“That’s what I meant,” Jane said. “We need him to make explosives.”
“I’m fine,” Maddock said. “Really.” The fact that it had taken him so much time and effort to get it out told Jane he wasn’t fine. She looked at the house they were in the back yard of.
“Think that place is empty?”
The anger in Randolph’s face was gone, replaced by what Jane could only guess was boredom. He looked at the house. “Possibly. Probably picked clean of anything useful long ago, but safe enough for us to rest, if we’re quiet, yeah.”
Jane didn’t wait for Randolph’s approval. She helped her father to his feet, and he leaned on her heavily, which worried her. They started toward the house. Beulah opened the back door for them, and shut it behind them before joining Randolph and Samuel in searching the place.
“It’s all right, Dad,” Jane said. “We’ll head out in another hour or two, it’s not much farther.”
“Thanks,” Maddock said. “I’m sorry to be such a bother. Haven’t done a lot of walking these days, I guess.”
“Don’t worry,” Samuel said, holstering his gun and sitting next to them on the lone couch in the living room. “Soon we can leave all work and weariness behind us.”
“Amen,” Beulah said.
“What do you think it’s like?” Maddock asked. “Being one of them.”
“Painless. Bliss.”
Samuel put an arm around his wife. “They don’t know pain, or hatred. Just cooperation.”
“And hunger,” Jane said.
“Not for long,” Randolph replied. He sat near the window, looking out occasionally. “How long do you need?”
“An hour,” Maddock said. “Maybe two, but probably just the one.”
“If anything happens, stick to the plan, no matter what. Head for the glow, you can’t miss the place. It’s the big ugly walls made of wood and garbage. They’ll let you in, all you have to do is get there.” Randolph snapped his head around and waited, but only silence filled the house. “Go by other names. Pretend we’ve never met before tonight, and try to stay away from each other. We can’t risk them finding us out.”
“I’ll be Sam. You can be Betty.”
“I hate that name.”
“Good,” Randolph said. “Let it remind you of them, and what we’re here for. I’m Randy.”
“I’ll be Mark,” Maddock said. He looked at Jane.
“Just Jane. Jane is fine.”
Randolph rolled his eyes, then returned to the window. He stood suddenly, staring through the glass. “We need to go.”
He led them out the back door, and they went through the yard and into the next. The house beyond that had a privacy fence, so they headed toward the road. Randolph stopped them at the corner of a house and looked down the street. He held up three fingers and pointed, then held a finger to his lips. He waited, peering around the corner, then motioned for them to follow as he crossed the street.
Jane stepped out of the side yard and couldn’t help looking down the road, where three greater humans were gathered around something on the asphalt. They stared down at it, unmoving and silent.
The grass ended at the sidewalk, and Jane nearly tripped. She caught herself and looked ahead, where Randolph was leading them toward the side yard of the house across the street. He was at the sidewalk and the rest of them were in the middle of the road when the streetlight above them flicked on.
Beulah covered her mouth to stifle a sound, but it didn’t matter. The greater humans had been facing this way, and their heads shot up when they saw motion. One started running, a newer greater human, still clothed with short hair, while the others shuffled after him.
“Move!” Randolph said. He ran through the side yard, and the others followed. The short rest didn’t seem to do Maddock much good; he sounded like a freight train barreling through the yard. Jane jogged at his side. She could’ve gone much faster, but she couldn’t leave her dad behind.
They rounded the corner, and Randolph was already in the next yard. The distant glow was closer, and it looked like it might be a straight shot through the yards, but a few houses later they reached another tall fence. Randolph rounded the house, toward the street, and Samuel and Beulah followed soon after, but Jane and Maddock were still two houses behind.
“Jane—go. Ahead.”
“Save your breath,” Jane said. She kept a hand on her dad’s shoulder.
They rounded the corner and came out at the end of the street. For a second Jane didn’t see the others. A raspy growl broke out behind her. She turned and saw the faster greater human coming through the side yard, his eyes locked on hers, his mouth open and dripping saliva.
“Jane!”
She turned toward Samuel’s voice. They were so far ahead, on the other side of an intersection, where there were fewer houses and more buildings, little shops and offices. Jane and Maddock started toward them, and she felt the greater human’s fingers trace down her back as it grabbed at her.
“Come on, Dad!”
Somehow, Maddock made himself go faster. They ran, and halfway through the intersection Jane took the gun from her side.
“Don’t—” Maddock said. Jane thought about Adam and the Cause and the growling, scrambling thing a few feet behind her, but mostly she thought about her mother. What would her mother do if she were here now?
“It’s just up there,” Randolph was saying. Jane could see the barricade, a huge cement wall with metal sheets and wooden boards plastered here and there to keep the segments together. One area stood out, more metal than cement, with huge hinges to one side.
“The gate!” Samuel said.
Jane’s feet hurt from straining to jog at the same pace as her dad. He gasped in and out, and she was sure he’d have a heart attack. The others shouted to her, but she didn’t hear what they were saying. Just behind her the greater human groaned, like it knew its dinner was about to get away.
Only they weren’t about to get away. The gate was close, but it was shut, and she didn’t see anyone around. Randolph was screaming “Open the gate!” but it wasn’t opening.
Twelve feet away, ten feet, five feet and still shut. Jane stopped running, turned and aimed her gun. The greater human was close, the two older ones still at the intersection. The newer one shouted as it leapt, and Jane’s finger twitched, but she hesitated.
Half of a screech got out before the greater human’s head exploded. Blood and bits of bone and skin showered her as the body flew past, landing at Maddock’s feet. Jane hadn’t even noticed it was aiming for him and not her, but it made sense: It wanted the bigger meal.
She noticed her ears were ringing when the shouts broke through it. Beulah was crying, crouched in the street, and Samuel was struggling to lift her, tears in his eyes. Jane looked at the gun in her hand. Had she pulled the trigger? Had she committed the unforgivable sin? No, but who—
Something yanked her backward, and the gate slammed shut just before her, with the other two greater humans in the distance. She stared at the barricade for a few seconds, her brain registering the sounds: The last few echoes of the gunshot, Beulah crying, Maddock catching his breath, and—
“Are you okay, miss?”
Jane turned to the man holding her by the shoulders. The first thing she noticed was the cross around his neck. The second thing she noticed was the gun in his hand. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Jane said, then threw her arms around him. “You saved my dad. I panicked, I—”
“I understand,” the man said, and hugged her back. “It’s okay, you’re safe now, you’re all safe here. I’m Ralph. Welcome to New Los Angeles.”
****
Jane and Maddock were given a small room with a few cots and a hastily crafted trunk to hold their belongings. Maddock fell asleep almost immediately, but it wasn’t late, so Jane lay awake staring at the ceiling. She watched as it all played out before her time and again: The greater human leaping, its head exploding, its body landing at her
father’s feet. All the while, she did nothing, and her dad almost died.
Jane swung her legs off of the cot and walked slowly across the room. Maddock snored loudly, but she didn’t want to risk waking him. He needed to rest.
She found the halls confusing, but made it out of the building. A few people wandered the streets, and two stood near the main gate, but Jane didn’t see who she was looking for.
“Are you new here?” someone asked. It was a young woman probably Jane’s age.
“Yeah.”
“I’m Lacie.” She stuck her hand out, and Jane shook it. “Can I help you find—”
“The boy—the young man who let us in, Ralph, do you know where he is?”
Lacie pointed behind her and up. At first Jane only saw the huge dish, but then she saw the silhouette of someone sitting on the roof of the radio station.
“Come on,” Lacie said, “I’ll show you the way. I don’t think he’ll mind the company.”
****
Lacie left her at the ladder, and Jane climbed up. She stepped onto the roof, headed past big gray vents and boxes she didn’t know the purpose of, and saw Ralph sitting on the edge of the building, his legs dangling twenty feet above the sidewalk below. She stepped loudly, and he looked in her direction, then stood.
“You don’t have to stand, it’s okay.” Ralph sat back down. “I wanted to thank you for saving us back there.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ralph said. “It’s what we do. We look after each other.”
“You don’t even know us.” Jane sat down next to him.
“I don’t need to. There’s nobody out there I wouldn’t try to help if I could.”
Jane stared at Ralph’s necklace. “But what about the g—them. You know.”
“What about them?”
“Would you try to help them?”
Ralph stared at her, then smiled and looked away. “No. Would you help a lion chasing you across the Sahara? Or a shark clamping down on your arm?”
Jane looked over the city below them. She could still make out the faces of a few people. They looked so happy. “Your necklace. Are you—”
“A Christian. I guess I am.”
“You guess?”
“I mean, it’s hard to say what that means anymore, if it even means anything. Yeah, I guess.”
Jane smiled, and Ralph laughed a little. “There aren’t a lot of believers anymore,” she said. “It’s… gotten harder to believe.”
“If you’d seen the things I’ve seen… Let’s just say it’s gotten a lot easier to believe, and a lot harder to want to.”
“This place, are we really safe? Can it really last?”
“Yeah,” Ralph said. “We’ve done all right this long. And we have to try, don’t we? It’s us against them, and they’ve been winning for a long time.”
Jane frowned and stood up. “I should go. I shouldn’t have come out here, really, I’m sorry.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing. I just need to get some sleep I think. And I… have a feeling my dad and I won’t be staying here long. We came to check it out, but we just wouldn’t feel right staying in one place. It was nice meeting you, but I think I should probably—”
“I almost lost a good friend today,” Ralph said. “Guy named Dex. You’ll meet him. He almost died. We were running from the zombies and he stepped on a beer bottle. Something as simple as that. All the things that bastard has lived through…” Ralph chuckled. “Just a beer bottle.” He looked up at Jane. “We’re so fragile.”
“How did he make it out?”
“We helped each other. Me and Harry carried him, he put together a Molotov as a distraction, our other friends came back in a van and got us. No one died.”
“No one but the…”
“No one but the zombies. When we help each other, we survive. Sometimes I wonder what the point of surviving is. Maybe it’s to help each other.”
“Like you helped me,” Jane said. “And my dad.”
“Yeah,” Ralph replied. Jane sat down next to him. “I can’t make you and your dad stay, but I think you’re safer here than out there. Out there, you don’t have anyone else to help you. But in here, we work together.”
Jane watched the scene play out again in her head. The greater human jumping at her father, her unwilling to kill it, and Ralph doing it for her, saving her father from being another lesser human eaten in the street by another greater human in a world quickly filling with greater humans. For the first time, she found herself asking who it really was that needed help.
Ralph tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned to see him handing her something. She held up a hand, and he dropped the necklace into it. “I have a dozen. I… like to hold it, when I need some hope. So keep it. In case you go, you know. To remind you where we come from.”
Jane wanted to refuse, to give it back and go back to her bunk and sleep for weeks. Instead she put the necklace over her head, pulled her hair out from under it, then spent the evening watching the people inside the walls of New L.A., and the zombies on the other side.
34
In the Snow
Bailey took the first side road she saw, and wound her way through more. Whenever she saw footprints or sled marks in the snow, she went a different way.
Her bag was heavy; it contained a few cans of food, some spare clothes, and the three smallest logs she could find. Fire was important, cold was death. Bailey deserved to die, but that didn’t mean she wanted to. Not like that.
The cold froze her eyes, but when she closed them she saw Cliff and Alyssandra’s bodies, so she tried not to close them when she didn’t have to.
The frozen roads wound through the woods for hours, but eventually she came into another small neighborhood. Bailey had learned to check the chimneys, to see which house Cliff and Alyssandra happened to be staying in. All the chimneys she could see now were lifeless, buried in snow.
“Uuuuuuuuuhn.”
Bailey stopped walking. A breeze pushed through the streets, clattering a few frozen branches together. Next came a crunch, then another. Bailey turned her head, she dared not move her feet.
The zombie stood in a back yard a few houses down. The wind must’ve carried its voice and made it sound closer. The creature took a few steps up a snowy hill, toward a house. It reached a window and raised its arms, stood swaying like a tree, then placed its arms against the glass. Bailey realized it was trying to break it to get in out of the cold, but was too weak to do much more than touch it.
Bailey took a few more steps through the snow, toward the other side of the street. The zombie could never catch up to her, but it was better to be safe. The ground below the snow was hard, then soft and deep, then hard again, the sidewalk. She pressed on.
A few blocks away, Bailey finally turned from the road toward one of the houses. It had a separate garage, and both doors were open. Inside was a big concrete room that the snow had blown a few feet into, but was otherwise empty. Whoever had lived here had made it to their car or cars and gotten away. It seemed a good house to stay in.
Bailey passed the garage and walked up to the front door. She listened, but if there was anything moving inside, she wouldn’t be able to hear it over the wind. She tried the knob and the door popped open. That was good; if she broke the door down she’d be exposed, and she was so cold and tired, she doubted her ability to do it anyway.
She closed the door behind her, then stared into the darkness and listened to the inside of the house. After a while she heard dripping, and realized it was the snow covering her beginning to melt and drip onto the marble floor below.
Bailey removed her coat and gloves and headed into the living room, straight for the fireplace. She set her bag down and took the firewood from it. The bag clung to one of the logs, and Bailey pulled at it, but it didn’t come free. She shook the bag a little and yanked at the log, and it flew from the bag and slipped from her hands, landing a few feet away on the carpet. Bailey
stared at it.
“It’s cold.”
Bailey took a can of lighter fluid and squirted it over the two logs in the fireplace, then put a few balls of paper below them. She struck a match and tossed it in, then fell back on the carpet, her arms spread wide. Soon the ceiling peeked out of the darkness, then turned yellow and orange as the heat from the fireplace washed over her.
“Why am I still here?”
The house answered with silence. Bailey rolled over and looked at the third log. She’d have to cut more if she were going to stay. Could she? She was out of the way of Burke and Mike and everyone from her past now; only the ghosts had followed here.
If only there was some way I could make things—
A crash made her open her eyes. Had she fallen asleep? The fire was lower. Bailey waited, and then she heard glass tinkling and crunching. She sat up and looked around the house. The fire left trails in her vision, and she rubbed her eyes.
“Ehhhhh.”
Bailey reached for her bag and took out her gun. She checked the safety, made sure it was loaded, then waited. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness while she listened for a sound, and through the windows she saw shapes, heard tapping against the glass. She cursed herself for not blocking out the windows; that zombie hadn’t been the only one around, and they could see the fire.
The fire. That’s what they wanted, not her.
Something pounded against the door in the darkness to Bailey’s left. Had she locked it? They couldn’t open doors. But they could break them down, couldn’t they? It pounded again.
“All right, I’ll give you a fire.”
“Blagh!” something shouted. It shuffled out of a hallway ahead, heading for the fire. Bailey put her gun away and picked up the lighter fluid. She doused the zombie as it walked by, and when it was a few feet in front of the fireplace, Bailey shoved it. The creature grunted as it fell into the flames, then it screamed as it went up like a candle. It rolled around, spreading embers across the carpet. Bailey emptied the can of lighter fluid into the floor around the fireplace, then picked up her bag and walked toward the door. She pulled her scarf over her nose and mouth to block the smoke, put her coat on, and opened the front door.
Zombiemandias (Book 2): In the Year of Our Death Page 19