by Alan Baxter
The fact that all of the scientists he knew were also dead skewed the math. It meant he might never get the right answers.
Once he and his apprentice were up on top of the rock, they pitched a camp, and ate a meal of cold salted rabbit and water. The elevation kept the dead away, but a cooking fire up here could be seen from miles and miles away. They sat together, wrapped in blankets against the cold of the desert night, and talked.
“I wish Sam was here,” said Tom. It wasn’t the first time he mentioned his older brother, who had been a sniper on Ledger’s Echo Team. As far as Ledger knew Sam had been killed a few days after the dead rose. Or so he had been told.
“Me, too,” he said.
Tom must have heard something in his voice because he turned to the soldier. “Joe… do you think there’s any chance he’s still alive?”
“A chance? Sure,” said Ledger, nodding. “The lady cop I met who’d been with him said she had been told that he fell under a swarm of zoms, but she didn’t actually see him get bit. Sam and his field team, the Boy Scouts, were helping the cop get a whole convoy of school buses filled with kids out of danger. They were overrun and Sam was doing what he could to give them a chance. He went down and the buses got out, but…”
“But…?”
“Sam was dressed for combat. Ballistic helmet with a face shield, Kevlar vest, limb pads, armored gloves. The works,” said Ledger. “He wasn’t exactly naked and painted with steak sauce, you dig? He might have made it out. But he didn’t have a vehicle, at least as far as the cop knew. And going back for him would have put the kids on the table for an all-you-can-eat buffet.”
“Then he could still be out there?” asked Tom. He was a nice young guy. Early twenties. Tough as nails. Smart. Decent. Damn good fighter. But he wore his heart on his sleeve and he pinned his own survival on ideals like hope and optimism, which was dangerously fragile scaffolding as far as Ledger saw it.
Even so, he didn’t try to kick that structure down. Tom had a little half-brother, Benny to think about. The kid was back in Central California, in a small makeshift town built around a reservoir high up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Tom had helped establish, build and defend that town, but he often left his brother in the care of his neighbors while he went out into what the people in town called the great ‘Rot and Ruin’ to look for survivors. Tom had rescued more than two hundred people so far, which made him a hero.
Joe Ledger had no interest in settling in the town. Like Tom, he was on the prowl for survivors, too. However, it was only half of his own self-imposed mission. The rest of it was less humanitarian. Or, maybe it was a service to the community in the most extreme terms.
He and Tom were not out here to kill zoms.
No, they were hunting people.
Tom must have read his thoughts. “What’s wrong with them?”
It was a question the young man asked in one way or another nearly every day. What’s wrong with them? Them. Not the dead. Smart as he was, Tom did not seem able to crawl inside the head of living people who saw the apocalypse as the chance to shake off all moral constraints, all ethics, all inhibitions. There were packs of predators out here – mostly, but not entirely men – who preyed on camps of survivors. Stealing their food and supplies, brutalizing the men, raping the women. Sometimes raping the children, too. Ledger and Tom had found absolute proof that human beings – the uninfected living – were a thousand times more savage than the legions of hungry dead. They had come upon camp after camp and read the proof in the twisted bodies, in the small violated corpses, in the leavings of monsters in human shape. Tom had called them animals at first, but later changed that to ‘monsters’ because animals did not do this.
Tom had been about to graduate from the police academy when the world fell. Since then he had bloodied his hands, but it was only after Ledger had taken him under his wing that Tom Imura had become a practiced and efficient killer. A hunter of hunters; a predator who preyed on predators.
“They do it because they’re weak,” said Ledger. He tore off a chunk of rabbit and chewed slowly.
“Weak?”
“Sure. Don’t confuse dangerous with strong. You’re strong, kid. So am I. So are the kinds of people, trained or untrained, who stand up to protect those who can’t protect themselves. That’s what defines strength. Just as being brave in the face of danger defines courage.” Ledger chewed and shook his head slowly. The sun was down and there were ten billion stars spread like diamond dust above them. “The people we hunt aren’t tigers or lions. They’re jackals. They hunt in packs because they’re too fucking afraid to hunt alone. And in those packs they trash talk so that everyone thinks they’re tough, but it’s a thin coat of paint on a pile of shit.”
“They put up a good fight, though,” observed Tom, but Ledger shook his head again.
“No. They fight, but it’s not a good fight. They fight because they’re afraid of dying, and they’re afraid of the pain of dying. But they aren’t warriors. They’re not going down in any fucking blaze of glory. Even a cockroach will fight.” He spat over the edge of the rock, listened, but didn’t hear it land. He shrugged.
They sat in silence for a long time. There was no moon tonight and the wind was quiet. Far away they could hear sounds in the night. The rustle of something small and fast moving through the brush. A little ground squirrel, maybe, or a rat. The distant call of a night bird. The soft, plaintive moan of something dead and hungry.
They sat and watched the stars.
“I miss my dogs,” said Ledger.
“Me, too.”
When Tom had met Ledger the big soldier was traveling with two monstrous dogs that were half Irish wolfhound and half American mastiff. Baskerville and Boggart. On one of their ‘training’ trips up to San Jose Boggart had gone missing and when they found him the dog had adopted a girl who called herself Rags. The girl was a scrappy little thing. Young but tough as iron, and she and the dog had bonded. After a violent run-in with a group of raiders who called themselves the Skull Riders, Ledger, Rags and the dogs had gone east. When Ledger returned nearly two years later, he had Baskerville with him as well as a new full-bred female mastiff he called Cupcake. Boggart, Ledger told Tom, had elected to stay with Rags, and the soldier was fine with that. Cupcake had joined his little pack. However the two big dogs were back in Mountainside because Cupcake had just dropped a litter of five very large, very noisy pups. Ledger missed his dogs. He liked them a lot more than he liked most people.
After nearly an hour, Tom said, “Maybe we’ll find some horses.”
“Maybe,” Joe said dubiously.
“If we don’t it’s going to be a long walk to Oro Valley, Arizona.”
“Yup.”
They sat in silence, watching the stars above them swim through the Milky Way.
“Joe…do you think it’s real?”
Ledger said nothing.
“The cure they keep talking about,” persisted Tom. “Do you think it’s real?”
Ledger sipped some water and washed it around in his mouth before swallowing.
“Christ, kid, I hope so.”
—4—
Top and Bunny
Top and Bunny wound up spending the night in the loft of a barn on old but clean hay, taking turns sleeping three hours then keeping watch – each twice that night. The next morning, they headed for the Arizona-Colorado border, several survivor groups having hinted that they’d heard rumors of another group struggling in the small town of Sun Valley near Petrified Forest National Park.
Top led the way, because the Georgia farm boy rode horses like it was second nature. Bunny, on the other hand, was an Orange County, California surfer, and his horse riding skills continued to amuse Top every time he watched him. Since riding along with a constantly chuckling companion had begun annoying Bunny fairly quickly, Top just rode ahead, so he could avoid the spu
rts of spontaneous laughter he’d been prone to when they’d first started out. Bunny knew this although it went unacknowledged. He loved the old guy anyway, though God knew he’d never say that out loud.
The two hundred and two mile journey would take them a little under fourteen hours at normal speeds for the horses – about eighteen minutes per mile – and using the older state highways to avoid the cities, where most large colonies of zombies congregated, also saved time. But they still had to be well rested and conserve their strength to remain effective when they arrived so they’d already decided to split the journey into two days.
They’d waste less energy riding early mornings and at night once they left the foothills of the Rockies and hit the desert. Cooler temperatures would be easier on all of them, despite the dangers of the dark. The same EMPs that had destroyed the zombies and automobiles had also eliminated many snakes, scorpions, and other predators. But not all by far. There were always the random zombie pods, but dealing with scattered zombies was much easier than the city hordes, and they were used to that.
As they rode south, the foothills turned to prairies and pine forests. The latter were littered with twigs and pine needles that crunched under the horses’ hooves more softly than dead leaves. Crickets, birds, and other creatures chirped in the branches and overhead in a constant droning symphony of sound. The wind blew strong, bringing the hot desert winds and smells of sand, dust, and dry grass to mix with the sweet scent of pine sap and needles. From time to time, amidst the pines, Bunny even thought he detected a faint scent of butterscotch, but decided his mind must be playing tricks. As the forests gave way to prairies, the prairies eventually gave way to gravel and rock formations. Trees were soon conspicuously absent, and the air became thicker with heat, making their lungs work harder.
The whole time, Bunny thought back on the nineteen years since the world had fallen apart and the DMS had ceased to exist, at least for Echo Team. They had once been like a family, but now they were all scattered to who knew where. They didn’t even know if anyone one else was still alive. Only Top remained in Bunny’s world and Bunny in his. And that was only because they’d been together on a supply run when the EMPs hit and they’d been stranded, forced like so many others to fight to survive. Teaming up had been a natural instinct after so many years of it, and here they were. Somehow they’d survived when so many others hadn’t. Bunny thought of Joe Ledger, Rudy and Circe Sanchez, Leroy Williams, whom they all called ‘Bug’, and Junie Flynn. He thought of the strange and enigmatic Mr Church who was their leader and about whom Bunny knew next to nothing. Last but not least he thought of Lydia Ruiz, Warbride, who’d gone from teammate to friend to lover. God, the memories of all them.
“Farm Boy!” Top shouted, startling Bunny from his reverie.
“What?” He shook it off and looked around as his horse just barely steered clear of a cacti bunch that would have surely torn into his leg through his pants. Fuck, he thought, grabbing the reins and resuming control.
“You’re lucky animals have good instincts,” Top said, shaking his head. “You falling asleep on me?”
Bunny shook his head. “No. Just remembering.”
To Bunny’s relief, Top read the look in his partner’s eyes and no further explanation was needed. He grunted in sympathy and they rode on together, now side by side for a while.
—5—
The Soldier and the Samurai
They did not find horses.
Not live ones, anyway. They found a farmer’s field full of bones and they found a half dozen zoms dressed in field denims standing around looking blank. Tom stopped by the rail and stared at the dead, and the zoms slowly turned toward him and began walking. There was never any hurry in the world of the dead. They were inexorable and indefatigable, but they were never hasty.
Tom reached over his shoulder for the handle of his sword, but Ledger stopped him.
“They’re not going to hurt anyone,” said the soldier. “They’re too clumsy to climb over the fence and who in their right mind would go in there?”
Tom frowned. “Right… but shouldn’t we… what’s the word you like to use? ‘Quiet’ them?”
Ledger shrugged. “Why? They’re not in pain. They’re not going to get lonely or any of that shit. They’re dead but they don’t know it. What good will it do anyone?”
“It would be merciful. They were people once, Joe. They had their lives stolen by the disease and now they’re in this living death hell. Or whatever you want to call it.”
Ledger sighed and walked over to stand beside Tom, watching the zoms shamble their way.
“Here’s how I see it, kid,” said the soldier. “These people are gone. Yes, we can mourn who they used to be, and we can feel compassion for how they died and for what was taken from them. I get that. We both get that. It sucks worse than almost anything. The only thing that would suck worse would be if they knew they were dead.”
“Knew?”
“Sure, if their personalities were somehow trapped in there, aware of what had happened to them. That would be the biggest suck-fest of all time.”
Tom went pale. “Jesus Christ…”
“But you’ve looked into their eyes, Tom,” said Ledger. “Have you ever seen so much as a flicker of personality? Of intelligence? Of awareness?”
“No.” He sighed. “No, I haven’t.”
“Of course not, because whoever lived in those bodies is gone. To heaven, to hell, or to whatever state of existence is waiting on the other side of death’s front door. I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” said Tom. “Maybe there’s nothing after this.”
“Maybe,” said Ledger, “but boy would that be a fucking kick in the balls. After all these thousands of years of religion and prayer and everything else, it would be a rotten fucking cosmic joke if this was it, finished, done.”
The zoms were almost up to the fence.
Tom said, “What do you believe?”
Ledger bent and plucked a long stem of wild grass and put it between his teeth. It bobbed up and down as he chewed the end.
“Not sure what I believe in has a name,” said Ledger after a moment. “I was raised Methodist back in Baltimore, but that’s kind of for shit. None of what happened squares with any religion’s apocalyptic prophecies, which tells me two things. Either everyone’s wrong and the universe has bent us all over a barrel, or this isn’t the actual end.”
Tom watched the zombies. “How much closer to the end do we need to get?”
The closest of the dead, a woman in jeans and a man’s flannel work shirt, thrust her arms between the slats of the fence rail, gray and withered fingers clawing at the air inches from where the two men stood. Ledger reached out and offered his fingers to the dead woman, who grabbed them and tried to pull them toward her mouth. Ledger was stronger and he did not give an inch. The zombie kept trying, moaning softly, but Ledger remained unmoved. Only when the other zoms reached for him did he pulled his hand free and wipe it on his jeans.
“Maybe the line in the sand,” he said quietly, “is when there’s no one left like you.”
“Me? I’m more of a skeptic than you are.”
“About religion, sure. Maybe. But you’ve been working your ass off to save your little town. What are you calling it?”
“Mountainside.”
Ledger nodded. “You may not have much optimism about your spiritual future, but you have a lot about the future of the people in Mountainside. About your stepbrother’s future. About the possibility of there even being a future.”
“I could be delusional,” said Tom, half smiling.
“You could. Not sure you actually need to believe in anything much yourself except life. You do believe in that, and don’t tell me you don’t.”
Tom nodded.
“So, as I interpret the whole End of Times thing,” said
Ledger, “an actual apocalypse should be all exit doors and no other options. I’m not seeing that here. Neither are you. Fuck, even those ass-pirates who are preying on survivors think there’s a chance at a future.” He shook his head and tossed the blade of grass into the wind. “We’re living in a fully dramatized example of that old samurai concept. Nanakorobi yaoki. You know that one?”
“’Fall down seven times, get up eight’,” said Tom.
“This is one of the times we get up.”
“What if we get knocked down again? What if that doctor in Arizona doesn’t really have a cure? What then?”
“Then we get up a ninth time,” said Ledger. “And a tenth.”
They watched the zoms, standing just outside of the reach of those dead hands. Then Ledger raised himself on his toes and looked over to the side of the farmhouse that stood on the edge of the field. A smile blossomed on his weathered face.
“What?” asked Tom.
“Maybe there’s a God after all,” said Ledger, “and maybe he’s not a total dick.”
“Huh?”
Ledger pointed to the porch. There, exposed by the slanting rays of the sun, was a pair of heavy-duty mountain bikes. “Not horses, but then again we won’t have to feed and water them.”
Tom pulled out his binoculars and studied them.
“Shit. The tires are flat.”
Ledger shrugged. “This is a farm in the middle of no-fucking-where. You trying to tell me these people didn’t have spares, patch kits and hand-pumps? Really?”
Forty minutes later they were pedaling along the road with the farm and its people falling slowly behind.
—6—
Top and Bunny
Bunny estimated they were less than a mile outside Sun Valley when they heard the screams. They’d traveled until early afternoon the first day, then slept during daylight and resumed their journey at night and into the early morning, winding up doing six hours the first day and over seven since they’d started out the previous evening. The journey had been quiet and unexpectedly uneventful – the two soldiers having somehow managed to avoid any pods of zombies or other hurdles the entire way. Until now.