To see one of them in the wild like this…Two, Evan corrected himself. There were two of them headed in his general direction. He suppressed a shiver, knowing it was natural, knowing also that he was safe. The wall kept him three meters off the ground. Zed couldn’t climb it. Zed would walk right up to the wall and start slapping, and a week later Zed would still be there pat-a-caking the concrete. Zed wasn’t so swift.
Evan sighted through his scope and watched them come. He was sure half a dozen other sets of eyes within range—including Diego’s—were fixed on the strolling pair too. But courtesy dictated they’d allow him to fire the shots. It would have been rude and a breech of protocol for someone else to take them down. Evan would let Zed get within range, and then he’d hit them up. It would be a fitting finish to an otherwise uneventful five nights on the wall. Give him something to talk about tonight with Anthony and Troi, with Riley.
Evan waited, eyeing the two things through the scope atop his Model 7, and the closer they got, the greater was his realization that something was amiss.
* * *
With the dawn of the third day of his imprisonment, MacKenzie lost hope. He gave up any notions of escape or release, of being allowed to walk free from this infernal bondage. Rodriguez would not be coming for him, nor would Red. He had sinned, he knew, and now he enjoyed the punishment for his transgression. If there was a god or gods in heaven judging him, he would meet them soon enough. No deity imposed this penance on his person.
“I’m sorry,” he cried aloud, his voice hoarse from days of shouting and lack of water. “I’m so damned sorry…so damned sorry…”
Little Red had put him here.
The diminutive redhead had requested that he and two others—Tommy and Dalton—accompany her into the wilderness. MacKenzie had dutifully piled into the bed of Dalton’s truck and the big, burly man with the beard and the knit cap had driven it along the rutted, worn path that had once been a road. MacKenzie had laughed nervously in the bed of the truck, and Tommy had smiled politely, as they were jolted back and forth. Red had just sat there, her back to the cab, the Noveske Diplomat N4 on her lap.
Of course now MacKenzie realized that Tommy had known. Dalton had known too. They’d understood what was to become of him.
MacKenzie had sinned. He had stolen. In their camp, that was the ultimate transgression. Greater even than murder. Murder was a form of theft in that it stole a life; yet murder could be and had been justified.
When he’d done the deed, MacKenize had known he was committing a punishable offense. He hadn’t expected to get caught, but he had been caught. And now, the old man, Thomas, having decided his fate, left him snared in the net.
The net was made of barbed wire. They had bundled him in it and dragged him, cursing and bleeding, from the truck to this spot beneath some southern sugar maples. Red slung a rope over a branch twenty feet above the ground. Together, she and Tommy and Dalton yanked MacKenzie kicking and screaming up off the ground. His bodyweight against the barbs caused them to cut deeper into the bottoms of his thighs, into his arms and shoulders, his face. MacKenzie swung there, not daring to move, because each motion resulted in new cuts and the deeper penetration of extant wounds.
“Consider what you’ve done, Mac,” Red told him, and MacKenzie listened as she and the other two walked off, back the way they’d come. He heard the truck’s engine turn over, heard Dalton put it into drive, and knew they were never coming back.
They left him bound here, in the air, with neither food nor water. With no weapons. No chance of freeing himself. MacKenzie tried, struggling to loose himself, which only resulted in fresh gashes. A strand of the barbed wire was way too close to his groin. He’d had to watch how he moved, less he worked it up farther under his manhood. None of the wounds were bad enough to kill him. The barbs stung like hell, but the wounds they inflicted were superficial. MacKenzie would not bleed to death here.
But the fact he bled was bad enough.
His blood, dripping from many wounds, had pooled beneath him amid the pine needles. His blood, in the dirt and leaf litter, was as dark as the lower trunks of the sugar maples, stained black from mold growing out of the sap sucker’s holes. MacKenzie’s blood would bring Zed, he knew.
A few hours after Red left him, MacKenzie heard the first of the zombies arriving. It stumbled through the bushes and trees, never attempting to mask its presence.
The sun was going down when it spotted him and walked herky-jerky to the spot where he was bound. It had been female, but wore a button-down men’s dress shirt, which it had either worn untucked or it had come untucked somewhere along the way. The zombie wore a man’s black tie, which matched the circles around its eyes and the color of its hair. Its head was bent to the side, and one of its arms hung useless. It had been short in life, and reached up for him with its one good arm futilely.
MacKenzie knew, no matter how long the thing spent grasping for him without success, it would not leave. It would never relinquish its task, even if the task was one the zombie could not fulfill.
He did not sleep that first night. He hung there, waiting, listening, watching for what he could in the moonlight. His pal, Rodriguez, would come for him. Rodriguez wouldn’t leave him here. No way. Rodriguez would know something was up when Tommy and Dalton and Red showed up back at camp without him, and Rodriguez would waste no time figuring out a way to save his friend.
The second morning, three more zombies showed up. They joined the first in pawing the air under MacKenzie, groaning and protesting, clacking their jaws and what remained of their teeth. He cursed them with every profanity he knew and others he made up. He kicked at the air above their heads, which only caused the barbed wire strands to wound him further. MacKenzie couldn’t bring himself to look at them. He’d pissed himself, because he’d had to go and because he was frightened. The urine had dribbled down his pants leg and mixed with his dried blood, spattering the upturned faces of the hungry ghouls beneath him.
There was a chill in the morning air that gave way to the relative warmth of the afternoon. He baked, exposed in the sun. Where was Rodriguez? He tried calling out for his friend, in case the man had tracked him to this area and was looking for him. Each time he yelled, a trill sounded among the zombies below. They were titillated. When he finally fell asleep on the second night, MacKenzie was beyond parched, and there were ten or eleven of them on the ground below him.
He woke in the dark of the third morning, soaking wet, but the rain was not what had awakened him. Overnight some new arrivals had shown up. One—on its outstretched wrist it wore a religious icon magnetic bracelet—was significantly taller than the others. Its fingertips were able to touch the toes of MacKenzie’s bare feet. Little Red had taken his shoes.
MacKenzie drew his feet up, sending waves of pain through his body as the barbed wire dug in further, ripping open new wounds and the old ones that had started to scab over.
He hung there miserably, the rain falling on him, the creatures beneath reaching for him. MacKenzie opened his mouth and tried to catch what rain he could but it was futile.
When the rain disappeared, so did MacKenzie’s last shred of hope. Rodriguez wouldn’t be coming for him. Rodriguez was afraid of Lil’ Red and Thomas and the others. Janis, his own wife, wouldn’t be looking for him. Truth was, MacKenzie knew, he wasn’t very good to Janis and his children. It wasn’t his son Paul’s fault that he’d been born different, born deformed. All that goddamn radiation. MacKenzie knew he should never have laid hands on the boy, never taken his frustrations out on his own flesh and blood. What kind of man was he?
One unworthy of life, he realized. At that moment he broke, sobbing uncontrollably without tears, his body gripped by dehydration. There were fifteen or twenty of the monsters beneath him, and they would still be there when he had rotted to nothing more than a skeleton hanging from this tree. And MacKenzie knew he deserved nothing more than the fate that had been dealt him; the just deserts of actions he had taken.
The morning was cold and damp. MacKenzie passed out.
Little Red sat for three days under a tree forty yards away, in a spot where she could see MacKenzie but he could not see her. She had gotten in the cab of the truck next to Dalton and driven about a quarter of a mile from where they’d strung Mac up. When she’d judged the vehicle was out of Mac’s ear shot, she’d had Dalton pull over. Red had climbed out, nodded to Tommy as she grabbed her ruck and rifle out of the bed, and hiked back to this position.
Red had kept low and kept quiet, and Mac had never known she was there. She’d listened to him, the curses meant for her, for Thomas, for the others in their camp. She’d watched as the first of the undead showed up and MacKenzie had yelled at it, like he could frighten it away. Red waited to see that she had tied him right, that even the tallest of them weren’t going to be able to reach Mac, and then she’d picked up her book and read.
Though Mac didn’t know it, she was out here with him in the chill of the morning, in the heat of the afternoon, and in the rain that accompanied the third day. This, after all, had been her idea. Thomas would have just as soon killed MacKenzie for what he’d done. For other things he’d done. But Little Red had talked to the old man and Thomas had listened. Red was one of his trusted advisors—a trust she had earned through years of battle and good decision making. If Mac stood a chance of being redeemed, of seeing the errors of his ways and adjusting his behavior, Thomas had believed Little Red was the one to help the man arrive at such an epiphany.
She had asked MacKenzie, Dalton, and Tommy to ride with her and they had come. She was trusted and respected among them. Maybe Tommy had some idea of what she had in mind. Red didn’t know. When they’d reached the spot where Red knew a net was set to catch any errant zombies that happened too close to their camp, she signaled Dalton to stop the truck. Mac had been caught off guard and surprised. Not that he’d have tried to fight her. Red had her N4 and her knives on her. MacKenzie had put his gun down as soon as she’d told him. If he’d tried anything he would have died. He knew it, and she knew it.
When MacKenzie lost consciousness on the third day, there were twenty-three zombies milling around underneath him. Little Red looked up from her book and considered his situation.
Thomas had given her a copy of the Iliad, and she was enjoying it. Achilles had spent a good deal of time pouting cross-legged on the beach. Then the Trojans killed his cousin, and Achilles…ohhh, Achilles was pissed.
The sleeves of her black turtleneck were rolled up to the elbow. Normally she wore the sleeves down, even in summer. But no one was out here to see the scars criss-crossing her forearms. Red had cut herself when she was a little kid, before she lived with Thomas and Gammon. When she lived with the other people, the bad people.
She placed her book down, stood and stretched. Red gripped her left elbow with her right hand and pulled it behind her head, then repeated for the other arm. It’d been two, maybe three, months since she’d thrown down with Zed. There weren’t as many as there were before. Red was young, having seen only seventeen winters, but she’d heard stories about the time before from Thomas and Gammon and others. Once there were millions and millions of these things to wade into and kill. She wished she’d been around back then.
Red placed the Noveske Diplomat N4 assault rifle, with its three hundred round drum, down on top of her rucksack, beneath the tree she had spent three days under. She wore chop sticks in her hair; the ones she kept needle sharp. Thing was, if she used them on Zed, there was no way she was going to put them back in her hair.
Millions and millions of them…
Red checked the load on her Stechkin, then reholstered the 9mm pistol with the wooden stock on her thigh. She adjusted the knives on her chest and legs. Red drew the four-inch push dagger on her right forearm with her left hand, and the matching push dagger on her left forearm with her right hand. She thought, sometimes, that she’d been born too late.
Little Red started towards the mass of undead, a blade in each hand. She was smiling. The zombies were so intent on the unconscious, bloodied man hanging above their heads, none of them noticed her until she was upon them.
* * *
The two figures got within a hundred meters of the wall before a gunshot brought one of them to the ground. Evan had sighted down the barrel of his Model 7, studying the two figures, noticing that something wasn’t what it seemed to be with them. He’d been tempted to fire on the two, but something was up here. Diego, farther along the wall, had made no such distinction, had not hesitated, and had been armed with a Model 9 sniper rifle.
“Damn you, Diego!” Evan yelled out, after one of the two figures fell, the crack of the Model 9 reverberating along the wall and into the Outlands. There was no chance the other man could hear him. “Hold your fire!” Evan barked into the radio “Hold your fire!”
“What’s your sitrep, sector three?” their lieutenant demanded over the airwaves.
“We’ve got two who’ve wandered in from the cold, L.T. One is down. I repeat: one is down.” As he spoke, Evan was already lowering himself down the wall along the built-in rungs. “I’m stepping outside to investigate.”
“Negatory, Zebra-Three. You sit tight until reinforcements arrive.”
“They’re not hostiles, L.T. I repeat, they do not appear to be a threat, and they do not appear to be armed.”
Evan cast a stern look towards Diego’s position on the wall. He couldn’t distinguish much more than the man’s outline over there, but he knew if Diego was looking at him through his high-powered scope, he could not mistake the look of dissatisfaction on Evan’s face. The shot hadn’t been Diego’s to take.
“Am approaching the targets…” As he neared the two forms, Evan ascertained that they were unarmed. He looked beyond them to the distance from where they had come but saw no indication of movement. “Signing off for the time being. Over.”
“Proceed with caution, Zebra-Three. Rodeo, you provide eyes for Zebra Three. We’re already en route. E.T.A., six minutes. Over.”
As Evan got closer, he started to doubt himself. He thought he’d made a mistake. The one on his back, clutching his leg, that one was human. But the other one, the one standing next to the guy who had fallen, what a mess. That was some kind of long-rotting zombie. Yet, as he got closer, he realized his reassessment was incorrect.
“Nazis…” The man on his ass was mumbling. He looked frightened. “I hate Nazis.”
Evan saw no weapons near them or on them. The man on the ground looked to be in his forties, with curly dark hair. His clothes were old and dirty. He was holding onto his leg, which could have been a lot worse. It looked like Diego had only nicked him. Not only had Diego taken the shot, he’d botched it as well.
But the wounded man’s travelling companion…Evan stepped towards them warily, one foot in front of the other, the stock of his Model 7 tight to his shoulder, the barrel locked on the monstrosity standing there in the open next to the downed man.
The man on the ground looked up at Evan and glanced away. “Where’s Jet Jaguar when you need him?”
“Who are you?” Evan demanded. “Identify yourselves.”
The thing standing…Its face was caked with skin lesions, as was most of its body, which Evan could see because its clothes were rags that hung off its shoulders and hips. Open sores were suppurating on top of the blisters. The thing’s arms ended in rounded nubs. One of the nubs had a thumb still attached to it. Whatever it was, the thing was barefoot. The lumps at the ends of its legs were heavily padded and lacked digits.
The goddamned thing, Evan made a mental note, had flies buzzing all around it. As he stepped closer, its stench nearly overpowered him.
Evan had never seen a zombie standing there so obediently.
“He’s probably holding Megalon so Godzilla can drop kick him.”
Okay, Evan thought. The guy down on the ground—something was up with him. If he was autistic or bit, Zed wouldn’t harm him. But that oth
er thing—if it were a zombie—it should have been coming for Evan by now. And it wasn’t. It just stood there by the downed man, like a faithful dog.
“I said who are you?” Evan stopped where he was, about four meters from the two figures.
“I’m Gary,” answered the seated man. “Who are you?”
“Forget that. What the hell is that thing?”
“Somebody in this camp ain’t what he appears to be. Right now that may only be one or two of us. Who said that? Did Kurt Russell say that?”
Evan spoke into the shoulder mic connected to his communications gear. “We have two here, L.T. They appear to be unarmed. One of them might be Zed. I don’t know…Something’s not right about this.”
“Zed?” the man on the ground grimaced from the pain in his thigh. “Zed’s dead baby. Zed’s dead. Hey, who said that?”
Something was definitely up with homeboy on the ground. Evan was pretty sure the guy was autistic.
“Yeah, okay. Gary, right?”
“Bruce Willis said that, didn’t he?”
Evan ignored him. “What’s the story with…this.” Evan dipped the barrel of his Model 7 at the rooted thing.
The thing spoke. “Schlemiel, Schlimazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated.”
“Holy shit!” Evan was startled. He hadn’t understood a word the thing said but he definitely hadn’t expected it to speak. It showed no signs of making a move towards him. Given its abject state of appearance, Evan didn’t think it could move too fast if it wanted to. “Dammit, I almost shot you! Why didn’t you say you could talk?”
“Bang-bang, he shot me down.” Its eyes were filmy but still sparkled with life. “Bang-bang, I hit the ground.” It laughed—a congested, unnerving sound. “That awful sound…”
Resurrection (Eden Book 3) Page 3