"What?" I said, annoyed.
"Can I have a coat?" he said. "It's freezing out here."
I hadn't thought of that.
"You need a coat?" I said.
"Yeah," the kid said. "Mine's upstairs in the room where you found me. It's blue and puffy."
"Okay," I said. "Wait here, and don't open the door."
I returned to the trailer office and found the kid's coat. I hesitated, then filled the pockets with food-Pop-Tarts, granola bars, and pull-top cans of soup. I also grabbed a flashlight with a built-in compass. Then I took my old rifle, removed the bullets, and slung it over my shoulder.
"Here," I said, back downstairs. I handed the kid the coat full of food, the flashlight, and the gun.
"A gun?" he said.
"Don't get too excited, chief," I told him. "It's unloaded. It's not for zombies-zombies, you can outrun-it's for pointing at people who might not be friendly."
He took the gun and looked at me, hard.
"Those people in there are dead, aren't they?" he asked.
I nodded, and said: "I hope they weren't your parents or anything."
He shook his head.
"My parents sent me out here to live with my uncle," he said. "He was the man with the beard. Don't worry; I didn't like him much. My parents thought it would be safer out here in the country. It turned out the opposite was true."
"You got that right," I said grimly.
"Are you a zombie?" he asked.
"Why?" I said. "What makes you ask me that?"
"You have blood all down your mouth that wasn't there before," he stated flatly.
"Oh," I said. "Yeah, I guess I am. But I'm ... I'm not exactly like other zombies. It's complicated." I stumbled a bit on this last line, like a lover trying to describe an open relationship.
"You don't look like a zombie, except in the face," he said.
"Thanks ... I guess," I told him.
Behind me, Rock Star moaned, curious about my guest. I decided to redirect the conversation and get the kid on his way as soon as possible.
"Look," I said, "this flashlight has a compass on it. See? I want you to follow it south. Got that? South. Eventually you'll hit Columbus, or at least the suburbs. If you see any soldiers or police, you drop the gun and go toward them. If they're in a car, then try to flag them down. If you see zombies, just run away. If you meet a person and they don't feel right, stay away from them. Just run."
"Okay," the kid said. "Thank you."
He turned, and I closed the door behind him.
So, let me just get this out of the way, here and now: I harbored no illusions about that kid-about his fate. About what probably awaited him. I'd chosen not to eat him, true, but it wasn't like I'd saved him. He was a kid. A fucking child. Maybe ten. At most, a young-looking twelve. And I'd sent him out into an empty, cold wasteland-world full of things that wanted to kill him. He had only enough food for two or three days, and no real way to defend himself.
This was not selfless or kind. This was the act of a coward-of someone too afraid and too weak and too drunk on his lust for human brains to do the things that would actually ensure a child's safety. I knew this kid would probably be killed out in the wilderness beyond ... just not by me. If I didn't do it myself-if he didn't die by my hand, or gun, or tooth-then I could wrap myself in a warm lie. I could tell myself that it was not my fault. Not my responsibility. That I'd had nothing to do with it.
But between you and me-yeah, some part of me knew that it was bullshit. A cop-out.
I hadn't killed him myself, but that didn't mean I wasn't his killer.
For the next few days, we stayed in the enamel factory, exploring. (Not that there was anything very interesting. Empty closets, dusty typewriters, cans of oil ... and hey, you see one enamel press, you've seen them all.) But for a while I had the idea that we might be able to make it our headquarters and lure people into the factory. After all, why muddy our feet and risk being shot when we could feed just as regularly by staying in one place?
I imagined erecting a banner reading WELCOME! FRIENDLY HUMANS AND FOOD THROUGH THESE DOORS! Then, when curious visitors wandered inside the factory, I'd pick them off from above and we'd feast on them below. If a group looked too unruly or hard to handle, we'd just batten down the hatches or escape out the back.
If only the factory hadn't been set so far away from everything else, it might have worked. But this factory was the kind of place that didn't see a lot of foot traffic. My band of zombies had been an aberration. It was where you went when you wanted to avoid people. And zombies.
How long would we have to wait here between seeing visitors, I wondered; a month? Two? Three? That would not be enough action to satisfy me, or my hungry companions. And I knew it. Ineluctably, I soon decided that the right move was to move on.
For a while, I feared the freckled kid might return-having run out of food and with nowhere else to go-but that never happened. He never showed up. After a few days in the factory, we lit out in the middle of the night, back on the hunt.
Short and bleak days followed-mysterious mornings of blue and pink that gave way to gray, profitless-feeling afternoons. Mold grew on us where the ice had melted, frozen, and melted again. Our skins grew slack and spongy like old, wet wood. We walked and walked.
We saw dead zombies-that is, zombies that had been shot through the forehead-more than we saw "living" zombies or humans. Some had been shot and then burned, leaving behind only piles of white bones with telltale holes in the skulls. Other times, we found dead zombies that had been tied up, or tied to fence posts or trees. Twice, we encountered orderly piles of dead zombies, stacked according to size. (I chalked these up to the Amish and their Germanic meticulousness.)
It was one big circular hunt, all of it. The humans hunting us. Us hunting the humans. Humans hunting each other.
I assumed that-as the days wore by-the humans would sort of "get better" at surviving in this new, zombie wasteland. That they would improve. Become accustomed to "survivalist mode" or whatever.
It was too early to tell if this was what was happening; it was certainly clear that a lot of them couldn't take it anymore. Many of the humans went stir-crazy. (I mean, rural Ohio, in the middle of the winter-that'll do it for some people right there; no zombies needed. But add a zombie outbreak to that, and you've got a situation ready to make inroads on the steadiest of nerves.)
Like one morning, a few clicks outside of Utica, we came across a man who'd killed his wife and daughters with an ax. Then he'd piled the bodies inside the family trailer and set it on fire. He was sitting on a stump, just watching it burn, as we approached him, the cruor-coated weapon resting at his feet. I wondered-after bringing him down with a bullet and eating his brain-if this murderer had always wanted to kill his family. Had it been a goal of his for a while? Something he'd always harbored, but never had the gumption to execute? (I imagined him as one of those henpecked husbands, imprisoned by a mortgage and stuck with a mean wife who found fault with his every foible. I imagined that his daughters had been shrill, self-centered, and irritating. Perhaps murder had been the liberation from this prison.)
Or, perhaps this man had truly loved his family and been happy here, despite the relative isolation and penury. Maybe he'd enjoyed his folksy, rural existence. It was possible, I had to grant, that it was only the outbreak of zombies that had driven him to this. (Not just to insanity, but also to murder.) Zombies had unhinged him. Zombies had warranted that he should kill the very family he had raised and loved.
Or-a third idea-maybe he was "saving" them from being eaten by zombies by killing them himself. Or saving them from rape and murder at the hand of gangs.
Alas, he was in our stomachs now, and not around to ask.
As we left the steaming, smoldering trailer, I saw the bodies of the two young daughters-charred and smoking, and with visible ax wounds in their chests-rise up and begin to walk. Their crisp, ashen bodies edged awkwardly through the rubble, leavin
g coalblack footprints in the snow.
Another time, we saw a fat man wearing only boxer shorts and an expensive fur coat running through a snowy field. I instinctively lifted my pistol to bring him down, but hesitated. This one was also a mystery. Was he running toward something, or away from it? Was he just running to run? We were on the edge of the woods, and there didn't appear to be anything around for miles. I could see the prints made by his snowy, bare feet extending back across the hills to the horizon. It was like encountering a big fish swimming in a tiny puddle. How had it gotten there? How could it live there? What was it trying to prove?
Nothing made sense until I saw the man's eyes.
He was insane. This man's brain was broken. A mania, ancient and terrifying, possessed him. He was not running to or from anything. He had ceased to need "reasons" for doing things. We surrounded and confused him, and I was able to bring him down using only the sword. He did not speak during the entire affair.
As we ate him, I noticed that his feet had turned blue from frostbite. His fingertips, nose, and penis also showed signs of having been frozen. Luckily, an insane brain tasted just as sweet as a normal one.
In yet another strange case, we encountered an overturned luxury car lying in the center of a field. (I could not have sworn to it, but it looked very much like the car that Bleckner-the Kenton College administrator-had driven.) There was no indication as to what force had flipped the automobile, but I reckoned it must have taken many men. The really remarkable thing was that the car's surface was almost completely covered in lines of poetry, etched hard into the paint.
At least, it appeared to be poetry. The sentiments were certainly poetical (though I could remember very few poems, and these were not among them). There seemed to be thousands of lines, and they had been painstakingly carved, as if with the tip of a sharp and exacting knife. The car was recently rainwashed, and the silver lines of verse stood out iridescently in the sunshine. It must have taken days for the author to have covered the surface of the car. I had to get in close to read them. Many of the verses were so small as to be nearly illegible. The ones I could make out tended to disturb me.
One line ran: "My head is heavy, my limbs are weary, and it is not life that makes me move." Another declaimed: "Horseman, your sword is in the groove!" Another still read ominously: "A ghost wants blood." I stopped reading before I'd finished a single door.
There were other instances of insanity. Weird things we found or saw: A missive to Satan ("our dark father below") written in blood on the side of a silo. A group-it appeared to be the remains of several families-who had shot up one another inside a recreation center just outside of Newcomerstown. A tiny house, deep in the woods, with recently skinned and mutilated animals hanging from all the trees around it ... and inside, a man in a rocking chair who'd blown his own brains out.
These grisly pastiches were like clues in a mystery that made no sense.
Clearly, these people had started out okay. They'd been holding their own as the dead rose from their graves and society broke down around them. They'd managed to avoid being eaten by zombies. They were hanging on. And yet, undeniably, here they also were-or parts of them, anyway-undone, insane, and dead.
For a while, I felt like an investigator. I'd see something like the skinned animals hanging from the branches at that house and think: "Aha! Another clue for the file." But these were not clues, and there was no file. There was no use for this information. If these instances "pointed to" anything, it was that life sucked out here. Sucked big-time. Especially for humans.
I felt luckier and luckier to be me-whatever I was. I embraced my inner zombie more and more each day. I felt a real contempt toward these humans. Not only did they hunt me; not only were they delicious to eat; they were also broken internally and couldn't handle reality. They were, in a word, losers. At least, compared to zombies.
I mean, we all had to live in the same shitty world. We had to walk through the same mind-numbing countryside day after day. We had to find ways to endure in this ugly snow globe filled with blood and gray dishwater and a little WELCOME TO KNOX COUNTY! sign. And yet, zombies, despite it all, could suck it up and keep going.
Humans-as was being made increasingly clear to me-were broken and could not. They lacked something. They were incomplete and broken. They went insane and turned on themselves, or on one another. Zombies, in contrast, were focused.
Alone, zombies were competent and resourceful and never gave up. In a group, zombies were harmonious. There was no infighting or disagreement. We stayed sane-sane and hungry, but sane.
We might have rotted from the outside in, but humans rotted from the inside out.
A few days later, I was leading my band west through a string of farms outside Pipesville, located along the southern border of Knox County. It was a warm morning, and there were signs of an early spring. Birdsong, the scent of tree buds on the wind, warm wafts of air-the whole nine yards. It was nice, nice in a way above and beyond being able to sense hot or cold. My cell phone-which formerly displayed time and date-had long since died, but I estimated the date as late February or early March.
Wherever the sun could reach, the snow had melted. The ground was wet and muddy, and it clumped to our shoes (and, in many cases, bare feet). The snow lingered only in the shadows under the trees.
I led the way when we were in forest or underbrush, but hung in the middle of the group whenever we crossed open terrain. (I was ever alert for snipers. Ever alert.) I was learning that zombies were like windup toys. If you could get them walking in one direction, they would pretty much go until they ran into something.
My band had grown. Our group now boasted numbers safely into the double digits. I still had Hunter-my original traveling companion, still decked out in his bright blaze-orange-and all of my original members (except for Mario [RIP]), but we had picked up others along the way. A formerly beautiful young woman with wispy hair, bright blue sandals, and a gaping shotgun wound in her chest. A teenage boy in a tuxedo who, judging by the dried gore running down his face, had already made a few kills. An ice fisherman who appeared to have frozen to death.
There was never any ceremony or pomp to the enlistment proceedings. Zombies simply tended to follow other zombies. Was that such a strange thing? I saw it throughout the animal kingdomfrom the flocks of Canada geese that soared above us and shat on the fields where we roamed, to the deer that loped after one another when we disturbed their solitude deep in the Ohio forests. Things followed other things that were like them.
We usually encountered lone zombies, not other groups. They would watch us approach without alarm, and we would pass them by like a slow and bedraggled parade. Then, after a few minutes, I'd look behind us and see that-sure enough-the stranger-zombie had become our rear guard. Some zombies moved faster than others, but no one was ever left behind entirely.
I had the sense that the growing numbers were making us stronger-more effective-and I wanted to keep it going. (Getting my share of the brains was never a concern. My companions were easy to outmaneuver when it came down to it.) With a group of fifteen or so, we could surround a house or building, block off passageways of escape, and confuse humans. Also, fifteen zombies meant fifteen noses (okay, really more like thirteen) and thirty eyes (actually, 27.5-and you really don't want to know about the .5). More noses to smell you with, and more eyes to see you with. Even though my compatriots were dense as hell, they often smelled or saw things that I missed. These other zombies seemed to have an ability to detect humans that I, for some reason, lacked. (I assumed this was connected to the other ways in which I was atypical for a zombie.)
So, anyway, the smells ... As I was saying, it was a springlike morning outside of Pipesville. Gradually, I began to sense something on the warn wind, something more than the melting snow and wet earth. It was the scent of people. A lot of people. Like a rock concert or a sporting event. But not just the scent of people ... There was also a low undercurrent of something else that
was sickening. Rot. Decay. The stifling musk of death. In my former life, I might have mistaken it for a freshly manured field.
My companions seemed to notice nothing at all.
Cautiously curious, I began to guide my group toward the source of the strange smell. I could see and hear nothing, but the intensifying odor was unmistakable. Where I had first only caught the odd waft as the wind blew in our direction, I soon smelled it constantly. It was powerful and wild. Then, as my band crested a row of man-made hillocks dividing two farms, the source came into view.
It was a battalion-a battalion-of zombies. Easily four hundred of them spilled across the plain in front of us. It was a walking forest of zombies. They moved slowly and implacably, their gaits unhurried and confident. They moved like time. Like inevitability. Like a force of nature. It was breathtaking. I had never seen so many. I felt no trepidation, only curiosity. What happened when large groups of zombies met? Surely, one absorbed the other. And my group being smaller by far, we were doubtless the appointed absorbees.
My position as leader and commander had always come naturally in my group. (I mean, who else was going to pick locks, shoot a gun, and lead us away from ambushes?) Perhaps, I thought, I would be able to insinuate myself as the leader of this new, giant throng. In that instant, I began to imagine what we might be able to accomplish. Entire towns surrounded. Bunkers starved out. Snipers and well-armed survivalists overwhelmed by the sheer force of our numbers.
My zombie compatriots had also paused to regard the approaching throng. They looked surprised, if not necessarily uneasy. Hunter, especially, seemed confused by our visitors.
"Now, now," I said warmly. "Nothing to fear here. We're among friends. Union, Hunter. Wade in with me!"
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