“I don’t need an escort.”
The man’s name was Malachi DeMott and he certainly didn’t like the look of this person in front of him. They had been told to keep an eye out for anything suspicious and this guy was as scruffy and ripped up as anyone Malachi had ever met. Even in a world with zombies, no one looked like this guy. “Maybe you don’t think you need an escort, but I think maybe you do. You got a gun?”
Deckard lifted his arms. His shirt and pants weren’t just torn but singed as well. There was no place to hide a gun.
Malachi gave him a closer look and even gave him a sniff. “We heard a rumor that someone tried to escape the Zone in a balloon, like one of them hot air ones. They said it got shot down.”
Deckard only stared at the young man, not saying anything.
“Would you happen to know anything about that?” Malachi asked, his finger slipping into the trigger guard. “I ask because you smell like one of them gas fires. You know like the ones people use for barbecues? They use them for balloons too, I bet.” He started nodding to himself as if coming to some realization. “Maybe you should put your hands up in the air.”
Slowly, Deckard lifted his hands to shoulder height. “Sure, but I wouldn’t shoot if I were you, especially if you think I was in the Zone. Blood spray could infect everyone around here. Is that what you want?” The people in the clearing were suddenly all ears. They sat up, looking nervous.
The young man was a cool customer and only lifted a shoulder. “I could kill you further out in the forest, away from everyone.”
“Where the birds would get at my body and then fly here or there infecting everything? I think it would be best if you just let me talk to whoever’s in charge. It’ll be safer for everyone.”
The two were silent, appraising each other. Another man, this one older with a paunch and wrinkles in a net around his eyes, eased away from the clearing, moving in a half-circle, looking ready to bolt out of there if Deckard so much as twitched. “I could get her for you, Malachi.”
Malachi shook his head and then pointed Deckard on toward the trail with the tip of his rifle. He didn’t follow close behind; he gave Deckard a good ten-foot lead, plenty of room to shoot and probably not get infected. The two followed a well-worn path that led through the forest to a grouping of pop-up tents, all of which were nylon and surprisingly brightly colored.
These were store-bought tents and around them, for the most part, were civilians, the twenty-first century equivalent of the Minute Men. Centered around one of the larger, family-sized tents was a hum of conversation. It sounded to Deckard as if there were ten conversations going on at once. It would be the communications tent and next to it, more than likely, would be the C.O.’s tent.
Both tents were flung open and in the C.O.s tent was Rebecca Vance, a woman who looked far older than her twenty-six years. Two days without sleep, no make-up, and the weight of responsibility crushing down could do that to a person. She was currently eating part of an MRE that she had saved from the day before; their food situation was nearly as dire as their ammo problems.
“Stop right there, mister,” Malachi said to Deckard. He then called to Rebecca from thirty feet away. “Excuse me, ma’am? I think you might want to see this.”
She turned and gazed at Deckard, and all the while she chewed her food like a bunny might, her teeth going up and down like thirty-two little white jigsaws. Just watching her made Deckard’s stomach growl.
He didn’t bother waiting for the questions to come. “I came out of the Zone in a hot air balloon a few hours ago.” She didn’t look surprised. She looked too tired to react as she would have done just four days before.
“And you want me to shoot you in the head?” Rebecca asked. There was no attempt at humor or bluster in the question. She had asked it honestly.
“No, thank you. What I need is to get back into the Zone.” This perked her up, but not so much that she was going to stop eating. She grunted for him to go on. No one made such a bald statement without explanation. “There is a scientist that we were trying to help escape from the Zone, but she got cut off and we were forced to leave her behind. It was a mistake. She is vital to finding a cure and, for the sake of humanity, I have to go back for her.”
Rebecca continued her bunny-like mastications, saying only, “That’s nice.”
Astonished Deckard and Malachi shared a look before he turned back to Rebecca. “Nice? That’s…that’s all you have to say? I just told you that the cure for this plague is right on the other side of your lines and all you say is: that’s nice?”
“Actually, what you said is: She is vital to finding a cure. That’s not the same thing as having a cure, is it?” When Deckard could only splutter, Rebecca followed up by saying, “If you had the cure, you would have led with that. Not that I would have believed you. Unless you have some proof; do you have any?” His eyes narrowing was his only answer and she said, “Of course you don’t. So, is she cute?”
“Very.”
She grinned at this and the years seemed to fall away. “Love is a very powerful motivator. It also makes us do the stupidest things. You have my permission to go into the Zone if you wish, however, I can’t let you come back, no matter how cute she is.”
It was the most Deckard could have hoped for, though he had to try for a little more. “I understand, thank you. Just one other thing, do you have an extra gun?” Rebecca shook her head and took another bite, the years sliding back on once again.
“We don’t have a lot in the way of ammo or guns,” Malachi said, as he escorted Deckard to a quiet section of the line where the land had been folded into a series of steep, treeless hills.
They paused on the top of the last hill. “I’d shake your hand,” Malachi said, and then shrugged. Deckard settled for a friendly wave before plunging down the slope. In seconds, he was at the bottom. He took the next hill at an angle and when he reached the crest, he crouched next to a tree. There were zombies in the ravine sixty feet below.
The sight of them drained him in a way he wasn’t expecting, and for a moment, he looked back across to the ridge line where Malachi and a few others were watching. Just then they weren’t citizens or soldiers, they were just people and he was one of them…except he wasn’t. He was an outcast, a voluntary one this time. There was no going back.
But he didn’t want to go back, at least not just then and not alone. After a long breath, he ran down the hill, heading to a copse of trees where the zombies were fewest in number. It was still early morning and the sun had yet to penetrate into the ravine where the shadows were puddled and he was among the beasts before they knew it.
Then he was past them and chugging uphill with a hundred or so hot after him. He didn’t bother looking back. His concentration was fully on his feet as he ran, putting miles between him and the line. The zombies fell further and further back, but there were always more of them, constantly coming out of the woods or from behind barns, or just loitering like perpetual vagabonds.
Deckard ran on and on, the soft hiking boots he had picked out the day before in Gamet Corner were easy on his feet and with all the holes in his shirt and jeans keeping him cool, the jog was a piece of cake. He was still running easily when the high school came into view. Only then did his chest tighten.
The football field was empty as he had expected, but so too was the school. There was no sign of Thuy anywhere.
Chapter 7
1– 6:21 a.m.
—The Taconic Valley, New York
Thuy drove the RAV4, noting landmarks, watching signs, counting mile markers. She hated that they were going southeast. They were going deeper into the Zone and with every minute that passed, the edges of it were growing: east into Rhode Island, south into Jersey and Philadelphia, and west, as the Pennsylvania National Guard slowly retreated to the Susquehanna River, where thousands of civilians were preparing defenses in depth.
Only in the north had the zombies been stopped completely. The lines hadn’
t budged more than an inch in the last thirty hours.
“Kinda quiet out here,” Jerry said, sitting back and tipping a bottle of Fireball to his lips. As it was cinnamon flavored, he thought it mimicked the smell of having just brushed his teeth. It did not. “I like it. It’s nice and peaceful.”
It was an odd thing to say as they passed groups of zombies shambling about in packs of two or three or fifty while, scattered here and there were decaying corpses and cars with smashed-in windows. Above them was the constant rumble and roar of jets. In Thuy’s mind, this was the opposite of peaceful. It was her version of hell.
“I guess I’m not seeing what’s peaceful about any of this,” Thuy said.
He tipped back the Fireball, enjoying the warmth in his gut and the heat in his loins. “I don’t know, I guess I just like it. You know it being just the two of us out here. Kinda feels like we’re the last two people on earth.”
The thought sent a shiver down her back. Had she been in this same situation a month before, she would have aimed the RAV4 straight for a tree and taken her chances with a head-on collision. She couldn’t do that when her world was infested with zombies. The first rule of zombies was that there were always more of them around than it seemed.
“Where exactly are we going, Mister…”
“To my house and it’s Jerry. Just Jerry. Mister Weir is what the kids call me.” That wasn’t true. They didn’t call him anything. For the most part, when he went about the school with his bucket and mop, he was a total nonentity. Eight hundred kids a day swept right on past without looking him in the eye or even acknowledging him in any way. If there was a spill, or if he was parked in front of a locker and he had to be addressed, it was always the same: Hey, as in “Hey, Mrs. Stephens needs you to unclog a toilet,” or, “Hey, can you move your mop bucket? The smell is nauseating, God.”
When he thought about it, Jerry was glad all those kids were dead. “Yeah,” he whispered, taking another slug. As he brought the bottle back to rest on his gut, he saw a sign with an arrow: The Greens. He sneered. The Greens was the name of a posh country club where all the high-box bitches pranced about in their short tennis skirts and never worked a day in their lives. Just the thought of them nearly upset the fine mellow the Fireball was giving him, but then he had a better thought: how many of them high-box bitches and their richy-rich husbands were now dead? And how many of them mansions were just sitting empty ready for a new occupant to take over?
He glanced over at Thuy, leering as he did. She was probably one of them high-box bitches. In fact… “You said you was one them doctors, didn’t you?”
“I have a Ph.D, yes.”
She would fit right in. She probably had two mansions. That’s how it was with doctors. They charged a man a million dollars just to save his life and you gotta pay it because what else can you do? Are you just gonna die? No, and that’s why they are all rich and why he wasn’t nothing but a janitor cleaning up the diarrhea speckles out of the boys’ stalls every living-fucking day.
A cruel laugh escaped him. He’d been about to have her turn back for The Greens, but he had a better idea. It had been never since he had cleaned his own toilet. It looked as though a water buffalo with a case of the runs had been using that toilet for the last twenty years. And holy fuck, did it stink. What would this high-box bitch think of that toilet?
He’d fuck her. He’d fuck her brains out and then he’d make her clean that toilet. “She’s gonna need a chisel,” he said and then cackled.
Thuy looked at him out of the corner of her eye. That cackle was a mean thing. It didn’t bode well. She began to get a worse feeling in her stomach. Her stomach had been squirrelly ever since Jerry’s thumping bat had woken her in the dark.
“Turn here,” he said, pointing at a crumbling run of asphalt that had probably been laid out thirty years before and hadn’t been resurfaced or even touched since. There were potholes and frequently the shoulder was bumped up by roots that were on the verge of erupting. Around them was scrub forest strung up with barbed wire that had rusting No Trespassing signs placed every hundred yards or so.
She began to regret having put on her seat belt. In those first few seconds with the zombies bashing her windows and Jerry screaming at her to drive, putting on the seatbelt had been the only automatic thing she had been able to accomplish. Everything else had come slowly to her as if she had never seen a steering wheel before.
Slowly, she dropped her hand down to the latch release button, but then Jerry shifted his bulk in the seat and she pulled it back.
“You gonna like my place,” he said, breathing his sickly-sweet whiskey breath on her. “It has a very lived-in feel. You’ll feel like you’re at home. Turn here.”
She actually planned on running the second they drove up to whatever crappy little house they came to. She expected it to be bad, but the mobile home was a shithole. It sat leaned back on its foundation so that there was a gap of about a foot between the front door and the “stairs” which were nothing but three concrete blocks he had glued together with a pint of Elmer’s glue he had lifted from the school.
Around the mobile home was an obstacle course of rusting junk. There were two cars that hadn’t had tires since the 1990s, a stack of bedsprings four high, a dozen bicycles that were in good condition—these had also been liberated from the school—any bike that had remained overnight, was in Jerry’s book automatically communal property. Finally, there was a bathtub, a seven-foot tall pyramid of filled to bursting trash bags that he kept meaning to take to the dump, a kitchen sink and about a thousand aluminum cans.
Part of the home itself was black from a grease fire. Just looking at it made Thuy’s skin crawl and before the car was even stopped, she had her seatbelt unbuckled and her door open. There was no way she was going into that place and if she did, she didn’t think she’d get out again.
She was half out of the RAV4 before Jerry woke up to what was happening. Quicker than Thuy thought possible for such a slob, he reached out a long arm and just managed to grab the back of her low-riding jeans. He had a great view of her pink panties and the glorious golden tan across the top of her ass. It mesmerized him and he had the beginnings of a chub growing as Thuy started screaming and flailing.
It was like landing the biggest, sexiest bass ever. Big as she was, she was light, light, light, and he reeled her right back into the RAV4. When he had a hold of her silken black hair in his dirty paws, he spoke into her ear, “Don’t be like that, baby.”
The struggle went out of her. “I-I’m sorry. I j-just thought I saw a zombie. It was right over there. We should maybe go…” She was cut off as he yanked her back into the RAV4, dragged her over the console and then out the other side, knocking over his bottle of Fireball in the process. It hit the driveway and shattered. Jerry’s eyes flashed with fury and he yanked her to her feet by her hair.
She had to stifle a scream. He was about to explode in violence; she could feel the hate thrumming through him and just then a scream could set him off. “I’m sorry,” she said, again, forcing her voice to remain calm despite him still having his hand bunched in her hair. If she tried to run away now, she’d lose half her scalp. “It’ll be okay. We can get more. Alcohol is everywhere now and it’s free. We can just take it. As much as you want.”
Jerry’s anger disappeared in a snap. “We? You, uh, you like to drink? Huh? I got some gin inside. And some other stuff. Like some Midouri Sour, you know shit like that.” He had all sorts of weird mixes that he had confiscated from the kids over the years. They just sat in his cupboards, aging poorly. He never got into those sorts of concoctions but, at the same time, he couldn’t bring himself to throw away anything alcoholic.
He pulled his hand out of her hair, but didn’t let her go. As if they were boyfriend and girlfriend, he slung an arm around her shoulder and copped a feel of her right breast. “I’ll fix you up with something good. You’ll be able to relax and have fun.” This idea appealed to him. When they had b
een in the school, he had liked the thought of hurting her, of dominating her. Now that she was at his home, he wanted her to be as into the coming fuck-session as much as he was.
Of course, when they were done, she’d still clean his toilet. That was for dead certain.
He led her to the door, the one door in or out, and he leaned past her to open it, like a gentleman would. She stiffened and her breathing started to pick up, still she managed to say, “Thank you so much,” without her voice cracking.
Inside was a cave. It stank of urine, cheap pot, and rotting garbage. The smell made her woozy and weak. Jerry effortlessly guided her to the kitchen, where he reached into the brimming sink and found two mugs, both with the Taconic Titan emblazoned on the front and some sort of grey liquid swimming around in the bottom. As a nod to the evils of bacteria, he turned them upside down for a moment so that the fluid ran out.
“This is the good stuff,” he said, producing a bottle of Beefeater Gin. “You’ll get plenty spun on this stuff as small as you are.” As if to reassure himself that she was indeed small, he ran a hand down her shoulder and arm. He then encircled her wrist with his pinky and thumb. “Man, like a kid’s wrist.”
As he marveled over it, Thuy gazed around at the inside of the mobile home. It was squalor and filth on a third-world level. Roaches crept brazenly around the dishes in the sink, while flies hummed over a grey drum of a trashcan that was overflowing onto the floor. There were stains and cigarette burns everywhere, walls and ceilings included.
She was beginning to feel something wanting to come up from the back of her throat when Jerry let her hand go and started filling the cups.
“Whoa,” she said, with what she hoped was a smile on her face and not a complete look of disgust. “I’m little, remember. You don’t want me puking, right?” She was only guessing that he would care. The carpet wouldn’t be appreciably worse off if she hurled all over it.
The Apocalypse Crusade Day 4: War of the Undead Page 8