by Joe McKinney
Jeff nodded.
“Yeah, he was cool. You know what he said about anarchy?”
“What?”
“He said, ‘As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.’ I’ll tell you what. I sat in my cell at Huntsville for nearly a year thinking about that. I’d be interested to hear what you think that means?”
“I have no idea.”
“Don’t want to play, huh? Well, I’ll tell you. See, people talk about liberty, and what they think they mean is the freedom to vote and shit like that. But that’s not what real liberty is. Not even a little bit. You see, liberty is the most personal thing a man has got. It’s like your soul. It’s something that belongs to each man as an individual. Ask any prisoner. He’ll tell you the same thing.”
Over at the gazebo, a sort of chant had gone up. Jeff could see Colin getting pushed up against the barbed wire, his hands forced inside the cage.
Colin looked like he was crying.
Gaines coughed once. He said, “Now think on this. Think what it would mean if every man achieved true liberty. True freedom. Every man is free to do as he wants, no laws, no religion, no obligations to anyone but his own desires and higher impulses. Can you imagine that? True liberty. That’s the root of anarchy right there. And that’s what them zombies represent. They are a means for the rest of us to achieve true liberty. They made me, Harvard, not the other way around.”
Jeff wanted to tell him that he was insane, but his tongue was feeling as thick as a shoe in his mouth. It was hard to breathe. He blinked, and when he opened his eyes the world seemed to be tilting on him.
“Got nothing to say, Harvard?”
With effort, Jeff shook his head.
“How about that acid? It startin’ to work yet?”
Jeff said nothing.
“Here, let me see your eyes.”
Gaines grabbed Jeff’s face and gave him a clinical once-over.
“Jesus, that’s some good shit your friend’s got. Look at those pupils. Man, you’re tripping hard. Okay, come on.”
He pulled Jeff toward the gazebo. Jeff resisted, or tried to, but nothing seemed to work right. He was dizzy, and every step sent a confusing flood of signals to his brain. Gaines let go of his arm for a second and it was enough to send him off balance. He staggered sideways, tried to right himself, but only managed to fall flat on his face.
The biker called out to some of the others and a moment later Jeff was being hauled up to his feet and carried over to the gazebo.
They parked him in front of the gate. Inside, the zombies were staggering around aimlessly. Off to Jeff’s right, Colin was trying to say something to him, but his voice was lost in the cheers and laughter of the crowd. The faces all around him were a blur.
Gaines appeared by his side.
“You ready for this, Harvard?”
Jeff grunted. He felt something forced into his hand and looked down and saw a knife there.
He blinked at it, unsure if it was real.
“Good luck, Harvard.”
The gate was thrown open in front of Jeff, and a moment later he was pushed inside. He landed face-first on the wooden floor. The knife skittered out of his hand. He reached for it, but his arm wouldn’t obey. It tingled, like it had fallen asleep.
A few feet away, the zombies began to moan.
CHAPTER 32
The morning after they buried Art Waller was cloudy and cool. The sun had just broken over the trees to the east and most of the sky was still a golden-gray. Smoke-colored rain clouds were moving in from the north. The breeze smelled vaguely sour, like garbage. People were already gathering outside their tents, getting ready for the day or talking to their neighbors.
There was a restlessness among the tents this morning that hadn’t been there before—or at least hadn’t been this noticeable. Billy Kline couldn’t exactly put his finger on it. He had seen enough fighting during his stays in the Sarasota County Jail to recognize the mute agitation and frustration that could eat up a crowd of people who had been too long contained. It was cabin fever fed by frustration and fear. That was close to what he was feeling now, but not quite.
Margaret O’Brien was by his side. Ed had sent the two of them out to the commissary to bring back supplies, but they never made it that far. Before they got to the clearing in front of the commissary tent, they heard the sounds of people yelling. They saw a commotion up ahead, people rushing forward to get a look.
“Billy,” Margaret said. She pointed to a crowd that had surrounded a small group of soldiers, who were blocking the entrance to the commissary. More people were streaming in from all directions. The soldiers looked anxious. Even from a distance, he could see them fingering their rifles nervously.
A large white rock flew from the crowd and struck one of the soldiers in the face.
A moment later, another rock arced through the air, and the crowd surged forward.
For a moment, it looked like they might overwhelm the soldiers at the entrance, but then Billy heard six distinct shots. The crowd stopped its forward surge, and the world seemed to grow perfectly still.
In the sudden silence after the shots, a voice shouted “Gas!” and a metal canister dropped into the crowd with a clank.
A thin jet of dark smoke rose up between the shocked crowd.
More canisters sailed through the air.
Then the people started shouting again. They ran in all directions. Rocks were thrown. More shots rang out.
“Oh, Jesus,” Margaret said.
Billy stood still, watching the commotion swirl around him. Already, he could feel the scratch in his throat from the gas.
“Run, Billy. For God’s sake, run!”
She grabbed him by the hand, and together they joined the flood of people running from the scene.
Ed and the others were waiting for them outside the tent. When he saw them coming, Ed rushed forward. “What happened?”
Margaret told him everything that had happened to them. “Ed, we have to get out of here.”
He turned to Julie Carnes. “Well?” he said.
Julie dropped down heavily onto a lawn chair. She looked much older than she had only a few days before, and though Ed felt for her, he knew there wasn’t time to coddle her. They had to do this, and do it quickly.
“Everybody get your things together,” he said. “Only what you can carry. Make sure you take all the food you can.”
“Ed,” Julie said. “How are we going to get out of here? We don’t have a car.”
“I’ve got an idea about that,” he said. He turned to Billy. “I keep coming back to you, son. You think you can help me steal a truck?”
Billy blinked at him.
Then he nodded.
With Ed in the lead, they made their way south of the camp, through a strip of pinewoods, and out the other side. Before them was a large, open, grassy field and a dirt road leading south. A pair of marines sat on the ground, sharing an orange. Behind them was a Humvee.
“That’s our ride,” Ed said to the others.
Julie looked at him, mouth open.
Beside him, Billy coughed gently. “Uh, Ed, I don’t think they’re gonna just let us take that thing.”
“I suspect they’ll listen to reason,” he said.
“Ed, what are you going to do?” Julie said.
He winked at her. “You guys just be ready to go. Billy, as soon as I give you the signal, you load everybody up and get us ready to move out.”
“Uh, okay. What’s the signal?”
Ed tipped the bill of his hat to Billy and said, “Just be ready, son.” Then he got to his feet and walked out of the cover of the trees and onto the grass. He walked straight over to the soldiers, smiling as he advanced.
“Hi, fellas,” he said.
The soldiers stared at him, but didn’t get up.
Still smiling, Ed reached under his shirt and pulled the pair of revolvers he’d tucked down into the small of his back. Before either soldier could react
, he fired a shot right between the legs of one of the soldiers and leveled the weapons at their faces.
“I guess that’s the signal,” Billy said.
“I think I hate that man,” Julie said.
They drove south till they reached Putney Avenue, then headed west to Newton Road and turned north. They passed along the western edge of Albany. The city was dead. They saw a few wrecked cars, and several looked like they’d been burned. And there were bodies in the road. Everywhere they looked, there were bodies. The smell of death was heavy on the air. Margaret pulled her grandchildren away from the windows, and they didn’t try to resist.
“Do you think it’s like this everywhere?” Julie said.
From the front passenger seat, Ed said, “I don’t know. But God, I hope not.”
“We ought to dump this thing as soon as we can,” Billy said. “They’ll be looking for it, and this isn’t exactly the most inconspicuous vehicle around.”
“Yeah,” Ed agreed. “Good point.”
“Ed, please,” Julie said. “Don’t stop here. Get away from this place before you try to find another vehicle.”
They passed a badly decomposed body that was swarming with flies.
Ed nodded. “Don’t worry. We won’t stop.”
They found a large white Ford Econoline van outside Roanoke, Alabama. After dumping the Humvee behind an abandoned gas station, they continued north on nearly deserted roads. By nightfall, they had crossed the border into Missouri and started looking for a place to spend the night.
They were near Marshfield when Billy pulled the van to the side of the road and pointed.
“Look there,” he said to Ed.
Off in the distance, some four hundred yards from the roadway, was a large red barn with a sloping metal roof where somebody had written:
GONE TO CEDAR RIVER
NATIONAL GRASSLAND
YOU SHOULD TOO IF YOU CAN
Ed smiled. “Looks like it was meant to be, huh?”
“Yeah, looks that way.”
From behind them, Julie said, “Ed?”
“Yeah?”
“Ed, are you really sure? Can we really do this?”
“Yes,” he said, and he meant it, too. He felt good about this. Seeing this sign here, it was a shot in the arm when he needed it most. “We can do this,” he said. “Absolutely, we can.”
They spent the night in an abandoned farmhouse. There was no food left in the pantry, none that hadn’t gone bad, anyway, but there was fresh water from a well out back, and they were able to combine that with the ramen noodles they’d taken with them from the camp and turn it into a passable meal.
Later, after everyone else had gone to sleep, Billy Kline walked outside and stood in a field of ripe wheat and looked up at the stars. He watched a meteor shower and took deep breaths of the cool night air. A lot had happened to him in a very short stretch of days, but he felt strangely good, as though he had shuffled off a large weight.
He was starting over, and for the first time in a very long while, he was thankful to be alive.
CHAPTER 33
Nate Royal lay on his bed in his cell and thought about running into daylight. The air conditioner churned noisily behind the walls, and a vent above his bed kept a steady chill blowing down on him. He shivered, drawing himself up into a ball. He tried to remember what it was like that morning in his sophomore year when he left that senior from Gatlin at the edge of the pinewoods and broke loose into the daylight of the homestretch, running like he’d never run before in his life. He thought about all that soft, gold daylight pouring down over him, filling his senses with the smell of pine.
But try as he might, he couldn’t hold the good thoughts. His body hurt. The wound on his left shoulder was throbbing constantly. The fingers of his left hand had a tendency to fall asleep if he didn’t keep them moving. The insides of his elbows were bruised up from all the injections they’d given him. And they had operated on him, too. That was what was hurting, he decided, not the bite. It was bandaged up now, but he had seen it the night before while one of the nurses was dressing it, and from what he could see, the original bite looked pretty well healed. It was whatever they had done to him that hurt so much.
Nate had lost track of time. The pain was part of it. So, too, was this cell they’d put him. There were no windows, no pictures on the wall. There was nothing but a sink near the foot of his bed and a small bathroom off to his right that didn’t have a door. They were careful not to talk around him. They didn’t leave magazines for him to look at, no TV, not even a radio to listen to. But the pain and the cell were only part of his hell. The main part was being stuck in his own head.
He forced himself to turn back to the plane ride that had brought him here. It hadn’t been a long one. Maybe longer than a movie, but not too much longer than that. They’d landed God knows where, though. It felt colder than in Pennsylvania; he’d been sure of that. The few people he saw had light Windbreakers on. Most were soldiers, though. They hadn’t allowed him a chance to look around. He’d been hustled inside a building, stripped, bathed, inspected, injected, interrogated.
“How were you injured?”
“I was bit.”
“By an infected individual?”
“A zombie, yeah.”
“What were you doing when you were attacked?”
“Just walking. Where am I? Who are you people?”
No answers, but lots more questions.
Later—he tried to remember how much later, but it was so hard to cut through the fog that had settled in his mind—they’d tried again.
“Do you have any allergies?”
“I don’t like dickheads in doctor’s outfits.”
“Tell me about your drug use.”
“Tell me if your mother takes it in the ass.”
They became less patient with him. He became more sullen, angrier, less cooperative. And the days began to turn to fog. He closed his eyes and opened them. The cell was the same as it always was. Too small. The bed was uncomfortable. Better than the cots at County, but just as small. He thought about taking a dump, but turned over in bed instead and looked away from the toilet. He couldn’t flush it himself. There was no handle. It just sort of flushed whenever it felt like it, he guessed. Or maybe they had a remote control somewhere. He’d taken a dump in it during his first day and felt bad about leaving his nasty steamer in there. Later, he woke from a nap and saw a guy in one of those white space-suits fishing the thing out of the pot. Somehow, it had made him feel even more deeply violated than any of the other things they’d done to him, all the questions and the injections and even the surgery, knowing that they were even digging into his poop. Jesus, he had thought.
Behind him, he heard the whoosh of the door and knew they were sending in another spacesuit. More injections. Maybe more questions.
He sighed and rolled over.
A white spacesuited figure set out a small metal plate with a syringe and three empty vials on it, each a different color.
“What are those for?”
“Can I have your left arm, please?”
“Sure. Tell me what those are for first.”
Nate was pretty sure he heard the figure inside the spacesuit let out a sigh of his own. But it could have been his imagination.
The spacesuit picked up the syringe and popped in one of the vials, a gray-topped one.
“Your arm, please.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Sir, your arm please. Do it now, or I will have a guard come in here and hold you down.”
It was an old threat, but one they’d made good on several times. And the guards were not good-humored about it, either.
Nate held out his arm.
“Your left arm, please.”
“Sorry,” Nate said.
He put his left arm across his belly, inside of the elbow pointed up. But when the spacesuit leaned in to stick him with the needle, Nate went on the attack. He brought his right hand up and
slapped the needle out of the spacesuit’s hands. Then he grabbed the loose knob of fabric at the top of the spacesuit’s head and tried to yank the damn thing off, though it was taped or Velcroed down tight and didn’t budge.
The spacesuit started to shriek like a little girl. He squirmed away from Nate and ran into the wall next to the toilet. He spun around, hands out like he was trying to ward off another blow, and began to back away.
For Nate, it was just like what had happened with Jessica Metcalfe at his van. He felt the same blind snap of rage, followed by the stunned shock as the spacesuit backed away from him. Had he really just done that? Jesus, the guy was really scared.
Nate began to laugh.
But a moment later, two guards came in and the laughter stopped. The spacesuit shrank from the room about as fast as he possibly could. The two guards—even though their faces were obscured behind the gold-tinted lenses of their space-suits—looked like they wanted nothing more than to drive Nate’s head through the wall.
And for a second, he was pretty sure they were about to do it.
Nate rolled out of bed and landed with it between him and the guards. They advanced on him. The little metal plate that spacesuit had brought the syringe and vials in was on the bed, and Nate picked it up and threw it at one of the guards.
It bounced off the guard’s forearm and clanged against the wall near the door.
Nate backed up farther, looking around for something to fight with.
The guards advanced on him again.
“Enough!”
The two guards stopped. Nate stopped. Behind them, a man was walking into the room. He didn’t wear a spacesuit. He was dressed in green hospital scrubs.
He said, “Enough. You guys wait for me outside.”
The guards hesitated.
“It’s okay,” the man said. He stepped aside and let the guards walk out the door. When they were gone, he pushed the door closed but not all the way. There was no handle, and Nate figured the guy didn’t want to be stuck without a way out if he needed one.