Heather nodded quietly, and then the tears came.
She told me her parents divorced when she was little, before the Fall, and when the world turned upside down, her father took her away because he could protect her better than her mom.
She didn’t have many memories of the woman, but from the looks of that blanket, I figured her mom had plenty of memories of her.
Heather gave me a long letter to take back to her mother, and though she could have paid my fee ten times over with what she carried in her pocket, I didn’t charge her.
I took the letter to her mother, and because she couldn’t see well enough to read, I read it for her. She died a few days later, but I think she was happy during those last few days. Happier than she’d been in years.
Heather and I got close after that, though we had to steal the moments we spent together.
At least we did before tonight.
Now, sitting on the back of my bike, she squeezed my waist and put her lips to my ear. “I love the wind on my face,” she said. “Go faster.”
Dinner was the best thing I’d ever tasted, roasted mutton with wasabi mashed potatoes and asparagus. To this day I have no idea what the hell wasabi is, or where you get it, but I sure loved the bite it gave those mashed potatoes.
And the scenery was fantastic. The stars dappled on the surface of Canyon Lake. On the shore, the tops of the hills were silvered with moonlight. There was music, a few older couples dancing on the open air deck, glimpses of a world long gone.
The conversation, on the other hand, lagged. At least at first.
I’d never really talked to a girl. Not like you do on a date, anyway. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, how I was supposed to act. She knew little about weapons, or the Zone, and that pretty much exhausted what I knew. She was into growing vegetables and had plans for building schools.
But I told her dad I was going to treat her like a class act, and I did. The thing is, deep down inside, I am, and always will be, a Zoner. Life, as I had known it, was short and mean and cheap, and I spent a lot of time wondering if it was really worth the effort I put into it. When you think that way, it can be hard to look at a girl and think the two of you have a chance at romance.
She asked me if there was anything wrong.
“This world seems kind of pointless, don’t you think?” I whispered across the table to Heather as the waiter poured each of us another glass of wine.
“There may not be a point,” she said. “But even still, we’re here. You and me. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
Her answer surprised me, the simple practicality of it. “That’s true,” I said. “Here we are.”
After dinner we danced on the open deck of the Starliner. A cool, late spring breeze was in the air, carrying with it the thick, marshy smell of lake water. I held her body close to mine, the first time I’d ever held a real girl, and lost myself in the warmth of her green eyes and the smell of her skin.
That feeling, that comfort of absolute privacy, the romance of it, was why the Starliner cost so much. The infected were everywhere, and not even the strongest compound was completely safe from them, but when the Starliner was off her moorings and out on the lake, it was its own world, untouchable by the harsh realities of the Zone.
But of course there were other dangers in the Zone besides zombies. As the evening drew to a close, and the Starliner began her slow cruise back to the wet dock, Heather and I stood on the bow and talked about the future, about the stars, about anything and everything except the past. It was our night, and though our bonds had been forged in the heartaches of the past, we wanted our night together to be about the future. We wanted our own happy memories together.
There were no other boats on the lake. At least there hadn’t been during most of our date. But as we rounded a final elbow of land and entered the cove, we saw a large cabin cruiser waiting for us, the vague shapes of men ringing the rails of the deck.
Heather broke off in the middle of a giggle and watched them.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Not good,” she said. “I think that’s Wayne Nessel. Daddy warned me he might try something. Daddy didn’t think he’d do it out here though.”
I knew of Wayne Nessel. He was Ashcroft’s biggest rival, and a man with a lot of resources at his disposal. People in the Zone called him “The Bull.”
“He couldn’t know you’re here.”
“He knows,” she said, and then she guided me to the far side of the Starliner.
“But how?”
“He’s got spies everywhere, Andrew.”
She crossed to the opposite side of the deck and climbed the railing.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Where are we going?”
She looked down at me. “Can you swim?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” She waited till Nessel’s boat lit up the Starliner with its spotlights, then she gave me a wink and dropped herself over the edge.
I went in after her.
I thought we’d cling to the side of the boat and wait it out, but that wasn’t what Heather had in mind. She went under and kept swimming under the Starliner’s hull.
I followed.
Above us, through the green murky haze, I could see the glow of the spotlights and the shimmering outlines of men running on both decks. There were a lot of muffled popping sounds that I took to be gunfire, but none of that was directed down at us. It was all boat to boat.
We surfaced on the far side of Nessel’s boat and swam to shore. I’d hidden my motorcycle in the brush next to the Starliner’s docks out of habit, and now I was thankful for my instincts. As we swam, we decided it’d be best to come ashore a little ways from the dock, just in case Nessel had men covering his back on land.
We crawled up on shore and Heather pulled her black hair back with both hands, her camisole clinging to the curve of her breasts like wet paint.
There were voices nearby, just on the other side of the bushes. Nessel’s men, I thought, left here in reserve.
I spotted them a moment later. Four men, all armed with AR-15s. They were lined up on the dock, looking out at the boats, pointing and laughing.
“Amateurs,” I whispered. “Look at that. They’re just watching the show.”
“Can you get them all?”
“No,” I said. “Not all of them. Maybe one or two, but not all of them.”
“What do we do?”
The switchback road we’d taken to the docks led a short distance up a steep hill behind us before curving out of sight. Low, scraggly oaks and cedars lined the sides of it. I told Heather to go up around the curve and wait for me.
“What are you going to do?”
“Try not to get shot,” I said.
She frowned at that, but she made her way up to the road just the same, careful to stay in the shadows.
When she was safely out of the way, I made my move.
My bike was hidden in a clump of cedar behind an old rusted truck. I crossed behind the guards and made for the bike, praying they didn’t turn around.
I got most of the way there before I heard one of them holler something. The next instant, they were firing at me. Little chunks of concrete exploded around my shoes as I made for the truck, but they didn’t hit me, and if their lack of attention on the shoreline hadn’t convinced me they were just hired goons, their shooting certainly did. At that range, professionals would have killed me with ease.
I got down beneath the truck, pulled my Glock, and waited. They were running up the slope of the lot, straight for me. I steadied my sights on the lead guy and dropped him with my first shot. My next three shots weren’t aimed. I just sprayed the crowd to make them duck for cover.
It worked. They dived behind an old boat trailer, giving me enough time to pull my motorcycle out of the bushes, start it, and go racing up the road. They fired after me, but they never got close.
I slowed long enough for Heather to jump on the back, and then we sped
off into the night.
We were still wet from the swim, and it was cold on that bike. What had been a lovely cool breeze while we were dancing was now a fierce cold snap, biting through us to the bone. Heather wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed, and I could feel her body trembling.
I slowed the bike down enough for her to hear me. “Are you okay?”
“Uh huh.”
“Why is he after you?” I asked.
“Anything to hurt Daddy,” she said, her voice coming in quick, breathy stabs. “His people are always ambushing Daddy’s shipments. Maybe he’s upping the ante now to kidnapping. Or assassination.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
“Warn my father,” she said. “Daddy told me Nessel always attacks on two fronts at once. If he’s coming after me here, he’s probably trying to attack Daddy somewhere else too.”
“The radio?”
She nodded. “I tried back at the lake. Nobody answered. We’ll have to get closer into town and try for my father’s safe houses.”
“You got it,” I said, and laid into the throttle.
When we got closer into town, I pulled off the highway and parked in a lot on the top of a small hill and Heather called Naylor on the radio.
“Are you sure it’s Nessel’s people?” he asked.
“I’m sure,” she said.
He told us not to use the radio any more than we had to. Besides a good share of the gasoline market, Nessel controlled the sale of most of the electronic equipment in the area. The radio Heather was using was probably stolen from one of his shipments, and there wasn’t much doubt he’d be able to overhear her transmission.
“Can you get to the pickup point?” he asked.
Heather gave me a sidelong glance and a smile. “I’m pretty sure we can,” she said.
We moved out, and as we rode, I thought about this old-timer I used to know who told me what life was like before the outbreak. He said people were pretty much the same then as they are now, and that turning into zombies hadn’t changed them much. What was different, he said, was the noise. It was noisy back then. There were cars and planes and trains everywhere, not to mention all the crowds. He said you couldn’t escape it.
But these days, there are so few cars left you can drive around all day and never see another driver. Heather and I hadn’t seen any all night. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a plane fly overhead. I’d never seen a moving train. Life in the Zone was quiet, even though it was rarely peaceful.
That’s how I knew something was wrong. Heather and I got up on the highway again and started driving, but we hadn’t made it very far before I heard the high-pitched whine of a pack of sport racing bikes.
We glanced around, looking for them. They were behind us, coming down from an overpass and getting onto the freeway at top speed. I didn’t need to ask if they were Nessel’s men. All of them had machine guns slung over their backs, and the way they were riding, they clearly knew who we were.
I got my bike up to top speed, but they were faster. My bike was just a beat up Harley Sportster, but they were riding Honda CXRs—top of the line racing bikes. I didn’t have a snowball’s chance of outrunning them in a dead sprint, so when they got close enough to take their shots, I did the only thing I could think of and veered over to the far left lane, let them come up on us, then downshifted and banked the bike hard to the right, taking the connector ramp to the Connelly Loop at almost a hundred miles an hour.
Heather yelled out in surprise. Nessel’s men overshot us. I saw them lock up their brakes and slide, but none of them reacted fast enough to take the ramp with us.
Their mistake bought us a few valuable seconds. The Connelly Loop led right into the heart of the Zone. There was nothing in there but crumbling buildings and legions of the infected. As a result, it was a low priority for the bosses who made it their business to keep the roads clear, and so it was still choked with long lines of abandoned cars.
My old-timer friend told me that rush hour traffic used to be so bad the freeways would turn into parking lots, and when it was really bad, you could sit in your car for half an hour or more and never make it more than a couple of miles. Looking out over the abandoned cars ahead of us I felt like I knew what he meant. It was a three-lane bumper-to-bumper junkyard as far as I could see.
As I slowed down to thread the gap between the cars Heather yelled in my ear, “What are you doing? You’re going the wrong way.”
I looked behind us and saw Nessel’s men coming for us. They looked like a squadron of mad hornets buzzing down the ramp, shooting the gaps between wrecks at fantastic speeds.
“Hold on,” I said.
A zombie was stumbling along between two rows of cars about a hundred and fifty yards ahead of us. I dug into the throttle and went straight for him, darting through the narrow gap, feeling a thump thump thump echoing in my ears as we passed all the cars.
Zombies are predictable. When they see you, they stumble after you. They don’t care if you’re on foot or driving a truck, they stumble after you just the same, which is exactly what the zombie ahead of us was doing.
And about ten yards ahead of the zombie was a gap in traffic. It looked like a driver in the middle lane had tried to turn into the lane to his right, and had hit another car in the process. The car was stuck at a forty-five-degree angle, with just enough room for me to slip alongside it and cross over to the gap between the middle and right lanes. But I had to time it just right. I had to get there just a fraction of a second before the zombie if I was going to make it work.
It was close.
When I got to the gap I hit the brakes, rocked the bike hard to the right, then hard to the left, feeling Heather gasping as she squeezed me. We threaded into the opening and took off at full speed.
I looked back just as one of Nessel’s goons hit that zombie. He must have been doing at least ninety miles per hour when he realized what was happening and hit his brakes. But at that speed, not even the Honda’s oversized racing brakes could help him. He hit the zombie, and both bodies went tumbling over the wrecked cars. The bike went sideways, hit the trunk of a car, and shot twenty feet up in the air, spinning end over end the whole way back to the ground.
That slowed the other three down, but not by much, and I knew I couldn’t play those games forever. I took us up another hundred yards or so until we came to a small box van. There I slowed, turned the bike around, and headed back the way we’d come.
“What are you doing?” Heather said.
But I didn’t have time to answer. I ducked my head and charged.
One of the remaining three riders was in our gap, and even though he was wearing a full helmet and face shield that kept his face hidden, I could tell by the way his body stiffened that his eyes were going wide.
I pulled my Glock and fired. I’m not sure if I hit him or not, but the bike shimmied beneath him, he lost his balance, glanced off a car, and crashed out.
I saw his head smack a bumper as he fell.
I stopped the bike and told Heather to get off. She looked panicked, but she did like I asked.
“What are you going to do?”
I pulled out my other Glock. “Just stay down, okay? I got this.”
Those huge green eyes of hers melted me.
“We’re going to be okay,” I said.
She nodded, and I moved out on foot. The other two riders were going slow now, practically walking their bikes through the cars, looking for us. I crouched down below the top of the cars and jogged into position. When the rider I was targeting got close enough, I stood up and fired both Glocks into his chest, knocking him backwards off the bike.
The other rider tried to react, but he was stuck between two pickups. I threw a lot of ammunition at him with both guns and managed to catch a lucky shot. He spun around, hit in the shoulder, and went down.
I ran over to where he fell and saw him rolling on the pavement, wounded. He pushed off his helmet and let it t
umble away. He looked up at me, his eyes pleading with me. Most of the time my moral compass swings closer to the good than the bad, but some people just aren’t worth the effort.
I shot him in the head.
When I got back to Heather, she was holding that portable radio in her hands and crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Daddy was right about Nessel,” she said. “The bastard used me as a decoy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Daddy sent a squad of his best men to the safe house where we were supposed to go.” She looked up at me and choked back tears. “Nessel was waiting for them. They’re all dead. Now he’s attacking the compound.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“He said for us to stay away.” She looked deep into my eyes. “But my God, Andrew. It sounded so bad. I heard explosions. And Daddy was screaming at people while he was talking with me.”
I had no idea what to say. She told me while we were dancing that she had begged her father for a week to let her go out on a date with me, and now his empire was in serious risk of crumbling and it was all because of our date.
I was feeling lousy, because I knew the role I played in wrecking her family, but then she surprised me.
“Andrew,” she said. “You were telling me the truth about my mom, weren’t you? You really did read her my letter?”
I nodded.
“You worked a miracle bringing her back into my life.”
I shook my head.
“You did,” she said. “I believe that. And I believe you can do it again. I believe you can give me my father back.”
I felt confused. “What are you asking me to do?”
“Help me save my father, Andrew. Please.”
She turned those big green eyes up at me, a tear welling up and running down her face, and in that moment, I knew I was powerless to refuse. I’d have handed her my soul for the asking.
“Let’s go get your dad,” I said.
I started toward the main gate because that was the only way into Ashcroft’s compound that I knew of, but when Heather saw where I was going she pointed me in a different direction.
The Living Dead 2 Page 54