The Crossing: A Zombie Novella

by Joe McKinney

  “I know a good place to cross. Quiet. The patrols pass through there, but they don’t hardly ever stop.”

  “Why not?” I asked. Despite my better instincts, this guy had me curious. He was so sure of himself, like he knew the Quarantine Authority’s business better than they did.

  “Nothing around there. No towns, no nothing. Just open countryside.”

  “Well they have helicopters, right? Robot drones and stuff, too?”

  His smile faded then, and I got the feeling that he was reevaluating his first opinion of me. He looked suspicious now, the wheels turning behind his eyes as he took in my clothes, which were dirty, but still holding together, my sturdy shoes, my skin, sun-burnt, but still healthy looking. I was different, and that was making him uncomfortable.

  I happened to catch a sharp, warning look from Jessica just then. Careful, it said.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  I lowered my gaze. I’d just done a very dumb thing and put us in a bad spot by doing so.

  “All over,” I said.

  I could feel him staring at me, but I kept looking at my hands in my lap. When I didn’t offer anything more, he went on.

  “The Quarantine Authority is no trouble. How much money do you have?”

  “I don’t have anything,” Jessica said.

  “Gold? Any diamonds? A wedding ring, maybe?”

  Jessica shook her head.

  He looked at me. “How about you? I know you’ve got something.”

  I shook my head.

  The man went silent again. After a long moment, he got up to leave. “My friends and I are gonna be here till tomorrow. Let me know if you find something you can pay me with.” Then he walked away without waiting for us to say goodbye.

  “I hope we never see that man again,” I said.

  Jessica watched him go, frowning, but said nothing. I should have wondered then if she knew something I didn’t.

  FIVE

  After lunch, we walked away from the main house so we could talk.

  “We should get moving,” she said. “It’s not smart to stay in places like this longer than you have to.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where?”

  “We should keep going east, toward Weimar.”

  “We can find somebody there to help us cross?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Pretty sure, yeah.”

  “Jessica, look. I gotta say, this is scaring the hell out of me.”

  “Me too.”

  “No,” I said. I was fumbling for my words. I swept my hand in a vague arc, trying to make a point about everything we’d been through together. “I don’t mean all this other stuff we’ve been dealing with.”

  “What then?”

  I was frustrated with her, angry in fact, and it crept into my tone. “We don’t have a plan,” I said. “Doesn’t that bother you? Even a little bit?”

  “If you want to change your mind,” she said, “I won’t be offended. I can make it from here on my own.”

  “Jesus, Jessica.” I threw up my hands.

  “Why are you so upset?”

  “Why am I so...?” I stopped there and huffed at her. “Jessica, don’t you see? We could die doing this. This isn’t some kind of game. The Quarantine Authority, those guys are for real.”

  “I’m very much aware of what’s real,” she said. She sounded injured, not haughty. “And for people like me, this was never a game. I hope you remember that when you write your story.”

  He words floored me.

  “Jessica, no. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. That was cruel of me.”

  “No, really,” she said. “It’s okay. You’re sweet. I know you mean well, but we’re living in different worlds you and I.”

  I felt so ashamed. I didn’t want to look at her.

  But the shame made it easy to make up my mind, and when she got up to go, I did too.

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  I nodded. No words.

  We set out on a County road with a little water, but no food. Luckily there was no wind, and though it was cold, the sky was a bright cobalt blue and the sunlight felt good.

  After a few hours we came to one of those little towns that used to dot the Texas landscape, a mill or a cotton processing plant surrounded by a couple of rundown buildings. This town was little more than a stop sign and a handful of moldering doublewides, but it was enough to put us on guard.

  “I lost a friend in a place like this,” Jessica said.

  I hadn’t heard her talk about people she’d lost before, and so this caught my attention. “Someone you knew before the wall was built?”

  She shook her head. “Just a girl I traveled with. We stopped in a little place like this to try to find some water. We were standing behind a counter and a crawler came up behind her and bit her on the leg before either of us knew it was there.”

  “I guess you have to be prepared all the time, don’t you?”

  “Yep.” She scanned the town, taking it in with one slow stare. “See! Look right there!” she said, pointing toward a dilapidated gas station. “See it?”

  I did. Stumbling through the waist high weeds that had grown up around the gas pumps was a female zombie. Its hands hung limply down by its sides, its hair a stringy, blood-encrusted curtain hanging over its face.

  “The place looks deserted, but there are probably more around here,” Jessica said. “Usually they can’t survive if it’s just one of them.”

  I watched the zombie for a moment, and was about to look away, when a shot suddenly rang out.

  The female zombie collapsed.

  Startled, Jessica and I spun around. We hadn’t heard the truck coming up behind us, and for a moment, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I knew there were a few vehicles still working in the zone, like the truck that had pulled that horse trailer full of zombies back at the ranch, but I hadn’t seen any actually driving around.

  And then it hit me. Oh shit, the truck from the ranch!

  “Run!” Jessica said, grabbing my shoulder and pulling me toward one of the trailers.

  As I ran I pulled off my backpack and struggled to get the zipper open. I started to fall behind. Jessica turned and yelled at me to hurry up, but I was too busy trying to get my Glock out of the special compartment I’d stitched into the interior.

  I slowed down even more. It wasn’t there.

  Jessica looked back over her shoulder. “What are doing? Come on.”

  I was frantic now. With the flaps open, my stuff was spilling out of the backpack, going everywhere. I lost my iPhone, my charger, my notebooks, a change of clothes.

  But no pistol. Where was it?

  “Hurry!” Jessica yelled.

  But it was too late. The truck overtook us, swung around wide, and skidded to a stop, kicking up a wave of dust that covered us. I dropped down to one knee and groped for the knife I’d stashed there.

  Again, I was too slow.

  Two men in camouflage jumped out, and I recognized them immediately as the two men who had been shooting zombies from atop the deer blind back at the ranch.

  A third man got out of the truck’s back seat.

  Our friend, the booze-soaked coyote with the black teeth and the dancing tongue.

  His eyes narrowed on us. It was a sinister gesture, full of menace. “That one right there,” he said. “In the black top.” He motioned to one of the other two men, who promptly searched me, confiscated my knife, and the pulled my shirt up to my chin.

  “Holy shit!” he yelled. “Hey, Jake, you were right. This one ain’t no Zoner. Look at this; she’s got a brand new bra on.”

  SIX

  They put us in the backseat and drove east. The two guys in the camouflage hunting outfits looked enough alike that they could have been brothers. They sure acted like it, both of them stinking of beer and sweat and singing along with an Iron
Maiden CD they’d plugged into the truck’s stereo. The older man they called Jake sat in the back with us, a pistol across his lap. Jessica seemed to have slipped into a morose silence. She didn’t react to anything the men said, just stared silently out the window at the empty countryside. Riding between them, listening to the two idiots in the front seat, all I wanted to do was be invisible.

  Eventually I saw a sign for a town called Harmony Springs, population 1,405. Harmony Springs was bigger than the little town where we’d been abducted, and it had obviously been hit hard since the Outbreak. Most of the buildings were burned, or so thoroughly looted that they looked like little more than empty shells. But there were zombies here. A crowd of them heard our truck coming and stopped, turning their heads to follow our progress.

  We pulled into a small motel. From the parking lot, I could see zombies out on the road, shambling toward us.

  “Why did we stop?” I asked.

  The man in the driver’s seat found me in the rearview mirror. “Girl, if you gotta ask, this is gonna be more fun than I thought it was gonna be.”

  His brother guffawed and slapped him on the arm. “Hey, that was a good one.”

  Jake kicked the back of the passenger seat. “Shut up, Tommy. Go and get the collars out of the back.”

  The laugh died in Tommy’s throat. “Sure thing, Jake,” he said, and climbed out.

  I heard him rummaging around in the bed of the pickup. He came back to Jessica’s side and pulled her door open.

  “Get out,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder at the zombies. They were still a few hundred feet away, but close enough to worry about. “Come on. Hurry up, girl.”

  Jessica climbed out.

  “You too,” Jake said, and nudged me in the back with his pistol.

  I climbed out and stood next to Jessica, my eyes squinting against the sudden brightness of the sun. The man named Tommy had two blood-stained leather collars in one hand and two dog leashes in the other. My heart sank. These men were clearly no strangers to this kind of thing. Whatever sick abuse they had planned for us, they knew how to go about it.

  Jake and the other man climbed out of the truck.

  “Do it,” Jake said. “Hurry up, so we can get inside.”

  “Yeah,” the third man said. “Oh, yeah.” Only then, when I saw the way his hands were shaking and the wild look in his eyes did I realize he was amped up on something, probably meth.

  I was crying when Tommy put the collar around my neck. His breath smelled foul, and when he ran his dirty fingertips across the outside of my bra, pausing long enough to give me a hard squeeze, I began to shake. Tommy handed the leash to his brother and a terrible sort of acceptance washed over me. I was going to die, and worse, I was powerless to stop it.

  Then he went for Jessica.

  I was only half watching what happened. He put his hands on her. She flinched, backed away, swatted at his hands. He closed his arms around her, laughing, despite the zombies who were getting closer every second.

  “Hey,” he said, “what you got there?”

  I saw him take a step back. He looked amused as he reached for her belt buckle. She pushed his hands away. Her clothes were so loose she had no trouble sticking her hand down the front of her pants, from which she produced a small pistol.

  My pistol! The one missing from my pack!

  Jessica’s face looked utterly blank.

  Tommy stood less than an arm’s length away, and he took the bullet in the left side of his chest, just under his arm. He didn’t fall down, though. He staggered away, his hands hanging limply at his side, and bounced off the side of the pickup, leaving a smear of blood there. His face was deathly white. He stared about, confused by the pain and the sudden crazy turn of events, and eventually found his way over to one of the concrete curbs at the edge of the parking lot, where he collapsed.

  Jessica didn’t stop shooting. As soon as Tommy stepped out of her way she turned her pistol on his brother and shot him once in the chest. The man fell back onto the pavement, rolled over onto his side with a sickening groan, and died.

  That left only Jake, the coyote.

  He was reaching for his own holstered pistol when Jessica stepped right in front of him and deliberately lowered her pistol to his groin before firing.

  The man collapsed to his knees, his face stricken, mouth open in a scream that never quite left his throat.

  It took me a moment to recover. Jessica stood over Jake, watching him writhe in agony. The two brothers were dead or dying. And the zombies were closing in.

  “Jessica,” I said, snapping back into the moment. “Get in the truck.”

  She didn’t answer me. She looked back over her shoulder to where the zombies were already entering the parking lot. They were seconds away now.

  “You bastard,” she muttered to Jake.

  I watched as she scooped up the dog collar from the pavement and clamped it around Jake’s neck. He tried to push her away, but he was in too much pain to do anything beyond a few feeble gestures. Next she took one of the leashes and clipped it onto Jake’s collar, pulled the free end over to a light pole, and tied it off.

  Jake groaned, trying to regain his feet. The zombies were close. Jessica turned away from him without another word and motioned for me to get in the truck.

  “Will you drive?” she said. “I don’t know if I remember how.”

  I didn’t need to be told twice. I jumped behind the wheel, slammed my door, and rolled up the window.

  Jessica got in beside me.

  I turned the ignition and the sounds of a big block V8 roared to life just as Jake let out a terrified scream. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw him wrestling with the collar around his neck, his fingers shaking too badly to work the clasp. The next moment, half a dozen zombies fell upon him and his screams of fear were choked off.

  “Go!”

  “Where?” I asked. “They’re all around us.”

  “Run them down. Hurry!”

  I dropped the truck into reverse and punched it. We took off with a lurch. Tires barked on pavement. Several zombies were right behind us, and the truck shuddered as we ran them down. I kept my foot on the gas as we bounced over the curb and spun out in the middle of the road.

  We paused there for a moment. The zombies in the parking lot were confused. Some were getting up from the three dead bodies of our abductors and starting after us.

  I looked from them to Jessica.

  “When did you take my gun?” I asked.

  She kept her gaze forward, eyes hard flints of rage. “I’ve been raped before,” she said. “I made myself a promise no one would ever rape me again.”

  I wasn’t mad. Maybe I should have been, but I wasn’t.

  She took a deep breath, then put the Glock on the seat between us. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Stealing from someone is the most serious crime we’ve got out here.”

  I left the gun where it was. “I’m lucky you were there.”

  “Thanks,” she said. She pointed east. “Weimar’s that way.”

  SEVEN

  Before the Outbreak, Weimar was a town of some 2000 people. It had a Wal-Mart, a movie theater, a couple of motels, and a string of fast food restaurants and gas stations clustered around an exit ramp off IH-10. Its survival depended on the traffic flowing between San Antonio and Houston, and so the town had grown up in pretty much equal measure on both sides of the highway.

  “You don’t think it’s strange, crossing here?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Well, I’d kind of thought we’d cross somewhere...I don’t know...a little less developed. Why do you suppose this is the place?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “I’ve asked you that already, haven’t I?”

  “Yeah.”

  I looked around, trying to see what made this place such a favorite crossing spot. But I still didn’t get it. I didn’t see anything that popped out at me. We’d made the trip to Weimar in no t
ime in our newly acquired pickup, and we’d even managed to find a good campsite that afforded a view of the town and the wall. I saw a blasted war zone on our side, with at least a hundred zombies wandering the streets, and on the other side of the wall, a gently decaying abandoned ghost town. The difference between the two parts of the town was striking to say the least.

  “You done eating,” Jessica asked.

  She sat by our camp fire, picking the meat off a rabbit’s leg bone.

  We’d figured out how to use the assault rifle our former abductors had been kind enough to leave us, and a small, but quite delicious spit-roasted rabbit was the result. I stood there, watching her eat the first good meal we’d had in days, examining the town, and for a second it was easy to trust her. She had gotten me this far, after all.

  But the feeling we were in way over our heads just wouldn’t go away. “You can have it,” I said, and went back to examining the town.

  In the few hours since we’d made camp, I’d seen dozens of Quarantine Authority trucks racing up and down the length of the wall. I even saw a few helicopters wheeling overhead. Now, with dusk settling around us, the trucks were playing zombie moans over loudspeakers, and it was driving the zombies crazy.

  “Why do they keep playing those sounds?” I asked.

  “Augment their numbers, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s the term, a force-multiplier? With the zombies wandering around, it’s a lot harder for people to cross.”

  I thought about that. “So that means they must know about this place? Do you think that’s true?”

  “How should I know,” she said.

  “I can’t believe I haven’t heard anything about this. I mean, I researched the Quarantine Authority for months before coming on this trip.”

  “I’m sure they don’t want to make it public knowledge.”

  “I should think not.”

  Jessica went back to her rabbit. She wasn’t letting any of it go to waste. I watched her work the meat from the bone with a thoroughness that only someone long acquainted with hunger could manage. By contrast, my own small pile of bones on the flat rock by my feet contained a fortune of meat. Not for the first time I realized that I was a long way from walking a mile in her shoes.