by Joe McKinney
Here and there, sleepers sat up and looked around for the source of the whistling. The infected are predictable in some ways; other ways they’re not. You can always count on them to go after something living if they spot it. But you can’t always count on them spotting it. Or hearing it, either.
Barnes had to whistle himself hoarse before he had a good number of them getting to their feet. Then the moaning started. That did it. I’ve become convinced their moaning is a trigger, the way certain gestures or sounds from a lead mare will trigger a herd of horses to change direction or suddenly break into an earthshaking gallop. That moaning, I think, is a key means of communication among the infected. Not the same kind of communication as speech or writing, obviously. More instinctive. Come to where I am. Food here. That sort of thing.
When the moaning started, the zombies—about twenty in all—got to their feet and followed Barnes. Barnes, for his part, calmly walked to the barn where I was waiting. He walked so slowly there were several times I thought he was about to get knocked down, but he never did. He just kept walking into the barn. I heard noises from inside, and I tried to figure out what he was doing, but it was no use. The noises were too indistinct, and I was too scared.
I heard them gathering inside the barn. It took nearly twenty minutes to get them all inside, but I wasn’t aware that it had happened. The first notice I had was when Barnes ran up beside me—scared the ever-loving crap out of me, too—and yelled, “Slam it shut, slam it shut.” He put his shoulder into the door and together we slammed the thing shut.
He put a bar over the door and that was that. The field was clear, all except for a few that couldn’t move well enough to walk.
“We’ll take care of them in a bit,” he said. “For now, let’s go get one of them gas cans from the truck.”
“What are gonna do?” I asked.
“Burn ’em,” he said, matter-of-factly. “What the hell did you think I was gonna do?”
“That seems inhumane to burn them.”
“They’ll kill us or turn us if we give ’em a chance. So what’s inhumane about burning ’em?”
“Good point,” I said.
Most of us hate Officer Barnes. We think he’s a tyrant, insane, abnormally cruel. But there’s a reason we keep following him.
He does keep us alive.
Dialville, Texas: August 6th, 10:00 P.M.
From Alto over to Elkhart, then north to Palestine, east again over to Rusk. We’re all over the place.
I’m hot, thirsty, irritable. If I never see another pine tree in my whole entire life, it’ll be too soon.
Christ, will we never make it out of Texas?
Frankston, Texas: August 10th, 7:15 P.M.
We have plenty to eat. It may not all be good stuff, but there’s plenty of it, lots of junk food, stuff that doesn’t have to be refrigerated. None of us are going hungry.
Sandra Tellez has done a wonderful job getting people organized, keeping them fed. She is, I think, a natural leader. She speaks, and the others fall in line. No discussion, no second-guessing. Maybe they recognize that she survived this way for nearly two years. Who knows? But whatever that elusive quality of leadership is, she has it.
And that’s part of the reason why I’m troubled.
I came to Sandra with something I saw the other day. Jerald Stevens is hoarding food. I was suspicious when I first met him in Houston. I was concerned when I saw him eating that ten-pound turkey breast right after we escaped the quarantine zone. Now I know it’s true. I’ve seen him do it. He has pounds and pounds of candy bars and beef jerky and moldy old sandwiches and bags of chips and God knows what else stashed away in his pockets and under his shirt and even inside his pants.
The hoarding I can understand. That’s the kind of thing a man can get over—that is, once he sees there’s not a need for it anymore. But it’s not just the hoarding. He’s eating constantly, and it worries me.
The other day, I saw him eat an entire country ham. Have you ever seen a country ham? We’re talking fourteen to sixteen pounds of pork. He gnawed it down to the bone during one of our daily marches.
And then he ate dinner with the rest of us, had seconds, and ate a candy bar in his sleeping bag while the rest of us drifted off to sleep.
Sandra didn’t think it was that big of a deal. She gave me the line about them surviving off scraps in the quarantine zone. She said he would swing back to normal soon enough. Let him be, she said.
But I disagree. I don’t think this is a phase you grow out of, like wetting the bed or chewing your nails. I think this is a bona fide mental illness.
Barnes, of course, had his own opinion. “Fuck him,” he said. “If he wants to eat himself to death, more power to him.”
Carrell Springs, Texas: August 14th, 8:20 P.M.
Right at dusk—the sky on fire with copper and red and orange, the land a dark purple along the horizon—a miracle happened.
For days we’d been hearing infrequent broadcasts on the AM radio bands about Jasper Sewell and his Grasslands village. Our group was divided. Most wanted to head that way. A few others, Sandra and Officer Barnes among them—the two of them on the same page for once—didn’t want to go there. Not to be with some religious nut job, they said.
And then, right outside of Carrell Springs, all of us dripping with sweat, tired, barely able to hold our chins up as we walked the last few miles into another town whose streets stank of human carrion, we saw writing on the road. The letters were huge, painted in white.
They read:
Cedar River National
Grasslands
We are going there
You should too
We all stopped and looked at it. Nobody spoke for a long time. Finally, I walked forward and tugged on Officer Barnes’s sleeve.
“What do you think?” I said. “These people. They need a plan, a destination.”
I looked at Sandra.
She nodded.
After a long time, Barnes did, too.
CHAPTER 35
The cop was out in front, the zombie in the blue dress right behind him. Jeff grabbed the knife and staggered slowly to his feet. The world was swirling around him in a blur of faces and noise. He swayed drunkenly, unable to control his balance. A beer bottle smacked into the side of his head and caused him to rock back on his heels. A moment later, his arms were pinwheeling out of control as he fell back into the barbed wire.
A hand shoved him roughly back toward the center of the gazebo.
“Get in there and fight, you pussy!”
The floor was undulating beneath him. He stood there watching the approaching zombies, his shoulders slumped, his mouth hanging slack. His hands felt like they weighed a ton.
The cop was on him, but his hands were still handcuffed behind his back and all he could do was snap at Jeff with his teeth.
Jeff stepped to the side and pushed the cop to the wall, where he fell in a clumsy heap.
The zombie in the blue dress stepped around the fallen cop and reached for Jeff. Her right hand looked like it had been broken at some point after she turned, and the fingers hung uselessly from the hand like locks of hair. The top of her dress was torn away and hung about her waist, her white bra almost black with blood.
Jeff kicked at her and managed to land a blow right behind her knee that sent her to the ground. She grunted as she fell, but showed no signs of pain.
By the time she rose to her feet again, Jeff was scrambling for the cop. He was leaning against the barbed wire and couldn’t get back up without his hands. Jeff came up behind him and slammed the knife down into the side of his head with a wet-sounding smack.
The cop stopped moving almost immediately. Jeff still had his hand on the knife. He looked down at the blood seeping around the submerged blade and for a horrible moment he thought he could actually hear it pumping out of the wound. Everything fell away but that sound. Jeff was lost in it, shocked and thrilled and terrified by what he had just done.
> The zombie in the blue dress put her ruined hand on his arm and she felt cold.
He yanked his arm back and rolled away from her. She came after him, but the sound of the blood pumping out of the cop’s wound had done something to him, energized him. He could feel the drugs surging through him now. He jumped to his feet, ran around the zombie, and grabbed the hilt of the knife sticking from the side of the cop’s head.
He pulled at the knife, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Come on, damn it. Come on.”
He was straining with everything he had, but the knife still wouldn’t come loose.
A hand came through the barbed wire and shoved him away from the corpse. Jeff batted the hand away. Through the screen of wire, he could see one of the bikers laughing at him, taunting him. But Jeff couldn’t hear him. The man’s mouth was moving, his eyes bulging with drunken excitement, flecks of white spit flying off his lips, but there was no noise.
Behind Jeff, the zombie in the blue dress was groping for him.
He turned. He was trapped between her and the corpse and the wall of barbed wire. The biker was still shoving him back away from the wall. Jeff grabbed the man’s hand and pulled it inside the gazebo with him as the zombie in the blue dress brought her teeth down on the spot where Jeff’s shoulder had just been.
She got a mouthful of the biker’s wrist instead.
The man screamed, and the zombie, now focused on the man, slid off Jeff’s shoulder.
Jeff stood up just as the man managed to free himself. The zombie tried to force her head through the barbed wire, but somebody kicked her in the face and knocked her backward into the gazebo.
Jeff’s chest was heaving. He looked down at the zombie and knew he had to do something. Then his gaze fell on the bra across her back. The clasp was coming loose, held together now by a single hook. Before she had a chance to stand, he reached down and pulled the bra apart. She was struggling to stand up, and as she moved, he managed to get one strap of the bra free from her arm and pull it up sharply, looping it around her neck until it formed a tight garrote. He put his knee in her back and pushed her facedown onto the wooden floor and he held her that way until she stopped squirming. The muscles in his arms were screaming at him by the time he let go of the bra and stood up.
The air was full of shouting. The gazebo was spinning, the faces leering in at him were distorted, alien, and frightening.
Then Gaines was standing in the gazebo with him.
“Harvard,” he said. “Holy shit, man. That was awesome. Come on.”
Gaines pulled him out of the gazebo and into a roaring crowd. Men were pushing him, congratulating him, slapping him on the back.
The crowd zippered open in front of him. On the ground, looking pale and frightened and angry, was the man who’d been bit by the zombie in the blue dress. He was on his knees, his face wet with sweat, his arms covered in blood. His lips were trembling.
“Here you go,” Gaines said.
Once again Jeff felt something forced into his hand.
He looked down and saw a gun. He turned to Gaines, his expression one of complete confusion.
“Kill him,” Gaines said. “Ain’t got no choice. He’s gonna turn.”
The man on the ground tried to protest, but the others held him down.
“Do it,” Gaines said.
Jeff looked at the gun, then at Gaines. The crowd was shouting for him to do it. Jeff let his gaze sweep over their faces, and in the crowd he found Colin. Colin was a wreck, his eyes puffy with crying, and it occurred to him then that Colin was deathly afraid of the zombies. Everybody was afraid of zombies, but Colin was out of his head with fear. Jeff suddenly felt a rush of sympathy for him. And he understood why Colin had reacted the way he did back in Barstow. It made sense to him now.
“Come on, Harvard. We’re waiting.”
Jeff turned back to Gaines. “I don’t want to.”
“You started this, Harvard. Now you got to finish it.”
Jeff looked at the gun again. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t. That’s the thing about liberty, Gaines. Give it to a man, you never know what he’s going to do with it. That’s what you meant by anarchy, isn’t it?”
He raised the gun to Gaines’s face and pulled the trigger.
The hammer fell with a click, but there was no shot.
Gaines laughed at him.
Jeff pulled the trigger again, and again, but nothing happened.
Gaines reached out and took the gun from him.
“It’s empty, Harvard. I ain’t got no college degree, but I ain’t a fool. I just like to see my message getting through to a new generation.”
He holstered the gun in the waistband of his jeans and motioned to the others. Jeff stepped to one side as the bikers lifted their injured comrade from the grass and threw him into the gazebo with the two corpses.
“Keep an eye on him,” Gaines said. “As soon as he turns, throw that one in.” He motioned at Colin. “That little pussy’s been whimpering the whole time. Let’s see how he does.”
Colin let out a feeble, sickening cry.
Men pushed their way past Jeff as the bikers moved into position along the walls of the gazebo. Inside, the injured man was pleading with the others to help him, but all he got was a pelting of beer cans.
Jeff staggered toward Colin. He was guarded by three bikers, but as Jeff got close, two others stepped in front of him and held him back.
“Colin,” Jeff said.
He was about to tell him he knew what had happened back in Barstow. Somehow, it felt absolutely critical that he say his piece, that he told Colin he understood and didn’t blame him for it, that it wasn’t his fault.
But he never had the chance.
From somewhere behind him there was the sound of an explosion.
Jeff turned and saw a fireball rising into the darkening sky. A pickup truck was on fire, and men were rolling in the street next to it. Some of them were on fire.
A figure was running from the burning truck toward the bus.
Jeff squinted, and all at once he realized it was Robin. She ran for the bus, and he expected her to keep running, but she stopped at the door and took something from Katrina.
It was a bottle of Grey Goose with a rag hanging from the neck. Even from a distance, Jeff could see her lighting the rag on fire and he thought, My God. A Molotov cocktail. Robin, you crazy, wonderful, beautiful woman.
She threw the burning bottle at a crowd of men who had advanced on the bus and it exploded at their feet. Two men caught the main part of the splash of broken glass and burning alcohol, and they caught fire instantly. One of the men ran a few steps, fell, and rolled in the street, trying to put out the flames. The other was beating at his pant legs as he staggered toward the curb. Their screaming filled the square.
Robin threw another burning bottle, then slipped inside the bus with Katrina just as the rest of the bikers seemed to grasp what was happening. Like a wave, they ran for the bus.
One of the men guarding Jeff ran with them. Jeff wanted to throw a punch at the man holding him by the shoulder, but that tingling feeling was spreading down his arms again, and it felt like his hands were a million miles away. The world was moving around him in slow motion.
But he wasn’t frozen. He recognized the opportunity and threw an elbow into the crotch of the guard standing next to him.
The man doubled over with a gut-clearing rush of air, but before his partner could move in to help, Jeff scooped up the fallen guard’s gun from the ground, turned, and put a round into the second guard’s face.
The sound of the gunshot was lost in the larger roll of gunfire that had erupted at the bus. The bikers had tried to force their way into the door and found it jammed with something. Frustrated there, they had taken to shooting the vehicle with their shotguns and their pistols, and already a thick cloud of smoke was drifting into the square from that direction.
Jeff was lost in the swirl of noise and movement.
It was all happening so fast. Somewhere in the back of his head, he thought to himself that this was battle; he was in the midst of a battle. He saw men running, saw their faces distorted into howling masks of teeth and bulging eyes and rippling veins, and it just seemed so insane, so useless.
One of the bikers fired at him. Jeff dropped to a crouch and ran around the gazebo to the cattle truck where the bikers had locked up most of the zombies they’d captured. He scrambled up the ramp, pulled the truck’s back doors open, and jumped down into the grass. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a flash of blood-soaked, rotting faces leering out from inside the truck.
He got to his feet and ran.
Colin was leaning against the gazebo, his face fear stricken. A man with a huge black wound on the side of his face was staggering toward him, his hands outstretched, his eyes milky and vacant.
“Colin,” he shouted. “Come on. Move it.”
But Colin couldn’t move. His will was gone. He just stood there staring at the shambling wreck moving closer. Jeff ran for him. He shoved the zombie and knocked him to the ground, then grabbed Colin by the front of his oxford shirt and pulled him away from the gazebo. There was a black Chevy truck, one of the ones that had guided them into town, parked along the curb on the opposite side of the street, and they ran for it. No one bothered to stop them. Those who weren’t shooting up the bus had seen the advancing zombies and were rushing that way to fight them.
Gunfire rolled through the square. Men were running in every direction. Some were injured and screaming for help. Others were hollering for more ammunition. A few had taken off between the buildings and were running north into the residential part of town.
Jeff managed to get Colin into the cab of the truck and then climbed in after him. The keys were in the ignition, and Jeff thanked God for at least that one small mercy. The truck started up the first time, and Jeff wrestled with the stick shift to get it into gear. His little Honda Accord back home was a stick, but the truck was a more cantankerous vehicle and he had to grind the gears before it finally seated into first.