87
"The jammer's going to be fine," said Buck. The words were ridiculous, and the way he said them – free arm akimbo, a look on his face that clearly said he thought Christopher was acting like a child – was infuriating.
"You ever drop a cell phone in the toilet, Buck? Spill your sippy cup across your Speak 'n Spell?" demanded Christopher. "Electronics don't do so well in the water."
Buck smirked at him. Drew something out of his pocket. It was dripping, and the sight of the water streaming out from between Buck's fingers made Christopher's stomach lurch.
Then Buck opened his fingers more. Something dropped a few inches, then jerked to a halt.
"I didn't want it to get ruined if we got caught in the rain again," said Buck. Then smirked again. "I told you it'd still work."
The jammer was dangling from Buck's fingers – enclosed in a plastic bag. And now that Christopher looked at it closer he could see that the bag was actually two bags. Buck had doubled up the bags to keep it completely safe from any water intrusion.
"I think I love you, man," said Christopher.
"Your boob-buddy is going to be jealous."
Theresa gritted her teeth. "Call me that again and me and Maggie won't be the only women here."
Christopher tried to think of something witty to say. Nothing came. A sharp crack from somewhere deep in the forest drew his eyes. Not the sound of the trees, still giving up the last bits of life as they fell to ash or their green hearts expanded beyond the bounds of their outer shell and exploded.
This sounded like… something walking. A tree not fallen, but pushed through. Perhaps shoved out of the way by something.
Many somethings.
Christopher looked back at Buck. "I think we should get going," he said. "Jammer or no jammer."
Buck nodded. "Yeah," he said. "You're right." He took a step, then stopped. Looked at Amulek. "You know where to go next?" he asked.
In answer, Amulek simply started walking north.
Then he froze.
Everyone looked in the direction of his gaze.
Christopher saw nothing at first. Just trees, smoke….
And something moving through them both. More than one thing.
He heard the growl.
88
There were a dozen of the things. Maybe more. It was hard to make out more than a blob of gray, hidden in the ashfall and the smoke. The smoke itself kept reaching searching fingers toward the group, tendrils drifting toward them, caressing them with its ghostly touch, then withdrawing. Playing with them. Daring them to live, knowing they would die.
The first zombie stepped into view.
No way of telling its real age, or even its gender. There was only black skin, bits of bone showing through at shoulder, at jaw, the ribs fleshless on the right side.
Its shoes had been red. Probably expensive. Now there were only flashes of the original red in the blackened remains. The plastics that had been woven into the cloth portion melted by heat, creating new shoes that had melded to the flesh beneath and would have had any normal person shrieking in pain.
The shoes moved forward. Dragging across the ground. Christopher couldn't tell if this was one of the "live" zombies, or one of the undead. It was moving slower than the "live" zombies tended to, but that could have been because of its injuries. Perhaps fire could slowed the things down the way even head wounds couldn't do.
One of the zombie's eyes was burned out. The other was whitened by death or by heat damage. It reminded Christopher of an egg, cooked too long. It leaked over the thing's cheek.
The zombie was headed toward them. Head cocked to the side, not looking directly at them. But there was no doubt it was headed toward the group.
It was followed by a mass of zombies. Pushing their way through curtains of darkness. Even slower than the leader, but still moving. Still moving.
Hunting.
There was a crack behind him. He turned and saw Amulek yank a four-foot branch off one of the trees. He was left with an ashy club, pointed at the end. He settled into an attack stance: low center of gravity, branch held in two hands with the point held forward like a spear. He moved sideways until he was standing between Buck and Maggie – and the little girls – and the approaching mass.
Christopher tore a branch loose as well. He couldn't do it in one yank the way Amulek did, but a few twists and it came off in his hand. He felt the loose shift of burnt bark under his fingers and knew that his club would be only a little better than bare hands. It had been burnt, nearly destroyed. It was probably as much ash as wood now – ready to fall apart with the first swing or stab.
Aaron didn't bother with a branch. He still had a knife – though how it had made it through crash and cross-river swim, Christopher had no idea. Regardless, the cowboy brandished it in his good hand. Like Amulek, he positioned himself between the throng and Buck and Maggie.
Christopher moved to join them. A moment later, Theresa took a place beside him. No branch in her hands. Just fists at the ready.
More zombies came. Another five, then another ten.
Now there were almost twenty, total. Against five fighters. Maybe six, if they put down the girls and freed up every single adult.
Six versus twenty. No hope to stand up against them.
"Run," said Christopher. No one moved. Not even him. He said it again – screamed it this time – this time willing his feet to motion.
"Run!"
89
Hot. Dirty. Sweaty. Breathless gasps that seemed to bring no oxygen, just more exhaustion.
Christopher's legs burned. His arms hurt, and the little girl in his arms seemed like she must weigh hundreds of pounds instead of the sixty or so he guessed she weighed in "normal" times. Buck had been holding her, but the third time he stumbled he finally let go of what remained of his pride and passed her to Christopher.
The run through the forest was beyond terror. Every other moment in the ongoing nightmare of the post-Change world had been a constant run, but this was different. Before it had been brief moments of terror, followed by a lull. Even if that lull had been a short one, at least it had been there. Had provided a moment to breathe, to stop. He had been hunted by the zombies – chased through several buildings, followed down an elevator shaft, through the gutted body of an airplane.
But this… the never-ending run through the forest. The endless rush to escape. It was eternity – and it had to be Hell, surrounded on every side by still-smoldering trees, ash crunching underfoot like the sighs of doomed souls.
The zombies that followed were slower than the survivors. Even now, even running lower on energy, the creatures were slower.
But they didn't tire. They didn't stop. Would never stop.
When Christopher shrieked at the group, yelled at them to run, they did. Quickly outdistanced the creatures.
Made the mistake of stopping.
And in less time than he could believe, there was that crack again. That sound of too many things pushing through nonexistent trails in the forest.
Coming for them.
They ran again. Making little headway in their stuttering, stop-and-go race. Never able to run fast enough to make real headway before one or the other of them had to pause, if only for a moment. To gasp in ash and heat and what little bits of oxygen made their way into the forest. To pass Lizzy and Hope from one to the other.
Christopher felt himself wondering what it would be like to run without the girls. Then cast out the thought as fast as he could. It was one step from wishing the girls weren't there. And that wishing would quickly turn to a hope that something would happen. That he would have an excuse to leave them behind.
That couldn't happen. These girls were the only hope for answers, for salvation. Even if they didn't know what they were going to do with Lizzy and Hope, the survivors all knew that to give them up would be suicide. Genocide, for by that action the human race would be doomed.
And beyond that… it would just be wr
ong.
He remembered talking with Dorcas in tunnels below Boise. Waiting for Ken –
(Ken, where are you buddy, are you still alive because we could really use you now)
– to resume consciousness after a series of injuries left him nearly dead.
"Funny how we all ended up here," he had said.
She shook her head. "Not funny. Just the right thing to do. We saw someone who needed help, we helped." And she added again, "Just the right thing to do."
The right thing to do. A joke, really. What could be right about anything in this world?
But he knew that was a lie. Everything done by the survivors had been impelled not merely by a hope for survival, but by a hope that they could help each other. Could make a difference.
Could do right by people who had nothing more in common than a desire to help each other live.
The right thing to do was to hold these girls. To keep them close, and to pass them back and forth. When one of them tired, the others picked up the slack.
Buck stumbled again. Aaron caught him, pushed him forward and gave him support until the big man could regain his feet.
They ran.
The creatures sounded close in the forest.
They ran.
The forest started to thin, and Christopher wondered what would happen next. Would they end up in a farm? In some field that was scattered with the burnt remains of some dead man or woman's work? Would they stumble into a town?
He guessed wrong on all counts.
90
Christopher had seen these places before. Everyone in the Treasure Valley had seen them. Idaho's nickname was The Gem State; most people thought that referred only to the fact that nearly every precious stone in the United States could be found in Idaho's ground. That was only part of it. In reality, it meant that Idaho had abundant natural resources, many of which could be plucked from the state's earth.
And two of them, oddly enough, were sand and gravel. Again, something few people thought of as important, but they were ubiquitous in their use. They were needed to make concrete, for road construction, and to make things like concrete blocks and pipes. They could be used to make roofing shingles, for recreational grounds – even for water filtration.
Typically, sand and gravel were mined by digging a pit to the gravel deposit. But sometimes they were located so close to the surface – particularly the sand – that all they needed was a clear space for the mining. That was the case here.
Christopher hadn't just seen these places from afar, either. He had actually been to a sand and gravel mine site once. Not during work hours – he and a friend had gotten ragingly drunk and ended up parked in the middle of the mine site for no particular reason. He didn't remember much of the night, but he did remember getting a sense of power from the machinery at the mine. It mostly consisted of long, treadmill-like conveyors still covered with a layer of large rocks from the day's work. To one side of the conveyors was the mine pit itself, with a bulldozer and an earth mover parked beside some kind of huge hopper that could funnel loads of dirt and rock onto the conveyor.
At the other end of the conveyor belts – several of them, placed end to end to create the length to get the materials from the pit to where they would be processed – were a series of machines. He climbed up the last treadmill – an angle steep enough that he barely made it to the top, given his inebriated state – and looked into the mouths of the various machines. They had held sifters and rock crushers inside them: spinning drums with huge teeth on the side that he guessed would take in the large rocks on the conveyor and leave only small pebbles or sand behind.
When looking into the mouth of the crusher, he almost fell in. Which wouldn't have killed him, he guessed – it was only a few feet down to the series of rotating gears and teeth that would eat rocks and chew them into pebbles – but the idea of falling into it was scary enough he backed down and went home.
His father had been waiting to dress him down about drunk driving and "acting in no way like the son of the state's most powerful man."
Like that night that seemed so long ago, the machinery now sat silent. Long conveyors with the crushers and sifters at their mouth.
And at the other side….
"Go right!" screamed Buck.
Everyone angled that way. Because that was where the dump truck was. If they could get it started….
For a moment, hope bloomed.
Please, let the keys be inside.
They ran. The conveyor belt was between them and the vehicle. The belt itself was at the worst possible height for passing: high enough that climbing up would be a pain – especially with Hope and Lizzy – but low enough that crawling through the crossbars that held the thing up would be equally difficult.
Surprisingly, Buck clambered up the bars and onto the belt with the ease of a gymnast.
Contractor. He's been around this stuff before.
He'll never let me hear the end of this: his moment of Superman-ness.
Buck held out his hand. "Give me Hope!" he shouted.
Christopher passed her up. Buck lay her on the belt, after kicking aside a few rocks to make room for her. Then he gestured to Amulek, who had been holding Lizzy. Amulek passed up the toddler, and Buck lay her down at her sister's feet.
He gestured for Christopher to take his hand. Christopher was pulled up to the conveyor belt, then Buck held a hand to Maggie. Christopher pulled up Amulek, and at the same time Aaron climbed – not as well as Buck, but still ridiculously fast – to the top of the belt. Helped Theresa up.
Then they reversed the process, climbing down to the other side, passing the girls down.
Buck was still on top of the machine when they heard the growl.
The first zombies hove into sight. All twenty or so, moving toward the machinery.
Toward them.
91
Again, flight.
I'll never run again if I get out of this.
A ridiculous thought. Of course he would run. That was all life was now. Running, running; the only possible blessing would be if you got a bit of a break between mad sprints for survival.
Christopher was holding Lizzy in his arms this time. Aaron had Hope, and they were being propelled along by Amulek and Theresa. Running full-bore for the dump truck, which seemed to recede two feet for every one he ran.
The growl was louder. He didn't look back. Afraid that if he looked, they'd be even closer than they sounded. Would be at his feet, teeth biting at air and fingers reaching for him.
They reached the dump truck. It wasn't as big as some he had seen, but still large enough to convey the sense that this thing had survived the end of the world with ease, and would likely be around for any further apocalypses that might occur. Six wheels, grayed from years of use and a layer of sand that had faded and pitted the once-yellow metal of the truck itself. The front of the truck bore the word "DEERE" next to a model number, 250D.
Christopher didn't know if that was a good kind of dump truck or a bad one, a cheap model or a top of the line unit – but if it ran, it would have room for three of the group in the cab, with the rest able to pile in the dump bed with ease. That was as close to perfect as they came.
Amulek ran ahead for the last few feet, sprinting to the side of the truck and throwing himself at the door so hard Christopher expected him to bounce off with broken bones. But the teen landed gracefully. Caught hold of the side of the truck. Yanked open the door – the passenger side – and was inside in a moment. He disappeared for long seconds, then poked his head out. Shook his head and shrugged – No keys, the motion said clearly.
"Dammit," whispered Aaron.
Christopher swiveled to look at him. "Whaddya mean, 'dammit'? Can't you just use your super soldier skills to hotwire the thing?"
Aaron grimaced. "It's not like it is in the movies. Best case, it takes a few minutes, and this isn't best ca –"
He turned at the last word, doing what Christopher hadn't had the ner
ve to do: check on their pursuers. And when he cut off suddenly, Christopher knew it was going to be bad.
Maggie had turned as well. She raised a hand to her lips. Gasped. And suddenly Christopher realized something.
Something's missing. Someone.
"Where's Buck?" he said.
He turned as well.
And screamed.
92
Buck hadn't followed them. Instead, he had jumped down on the other side of the conveyor belt – the side closest to the zombies that were now wending their way toward him. It may have been Christopher's imagination, but the things seemed faster than before, as well.
No. Not my imagination.
The zombies were covered with a slick, waxy substance. The yellow ooze both supported and healed.
They were healing. Moving faster than before.
Buck didn't even seem to notice. He ran to the far end of the conveyor belt, and Christopher could see him doing something there.
The belt rumbled to life. Rocks started cruising down the conveyor, dropping off the end and onto the next belt in the line. A small pile of rocks quickly accumulated there.
Buck moved again, and the second belt rumbled to life.
"What's he doing?" said Maggie.
Christopher knew. Knew, but wished he didn't. Wished he could be done, just done, with all this.
Please, not another friend. Not Buck. Not Buck!
The things were close to Buck now. Maybe twenty feet away. Focused on him, which was a good thing for the rest of the survivors, whom they didn't even seem to see.
But it was very bad for Buck.
At the last second, the big man clambered to the top of the conveyor belt. Began running in the same direction it was moving. The speed it gave him moved him quickly out of the range of the zombies. They milled for a moment, seeming confused by their quarry's sudden disappearance.
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