“There’s not many people left out here,” Krieger said. “And the people’s that are left, aren’t people you want much to meet. Usually.”
“You’d know, right Krieg?”
The man’s grunt was his sole acknowledgement of Evan’s comment.
“My face itches.” Anthony touched the stubble on his cheeks.
Shortly before they stopped for the third night, Evan made what he considered a breakthrough. Over the last few days, they’d passed several human artifacts that had given them pause. They’d passed a lake where the tail end of an airplane jutted straight up out of the middle of the water. They passed road signs—trucks use right lane; two lanes ahead—where a road was no longer apparent. They’d passed more derelict cell phone towers.
There had been several vehicles, mostly long rusted cars. Whatever surface area wasn’t corroded was bleached out by the sun. Several of these automobiles had their license plates intact. The license plates struck Evan as curious. They struck him as curious, in part, because private cars did not exist in New Harmony. More than that, the license plates bore numbers. Most said North Carolina. And there was something else about the license plates, something Evan couldn’t quite figure out.
They passed a truck in the middle of their path. It rested flat, its tires long since rotted away. The truck bed was filled with dirt and soil and grown out with plant life. Its windows were blackened from soot and mud and the dirt of dozens of years.
Its license plate was faded but still discernible. North Carolina. TMM-8296
Evan thought about ways he might be able to shave his head out here in the field without his usual kit, when he stopped walking. He scrambled to get out of his pack, nearly dropping it on the ground because he was so eager to get something out of it.
“What’s up with Ev?” Troi called attention to their friend.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute…” Evan found his note pad and flipped through it, rushing through pages with his thumb until he found what he was looking for. “Uh-huh, uh-huh—” He stopped on one page and jabbed with his finger at something written there “Yes!”
“What?” asked Riley.
They all gathered around Evan and the truck. Krieger waited impatiently several meters away, leaning against his Bo.
“Look at this. Look at these numbers.” Evan read the numbers he had written in his pad.
“Yeah?” Anthony prompted.
“Well, look at this license plate.” They did. 8296. The numbers in Evan’s book matched up with the numbers on the license plate. “Ain’t that something?”
“Where did you get those numbers?” Troi asked.
“That autistic guy in the hospital. Him and the other guy must have come this way.”
“You just figured that out?” Krieger called back, unimpressed.
“Yeah—why? You knew?”
“Course I knew.”
“What do you mean you knew?” Evan demanded.
“I passed by this way with them two nitwits. Had to listen to them the whole time too. Gave me a goddamn headache.”
“You’ve been here before?” asked Anthony.
“Yeah. Sure I have.”
“Why didn’t you say anything then?” asked Riley.
“What’d you want me to say?”
“So you do know where we’re going?” Troi sounded more assured.
“Course I know where we’re going.”
“Son of a…” Evan muttered. Then, louder, “Hey, Krieg, maybe you can do us a favor? When we get to a place you don’t know—”
“When we get somewhere I don’t know, I’ll tell ya. Now come on.”
As his friends moved forward, following the guide, Evan looked down into his note pad. Somewhat dispirited, he shut it and stowed it back in his pack.
* * *
The next afternoon they entered a city’s limits.
The first houses they passed were dark and empty. Entire sections of them had rotted and collapsed. Several had fallen in on themselves. Others were burnt to their foundations, and the only hint of their previous existence were the lone chimneys that still stood. Weeds and grasses and trees grew up through the asphalt and concrete, merging seamlessly with the oranges and browns of the turning trees that surrounded the homes. These outgrowths, in many cases, sprouted from the homes themselves.
An occasional bird darted by overhead.
In places the streets were cratered, and they stepped gingerly around the gaping chasms filled with water.
“I don’t like this,” muttered Evan. He looked suspiciously from one house to the next. “There’s no telling what’s in any of these…”
“Just relax,” said Krieger. “There’s no cause for worry here.”
“How do you know that?”
“No wildlife where there’s Zed.”
As if to verify the guide’s words, three deer bolted from a hole in the side of a house and darted across their path before disappearing into the trees.
“Did you see that?” Riley asked in wonder.
“They were gorgeous.” Troi looked off into the trees where the deer had gone, the leaves and boughs they’d brushed swaying in their wake.
“We have to go around,” said Anthony. The street ahead of them was gone. Sewers that had long ago been clogged with debris had birthed puddles, and the puddles had grown to the size of a small lake. Krieger was already circling a house, leading them around into what would have been the backyard.
“What was that?” asked Riley. An indentation in the ground behind the home was filled with soil and plants.
“Swimming pool,” said the guide.
Evan winced when some faded, fallen vinyl siding cracked under his foot.
“Don’t worry, Ev,” said Troi.
“I’m not worried,” he said too quickly.
Anthony stepped around a discarded frying pan. The handle was split, but the pan itself was intact.
“What’s that thing?” Troi asked about a squat, white appliance sitting out in the grass.
“Washing machine,” replied Krieger.
“It didn’t rot?”
“It’s aluminum.”
Riley guessed that meant it would not.
“Why do the houses have numbers on them?” Anthony asked. The homes they’d passed that were more or less intact had numerals spray-painted on them. The house they moved by now had a giant 2 on it.
“The number of bodies inside.”
“The number of bodies inside?” Troi was shocked.
Their guide did not reply.
The suburbs gave way to the first city blocks—streets of blackened super-structural steel that jutted up into the sky amid vast piles of burnt bricks and debris.
“What happened here?” Riley asked.
“Probably a gas line went up,” said Krieger. “That or it was bombed.”
“Did you see that cat?” Troi asked, but no one else had.
“They’re feral. They won’t come near you. Better look out for dogs, though.”
“Dogs?” Evan looked around suspiciously.
“Wild dogs. I wouldn’t try and pet ‘em.”
Evan gripped his Model 7 a little tighter.
Click……….click……….click
“Radiation seems okay here,” said Riley.
The suburbs behind them, they moved into the city proper, passing stalled and burnt-out vehicles. The streets were cratered and filled-in with stagnant water, upon which splotches of green growth set. The ruins of high-rises towered over them. They didn’t get too close to most of the apartments and buildings, but the few they did had what the four friends thought were outrageously high numbers—237, 412—painted on their facades. The air was growing cooler than it had been, and the sun was sinking in the western sky.
“It’s going to rain,” predicted Krieger.
“It’s been overcast the whole time we’ve been out here.” Evan sounded unconvinced.
“No bodies out in the street,” said Anthon
y. “No skeletons.”
“The dogs and wolves would have carted them off,” replied the guide. “Coyotes too.”
“Wolves?” Troi was concerned.
Riley felt something touch her hair. She looked up. A raindrop speckled her cheek. Then another.
“It’s raining.”
Krieger grunted. Evan looked dissatisfied. The guide waited while the four friends donned their ponchos. Krieger looked at the rain slickers. Unimpressed, he hunkered down in his furs.
The rain fell in a steady drizzle.
“We should find someplace to stop for the night,” Krieger announced sometime later.
The building they chose appeared intact. Some of the windows still had glass in them. Another reason they settled on it—one the four friends did not voice to each other—was that the number painted on it was relatively low compared to other buildings they’d passed. 23.
A stairwell in remarkably good condition led upstairs to a second floor where they spread their sleeping bags and gear. Krieger, Evan, and Anthony walked off to find wood or anything suitable for a fire.
“Let’s not split up,” Anthony said to Evan as Krieger walked off on his own.
“Agreed. Hope he knows what he’s doing.”
They scouted the area, collecting various branches and combustible, non-toxic debris. The rain had not been falling long enough to render these sodden.
Troi and Riley explored the various rooms on the first and second floors of the building. They found half a dozen skeletons on the first floor and none on the second.
“The rest must be up above,” guessed Riley. Not all of the skeletons were in one piece and not all of the pieces were accounted for.
“Think the wolves got these, Rye?”
“Maybe. That or the platypuses.”
“You’re funny.”
“Gallows humor is what I think it’s called.”
When Anthony and Evan returned to the building, the guide had not yet returned. They got a fire going out in the street, afraid they’d burn the building down if they did it indoors. They built it under an overhang produced by an advertising billboard that had collapsed, wedged at an angle between the street and the building. It kept them out of the rain.
“Should we wait for him?” Troi asked when the others began eating.
“You can wait for him if you want.” Evan shoved a spoonful of beans into his mouth.
Troi waited a moment then, famished, began eating.
When they had finished their meal, the rain fell more heavily than before. Krieger returned, carting an armful of chopped wood.
“Where you been?” Evan asked him.
By way of an answer, he made a noise that sounded like a growl.
“Okay.”
The guide sat down by the fire, leaning against his bodypack, the multi-barreled grenade launcher propped up on one side of him, his Bo on the other.
“See any sign of Zed?” Riley asked him.
“No.” At least he answered her. “Saw some wild dogs.”
“Is it safe to sleep inside tonight?” asked Troi.
“Long as the building don’t fall on you.”
As the night gave way to shadow and their eyes grew heavy, first Evan then Anthony and Riley made their way into the building and up to the second floor by flashlight. Troi opted to spend the night on the street, huddled in her sleeping bag, close to the fire.
She was just about to go under when a maniacal yipping in the distance startled her alert.
“What’s that?” She looked nervously up and down the darkened street about them, into the shadows beyond their overhang, outside the fire.
“Coyotes.” Krieger wasn’t asleep either. The liquid in his bottle sloshed. “They won’t bother us though.”
“I’ve never actually seen a coyote.”
“And you won’t, ‘less they want you to see them.”
“That sounds scary.” Troi meant it.
“You’re okay. We used to get them in the suburbs, back…long before all this. Some idiot would leave their poodle out, and the coyotes would come and take it at night.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Shouldn’t leave your dog out overnight.”
“Did you live around here?”
“No, nowhere near here.”
The guide wasn’t volunteering any information, so Troi spoke up. “You knew Bear?”
“I saw him once, up close.”
“Where?”
“I fought in his army. That’s what they called it. Bear’s Army. Funny, huh?”
“We grew up with stories about him. But you can never tell which were true and which were made up. A lot of them were pretty hard to believe.”
“Believe them.” Krieger started to cough.
When he’d quieted down, Troi spoke. “What was he like?”
“He was a big man, a great big man.”
“Yeah. That’s what they said in school.”
“They still teach you guys about that in your schools?” Krieger sounded pleasantly surprised. “Bear’s reputation proceeded him. He understood what no one else wanted to. What no one else was ready to. You know what that was?”
“What was that?”
“The stakes.”
“The stakes?”
“The stakes. No matter how futile it seemed, no matter how overwhelming the odds, Bear wouldn’t quit.”
“Fighting zombies?”
“Fighting the zombies. A lot of people said he was crazy.”
“What do you think?”
“How could he not be? But I didn’t think it mattered. He was the best at what he did, which was killing zombies. Killed a lot of men too, when he had to, but they had it coming.”
“Did he carry a doll?”
“I’ve heard that, but that was before I knew him. They spent eight or nine months fighting in New York City, and then when the power plant melted down, we all just assumed that was the end of Bear’s Army, the end of the man. But then he resurfaced down in New Orleans—what had been New Orleans. That’s where I knew him.”
“What about the Black Angel of Death? Was she real?”
“There was a black woman who fought at his side. From what I remembered, she was just as dangerous as he was. Not very approachable either. Not that he was.”
“Do you think we’re going to find him out here?”
“I think we’ll find his Army. What’s left of it. They shouldn’t be too far away from here, last I heard. But I don’t think we’ll find Bear.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s probably dead.”
“From the war?”
“The war. The radiation. The depravity. Take your pick.”
Troi looked glum, and Krieger saw the look on her face.
“But you never know. You might find him.”
She looked up, not as discouraged.
“Not that it’ll answer any of your questions—your friend’s questions.” Krieger tapped the side of his bottle with his finger. “Hell, Bear might not even want to speak to any of you.”
“I’m going to go inside to sleep. Thanks, Krieger.”
“I don’t know for what. But you’re welcome.”
* * *
They woke in the rain and resumed their journey shortly thereafter. They passed through urban street canyons whose asphalt and cement were long split apart by the freezing and thawing of water. Ruts and fissures gave to gaps and yawning cavities, dropping a dozen feet or more to rain-dappled waters. They avoided these, stepping carefully around them. Other streets had disappeared into chasms, the buildings on either side leaning into the abyss or disintegrated into piles of rubble and building materials. Travel along these paths was impossible and necessitated a detour.
Buildings groaned in protest as they expanded and contracted, and the four friends looked about themselves nervously with every tick and snap. They passed burnt buildings and entire blocks reduced to debris with scorched steel skeletons protru
ding into the air. It was a cold and wet morning.
Krieger walked ahead in his customary place, putting the Bo before him, the Hawk MM1 still on his back. He coughed and spat.
“Can you believe this place was full of people once?” Anthony asked his friends.
“It’s weird.” Troi looked from deserted building to deserted building. “Where’d they go? I mean, I know where they went, but…”
“Places like this,” said Riley, “were never meant to be this quiet.”
“It seems…” Anthony’s imagined streets full of human beings, their sounds, their lives.
“It’s a sacrilege,” Krieger called over his shoulder.
“Yeah,” agreed Troi.
“He can hear us?” Evan whispered to Anthony. “He’s that far ahead and he can still hear us.”
“I saw you talking to him last night,” Riley mentioned to Troi. “What about?”
“Nothing really. Bear mostly.”
“Oh.”
Sometime later, Evan asked, “What’s up with the Krieg?” He looked ahead to their guide. Krieger had stopped in the middle of the street and unslung his grenade launcher, which he held muzzle down. He stood over something. As they drew close to him, they saw what it was.
A charred torso lay in the middle of the street. It was blackened beyond recognition, the limbs burned away, the eye sockets empty.
“What happened to him?” Anthony asked the guide.
“It’s not the what that concerns me.” Krieger glanced from the body to the buildings around them. “It’s the when.”
“When what?” asked Troi.
“This body isn’t like the others we’ve seen,” Riley pointed out.
“All we’ve seen are skeletons.”
“Exactly, Ev.”
“But this isn’t fresh or anything, right Krieger?” Anthony sounded like he wanted to be assured. .
The guide did not speak for some time, and while he was silent the friends looked around anxiously.
“You feel that?” Krieger finally asked.
“Feel what?” Evan said.
“Keep your voice down. We’re being watched.”
Troi and Anthony turned and looked around, up and down the street they’d come from, into the empty windows of the buildings on either side of this block.
Resurrection (Eden Book 3) Page 13