Her brother certainly does.
But this. This is a new kind of fucking stupid, and I'm not marching into it alone. I'm walking into it with a unit of people who expect me to lead them in and out, and with Nurrin.
I am very tempted to turn the bus around and head for Florida, but I know my people will never tolerate that. And even now that Fish is dead, and I'm no longer certain of who is reporting to the priest, I know that one of them is.
“We do it fast,”" I say, finally. “I’ll take the bike with Tuck. No stopping, not for anything. We've got the sweepers, so we should be able to clear whatever comes at us. We get what we can and we get the fuck out again. Two hours in the city is going to be a death sentence, and we can't do it much faster than that.”
They watch me, eyes curious, and I nod. “Get some sleep, and we’ll leave at first light.”
For a moment, the bus is quiet and still, and then, “Sir?”
It’s Mercy, and I let my gaze rake over the petite brunette. She’s a small thing—could almost pass for a young boy with her subtle curves. I wonder if fucking her would make me forget the girl staring at me with wide green eyes and dirty blonde hair.
“What?” I ask, and my voice is rougher than I mean for it to be.
“Will we find anything?”
The truth, or the lie? Why do they still ask questions? They know I hate them. They know the answer is almost always a lie—even if the lie does not come from me, or if it’s well intentioned. A lie, no matter how pretty, is still a lie.
“No,” I say, finally, “we won’t.”
“Then why are we going?” she asks, and her voice is plaintive and scared. They are all scared. Only Tuck and Nurrin seem untouched by the fear that is rising and almost choking in the little bus.
Why indeed?
“Because hope,” Nurrin says softly. “The federal government bombed Atlanta to hell and back, but before, the best hope for a cure was in the CDC, working with the world’s best minds to find a cure. We all know nothing survived. No one could.” Her eyes find mine, and there is understanding there that makes me irrationally angry. “But we’ll go because we have hope.”
“And we’ll probably die because of it.”
Chapter 5.
The Dead City
Before the change, Atlanta was a beacon. It was a fucking metropolis, with a glittering skyline and steep heritage, and a population of millions. It was home to the world's largest airport, and the infection hit it like a fucking hammer.
It's easy to say we lost everything. But hidden behind the walls of the Havens, with the goods that are brought in and the commerce that's sprung up, despite everything, life goes on. Our world goes on.
Atlanta, though. Atlanta is still the worst thing we have ever done.
The infects didn’t destroy Atlanta. They might have. They were well on their way to killing a good percent of the population.
But fear is what destroyed Atlanta, what leveled the skyscrapers and burnt out the world class aquarium, killing millions in the blink of an eye and turning a city that once thrived into a toxic wasteland. The bus idles behind me on the remains of 75, and Tuck whistles softly.
The city lies broken and toxic in front of us, and my stomach turns.
I’ve seen a lot of fucked up shit in the twenty years since the dead rose, but nothing compares to the destruction of Atlanta.
I swallow hard and lift a hand, signaling the bus to ease forward.
The sooner we’re done here, the better.
It’s precarious and slow going. 75 is a wreck of broken road and deserted cars, although most of the long forgotten traffic has been cleared, by the army and scavengers over the past two decades.
Most of them were people from the south heading into the safety of the city to avoid the horde that was tearing apart Newnan.
They ran from one nightmare, into a death trap.
The bomb we dropped hit in Olympic Park. It leveled a five mile radius. The fires and damage went out another ten miles. The bomb wasn't supposed to hit that early—that was the secret that Andrew Buchman carried. But I was there, in that war room.
They were supposed to bomb the horde outside the city, when it was still between Newnan and Peachtree. But the president waffled, and by the time the decision was made, the horde and the army were the same thing and had turned back to Atlanta.
With one warhead, we leveled a ten mile radius in a fucking metropolis.
The skyline is gone—the arching towers and tangled highways, the fucking park and aquarium—everything.
The bomb leveled everything for ten fucking miles, and the destruction and fires raged for another fifteen.
It’s been talked about, before the bomb was dropped, and almost constantly since. People talk about why and what went wrong, and all the other fucked up bullshit. But here’s the truth.
The beginning wasn’t Emilie, or my mother, or even my uncle. The beginning, the thing that fucking ruined the world was when Carlos Perez took off the USS Minnesota in the Gulf, and bombed one of America’s cities.
That’s when humanity let the zombies win.
Chapter 6.
Changing Plans
We don’t move quickly, no matter what I said. It’s not like there’s a lot in the way, but it’s still slow picking a path through the blast radius, over the broken streets.
Tuck and I prowl the busted up concrete in the motorcycles, until we finally hit a roadblock the bus can’t get around.
We aren’t anywhere close enough to the CDC, but what we’re doing isn’t working. I sit on the bike for a long time, watching the desolation for some sign of movement, but nothing is out there. Nothing alive or dead.
“Sir?” Tuck finally murmurs from my side and I shake my reverie and swing off the bike.
“She’s going to fucking hate this,” I mutter.
Tuck wisely doesn’t comment, just rolls his bike back and follows me to the bus.
Nurrin is stepping out before I reach it, and I scowl, grabbing her arm and tugging her back on. “What did you not understand about ‘danger zone?’?” I snap.
“What the hell are we doing?” she counters, ignoring my question. Good. It was fucking rhetorical. I tug her up into the bus behind me and Tuck brings up the rear, the door swinging shut behind him.
“We need to get to the CDC,” I say without preamble.
There’s a beat of silence, and then Lane says softly, “Do we? Sir, there’s nothing. There’s been nothing—and the CDC was only twenty miles from the drop point, right?” Pity flickers in her eyes, and I bare my teeth at her.
“The bus won’t make it. So we’ll split up. Tuck and I will take the bikes and get into the CDC. Nurrin, I want you to take the bus and the rest of the unit and head to Macon. You’ll be clear of the radiation by the time you reach the state line—wait for us there. Forty-eight hours. That’s it, and then you get the unit to safety.”
She looks like she wants to argue, but Nurrin is not stupid and she won’t do that, not in front of the entire unit. Her lips press into a furious line, and she nods.
I’m surprised. Even knowing the stakes, I expected an argument. That’s as ingrained in Nurrin as breathing and avoiding the Order.
She doesn’t though. So I glance at Tuck. “Blades and bows, extra ammo. We’re moving quickly, so don’t bring anything that will weigh us down.”
Tuck grins and heads to the back of the bus to pillage the weapons locker.
I step out of the bus, only a little annoyed that she follows.
“What are you hoping to find?” she asks, and I swallow my sigh.
“Answers.”
“Obviously. The question is, to what? What questions are you asking—and are you prepared if the answer is a lie?”
I flinch and look at her, my eyes narrowed. She nods, as if to herself.
“Finn, don’t go there. You’ve buried her. Let her die.”
“You have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” I s
nap and she laughs, a bitter noise as her hand comes up to touch the vials hanging at her throat.
“We all carry our dead.”
She doesn’t wait for me to respond to that, just climbs back into the van, yelling over her shoulder, “Try not to get yourself killed out there, O’Malley.”
Tuck emerges a few minutes later, and she gives me a mocking salute as Mercy shifts the bus into gear and they rumble away.
It’s hard to watch her getting farther away, harder than I expect, so I nod at Tuck as I take the weapons bag he’s extending to me.
“Ready?” he asks.
I nod, and he guns the bike. The sound echoes, eerie in the silence and desolate surroundings.
But there are no screams to answer, so I shove down my unease, swing onto my bike, and follow him deeper into the dead city.
Chapter 7.
Shifting Perspective
We reach the CDC late in the afternoon. By then, the heat has made it almost impossible to do anything but curse silently. Behind my face mask, sweat drips into my eyes and stings, makes it hard to see. The smell of my body is rank and I need to piss. It’s fucking miserable, and Tank is silent, a broody companion on the empty road.
The silence is almost suffocating, with only the sound of my breathing to keep my thoughts company as we ride.
I hear Ren, her tart voice, and the pity in my unit’s eyes.
They all know I’m Sylvia’s son, that I’m here because I was her son, and Kelsey’s best friend.
The ghosts of my past that I can never fucking get rid of. Sometimes I wish—I cut that thought off hard, and push the bike for a little more speed.
We’re past the worst of the destruction now, and it’s almost worse—the bomb didn’t level everything here, so there’s more shit to dodge, and places to watch for the dead.
But it’s good for keeping my thoughts out of my own crowded head, so I’ll take it.
It works, until we turn into the complex.
The CDC looks, depressingly, like every half-standing building we’ve passed in Atlanta. The metal fencing, more decorative than anything, is melted into the ground and the plate glass windows are long since shattered. The steel skeleton stands ominous, twisted and broken and forbidding.
Where was she, when the bomb went off? Where in that fucking death trap was she?
And why the hell have we come?
Da thought he could talk sense into Andrew. The usage of Synthrix was out of hand and Mum was convinced if we didn’t head it off soon, it would have devastating consequences.
She was right—it did. I think if she knew just how wrong things were going to go, she would have shot Keifer herself. Or locked us away in our highland home. It was a small fortress, and she would laugh with Da, that we could survive any apocalypse there.
It was a joke until it wasn’t, and we were too fucking far away, too scattered to survive anything.
Instead, she died in a southern city an ocean away from her Highland home, separated from her family.
Rage is familiar, and it licks through my veins as I stare at the CDC and Tuck idles next to me.
“Come on,” I growl. “Let’s get this over with.”
Part 3 Strangers of the East
*
The truth is often stranger than fiction
Mark Twain~
**
There are some weird ass things in the world. The dead are just one of them.
Nurrin Sanders~
Chapter 1.
Personal Apocalypse
We forget that the apocalypse wasn’t about the millions who died, or the city we destroyed, or the fact that we gave up the East. It was not about the countries that we never heard from again—the black holes of infection spread across Africa and South America.
That is the cost that is easy to tally, the one that we can point at, wave and scream, “The cost was too high!”
But it was never about that. It was about a sister trying to save her brother, a mother finding the best way for her daughter to live, soldiers putting their lives together as they kept the masses safe.
It was the mother who killed her husband to keep her infant safe during the change, the orphans shuttled into Havens as the evac orders rolled through the country, and found a family in the people they were forced to be with.
It is small, small stories. It’s not about the world falling apart—that is easy to put on the table and wrap your head around.
But every person has a story. Every single one of us has a personal apocalypse, and that—that is the true cost of the disease. The way it changed everything and nothing, and touched every soul living today.
We all have dead, and we all carry blood on our hands. There is no way to survive without both.
But it’s not the blood and the dead—it’s the scars we carry, that we don’t share. It’s the history and the scars no one sees that kill us.
Finn says we are more than the past. That it doesn’t define us.
But he’s wrong.
Our past is all we have.
Once upon a time, we had a future. A way to plan. Then the zombies rose and everything became not the future, but how to survive a day.
We gave up our future because we fought to stay alive.
And now, it’s been twenty years. Twenty fucking years of living behind Walls, in fear.
Twenty years of carrying our scars and our dead and running from the past because it’s too much, too heartbreaking, too devastating to face when we examine what we gave up.
So we live in fear, because fear is easier than facing the hordes, and it makes living behind Walls, living one day at a time, waiting to die—easier. Bearable.
It’s the true cost of the infection that tore apart our world.
Not the millions who died. It’s the personal apocalypse we each face, and the way we choose small, safe lives.
Chapter 2.
Strange Leader
I don’t know Finn’s unit. It’s odd to be with them, and effortless—Finn never tolerated questions, and his unit is well trained, enough that they follow my orders without much comment.
I see the looks though. Mariah, in particular, isn’t pleased that I’m here. Vaguely, I wonder if it’s because Finn isn’t here or because I am, and things between us are so clearly complicated. There are side-long looks and I feel the difference.
I ignore it. We have more to do than for me to concern myself with the speculation of a few soldiers, even ones as well-trained as Finn’s.
There is a deserted rest stop at the border of Georgia and Florida, and we stop there.
“Scout it,” I murmur to Greer and Estep, and they leave in a clatter of guns and boots. The rest of the bus seems to tense as we watch them jogging the perimeter, checking the cars left behind. There are a few green army convoys—I wonder if it was a staging ground during the evacuation or after, when the war for the East raged. It doesn’t really matter—it’s just relics from a lost time, and vaguely curious because of that.
Estep clears the last building, a falling down brick thing, and then he and Greer circle back. “Clear, ma’am.”
“Set up camp. We need three on guard duty, and I want someone in the cage. We leave as soon as Finn and Tuck get here.”
There are more sidelong glances and my temper flares in response. “What?” I snap.
“What if he doesn’t come back?”
I twist to look at Mercy, who flushes under my scrutiny.
“Get the camp set up,” I order.
“It’s a fair question, ma’am. We can’t stay here forever.”
I smile, and Greer falls back a step, paling. “It would be,” I say pleasantly, “if I had asked for questions. As it is, I didn’t. So follow your fucking orders.”
There’s a moment, a heartbeat, in which I think they’ll continue to press. But then Greer nods, his head dipping respectfully. As they begin to move away, breaking tents and gear out, I let out a small sigh of relief.
I know
what they want—these are the soldiers Finn chose. They are pragmatic and capable and—above all else, survivors. They won’t be kept here out of hope that Finn might survive. They want me to agree to leave now. And that isn’t an option. Finn gave an order, and if there is anything I have learned since 8 fell, it is that he doesn’t do that without reason.
I might hate them, and I might not always understand his logic—but I know better than to argue with it.
I glance back, down the ruined highway, and hope like hell he arrives in time.
Chapter 3.
Watching Darkness
The darkness has eyes.
It takes me until sunset to confirm it—that someone is watching us. Someone living.
Zombies might be different here, but they aren’t thinking and they don’t stand around watching their dinner. They just attack it.
“Greer,” I call, and he shifts, standing to walk to where I’m leaning against the bus.
“Ma’am?”
“We have someone tracking us,” I murmur, and he goes stiff, his head jerking to the stand of trees behind the rest area. I shake my head. “Don’t. You don’t want to give us away. They aren’t here to hurt us, I don’t think.”
“What makes you say that?” he demands.
I shrug, and shift my bow more comfortably at my back. “Because he could have, if he wanted. We’re not exactly concealed here.”
He grunts his agreement, and I sigh. “Send the best tracker to scout. Who is that?”
“With Tuck gone, probably Little.”
Mariah. I grit my teeth in annoyance but nod. “Fine. Tell her to avoid contact if at all possible.”
He nods, and slips away and I stand there. Waiting.
Mariah glances at me as Greer talks to her, and her lips curl in disdain, but she doesn’t argue, just grabs her knives and vanishes into the trees.
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