by Joe McKinney
“I’m out,” he said, and stepped back until he and Sandra and the woman and child were side by side.
The little girl whimpered into her mother’s shirt. Richardson reached back and put a hand on her shoulder. Sandra stepped forward and pushed one of the zombies to the ground, but there were just too many of them.
One zombie, a woman in a yellow dress dotted with tiny red flowers, staggered forward over the one Sandra had pushed to the ground. Richardson tensed, his hands up against his chest, ready to sidestep the zombie’s grasp and push it down to the ground.
But he didn’t get the chance. A shot rang out, and the next moment the zombie’s head snapped violently to one side and it sank to the grass, immobile.
Another shot, and another, and another.
They were coming in rapid succession now. Richardson looked up to see Barnes moving across the street in a tactical crouch, his AR-15 tucked up tightly against his cheek as he moved. Barnes fired through his magazine, ejected it, slammed in another, and went on firing. When he was done shooting, and the echoes of his shots faded into silence, there were bodies everywhere. Most of them nearly headless.
The crowd stood watching him.
Barnes surveyed the mess without expression. Watching him, Richardson remembered the reputation the Texas Rangers acquired during their outlaw hunting days in the Old West. Tireless, unforgiving, a law unto themselves.
Barnes used the barrel of his AR-15 to turn over the corpse of a zombie who was facedown in the street. He stared at it, and he seemed to be deep in thought.
Then, suddenly, he stepped over the body and said, “Everybody back in the vehicles. Let’s go, people. Move it.”
Richardson walked Sandra and Clint back to their bus. Barnes was there, AR-15 cradled in his arm like a baby, watching the crowd as they got on.
Ahead of Sandra, a young man and a woman who was evidently his wife or girlfriend were getting on the bus. The woman climbed on, but as the man was about to follow her, Barnes grabbed the man by the back of his shirt and threw him down onto the pavement.
“What the hell?” the man said. He was on his back, staring up at Barnes.
“You,” Barnes said. “Stand up. Move over there.”
“What are you doing?” the woman said. “Leave him alone.”
Barnes ignored her.
“Get up,” he said.
The man didn’t move. Barnes reached into his Windbreaker and pulled his pistol. A few people screamed. Others scrambled out of the way.
“Wait!” the man said. “Wait!”
Barnes leveled his weapon at the man and fired three times, twice to the body, once to the head.
The man collapsed onto the pavement, glassy, sightless eyes pointing up at the portico roof above him, and lay still. Blood trickled out of the wound in his forehead and down the side of his face.
“No!” the woman behind Barnes screamed. “No!”
Richardson couldn’t believe it. He stared from the corpse to Barnes, too shocked to even ask why.
Barnes holstered his weapon, then took a lock blade knife from his pocket and snapped it open. He knelt by the corpse and cut the man’s shirtsleeve open all the way to the shoulder. The fabric fell away, revealing a nasty bite wound just above the elbow. It was already starting to darken to an angry reddish-black.
The crowd gasped.
Barnes looked at Richardson. “You didn’t notice he rolled his sleeves down?”
The woman from the bus pushed her way through them and rushed to the fallen man’s side. She was crying when Richardson turned away.
“He had his sleeves rolled up when he got off the bus,” Barnes said. “They’re down now.”
“Are you serious?” Sandra said. “You just killed a man for rolling his sleeves down?”
“I just killed a man who was gonna bring that virus onto that bus. He didn’t give a damn that he was gonna infect everyone else onboard. I just saved your ass.”
“But you weren’t sure. You killed him without knowing he was infected.”
“I was sure enough.”
“Sure enough? Do you hear yourself?”
“Lady, I told you, this is about survival. I told him to stand up and move away from the crowd. He didn’t do it.”
“You didn’t give him a chance.”
“Fuck that, lady. You do what you’re told the first time or you get fucked. I don’t give second chances. I don’t play games with my survival. You hear that, lady? All of you, listen up. If you want to survive, you do what I tell you to do. You don’t ask questions, and you don’t make me tell you twice. I will get you through this. If you’re too scared to act, then I’ll let you die. If you’re too stupid to do what needs to be done to survive, then I’ll let you die. There’s no place here for sentimentality. If you don’t like it, go off on your own. Good fucking riddance to you. But if you want to live, you stay with me, and you do as you’re fucking told. That’s it.”
He looked around the crowd, searching their faces for anybody who would dare to challenge him. Everyone, even Sandra Tellez, stared at the ground.
“Fine,” he said. To Richardson he said, “Get them on board. I’ll be in the truck.”
CHAPTER 28
Every time she wanted to quit, just fall over in the ditch and die, some indefatigable love of life, like an ember deep inside a pile of ashes, made her go on.
Kyra had been walking for two days in the desert heat without water, without shade. The heat from the road was melting the soles of her sneakers. She could hear them peeling away with every step. Her lips had burst open. She felt faint, couldn’t concentrate. Very likely, she was going to die out here. She knew that. If one of the infected didn’t get her, the heat and the dehydration and the sunstroke would. But either way, she was going to die on her feet, fighting it.
She owed herself that much, at least.
They stopped on the side of IH-10 a few miles east of Allamore, Texas, because the bus was overheating again. They all needed bathroom breaks. Somebody—Jeff was pretty sure it was Colin—had clogged up the toilet beyond repair, and now they couldn’t flush it. They couldn’t clear the line either, and the inside of the bus had started to take on a sickeningly sweet sewage smell. Driving through the Arizona and New Mexico and West Texas heat with that smell had been unbearable—and that was before the bus’s air conditioner started to sputter. He was dreading getting back on board.
“Man,” Colin said, “you’d think driving cross-country with a bus full of fuck dolls would be about as much fun as a man could have. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m about ready for this trip to be over.”
Jeff looked back at the bus, and though he hated to admit it, he agreed with Colin. He found himself wanting to run again, wanting to leave the bus and Robin far behind him, just like he’d left Colorado far behind in the ruins of the not so distant past. He’d never thought of himself as a runner, but it sure as hell looked like that’s what he was becoming.
“You think we’ll be able to get that air-conditioning working right?” Colin asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “if we meet somebody who knows how to fix it. I know I can’t, and you can’t either.”
“That bus is a piece of shit.”
Jeff ignored that. It wouldn’t do any good to remind Colin that it was in the shape it was in because he had lost his mind back in Barstow. Colin still hadn’t owned up to that.
Jeff turned back to the figure coming toward them on the road. It was a girl, staggering, arms and legs lurching out of control, one of the infected. He adjusted his cheek against the rifle.
But he didn’t fire.
A long moment went by.
Colin said, “You gonna shoot her or what?”
“Yeah, yeah. Give me a second.”
They had set up on a blanket on the shoulder of the road and were on their bellies with a rifle they’d found in a gas station on their way through Arizona. Jeff looked through the scope and sighted the crosshairs on
the girl’s face, right along the crease between her nose and her upper lip. He had never paid much attention to the public service announcements about the infected, but he’d read the book One Shot, One Kill: The Story of Marine Scout-Sniper Carlos Hathcock, and he knew the magic point on the face that snipers called the kill spot—put a bullet dead center right below the nose and the medulla oblongata goes blasting out the back of the head in a pink spray the size of a beach ball. The person dies before their body hits the ground.
Through the scope, her skin looked blistered and cracked, a lifeless gray. Her mouth hung open, her eyes looked milky and empty. He focused on his breathing, thinking about Carlos Hathcock’s credo. Control your breathing. Squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it. Let the gun surprise you when it goes off.
But he didn’t fire.
He looked up, wiped the sweat from his eyes, looked through the scope again.
“What’s wrong?” Colin asked.
“I don’t know. She doesn’t look right.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got the binoculars. Look for yourself.”
Colin picked up the binoculars and pointed them at the girl. “Looks like a fucking zombie to me. You want me to shoot her?”
“No, I don’t.”
Then Jeff stood up and yelled at the girl.
“Hey, what the fuck?” Colin said.
“Shut up,” Jeff said.
The girl stopped in her tracks. She turned away, startled, then stopped. She was looking off across the desert. Not anywhere near where they were standing.
“Over here,” Jeff said to her.
The girl turned partially in their direction. He waved his hands over his head, and yet she gave no sign that she saw him. She looked startled, disoriented, even terrified, like she would turn and run the other way if she could.
“Fucking zombie, huh?”
Colin shrugged. “Hey, what can I say? She looked like one to me.”
“Yeah, well, she’s not. Come on, let’s go see if we can help her.”
She heard them approaching. She stood very straight, very still, her head and shoulders turned away from them. To Jeff, it looked like she was set to run away, though he doubted she could make it very far in her condition. And besides, if she ran in the direction she was pointed, she’d go straight into a shallow ditch at the edge of the road.
He said, “Miss, are you okay?”
She flinched at the sound of his voice. Stiffened, if that was possible, even more than she already was.
Jeff held out a hand to her.
“It’s okay,” he said. “We won’t hurt you.”
She half stepped, half staggered away from him.
“Holy shit,” Colin said. “She’s fucking blind.”
Jeff glanced at Colin. He was shocked he hadn’t noticed that. But now that Colin said it, it was obvious.
“Are you hurt?” Jeff asked her.
She shook her head.
“Can you speak?”
She looked indignant. She opened her mouth to speak and tried to speak, but only managed a feeble cough.
“That’s all right,” Jeff said. He took a step toward her. She took a step back. “It’s okay. I won’t hurt you, I promise. Are you hurt anywhere?”
“Dude, she’s fucking dehydrated.”
“Is it…okay if I come closer?” Jeff asked her.
She stiffened again but finally nodded.
“I promise I won’t hurt you. My name is Jeff Stavers. This is Colin Wyndham. We have a bus over here. We’ve got food and water.”
He held out his hand to her.
“My hand’s right in front of you. Is it okay if I help you to the bus?”
She nodded, and slowly, he took her hand and guided her along. He put an arm around her shoulder and he could feel her trembling. It was a hundred and ten degrees out here, and she was trembling.
He looked around. There was nothing but desert around them. He could see to the horizon in every direction, and there wasn’t even a tree for shade. Nothing but rocks and blowing sand and a constant wind that whipped about his ears and left his skin dry and chapped.
Jesus, he thought. What’s she been through? Blind. In the desert.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
He heard a mumbled whisper and leaned closer.
“Kyra Talbot,” she said.
Jeff got onto the bus first, turned, and took Kyra from Colin. They had to carry her up the stairs, but she was lightly built, and it wasn’t hard to lift her. Once they got her steady in the center aisle of the bus, Jeff kept his arm around her, whispering softly to her about what he was doing and where he was taking her. She let him guide her without resistance and without saying another word.
Robin was reading a magazine on one of the couches back near the bar. Katrina—that was Katrina Cummz’s real first name, apparently, Katrina Morgan—had filled the sink with water and was washing a shirt. The two blondes, Sarah and Tara, were sitting at an open window in the back, passing a joint back and forth and blowing the smoke out a crack in the window. It reminded Jeff of the way he and Colin had done it in their apartment back in school.
As soon as they came through the partition, Robin and the others looked up. Robin’s face went from tired indifference to sudden concern, and she jumped to her feet.
“What happened?” she asked Jeff.
“We found her wandering the road,” Jeff said. “Her name’s Kyra Talbot.”
Robin looked the girl over. Jeff watched her critical eye sweep the girl’s features, her blistered and cracked lips, her dirty, mottled skin, her rheumy, vacant eyes, and he knew exactly what she was thinking as she suddenly backed away.
“She’s not infected,” Jeff said. Then, just mouthing the words, he said, “She’s blind.”
“I can hear you when you do that,” Kyra said. The words came out in a hoarse whisper broken by a ragged, phlegmy cough, but they were clear enough. Robin smiled, and the smile lingered as she caught Jeff’s eye. A quick thrill went through him.
“She’s dehydrated,” Robin said.
“Yeah.”
“Kyra?” she said. “Sweetie, my name’s Robin. I’m going to sit you down over here and get you some water, okay?”
Kyra nodded, and Robin took the girl by the shoulders and led her away.
CHAPTER 29
Mark Kellogg stood with Jim Budlong on a hastily constructed runway, watching a C-130 taking off for Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Over the last two days, the situation in Pennsylvania had gone from bad to just plain catastrophic. It was like San Antonio all over again. Every bit as fucked up. The civilian population was past the point of saving. The federal government’s response had been orchestrated with their usual day-late-and-a-dollar-short philosophy toward disaster mitigation. They’d come into the area with the idea that moving real-life people out of harm’s way was as simple as moving armies on a Risk board, and now there were thousands dead, and tens of thousands had been infected because they couldn’t be evacuated from affected areas in time.
The Department of Homeland Security stepped in and took the lead on the evacuation process, and as usual they completely misjudged what the people on the ground would actually need. They brought in hundreds of work trucks from neighboring towns to help restore electrical power in the area, but they had yet to deliver even one-tenth of the buses they had promised to help get people out of the hot zone. They delivered thousands of cots and tents and bottles of water, but they had assumed a static relocation of the population and made no provision for moving all those supplies a second or a third time when the battle lines changed, and the infected appeared in areas that Homeland Security assumed would remain safe. There were at least fifteen Katrina-style evacuation villages in the area, all of them now crawling with the infected, the supplies dumped there useless. The military was forced to step in and fill Homeland Security’s shortcomings, and that had stretched their limited resources way beyond the breaking poin
t. He could see it in the faces of the soldiers standing guard all around them. Some, he guessed, hadn’t slept in the last two days.
Kellogg shook his head in disgust and wondered how many times they had to make the same mistakes before they finally grew some sense.
“This is your boy’s flight here,” Budlong said. He gave him a knock on the shoulder and pointed at a C-130 lumbering down the dirt runway. The plane bounced and kicked up a huge tail of gray dust, and then it was airborne, on its way to Minot with the rest of their team and their test subjects.
Kellogg wasn’t thrilled about relocating to Minot. It was the home of the 5th Medical Wing, but it didn’t have a medical facility of the sort they were going to need. Everything would have to be flown in and set up right off the C-130s, and if what had happened in San Antonio and again here in Pennsylvania were any indications, they were fighting a losing battle. The only good news about going to Minot was the seclusion it offered. Set in the middle of the North Dakota prairie, it was a thousand miles from nowhere. At least they’d be able to work in peace.
Nate Royal’s plane banked hard left and inched across a cloud-filled sky that was still laced with gray from the hard rains of the previous week. He still hadn’t shown any signs of depersonalization, and though Kellogg had no idea why that was, he was thrilled.
“That one is gonna be the key to this, Jim.”
“I certainly hope you’re right,” Budlong said. The two watched the plane lumber away until it was just a dark, indistinct speck in the distance. “God, Mark, I’m so worn out.”
“I don’t doubt it. You haven’t slept in, what, the last thirty-six hours?”
“When have I had time? The damn phone won’t stop ringing. They scream at me for a cure and then they won’t let me off the damn phone long enough to go find it. Everybody’s got to make sure I know how committed they are to getting this very important project successfully resolved.”