“I think they heard that,” Ike said, his eyes wide.
Then he opened up with his rifle, the muzzle flare blinding me as he shot into the oncoming wave of once-human flesh. I took my knife out of my belt, knowing that he couldn’t get all of them.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw the positives behind me, climbing over one another in their desperation to get away from the windows. I looked over at Ike in time to see him fire his last shot. We were still facing more zombies than my panicked mind could count.
“Go find another weapon. There were kitchen knives in aisle twenty-seven,” I told Ike.
“They’ll be all over you like flies on puke in a minute,” he said.
“Then get something to help me fight them off with,” I spat at him. He didn’t waste any more time but ran for the aisle. I stepped forward, over the broken glass, thinking I would plug the hole in the windows with my own body if I had to.
I didn’t even think of expecting reinforcements from the positives behind me. The vast majority of them had lived in cities all their lives until they came to the camp. They’d probably never seen more than a couple of zombies, much less fought any. Even the bosses, who were used to violence, had only ever fought humans, and then with their fists. What was coming my way was a lot bloodier than what they knew.
I had little time to think. The zombies were on me in seconds, and it was all I could do to slash and stab at them, to push them back as they tried to squeeze in through the broken window. Blood splattered all over me as I cut and hacked, as hands reached in to grab me, as teeth gnashed at my hands and face. They cared nothing for pain, recoiling when I cut them only out of instinct. Nothing would stop them from coming in, nothing could hold them back for long.
Then one of them grabbed me by the throat, and I couldn’t breathe. I could feel its ragged nails digging into the skin of my neck. I could barely see as black spots danced in my vision. I lashed out blindly with the knife but connected with nothing but air. This is it, I thought. This is the end—
—except Ike returned just then, with a massive meat cleaver in his hand. It must have come from the Food Queen’s butcher shop, and it was made for nothing but cutting through bone and muscle tissue. It took the zombie’s hand clean off at the wrist, and suddenly I was free. I stumbled back, and the horde of zombies came pushing in, through the window now, but Ike slashed and chopped all around him in a flurry of steel, and once I’d had a moment to catch my breath, I jumped in too, not even bothering to get up, just jabbing and slashing at the zombies’ legs.
Still, it wasn’t enough. One of the zombies got through, climbing over the mutilated bodies of its fellows. It leapt over our heads and headed for the biggest supply of meat it could find—the positives in the back of the store.
“We can’t let it get them,” I shouted at Ike.
“So go—I’ll hold these,” he told me.
I nodded and scrambled to my feet. I couldn’t see the zombie in the gloom of the store’s interior, but I could hear screaming and I ran toward it, my knife out at my side where I wouldn’t stab myself with it if I tripped and fell.
Back in aisle fifteen the positives had set up a sleeping area, and I dashed over their scattered blankets, kicked through their possessions in my haste. The screaming came from my left then, and I ran that way. Up ahead, I saw my people running in every direction at once. In the middle of the crowd stood the zombie, its hands clutching at a woman in a blue shirt. I raced forward and planted my knife deep in its back, low, below the rib cage. I must have struck its liver, because it went down instantly.
“Clear!” I heard Ike shout from the front of the store.
“What?” I called back, unbelieving.
“They’re all down,” he said, coming around the side of the aisle. “You got yours?” He looked down at the dead zombie on the floor. “Yeah, I guess you did. Fuck yeah! What a goddamn team we make, huh, Finn? We got ’em, you son of a bitch! We got every last one of—”
“Excuse me,” the woman in the blue shirt said. “I’m sorry, but—”
She was holding up her arm. The zombie had taken a sizable bite out of it, leaving a gushing red wound. Suddenly she went very pale, and her eyes fluttered shut as she fainted to the ground.
CHAPTER 102
The store stocked plenty of rubbing alcohol. Ike doused me in the stuff until the fumes made it impossible for me to breathe or see. Until all the zombie blood had washed off me. When I’d recovered a little, I picked up a fresh bottle and said, “Your turn.”
“Not quite yet,” he said. His face was grim, but there was a certain light in his eyes I knew all too well. He looked at the bloody cleaver in his hand and then down at the injured woman who lay on the floor where she’d fallen. “Just let me take care of this, then I’ll clean up.”
I looked down at the woman. There was a round hole in her arm, just the size of a set of human teeth. She was still bleeding liberally and her breathing was shallow, but that was probably just shock. She was still very much alive.
“Hold up,” I told him.
“You want to do it?”
“No.” I looked around at the positives who stood in a great circle around us. Nearly five hundred people, all watching. Waiting to see if I had the backbone to do what was necessary.
Or rather, what they’d always been taught was necessary.
“No,” I said.
Thinking of Bonnie. Thinking of my father. Thinking of everyone I’d known who was killed because they were infected. There was no law requiring it. None was needed—in all the civilized places in America, even in the looter camps, everyone understood. This was what you did. It was a tradition dating back to the early days of the crisis, when zombies outnumbered humans by a factor of ten. It was how we had survived as a species. If there was a chance you were clean, you got the plus sign tattoo and you became a positive. But if there was no question, if you were definitely infected, you had to die.
It was, I realized in that moment, an outdated custom.
“No,” I said again. “No, we’re not going to kill her.”
“Are you nuts?” Luke asked. He pushed his way forward through the crowd. “Finnegan, I know you want to save these people, but—”
“But you think she’s going to zombie out. Except you know how it works. The virus can take twenty years to incubate. Twenty years! That’s a lifetime to some people. That’s two decades of life and you want to take that away from her.”
“It can take twenty years or twenty minutes,” Luke pointed out.
“Then that’s twenty minutes she wouldn’t have otherwise.” He started to say something else, but I shouted him down. “This is who we are!” I said, holding up my left hand. “We’re positives! Society has pushed us out because they’re afraid of us. Are we going to be afraid of each other?”
I could see from the looks on their faces they thought the answer should be yes.
But leadership isn’t just agreeing with everybody. It’s not just about consensus. Sometimes you need to make new rules. New laws. “I brought you here, out of that camp. I fed you. I protected you with my own life.” I held up my knife for them all to see. It was still pink with diluted blood. “And I say she lives.”
They didn’t nod or murmur agreement. They didn’t cheer for me. But they backed off. Ike put away his cleaver.
Under his breath, he spoke to me. “If she zombies out tonight while we’re sleeping, or tomorrow in the road, I’m going to finish it.”
“Yes. Once she’s a zombie, she’s not human anymore.”
“And people will say you’re crazy. That you’re going to get us all killed.”
“Then I’ll have to hope she doesn’t zombie out tonight or tomorrow,” I told him. “Here,” I said to Luke, “help me get her sitting up. We need to get her awake so we can move out.”
He didn
’t want to touch her. But he did as I’d asked. For all his doubts and questions, Luke always stood by me.
Everyone seemed to have forgotten that I’d said we could rest for a day in the Food Queen. I think they wanted to be away from that place as quickly as possible. Within the hour we were walking again, walking west.
CHAPTER 103
We set out to the sound of rattling wheels.
There was so much canned food in the Food Queen that we couldn’t carry it all. Luckily the people who’d built that place had provided us with a perfect means to convey their bounty—wire shopping carts, still as shiny and bright as the day they’d been made. Some had wobbly wheels, and a few collapsed when we tried to push them, but dozens of them worked just fine.
I can’t help but smile when I remember the horrible rumbling, squeaking noise they made as we pushed them down the highway. It was annoying as hell at the time, but now I think of that time with a certain nostalgia, despite the constant danger, despite the uncertainty of the people I led.
I had made a new law, and I was proud of it, proud of what it meant for us.
Of course, you can’t just declare something true and it becomes a fact. Someone will always challenge you. And that led to one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, but one of the most important.
It took two days before anyone questioned my law. Only two days. I watched, feeling helpless, as the woman in the blue shirt moved about the camp at night, the wound on her arm like some terrible new kind of tattoo. Like the plus sign on her left hand, it became a mark of shame. As much as I wanted people to accept her, as much as I tried by sheer willpower to make them take her in, she was shunned. No one would eat with her or let her sleep near them. I brought her forward and had her sleep next to me the first night, but she didn’t seem to find that acceptable. I could see why. If she was under my direct protection, that meant she was in danger, and she could never feel comfortable at my side.
I watched it happen. I consulted with my advisers about what to do, but no one had any ideas. I watched the whole thing, ready to move at a moment’s notice, but when the time came, I wasn’t ready. I’ll always blame myself for her death.
She was found one morning with her throat cut. The culprit wasn’t hard to discover. He was a big positive, one of the old bosses from the camp, and he was proud of what he’d done. He showed everyone the razor he’d used, still red with her blood. “I protected us all,” he announced, and plenty of people murmured agreement around him. “Everyone knows it has to be done. Just because Finnegan says otherwise, we know the world we live in. We know the rules!”
Ike and Macky stood on either side of me as we listened to him crow. I think they believed I was in danger, that at any moment my leadership was going to be overthrown. Maybe it was. But I wasn’t afraid just then.
I was enraged.
I didn’t see red. I couldn’t hear my heart thumping in my chest. This was a much purer, colder anger, an indignation I’d never felt before. I’d made a law, and this man had violated it.
If I had been the boss of a work crew, or the leader of a gang of road pirates, or Adare, or some warlord of the wilderness, I would have stalked over and slaughtered that man where he stood. I would have ruled by death and violence, and it would have been over. But my anger wouldn’t let him off that easily.
So we had a trial. I had him brought before me—he came readily, perhaps thinking this was his big chance to push me off my throne. I could see the excitement in his eyes, and it made me sick. Instead of having him beaten or killed, though, I asked him to tell me his story. His side of things. To describe in vivid detail what he’d done, and why.
He was happy to. He laughed as he described cutting the woman’s throat. When asked for his justification, he simply said, “She was infected, and everybody knows it,” and left it at that.
“You heard me when I laid down the new law, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Yeah, of course I did.”
“So you knew this wasn’t acceptable. All right. It’s time for judgment. I could simply pronounce you guilty, I suppose. But in the old days, before the crisis, they didn’t like to do that, and I can see why. It shouldn’t be up to just me.”
He shot me a quizzical look. He couldn’t seem to understand.
“When you broke the law,” I said, “you didn’t just hurt me. You hurt all of us. All of us should have a say in what happens to you.” I turned and looked at the positives gathered around us. Pretty much everybody had come to see what would happen.
“I think this man is guilty of breaking our law. Everyone who agrees with me, raise your hand.”
I had assumed that every hand would go up, or that none of them would. In fact it looked pretty evenly divided. A lot of people kept their hands down. A lot of people turned their faces away, like they didn’t know what to think. Luke started running around the crowd, counting raised hands.
“More than half,” he said when he was done.
I nodded.
The condemned man jumped up and tried to run for it. Macky had already moved behind him while the votes were tallied, and now he tripped the man and knocked him to the ground.
“You’re guilty,” I said. “Maybe not all of us agree. But more than half.”
“You can’t kill me for this!” the man shouted. “I only did what I was supposed to do! I did what anyone would do!”
“Apparently not anyone,” I said. “Not everyone. Not us.”
Ike lifted his cleaver. “I’ll do it,” he said.
“No.”
Everyone turned to look at me. Their eyes said, What now?
“No. We’re not going to kill him. Blood doesn’t answer for blood.”
“Then what are we going to do with him?” Luke asked.
“He broke our law. That means he isn’t one of us anymore. Someone, give him a day’s worth of food and water.” There was a lot of commotion at that, a great deal of confusion, but it was done as I said. “Now,” I told him. “Get out of here.”
“What? What the hell are you—”
“You’re not one of us anymore, so you don’t walk with us. Head east, if you want, and try to make it back to the camp. North or south, whatever direction you pick. But start walking. Don’t follow us, and don’t come near us again. Or we will kill you.”
He protested. He spluttered with rage. He threatened me. “I’ll be dead by nightfall,” he said. “The first zombie that comes along will get me. You’re killing me, you just want to keep your hands clean! You’re just too chickenshit to do it yourself!”
“No.” I drew my knife and held it up. “If you prefer to die, come here and kneel before me and I’ll cut your throat myself.” I would have done it, too.
Eventually, he walked.
CHAPTER 104
The rest of us moved on.
And we survived.
We made do. We moved from one supermarket to the next.
There were, it turned out, plenty of them. Most had been looted—we were well outside the military control zone at that point—but a few still had shelves of canned food just waiting for us.
We supplemented this meager diet with game when we could. Herds of animals roamed those great empty plains—mostly a kind of wild, scrawny pig that was almost impossible to catch but that tasted so good when it was roasted over a fire that it was worth it. I created hunting parties, and Ike taught them how to kill. Some of them already knew how to butcher and prepare steaks and chops.
We found weapons, in old gun shops and malls. We found what we needed.
Little by little we all learned to survive out there, in the western wilderness. And the miles disappeared under our feet. Sometimes it rained, and we had to take what shelter we could find. Sometimes we were beset by mobs of zombies, and we had to fend them off. But we handled it as best we could.
We lost people, it’s true. People died under my watch. But I kept to my new law—no one was killed for being infected.
Those who zombied out were another matter, of course. And some of us did. We were positives, after all, and some of us had been infected for years. When it happened, it was always bad.
But the crazy thing was—when someone did zombie out in the night, and bit half a dozen of their neighbors before they were put down, the people didn’t turn on me. They didn’t blame me for lax hygiene. They worked together at putting the zombie down. They grieved together, and they swore to be more alert, more cautious, in the future.
It actually brought them closer together. I was learning what every leader since time immemorial has probably known—people will tear one another apart when they’re safe. They’ll bicker and argue and fight among themselves. But if they have a common enemy, an external threat, they will bond so tightly together nothing can drive them apart.
We walked all through the end of that summer, and well into the autumn.
And we were okay.
I had spent so much of my life being taught to fear. To fear the zombies. To fear other people. That fear, that paranoia, had kept the first generation alive after the crisis. It had been valuable to them. As we got better and better at surviving, at not having to worry about every little thing, I learned that fear wasn’t worth the price. The fear had turned some human beings into animals and some into savages. It had turned good people bad and had turned a country inward, until it was feeding on itself.
There was hardship and horror behind us and more to come. But as strange as it may seem, I was happy in that fragile time. I was joyful, even. A big part of that was Kylie. Though our material situation had not improved much from when we were living together in an SUV in the wilderness of New Jersey, we had both found a kind of hope and belief in each other. Every night we came together, and little by little we became more intimate. She would let me touch some part of her, some wounded patch of skin. Some nights it seemed almost absurd, as when she let me touch the backs of her knees. It turned out that Adare had beaten her there once as a punishment, leaving her barely able to walk. She flinched and wept as I stroked the soft skin there, but afterward, she said it was like a healing.
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