Devil’s Wake

by Steven Barnes

  But they did hunt in packs.

  “Ah…” Kendra said, nudging. “Time to go.”

  “Can’t leave all these MREs,” Piranha said.

  Terry also couldn’t imagine leaving without more guns and ammo, although he didn’t say so. His mind mapped out a plan as they moved toward the light, away from a bungalow wall where they could be herded with nowhere to run. “Okay… best shots—”

  “That’s us,” Dean said, and raised his rifle to his shoulder.

  “Let’s just go,” Kendra said, nearly whining.

  Piranha leaned close. “You. Shut. Up.” She seemed to pale in his shadow, as if she knew he would abandon her if it would make the tiniest smidgen of difference to his own survival.

  Terry wished Piranha would go easier on her, but even Sonia was too busy checking her weapon to worry about Kendra’s hurt feelings. “Take the defensive perimeter,” Terry told the Twins. “Get ’em from a distance, if you can.”

  “Easier to say,” Dean said. “They’ve gotta be close enough for head shots.”

  Terry’s mind soaked up the scenario, spitting him ideas. “Take the fast ones, let the slow ones get closer before you shoot. I’ll move the Beauty up close enough to load the boxes, but we can’t obscure the view.”

  “Anything else, Daddy?” Darius said.

  “Yeah,” Terry said. “Don’t get us killed.”

  Kendra trotted behind him like a puppy, practically clinging to his shirt. The plan set, he finally turned to look at her. “You stay with me,” he said.

  Kendra looked like she wanted to hug him.

  Terry and Piranha were the strongest, so they hauled boxes out of the storage garage. Armed with two rifles and a shotgun, Darius, Dean, and Sonia faced east and west and south, with the bungalow itself protecting the north. Kendra used a dolly to wheel the boxes to the bus, where Piranha had opened up the side luggage compartment. Together, they slung the boxes in, then new boxes atop the old.

  The approaching moans sounded hungry. Almost… angry. Definitely getting louder. Where the hell were they hiding?

  “Freaks!” Darius screamed, and Terry looked up as the first of them approached from the direction of the radio antenna, moving fast. A lone runner, swiftly followed by two more. Shit.

  “How many?” Terry said.

  “Enough.”

  Darius dropped to one knee, steadied himself, and aimed at the oncoming horrors. He fired. The first one down was barefoot, wearing overalls and nothing else. Darius’s first shot took him directly in the center of the head, and his feet went out from underneath him like a roller skater running into a tree branch.

  Piranha froze beside Terry, watching the approach.

  Two… five… and now a dozen runners, with something else behind them… a small army of shuffling ghouls, some barely able to move, but all of them starving for flesh. Sonia standing, Dean kneeling. Firing, breathing, firing, breathing. Slow and steady, just like they’d practiced at Round Meadows.

  The first wave of freaks reached the fence. At first they were stymied, then spread like oil on water, swiftly finding the gap Blue Beauty had plowed in the line. The howling horde ran and staggered on. Most were bare-handed, but some carried branches, wooden slats, metal pipes. They didn’t wield these implements with anything like grace or skill, seemed almost to tote them from some dim memory of a previous tool-using incarnation.

  The gunfire sounded like a war. If they didn’t find ammunition, they’d be breathing fumes by the time they left here.

  “Too many,” Piranha said. “We gotta go, man. Maybe we’ll come back.”

  “Keep loading,” Terry said. “If Dean or Sonia need help, they’ll say so.”

  Piranha gave him a hard look: Are you out of your mind? But he trusted Terry enough to keep loading. Kendra ran out two loads on the dolly while Piranha slung them into the undercarriage. The smell of rotting flesh was temporarily masked by the stench of gunfire.

  Suddenly, Kendra went to stone. She stared at the oncoming army, eyes wide and arms wrapped around her waist.

  “I said keep moving!” Terry roared at her. “Don’t look.”

  He knew why she was staring, why her mind might be breaking. Terry had tried to be ready for a sight like this, but he realized there was no way to get ready.

  The fastest freaks were also the smallest. The most newly made.

  Children.

  If Kendra blurred her eyes a bit—and she didn’t know how they weren’t already blurred with tears—she could imagine that the children running toward them were playing some kind of game. They weren’t close enough to reveal the red-rimmed eyes or the blood-crusted teeth. The howls could have been a Halloween pantomime, merely some ghoulish playtime.

  But what Kendra felt was as shocking as what she saw. She didn’t care if they had once been children. God help her, she wanted to see them fall, bleed. Die. The thought of those small hands clutching at her, the cupid mouths seeking kisses…

  Every time an infected child stumbled and flew face-first into the asphalt, her heart sang.

  Get them, she thought, and this time tears burned her cheeks. Kill them all.

  As if a prayer were being answered in the thunder of gunfire, the smaller ones fell until all of the fast ones were down, leaving the surging tide rolling over them.

  Kendra was shaking, all the more for realizing that the others were getting a kind of charge too, far different from the primal, visceral fear that swamped her. Adrenaline baked off Terry in waves of heat, the corners of his mouth turned up in a Reaper’s smile almost as frightening as the creatures shuffling toward them. How could he feel anything other than horror?

  She resolved to riddle him that when they had time. If they had time.

  The luggage compartment was crammed now. Whatever they had expended in the week since leaving the Olympic forest area had been more than replenished.

  “Let’s move!” Piranha said. “We can’t waste ammo trying to get ’em all.”

  Hipshot barked agreement and jumped up into the stairwell, back into the bus.

  Terry cursed with a cry of frustration. “There’s ammo here somewhere!”

  “We don’t know that, and we don’t have time to search,” Piranha said. “Will you move? That damned dog has more sense than you.”

  The bang! bang! bang! of the rifles was more a series of body blows than merely a series of sounds.

  A female freak was only fifty feet away, moving slowly but steadily, as if impervious to bullets. Her dress was riddled with bright red holes, but no head shot yet.

  Nothing about this situation felt right. Why the hell hadn’t they fled as soon as they realized the freaks were coming? That question led to a queasy revelation: something dangerous was playing out between Terry and Piranha. The bigger man grabbed Terry’s shoulders and Terry shoved him away.

  The nearest freak finally went down, but there was a wave behind him, at least a hundred creatures lurching and moaning like a haunted wind through a forest of skeletal trees. “We have got to go, man!” Piranha said.

  Kendra realized she hadn’t seen anyone else drive the bus. Was Terry the only one who knew how?

  “There’s a bunch of other buildings!” Terry said, arguing with Piranha as if he couldn’t see death marching their way.

  “Probably full of corpses—you wanna join ’em?”

  Sonia let out a yell that was more like a shriek. “They’re getting closer. And there’s more fast ones!”

  Terry and Piranha were nearly wrestling, suddenly, a sight nearly as horrifying as the freaks. “Man, don’t make me knock you the hell out!” Piranha said, fist curling.

  Terry’s face was suddenly bright red, and Kendra saw tears in his eyes.

  “There has to be more here!” Terry said. “We came all this way! All this way! There has to be more than this!” He screamed the last words, drowning out the gunfire.

  Kendra had been right to want to leave. Even Piranha saw it now. Piranha still made Ken
dra nervous, but she suddenly grabbed Terry’s arm, pulling hard, hoping he would look at her. He did.

  For the first time, Kendra really saw Terry. She didn’t know his last name, like he didn’t know hers, but she suddenly knew him. This standoff wasn’t about finding supplies. Terry had masked his terror, compressing it behind a steely resolve. And now that the dream had died, there was a part of him that was just like she had been before they had driven up in the Blue Beauty. He was ready to give up, but not by curling up the way she had; he wanted to die like a fighter, in a blaze of glory. And his friends, even Piranha, trusted him so much that they risked dying at his side.

  But she wouldn’t. Not today.

  “Maybe you’re ready to die, but I’m not,” Kendra said. “You don’t think I know how hope hurts? My own grandfather tried to kill me! My parents are dead, or worse than dead.” She fought to keep her voice strong, almost lost it, then pushed through the emotion. “But this isn’t the only place left. If we stay here, we’ll all die. Let’s go while we still can.”

  Her words exhausted her. Kendra fell against Terry, clutching at him, mostly to keep standing upright. Terry pulled away from her. Then he didn’t. She felt his arm wrap around her, holding on too.

  When she looked up at his face, he was blinking like the people on the newscasts back in the early days, when no one understood anything anymore and no one could explain.

  “We’re pulling out!” Piranha said. Darius and Dean fell back to the bus, popping off final, head-shattering shots as they did. Their bikes were a world away, in the parking lot. Sonia and Kendra piled into the Blue Beauty behind them, then Piranha, and Terry last, with a final longing look at the warehouse. She felt his pain. The other lockers might have been filled with death. Or with food. Or ammunition. They would never know.

  Terry took the wheel and turned the Blue Beauty around, too slowly for Kendra’s taste, in a circle large enough that the first of the new freaks had reached it by the time they were headed back toward the fence.

  With terrifying animal ferocity, men, women, and children hurled themselves at the bus, scrabbled toward the windows, mindless of the risk to their bodies. An older, rotting freak stared face-to-face with Kendra at her window, eyes so encrusted with a red rot that she didn’t know how it could see.

  Terry yanked the wheel sharply to the right, grinding the engine. Something splattered against the windshield, followed by a jarring thump against the bumper that caught Kendra by surprise. She looked back, and Sonia was gagging. Hipshot was standing on the seat, looking out at the carnage as if even a dog could be appalled by the sight of so much bizarre death.

  Terry picked up speed, careening back toward the broken fence that would lead to the parking lot, the waiting bikes, and the freedom and life of the open road.

  “Wait!” Darius screamed.

  They all swiveled their heads around, trying to see what could be more important than outrunning a horde of freaks.

  Two new freaks in olive drab and boots were running out of the rear door of the main building, the building they had explored and abandoned. The smaller one wore a backpack. Both carried rifles over their heads, pumping them up and down frantically, almost as if to catch Terry’s attention. Shouting toward the bus. Strange behavior for freaks…

  Kendra’s heart caught in her throat when she realized the newcomers were… National Guard!

  “Human!” Sonia screamed before Kendra could make a sound.

  “They waited too long!” Piranha said. “Keep driving. Get the bikes.”

  “Can’t leave ’em,” Terry said.

  Terry steered with such a wild turn that Kendra nearly fell out of her seat.

  As they watched the soldiers, the smaller one stumbled, and the larger helped him up. Before Terry could wheel the bus back around, slewing in an S-turn, the freaks were on the larger soldier while he hacked and clubbed at them with the rifle. The smaller one stumbled toward the bus, nearly losing his balance, never dropping his rifle.

  Terry opened the doors with a pneumatic hiss. When Kendra gazed back at the bigger soldier, the freaks had engulfed him like sharks swarming a sailor. But they’re busy with him instead of us, Kendra thought, not wanting to.

  The Twins fired out of the bus through slitted windows. Kendra watched Piranha and Sonia drag the smaller soldier into the bus. The doors closed.

  The bus roared out of the courtyard, bouncing over the broken fence.

  The smaller soldier was sobbing: “Mickey! Mickey!”

  The soldier was a woman.

  TWENTY

  No one spoke for at least five miles while the soldier sobbed, a keening cry that Kendra remembered too well—the sound of losing everyone. Everything. The soldier had been fortunate to find Terry and the Blue Beauty, but she didn’t know it yet. How could she?

  Armed only with machetes, Darius and Dean had recovered their bikes and roared off ahead of the Beauty, heading south. The roads were clear for a while, as if to give her a peaceful passage.

  They all needed peace. Kendra’s bones vibrated with the memory of the freaks chasing them down at the armory. She had never seen so many in one place, never imagined that anyone could survive being swarmed by them. In her mind, she still heard the battering against the bus, like a rain of fist-size hailstones. She didn’t realize she was shaking until it stopped, her limbs magically falling still.

  She thought about her notebook, but there were some things writing couldn’t help.

  Kendra gravitated to the seat directly behind Terry, where she sometimes saw his stonelike profile and watched his concentration in the curved mirror above them as he drove.

  The soldier held tightly to her rifle near the back, in the seat Kendra had chosen at first. Her finger hovered close to the trigger, eyeing them all so suspiciously that none of them dared get too close. Kendra hoped she wouldn’t start shooting in a fog of grief and rage. The soldier was brown-skinned, with a slight Asian caste to her face, as if she had Mayan blood. Her hair was cut quite short, and it occurred to Kendra that in other circumstances the girl would have been thought beautiful. A gold-on-green eagle insignia graced the right shoulder of her khaki shirt.

  Her tear-smeared face was anything but beautiful now. Like the rest of them, she was far too young. No older than twenty-one, eyes already red-rimmed with grief. Piranha was studying the woman from where he sat across from her, his brow furrowed while Sonia stroked his cheek. Piranha had put his machete aside and had his finger on his trigger too.

  By the time the clear stretch ended, the soldier was drying her eyes with the heels of her hands, as if trying to push her tears back. The Blue Beauty had slowed to about five miles an hour, weaving between cars, pushing a Harley-Davidson out of the way. There was a body trapped beneath the motorcycle, but Kendra barely noticed it. Crows flew up, squawking with indignation. Hipshot’s bark fogged a cracked window as the birds circled and landed again behind them, undisturbed.

  “It was Mickey’s idea,” the soldier finally said.

  “What was Mickey’s idea?” Piranha said.

  “Joining you,” she said bitterly. The girl had the trace of a Hispanic accent. She refused to look any of them in the eye. There was a defiant tilt to her face, a strength to her jaw that fit the uniform. But then there was something else, hiding deeper within, something very feminine held almost at arm’s length, as if softness were a snare. “We were safe, hiding in Admin.”

  “You were in there when we were?” Piranha asked, skeptically.

  “We heard you tromping around, yeah,” she said, a spark of malice in her voice. “Surprised we didn’t hear you screaming and dying too.”

  Silence, for a few moments. No one asked the obvious question: Why didn’t you talk to us?

  “Then Mickey says, ‘We should go with them. Let’s be with people.’”

  “We could have used some help,” Piranha said, not sounding sympathetic. “Why didn’t you come out sooner?”

  The soldier laughed, a
short, ugly sound. “That’s what Mickey wanted. We didn’t know who you were. What you wanted. I said we were doing fine, we didn’t need you. We had food, shelter, weapons. Everything we needed, and we gave up all of it, all of it, because Mickey wanted to be with people.” She bit off the last words, spit them out. Then a hint of something ineffably sad peeked through the cracks in her armor. “No. Mickey wanted me to be with people. So we grabbed as much ammunition as we could and ran out.”

  Piranha opened her khaki backpack, his eyes opening wide as he hauled out a rectangular box. “Nine millimeter,” he said. “Jackpot.”

  “So…” Sonia said gently, “you were the ones who stacked up the bodies.”

  The soldier didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. The bus fell into silence again.

  Had Mickey been like a brother to her? A soul mate? Kendra wondered, but didn’t ask.

  Terry drove down the Five, toward a dead Portland. Gray tongues of smoke wafted across the city. They crossed a bridge high above a neighborhood, and below someone had spelled out a sign with white rocks on one of the rooftops: help us.

  Piranha had craned over to stare down as well. “Don’t even think about it,” he said to Terry. Piranha caught Kendra’s gaze but looked away. The big guy hadn’t wanted to stop for her, and he hadn’t wanted to stop for the soldier either.

  Terry nodded, not changing his course. In the mirror, his eyes didn’t blink.

  They had no idea if there was even anything or anyone alive down there anymore, and they’d weathered enough risks for a day.

  The bridges were clotted with stalled cars. The snowplow growled as it ground them out of the way.

  Then, a stretch of blessedly clear road.

  Kendra looked out of the window as they drove past an overgrown forest of freeway landscaping. Something poked out of a clump of grass beside the road. Kendra recognized human bones, gleaming and white, draped by a mass that might have been shredded clothing. Had there been more than one mass? A larger and smaller mass? A mother and child?

  Kendra remembered her dad talking about the discovery of Lucy, the oldest hominid remains, in Tanzania. Lucy’s bones had been found beside another, smaller, body. Anthropologists had been ecstatic to find such complete specimens. They theorized Lucy had been clinging to her child’s hand when a volcano erupted, burying them both in ash. Had the excited anthropologists given any thought to the raw terror engulfing Lucy and her offspring as the boiling cloud approached?