CHAPTER 107
Together we headed out of Indianapolis, eastward, back toward the camp of positives. Ike and I spoke even less on the way back than we had on the way out. When I got back, Kylie was waiting for me with open arms. I pushed her away—gently—because I didn’t want to be with her with the stink of Indianapolis still on my clothes and hair.
“We can go around, to the north,” I told Luke and Macky. “The ring roads are clear enough. I want to get as far past the city as I can, though, before we make camp again, so we’ll start first thing in the morning.” They must have seen something in my eyes, because they asked a lot of questions. I didn’t want to talk about what we’d seen. Eventually they stopped trying to pry it out of me. I didn’t want them to know. I didn’t want any of my people to see what I’d seen.
I did go and find the death cultists in my own camp. They weren’t doing anything objectionable that night. There were no sick people nearing death for them to pray over, no bargains to be made at that particular moment. They smiled and waved as I approached, though their cheer faded quickly when they saw the look in my eyes. “Where is it?” I asked. “Your idol. The skeleton.”
One of them pointed to a little tent off to the side, sheltered from the wind between two shopping carts. I pulled back the flap and looked inside. The skeleton was lying on a blanket, with another blanket rolled up as a pillow for it. Across its torso they’d laid garlands of wildflowers braided together into chains.
I grabbed the skeleton by its ankles and hauled it out of the tent. It flopped crazily as I dragged it out into the road, its lower jaw flapping back and forth as if it were making comical protests to this rude treatment.
I had brought a hammer with me. I took it from my belt now and used it to smash the thing to dust. I started with the skull and worked my way down. I felt a little bad for whoever it had belonged to, whoever it had been—they’d done nothing to deserve this; they’d just died in the crisis like so many others. But the skeleton had stopped being a person a long time ago. I shattered every bone of it, down to the tiny knuckle and toe bones, until it was nothing but fragments and yellowish-white powder.
The worshippers did nothing to stop me. They didn’t say a word, just stared at me openmouthed as I crushed their idol.
I was worried later that there might be repercussions. That they would try to kill me in my sleep, or that they might just gather themselves up and leave, head east or north or south, refuse to stay with me. But no one ever said a word to me, and no one did anything rash. It seemed like they were completely fine with me destroying their idol.
Especially since, within two days, they found a new one.
CHAPTER 108
Other than that, I pretended like nothing had happened. Like I hadn’t seen anything in Indianapolis. Like Ike hadn’t revealed anything to me there.
Maybe I watched him a little more closely. Maybe I worried.
I tried not to let on.
We kept moving, because that was what we did. We walked across Indiana as the nights grew colder. We walked through Illinois and into Iowa. It took longer and longer in the mornings for things to warm up, for the days to become bearable. Walking helped—it kept us warm—but it was tough getting going each day. We spent more time sheltered in abandoned big box stores and supermarkets, whether they held anything we could loot or not. Luke and Macky kept asking what we were going to do when winter came, and I didn’t have a good answer. Find somewhere to hunker down, I supposed. Macky insisted that we start stockpiling food, and I agreed that it was an excellent idea. We had learned by then how to smoke the meat of the wild pigs so it stayed edible for a long time. For every three cans of food we ate, we set one aside.
Most of the time I was all right. When I was with Kylie at night, everything was okay. In her arms I had peace and I could stop thinking for a while; I could just be with her, breathe her in. Kiss her skin and feel her relax, bit by bit. It was somewhere in that stretch of time that we found ourselves naked together, wrapped up in a blanket, kissing for hours until suddenly we were enmeshed more deeply than we’d ever been before, our bodies joined together, and I stopped, afraid, worried about what was happening, worried what it would do to her.
“It’s okay,” she said, though her entire body was tense. She forced herself to relax, to receive me. “Just—go slow. Adare was always in a rush. If you’re slow, and you keep kissing me, and you tell me you love me—”
“I love you,” I said, with no hesitation.
“If I say stop, you have to stop, okay?”
“Okay,” I told her.
“Okay. Okay. Okay.”
She didn’t say stop.
Afterward, she pulled away from me and threw her clothes on and ran out into the cold night, and I knew I shouldn’t follow her, even though I desperately wanted to. She went and slept alone that night, and for three nights after that. The fourth night she came back to the tent we shared, and we made love again. And that time she didn’t run away. She never ran away again, and she never told me to stop again.
She became a refuge for me, and I for her. A safe place, a haven in a dangerous world. I suppose that’s the story of every pair of lovers since the world began, but I also think that for every one of those lovers, the story was new. Different. What Kylie and I shared was sacred to me.
Which is not to say it made everything perfect. There were still constant problems to deal with. Fights broke out between various groups of positives. One man tried to steal food from our winter stores. We didn’t exile him, but the jury was split almost down the middle. So instead I put him in one of the hunting parties, even though he’d never gone out after the pigs before. It kept him away from the food stores, and it meant he would help replenish what he’d pilfered. Luke thought that was a good solution, though Macky thought we should have beaten him as well.
“No,” I said. “That was how things worked in the camp. We aren’t like that anymore. We aren’t those people anymore.”
“Then who are we?” he asked.
A lot of my people still thought of themselves as escapees. As people who had fled the intolerable conditions of the medical camp, but who were just biding their time until they could go home again. They thought of themselves as having a home, away from our little tribe.
Maybe, I thought. Maybe some of them would leave us, and go back and try to take up their old lives exactly where they’d left off. I knew I was never going back to New York. I asked Kylie and she said she couldn’t imagine going back, that she couldn’t even remember what Connecticut had been like.
The answer was in front of me, a puzzle I could solve. I had most of the pieces, but I never bothered to put them all together. But when the time came, it would seem like the most natural thing in the world.
“Seeds,” I said, one day. “We need seeds.”
Luke frowned at me. “The plants out here are already dying. It’s a little late to start gathering seeds. What are you thinking?”
“We need seeds. There will be some left. Soy seeds, corn seeds, wheat, tomatoes—lettuce and . . . turnips, potatoes. Anything we can find.”
“I don’t think potatoes even have seeds,” he told me.
“Find someone who does know. Get all my gardeners together. Ask them. Ask them how we can get seeds now. This is important.”
“But . . . why?” Luke and I were walking side by side, trudging along like we had been for many weeks. We didn’t even think about what our feet were doing anymore. We’d walked so far. “I guess you can eat seeds, but—”
“You plant them,” I said. As if he didn’t know that. “You plant them, and food just grows right up out of the ground.”
Ground. Just like that. I had it.
“We’re going to stop walking,” I told him. “We’re going to find a place. And we’re going to make it our own.”
CHAPTER 109
Easier said than done.
Finding the right place meant leaving the highway. The small towns we’d passed through on our march west had all been woefully inadequate to our needs—they tended to be spread out along the road, a couple of roads huddled around the wide open highway. We needed someplace compact, someplace we could fence in to keep the zombies out while we huddled down for the winter. We needed a place small enough to defend, big enough for five hundred of us, far enough away from the main highway that we would be safe from road pirates, close enough to a major abandoned urban area that if necessary, we could go out and loot for canned food when our smoked pig meat ran out. We needed a place that felt right, too.
And a place that wasn’t tainted by death.
Kylie and I typically went out with the scouting parties now, looking for a new home. I would have preferred to leave her back at the camp where she would have been safe, but she would have none of it—now that she’d come back to life, to herself, she insisted that she be part of every decision. I think she wanted to make sure I picked a place she liked. It was going to be her home, too, after all.
After my initial reticence, I was glad to have her along. It felt good to be with her out on the plains, out in that wide-open landscape. It was a strangely romantic landscape we covered. I will never forget those silent places where the wind blew in straight lines for hundreds of miles, where the moon rose so big on the horizon it looked like an arched portal into a silver world. The houses we saw with windows that hadn’t been opened in twenty years, and the way the first tentative fingers of wind would stir the ancient dust inside.
Having her along also meant I had someone there to share my horror when we found more evidence of the skeleton cult. Far too often when we chanced upon some likely little town, we had to turn back because we saw the grinning face of their icon writ large across the faces of the houses. I wouldn’t let my scouts go near these haunted places, for fear of what we might discover inside their silent buildings. It couldn’t be as big or as horrible as what had happened to Indianapolis, but even one sign of human sacrifice would be enough to scare my people. I wanted them inspired, not terrified.
The skeletons were a message, one I could read. The cult that killed Indianapolis wasn’t done. They were sweeping through the west, wreaking their havoc wherever they went. Whatever madness possessed them had not yet been sated.
We found a house sitting on a low rise of earth, standing up straight and square against the blue sky. The whole side of the house had been turned into a giant mural of a grinning skull. I didn’t like to look at it. Kylie hated the skeletons as much as I did. “These are the same people who took Heather,” she said. “They think the same way, just bigger.” A little of the old armor crept into her voice. The deadness, the place inside herself where she could retreat to keep away from the horrors.
Except now it seemed different. It seemed like she was in control of it, that she could put that armor on or take it off as she liked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know how the cult got into the medical camp.” I thought of Red Kate’s knife, the one with the skulls around the hilt, and realized for the first time the cult had already spread as far as the East Coast. “I don’t know how many of them there are or what they think they’re going to achieve. But it’s the idea that’s important to them. This idea you can placate death.”
“We’ll stay out of their way,” she said. “If we can. If not, we’ll show them they’re wrong.”
She was my strength when I was weak, and I was never more grateful for her than then.
It seemed, based on what I saw, that the skeleton cult was moving west. I took my scouting party south, thinking to get away from their influence, and also that we might end up somewhere with more mild winters. We found more skeletons painted on the barns and farmhouses down there. But we found something else as well.
CHAPTER 110
Five of us were in the scouting party—Kylie and myself, Macky, and two women named Archer and Strong, tough women who had been bosses back in the medical camp. We were all armed with guns and knives in case we ran across any zombies, though it seemed the skeleton cult had done a pretty good job of clearing those out wherever they went.
We ate up the ground. We must have walked thirty miles each day, but so far we’d found nothing—just endless stretches of farmland, none of it useful for our purposes. Either the places we found didn’t have enough buildings to house all five hundred of my positives, or they were too close to the highways. At least we saw fewer of the painted skeletons. That was something. It told me I was on the right track.
The year was growing old and the days shorter, and I had to call a stop earlier than I’d wanted that day, because it was getting dark and we were likely to stumble into a nest of zombies if we couldn’t see where we were going. In the last daylight, I climbed on top of a low rise to get an idea of what lay ahead. From there I could see an old farmhouse just off a decaying road, about a twenty-minute walk to the south, and I announced we would hole up there for the night. The others seemed happy to hear it. Up ahead, on the side of the road, stood a couple of abandoned cars. We would need to clear them out if there were any zombies inside, so I sent Strong and Archer forward to take a look.
I wasn’t expecting any trouble. We hadn’t seen a zombie all day. My shotgun was slung over my shoulder so it didn’t bang against my hip while I walked. I stopped well clear of the cars and took a drink of water from my bottle, then turned to hand it to Kylie.
As she reached for it, something exploded with a loud flat bang, and I was thrown backward, landing on the road surface on my shoulder. I looked up and saw a puff of black smoke rising from one of the cars. Archer was stumbling around in a circle, clutching her face. Bright blood covered one of her arms.
“What the hell just happened?” Macky demanded. He was down on the ground too, crawling on his belly.
“Archer’s hurt,” Kylie said, and she ran forward, toward the cars. I shouted at her to come back, to stay clear, but she wasn’t listening. I rose to a low crouch and ran after her, thinking I would grab her arm and pull her back.
When I was halfway there, the side of Archer’s head erupted. Blood and brains leapt out of her shattered skull in bright ribbons. She slumped over and fell down next to Strong, who tried to catch her as she fell.
Strong yelled something I couldn’t make out. Macky was still down on the ground, wriggling his way forward, his hunting rifle in his hands. I managed to grab Kylie—she had stopped running by then—and I turned her around, sent her hurrying back toward the others. I heard a rifle shot, and I thought Macky had fired his weapon, but it wasn’t him. A bright spot of blood appeared on Kylie’s shoulder. She didn’t cry out, but it didn’t matter. Someone was shooting at her. I grabbed her and shoved her down onto the road surface and covered her with my own body.
Just as another rifle round dug into the pavement, right next to my head.
“Sniper!” Strong kept bellowing. “Sniper!”
“Shut up,” Macky said, and took his shot.
And then—silence. Silence for way too long.
“Macky,” I called, when I couldn’t take it anymore, when I had to know what was going on. “Macky, what just happened?”
He came up behind me and yanked me to my feet. “Come on, boss. I know you don’t like fighting, but I don’t think we have a choice right now. I got that sniper, but there may be others inside.”
I looked down at Kylie, lying in the road. She was breathing heavily, and her face was pale. She didn’t make a sound, but I could see from her eyes that she was in pain.
I wrestled my shotgun around until I could hold it properly. I thought about the time, back in Adare’s SUV, when we’d been besieged by road pirates and I hadn’t fired a single shot. How I had exiled people from my tribe rather than executing them. I tho
ught about how much I hated killing. And I thought about how the stupid fuckers in the farmhouse had shot my Kylie, and how I would cut them to pieces with my own two hands.
“Come on,” I said, and ran toward the farmhouse.
“I’ll cover you,” Strong said, bringing her own rifle up.
I didn’t fucking care. I ran right up to the door of the house, Macky running along behind me saying something about finding cover, about being smart and taking this slow. I kicked in the door and shoved the barrel of my shotgun through, into the darkness inside.
A hatchet came down out of the shadows, aimed right at my head. I brought my shotgun up and yanked the trigger. The burst of light showed me a man with a very surprised look on his face crumpling to the floor.
A woman with a revolver came at me next, but Macky knocked her down with the butt of his rifle. We stormed inside the door and pressed our backs against the wall.
“Please, boss. Slow down,” he whispered.
I could feel my heart thudding in my chest. My adrenal glands told me to kill every person I saw. I forced myself to calm down—just a little. I lifted one finger and held it against my lips.
There were no lights on inside the house, but I could make out a few details. I saw a big front room with a staircase at its far end, stairs leading up to the second floor. I couldn’t hear any footsteps.
I pointed at the stairs. Macky moved forward slowly, careful not to make a sound, until he was standing directly below the stairs, his rifle aimed upward at the top of the steps. I moved around to one side until I could just see up the length of the stairs. If anyone came down from there, we would have them in a cross fire.
I saw something in the corner of my eye. I looked over and saw a stone fireplace set into one wall of the big room. The embers of a fire still burned there, shedding a little light on a skeleton idol about two feet tall. Maybe it was just the firelight, but it looked like there was blood on it.
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