, but that was enough to make trouble.
Tom shut another snowmobile’s seat and whacked the flag pole behind it to swat the snow from the red triangle at the top.
“Snow’s getting heavy,” Tom whispered. “Go close up O’Farrell’s and get on it.”
Tom went to close the last seat, struggling to move through the snow as quickly as he could.
Penelope moved to the snowmobile O’Farrell drove. It towed a rescue sled as well, one that hadn’t been ransacked. She pushed the seat closed and sat on it, waiting for Tom to finish. The air still smelled crisp, no hint of zombie, as it gusted one way, then another. The silence was the most unsettling, though. She held her breath and turned her ear until she could hear it. A faint wailing from the children in the woods, so soft the falling snow on her jacket seemed louder.
“No other tracks leading out,” Tom said as he crunched through the snow to Penelope. “It must have followed Hank’s or Jones’ and O’Farrell’s trails.” Tom reached the snowmobile and climbed onto the seat, putting the shotgun across his legs as he reached to turn on the engine.
Penelope covered her ears.
Tom’s hand stopped. The engine didn’t start. Tom looked the vehicle up and down, then at the snow all around it, before he turned to look at Penelope.
“Do you have the key?”
She shook her head.
“Did O’Farrell take her key?” he asked, getting up again and crunching through the snow toward his own snowmobile. He knelt onto his snowmobile, then looked at the other snowmobiles.
“Where are the goddamned keys?”
Sixteen
Tom and Penelope marched in the direction the GPS indicated for the woods. Penelope didn’t need the device anymore, though. The sound of wailing was enough of a direction finder for her. Having the device to tell her she was right simply made her feel better about its accuracy.
“Why take them?” Tom wondered aloud about the keys.
Penelope couldn’t think of a good reason. They were made of metal, and that was useful as a tool, but keys were so small they could hardly be used for anything. Tying them to a sleeve to make bite-proof clothing would be noisy. The keys would jingle together and draw in even more biters. The best defense against biters was simply speed.
The wailing rose in volume as they crunched through the snow. Pretty soon a tree took shape in the haze, then another, and finally a wall of them stood like boney forearms, frozen as they reached skyward with empty, skeletal hands. Penelope scanned the tree line from end to end and saw only the falling snow. It seemed safe.
Tom unzipped his jacket and took out the radio. Penelope nodded that it was OK to use it.
“We’re in the woods,” Tom whispered into the radio. Jones and O’Farrell went in a few minutes earlier. Tom waited a minute before tucking the radio back into his jacket. He knew as well as Penelope did that no news wasn’t necessarily a bad thing out here. The bad thing was that the last time everyone talked on the radio, the others didn’t have their keys, either.
Tom pointed the shotgun ahead of them and turned it slowly, side to side, like a windshield wiper running on a dead battery. They crept forward through the barren trees, listening to the wailing shift pitch with the breeze. The deeper they went, the milder the breeze, and the louder the wailing grew. Everywhere around them, large mounds of snow rose like frozen bubbles where shrubs and bushes were buried.
Their path took them through the troughs and deeper into the woods. More trees took shape all around and the mounds grew to form walls as high as themselves in some places, forcing them to backtrack and go around.
Eventually the snow receded, no longer consuming her legs with each step, allowing her to move faster. Tom kept up while watching behind them, sweeping his shotgun side to side.
“Is it me, or is it getting warmer?” Tom asked, blowing out his mouth and seeing no fog. “It is warmer. How the hell?”
Penelope put a finger to her lips. Even though the snow still fell, it hardly covered the barren trees. Most of the large shrubs and bushes appeared green instead of snow covered. Penelope motioned for Tom to follow her and she pushed through a barrier of foliage to find a diminished, brown-stained snow pack
at their feet. The air felt tangibly warmer, and with that warmth came not only a fetid stench, but also an escalation in the volume of the wailing children.
Penelope froze in her tracks, putting an arm out to stop Tom. Ahead of them stood two children clutching one another, swaying slowly inside the protection of a tall, hollowed out bramble that acted like a sentry post. They wore long-sleeved shirts and two pairs of pants each, their feet covered with old rain boots. These were someone’s warning signals.
Penelope pointed east and took Tom by the hand as she led him away from the children, giving them a wide berth.
Another post of two children came into sight and Penelope stopped. None of the trees here were tall enough to be homes for the half-breeds. These children were the outer guards. Penelope felt sorry for them. Their mournful calls haunted her memories, rekindling her most base desire to reassure them and comfort them, to remind them that they weren’t alone. Had she still lived here, she would have been one of the half-breeds that came through occasionally to make sure the children were tended. By the sound of their wails, no one had been through for a while.
The snow gave way to bare earth after they passed a third clutch of children. The moist ground spread underfoot, letting them sink down a few slippery inches. Penelope examined the tracks. None were fresh.
Tom took off a glove and held his hand above the ground to feel the air. “The ground is warm,” Tom whispered in amazement. “How?”
Penelope shrugged. She never knew why, but the snow here melted every year. The zombies didn’t live in these woods because, by day, it was too bright. But nothing stopped them from coming through at night.
The falling snow melted as it landed. In older tracks, the water pooled until it overflowed the edges of the footprints and spilled into tiny rivulets that meandered through the bushes and trees. Penelope led them along the watery trails toward the bog-like stench. The chorus of children grew louder and the trees grew taller.
Plagued States of America (Book 3): Plagued: The Ironville Zombie Quarantine Retraction Experiment Page 8