Little by little her armor came down, and she came back to life. It was an incredible thing to watch. I would catch her eye, at some random moment of the day, and in the second before she looked away, her eyelids would crinkle with embarrassment or shy surprise, and she would bite her upper lip. Or I would see her play with her hair, like a normal woman in a normal world, lost in thought. Most of the time it was just seeing her smile, a cautious, furtive smile. Sometimes it was seeing her weep with the other women, the ones who had lost someone dear to them. Those moments broke my heart. The funny thing is, sometimes you have to let your heart break to remind yourself it’s there.
I didn’t understand at the time what we were building, she and I. I didn’t understand what any of us were building, the strength or the meaning of the community of positives. Most of my days were spent just keeping us alive. But with every step we took to the west, things got just a little better. A little brighter.
It felt like not the end, but the beginning of a world.
CHAPTER 105
You can’t really understand the scale of this country until you’ve walked across it. You can’t grasp the scope, the sheer magnitude, of the precrisis world until you’ve crossed its ruins.
There was a highway cloverleaf, somewhere in Indiana, I think. It has to have been before we saw Indianapolis. A thing of concrete, with great, arching ramps that lifted over our heads, carrying roadways so wide fifty men could have walked them abreast. The way they soared up, then whirled around to tie into knots, made me dizzy. It took us most of a day to walk from one end of that cloverleaf to the other. Villages could have nestled in the great loops of concrete serpent that draped across the ground. It was impossible to imagine why such a thing was needed, to comprehend just how many cars must have headed every day for just how many destinations.
How quickly they had moved. It took us weeks to walk from one end of a state to another. Weeks while we burned through our food. People died along the way.
We’d met our fair share of zombies along the way, but we’d seen no sign of other human beings. I’d been a little surprised we hadn’t seen any looter crews at work, though we stayed far from any developed areas and any structures big enough to be used as looter camps. As for real civilization, we gave the walled cities of Columbus and Dayton a very wide berth, knowing there was no point even trying to make contact with them. They were never going to let us in, not with the plus signs on our left hands, and at worst they might call in the army to keep us away. Indianapolis was another story, though. I spent a lot of time studying the maps, looking for a good way around. But the highway seemed to go right through the city, and I didn’t want to traipse around it through endless fields of overgrown vegetation, where any number of zombies might be hiding, waiting for us.
Luke, Ike, and I huddled over the road atlas, studying how to proceed. “Here are some surface roads that’ll take us around,” Ike pointed out, but I shook my head.
“Kylie and I tried that outside of Trenton. It didn’t go so well. These main highways are still in good shape, but the smaller roads have fallen to pieces and they’ll be cluttered with abandoned cars. And zombies love to make their nests in abandoned cars.”
“What about this ring road,” Luke said, pointing at Route 465, which joined up with other roads to make a rough circle around the city.
“That was my first thought,” I said, “but we don’t know how much of the city is walled off. If we can avoid it, I don’t want to get close enough that anyone even sees us.”
“A couple of us should scout ahead,” Ike suggested. “See how close we can get. I’ll go. It’ll be dangerous.” He couldn’t hide his excitement at the possibility. Ike would have preferred death to boredom, and our long trek had been pretty boring as far as he was concerned.
“I’ll go, too,” I said.
“Bad idea. We can’t afford to lose you,” Luke pointed out.
“So I’ll be careful. I can’t ask anyone else to go in my place. I won’t ask them to do something I wouldn’t.”
Maybe I was just starting to get bored myself.
So Ike and I headed out while the rest of the positives made camp, all of them excited and glad for a day off their feet.
Kylie saw me off with a deep, soulful kiss. Her eyes flashed with emotion now every time she looked at me. It was intoxicating. We’d come so far, and I’d gotten so used to her dead-eyed stares, that when she was alive with me now, no other woman could possibly compare. I wrapped my arms around her and held her close.
“If you don’t come back—” she said.
“You’ll be fine. I know this is scary for you, sending me off like this, but—”
She sighed and grabbed my lips to stop me from talking. “I was going to say if you don’t come back, I’ll take these people south and the long way around the city. You think I need you to keep me alive? Finn, I was surviving in the wilderness for years before you came along.”
I laughed and hugged her again. And then I headed west, with Ike, toward the big bad city.
Each of us had a shotgun now, looted from a hunters’ shop in a minimall in Ohio. I had my knife, and he had his cleaver. We carried enough food and boiled water for three days, and a blanket each. Nothing else. We wanted to travel light so we would make good time.
We were still about twenty miles out from the city, but we ate up the ground all that day. I’d forgotten how fast one or two people could move on their own, and how the five hundred positives had cut down that pace.
Ike and I said little as we hurried along. We saved our breath for walking. It was strange, though, the way we fell into the same rhythm, the same stride, without even trying. I often forgot in those days that he and I had grown up together. We’d become such different people, but in many ways we were still the kids who fished in the subway and climbed skyscrapers looking for canned food. It felt good to be working with him again, no matter what darkness he’d found in his soul or what I’d found in mine.
Then we stopped for lunch, and he shattered my mood beyond repair.
We had some sliced pig meat and boiled water. The best our tribe could provide. We ate in silence. I was raising a bite to my lips when he said out of the blue, “Finn, I don’t know where it is you’re headed. I don’t know what you’re looking for out here. But I know one thing. I’m not going there with you.”
I lowered the food. Suddenly it didn’t look edible.
“I need you,” I said. “We—the positives—need you.”
“No. Maybe at first . . .” He sighed and looked at me with such a desperate, longing glance I had to turn away. “I’m no good for what you’re trying to do. If things keep changing like they have been, eventually you’re going to have to exile me. Or kill me.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
He shrugged. He wasn’t looking at me anymore. We’d stopped under a copse of trees and he kept looking up into their branches, as if searching for the insects I could hear buzzing up there. The last cicadas of the year, probably. “Ever since I ran from New York, I’ve known one thing—I don’t believe in anything. I just don’t have it in me. I’m not living for anything. I don’t know why I’m living at all.”
“Come on,” I said. “That’s bullshit. That’s useless thinking.”
I threw my lunch into the undergrowth.
“Finn, I’m getting bored again. Helping people learn to hunt was okay. And fighting zombies is good. But boiling soybeans? Making laws? It just feels like death to me, to sit through all that crap. There’s something inside me—something maybe I don’t like so much. But it’s part of me. It is me. And it talks to me all the time. It says, ‘Why don’t you break something, just to see what happens?’ ‘Why don’t you start a fight, just for something to do?’ All these questions. All these ideas. I think, if I was born before the crisis, I would have been some kind of criminal. Th
ey would have had to lock me up. Now, out here, sometimes you need somebody violent. Somebody who isn’t afraid to fuck things up just for fun. But when you get where you’re going, I’m just going to be a liability.”
I had no idea what else to say. We sat and listened to the cicadas for a very, very long time, neither of us speaking, neither of us looking at the other.
When he did speak, I was so lost in thought I barely heard him.
“It was funny, huh, you and me finding each other again? After what happened? I mean, what are the odds I would get assigned to that camp?”
“About as good as the odds on me surviving long enough to get there,” I said.
He nodded and got to his feet. “You’re like the one thing in my life that didn’t completely suck,” he said.
“You’re going to make me cry,” I joked, though I wasn’t feeling very humorous.
“I said ‘completely.’ There’s plenty of times I wanted to kick your ass. Still do, kind of. Just on principle.” He laughed.
“You could try.”
He kicked at a fallen tree branch and sent it whirling off into the brush. “When I—when I took care of your mom, tell me something. Was I doing you a favor? Or was I hurting you?”
“Both,” I told him. We were past the point of lies.
“Uh-huh.” He picked up his pack and started back toward the road. I jogged after him. Clearly our lunch break was over. “When the time comes, I’ll just go,” he said. “I won’t take the time to say good-bye or let you talk me out of it.”
I did not reply.
We spent the rest of that day moving fast, staying clear of the highway in case it was being watched. On either side the green tides of overgrown fields shimmered and shook in the autumn sun, and their movement was hypnotic enough to keep me from thinking too much. I knew I didn’t want to think very much just then.
A couple hours later we saw the city up ahead of us.
CHAPTER 106
That land is so flat you can see for miles in any direction, but a strange trick of perception means things are constantly sneaking up on you. Indianapolis, before the crisis, must not have been a discrete city like New York. It wasn’t a tight knot of buildings with a clear border, but instead a sort of general increase in development. We started seeing buildings on the sides of the highway, big stores at first but then smaller houses and patches of parkland. Roads converged toward us, all headed in the same direction. In the distance we saw the spires of office buildings, shimmering in the heat haze. And then we saw the wall.
It must have been built during the crisis. Built in a hurry, but by people who still had access to powerful tools and an enormous pool of manpower. It stood across the road, an obstacle thirty feet high, built from stacked pyramids of old rusted shipping containers. The containers had been filled with construction debris—broken concrete, old bits of rebar, sand, gravel, whatever the engineers had on hand. To hold the containers together, chain-link fencing had been draped over them like a net, and then coil after coil of barbed wire was strung along the wall length-wise. It was ugly and dirt simple and bigger than it probably needed to be. It would have kept out an army of zombies forever.
Except then someone had come and blown a hole right through it.
Where the wall crossed the road it was broken wide open, the shipping containers torn apart like they were made of cardboard. The barbed wire had been peeled back until it stuck up in the air like frizzy hair.
The breach was wide enough to drive two SUVs through, side by side. The torn shipping containers in that hole were still streaked with soot, and a smell of harsh chemicals filled the air as we approached.
Ike and I had spent hours watching that hole, sure that someone must be guarding it. Whatever had happened here, the people of Indianapolis would want to fix it, we thought. That hole would make them paranoid. Anyone approaching that opening would be shot without warning.
So we moved in very slowly, very cautiously, looking for signs of snipers or land mines or any kind of defenders at all. And we kept not seeing them.
“Something’s wrong here,” I said when we were no more than a hundred yards from the breached wall. “I mean, a hole in a wall like that is wrong enough. But there’s something . . . worse. Something really bad going on here. I really wish I knew what it was.”
“One way to find out,” Ike said as he jumped up from our hiding spot. Before I could stop him he ran forward, straight toward that wall, waving his arms over his head. “I am not a zombie!” he shouted. “I am not a zombie!”
Nobody shot at him. Nobody shouted for him to turn back or get down or just fuck off. I didn’t see any heads pop up from concealment along the wall. I didn’t see anything moving anywhere, except for Ike.
He walked right up to the hole in the wall. Then he walked through.
“Jesus, Ike!” I said, jumping up from my own hiding spot. I ran after him, intending to grab him and pull him back, pull him out of there before the good people of Indianapolis figured out just what kind of horrible death he deserved.
But when I reached the wall and looked in through the breach, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. The people of Indianapolis weren’t going to kill Ike, because there weren’t any people in Indianapolis.
The place was deserted.
No. That isn’t the word. It had been sacked. Razed.
Inside the wall every building had been burned. Wooden structures were leveled, leaving only pits of ash and charred beams. Stone structures were black with soot, their insides gutted and left to collapse. I’d seen destruction on this level before, in Trenton, but there plant life had twenty years to climb over the ruins, softening the sharp edges, hiding the worst of the damage. This was like looking into a mouth full of broken teeth.
“We shouldn’t be here,” I said to Ike, but he was already hurrying forward, deeper into the city.
As reduced as it may have been, Trenton had not been uninhabited. Much to our chagrin, Kylie and I had seen what people living in a ruin were capable of. I was terrified that any moment someone would appear and start throwing rocks, and this time I didn’t have an SUV or a driver like Kylie to get me out of there. I couldn’t just leave Ike in there, however. I desperately wanted to take the shotgun off my shoulder and hold it in my hands, if only to reassure me, but I was worried if anyone saw me like that they would assume I was a looter looking for an easy score. So I kept my hands where they could be seen as I raced after Ike.
I needn’t have bothered being so cautious. Maybe Ike had already sensed it. Maybe, attuned as he was to death and destruction, he could sense that this place would not hurt him. More likely, he just didn’t care.
I followed him deep into the center of the city, where its buildings grew up straight and tall from the earth, too tall to be burned down. Someone had still tried—the lower stories of the office towers were blackened, their windows shattered. The destruction had a sort of haphazard quality there, though. Whereas the outlying buildings must have been systematically and methodically destroyed, here it looked like someone had sprayed fire indiscriminately, almost as an afterthought.
As I chased after Ike he took me right into the center of the city. The buildings fell away to reveal an enormous circular park. It must have been acres wide, surrounded by a broad street. Trees had filled that open area once, but they had been cut down to stumps long ago. Now the ground was open, surrounding a monument two hundred and fifty feet high. It had the form of a massive obelisk, almost as big, I thought, as the Statue of Liberty. At its top was a bronze statue that I could barely make out. It didn’t matter what the monument might have commemorated once. It had since been repurposed.
Up and down the length of the obelisk, someone with a lot of paint and plenty of time had created an image of a skeleton two hundred feet high. Some attempt had been made to give its rictus grin a cheer
ful expression, but that attempt had failed—it could not help but look sinister. Its bony hands beckoned us to come forward.
At the base of the obelisk were four square fountains, one on each side of the obelisk. It was here that we found the missing people of Indianapolis. Or at least we found their bones. They must have been piled in the fountains in great heaps, then doused in some kind of fuel and set alight. The skeletons in the fountains formed pyramids twice as high as a man, wider than some of the buildings around us. So many bodies, so many people . . . it staggered me, literally made me stumble as my knees failed me. The bones were blackened and broken, collapsing to ash as we watched. The stink was overpowering—not the stink of death, which I was used to. This was the stink of burning, and it was still so strong it made my eyes water.
“Oh, God, no,” I said. “Oh, no.”
There could be no doubt that whoever had done this—whatever mad army of zealots had burned an entire city’s people as a sacrifice to their god—worshipped the same deity as the death cultists from the camp. The little skeletons I’d seen, of wire and wood, of sculpted wax, of a dead man dragged out of an abandoned car—had just been tiny images of this two-hundred-foot icon. But where the cultists I’d known had been happy to bargain with lives that were already slipping away, the worshippers here had taken it further. So much further.
And they’d done it recently. The bodies I saw couldn’t have been lying in those fountains very long. There was still . . . meat on some of them. Charred meat that hadn’t been devoured by scavengers yet.
“Ike,” I said. “Ike. Come on, Ike.”
I wanted nothing but to get out of there. I’d never felt such a sensation of repulsion, of a desperate need to flee. But Ike just stood there, taking it all in. Studying it, memorizing every detail. Nodding, in something like appreciation.
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