“The infected didn’t get them?”
“Oh, I’m sure they got some. The sick, the old, the lame, the very young. But your average healthy cow is more than a match for even a large number of infected. You see, like all animals, cows are immune to ghoul bites. They also have tough hides that are extremely difficult to bite through, they’re very physically powerful, and they can run in excess of twenty miles an hour. When traveling in herds, they can fend off hordes thousands strong just by trampling them. So, since the Outbreak, cattle populations have boomed nationwide. An entire cottage industry has cropped up around them. Young bulls are one of the most valuable commodities a wildcat rancher can hope to find. Just cut their balls off and teach them to pull a yoke, and you’ve got yourself an ox. And oxen are not cheap.”
“So there there’s good trade to be made in ranching?”
I shrugged. “Sure. It’s dangerous, brutal work, but if you can stay alive long enough and get some good people working with you, yeah. You can make a living at it.”
Sabrina nodded quietly and did not speak for another hour. It had been this way with her for the last three months or so. The questions she directed at me mostly regarded the elements of post-Outbreak society she did not understand, and the questions she asked her father pertained to life before the Outbreak. What kind of car is this? Were there really billions of people, once? What does the Pacific Ocean look like? What was New York City like? Which war did you fight in? How do you say the word on that sign over there? How many languages do you speak?
One of the difficulties we encountered early on was, despite Sabrina’s age and natural intelligence, she had only a fifth grade education. Worse, the nearly four years of day-to-day survival she’d endured since the Outbreak had done nothing to sharpen her recall of what few lessons she had learned.
She could read well enough, and could do basic four-function math, but her memories of history, science, civics, and everything else kids used to learn in school were spotty at best. When she wrote, she often misspelled words and substituted correct spellings for what the word sounded like. For example, she’d once left a note on the store corkboard reading, “Jonny helpd me cleen the shop today. He is a good helpur.”
She was not quite sure who John Adams was. She remembered Abraham Lincoln’s name, but not why he was important. She regarded the wars our nation had fought like stories of great, mythical beasts repeated to frighten unruly children. She could not find England on a map. Or Hawaii, or Japan, or any number of other places. Oddly, though, she knew where to find Madagascar. Something to do with a kid’s movie she watched as a little girl.
I remember the first week she was with us, I pointed to the night sky and said, “You can see Venus tonight.”
She scrunched her eyebrows at me and said, “That’s a planet, right?”
“Yes.”
“Closer or farther than us?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. To the sun. Venus is part of our solar system, right?”
“Yes. And it’s closer. Mercury, Venus, then us.”
It was at that moment I decided to have a nice long chat with Gabe about seeing to her education. He listened and took action.
Despite his efforts, however, there is only so much a kid can learn in three months, and only so much that can be learned about her. I knew she liked to read. She came over to my house often and sat alone on a chaise lounge in one of the guest rooms reading to herself, her lips moving over the prose of Steinbeck and Hemingway and Joyce Carol Oates, an old Oxford English dictionary close at hand for the difficult words. When she finished a book she wandered into Allison’s office and hungrily perused her small library of paperbacks for a new one. Sometimes she would read six or seven books a week.
Math, on the other hand, she did not like very much. She was good at it, she just did not enjoy it. I told her I did not enjoy it either, but it was necessary for her to learn. At this she shrugged—her go-to response for pretty much everything—picked up her math textbook, and set to work. And my God, did she work fast. In a week, she was caught up on junior high math. Two weeks later, she was ready for algebra. By the time we were three weeks on the road, she had mastered statistics while sitting in her bedroll at night and working problems under a little battery powered reading light. I spoke of this to Gabe and asked if he had done any testing of her mental acuity yet.
“She can’t do what I can do,” he replied.
“You tried already?”
“Yes. Her capacity for repeating quotes and pieces of information is remarkable, but she does not have an eidetic memory. Close, but not the same. That said, her ability to learn and absorb new information is far beyond what I can do.”
“How so?”
“There’s a difference between memorizing and learning. Memorizing comes naturally to me. Doesn’t take much effort. Learning is taking that which is memorized and applying it in a useful way. Take her knife fighting, for instance. She only trained for two years, but her level of advancement is beyond that of some masters I’ve trained with. If somebody teaches me a new technique, I have to drill it hundreds of times, build muscle memory. Sabrina’s not like that. I teach her something once, and she’s got it. Barely needs to practice.”
“Must be nice. What do you think it means?”
Gabriel poked a stick in the fire and looked at his daughter with a glimmer of pride. “It means she’s barely reached a fraction of her real potential.”
Without looking up from her textbook, Sabrina said, “You two assholes know I can hear you right?”
“Sorry. Thought we were being quiet,” I said.
“Not quiet enough.”
I frowned at her. “Yeah, well, do me a favor. Don’t call your father an asshole.”
Her eyebrows lifted enough for the gray eyes to fix on me. “Why not?”
“Because he loves you,” I said flatly, “and he’s been nothing but kind and generous and patient with you. And he’s my friend, and I don’t like it when people insult my friends. So knock it off.”
She did not reply, but I had not heard her insult Gabriel since. Me, yes. Plenty of times. But not Gabe.
Ahead of us, the Wichita Safe Zone grew larger and more distinct. Having 20/10 vision, I was able to see it much better than most of the other people in the caravan. In this instance, I was not so sure my enhanced eyesight was such a good thing.
Wichita, like most major cities, was a burned-out wreck of what it had once been. The place reminded me of pictures of Hiroshima after the bomb: flattened buildings, rubble-strewn streets, bare patches of scorched ground where houses once stood, broken ruins of walls and foundations and columns stretching upward like fingers on a skeleton’s hand, and covering it all, a thick layer of gray dust and black soot.
About a year ago, the Army had embarked on a mission the president had dubbed Operation Relentless Force. Over a hundred-thousand soldiers set out with tanks, artillery, and air support with the sole intent of liberating Kansas from nearly three million infected. They had succeeded, but at great cost. Over ten thousand troops were lost to the infected, with another ten thousand dying of exposure, disease, accidents, and skirmishes with raiders and marauders. I suspected friendly fire factored into that number as well, but the brass at Central Command did not like to discuss such things. Not publicly, at least.
By the end of it, Kansas was as ghoul free as anywhere on Earth. Even in the spring and summer, if rumors were to be believed, one could ride for days without seeing a single walking corpse. I had my doubts about that. No one had built a wall around Kansas, and the last time I checked, the infected do not give a pinch of flying monkey shit about state borders. Ergo, I treated Kansas with the same level of healthy paranoia I treated every place else.
The military presence was light as we rode into town. Most of the ruins on either side of us had been bulldozed to allow the Army to lay down a broad concrete highway through the ruined city. Guard towers manned with light mach
ine guns stood at staggered intervals on alternating sides of the unmarked gray road. Our caravan rode single file northward while people leaving town traveled southbound to our left. Ahead, I could see the sectioned square walls of the various districts rising out of the ashes, small figures of soldiers patrolling the catwalks.
“Security seems pretty light,” Sabrina said. “Last time I was in a safe zone the place was crawling with troops.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Strange.”
We continued bumping and rattling along until we reached a crossroads that branched off in eight directions. I had heard one of Spike’s guards refer to this area as Eight Points, referring to the various avenues for caravans to go.
The caravan ground to a halt as the lead wagon reached a large security checkpoint. A low wall of concrete highway dividers barred the way ahead for a hundred yards on each side of the entrance, which itself was wide enough to allow four carts through side by side. Four forklifts loaded with additional highway dividers waited in a row not far away should the gates need to be closed quickly. I did not see drivers waiting in them, so I assumed the task had been assigned to designated soldiers nearby. It’s what I would have done, anyway.
A semi-circle of five guard towers stood behind the checkpoint, all manned with M-240s and snipers carrying long guns. I spotted two M-110s, two bolt-action .338 Lapua magnums, and in the center, a big Barrett .50 caliber. There were additional machine gun nests at ground level laid out to create a crossfire on the highway, as well as numerous troops armed with everything from M-4s to LAW rockets. All in all, not the kind of place one wanted to get mouthy with the security staff.
Probably best if I kept quiet.
A discussion spanning perhaps two minutes occurred at the checkpoint, after which the officer in charge directed Spike and his men to take the caravan up one of the avenues headed northeast. As we entered the massive compound, I could feel dozens of eyes watching us, alert for the slightest indication of malfeasance. I kept my hands on the reins, my eyes straight ahead, and did my best to look disinterested.
“I hope they have baths,” Sabrina said. “I could go for a bath.”
“I think we all could.”
“And laundry. My clothes stink. Smell like sweat and cow shit.”
As she said this, the beast at the top right of the four-oxen team pulling us along voided its bowels less than two feet from the face of the animal behind it. It did not break stride, nor had any of its brethren the hundreds of times I had witnessed similar events in the last six weeks. It occurred to me a few days into the journey that anyone wanting to track the caravan’s progress need not keep us in sight—just follow the trail of dung piles and they’d be on us in no time.
“You know what I miss more than anything?” I said.
“What?”
“Cars. I miss cars.”
FOURTEEN
“Not so bad here.”
I looked around the square we stood in. It had once been a residential neighborhood on the northeast side of Wichita. Now, it was a bulldozed patch of snowy ground dotted regularly with bare foundations of houses long destroyed. A twelve foot wall of concrete and steel surrounded the square, complete with catwalks and guard towers at the corners. I counted twelve troops on duty, two machine guns, and a single sniper in the northeast tower.
“How big you figure this place is?” I said.
“’Bout a quarter-mile square.”
I looked northward and saw a long, dome-shaped building shaped like half a cigar planted into the ground. The roof peaked out at twelve feet or so with walls maybe thirty feet apart at the base. I had seen buildings like it before at Fort McCray. The soldiers called it a drill hall, but the civilians in the caravan called it a long house. The floor was bare concrete, the windows were horizontal and mounted eight feet off the ground, and the doors at either end were made of reinforced steel. The building’s purpose was to put a roof over people’s heads and provide a layer of protection from the elements, nothing more. No heating system, no place to prepare food or do laundry, no fires allowed inside.
To the south, well away from the long house, were the livestock pens and the biggest damn latrine I had ever seen. Wooden buildings marked MENS and WOMENS straddled the latrine side by side. When our caravan left, an excavator would pour mulch over the latrine, then empty it into trucks and haul it to the edge of the city where it would be used to make the fertilizer the government provided as a subsidy to farms in the area.
To the east were bathing facilities, and to the west was another long house, this one with just a roof and support posts, no walls, with cooking stations and rows of picnic tables. A tangle of caravaners were already hauling bags of grain, beans, and boxes of preserved vegetables to the cooking stations. A team of two dozen men and women worked to haul the oxen and horses into the livestock pens where children were already emptying feed bags into large bins and pumping water into long troughs. Spike and a few of his men, including the two Blackthorns, spoke calmly with a quartermaster whose attention never seemed far from a clipboard in his hands.
“What do you think they’re talking about over there?”
Gabe looked in Spike’s direction. “Ordering supplies, applying for passes to the market district, that kind of thing.”
“Where’s the market district?”
“Not sure. This is my first time here, same as you.”
“You know if they have hotels there?”
“They do. Laundry and private baths too.”
I smiled. “You and your daughter think alike.”
“Hmm?”
“Something she said on the way in.”
Gabe’s eyes tracked to Sabrina sitting in the wagon. She had her feet kicked up on the buckboard and was leafing through a paperback. As I watched, a few years seemed to drop off my old friend’s countenance, the hard lines easing, the jaw less tense, the eyes softer and kinder.
“Maybe there’s a nice place to eat,” he said. “I bet Sabrina would like that.”
I patted the big man on the shoulder. “I bet she would.”
Elizabeth sat up from the back of the cart and rubbed sleep out of her eyes. “We there yet?”
“Halfway,” Gabe said. “We’re in the Wichita Safe Zone.”
The former mayor of Hollow Rock stood up and climbed down from the wagon. Once on the ground, she raised her arms and stretched luxuriously. I tried very hard not to notice the line of stomach and navel her shirt revealed as it went up and the wondrous way her large breasts lifted under her wool sweater as she put her arms over her head. When I felt my eyes lingering too long in places they shouldn’t, I looked away and told myself I was only human, it had been over a month since I had seen my wife, and Elizabeth was a very attractive woman. No shame in noticing a woman’s beauty any more than appreciating a bright sunrise. Except pretty sunrises did not elicit a low tug in my groin.
Stop it.
“So what now?” Elizabeth said.
“Now I’m gonna go talk to Spike,” Gabe said, “and get passes to the market district.”
“For all of us?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
Gabe grunted acknowledgement and walked in Spike’s direction. He was still in conversation with the quartermaster, who saw us approaching and pointed.
“Who’s this?”
“Gabriel Garrett and Eric Riordan,” Spike answered. “They’re VIPs in this caravan.”
A greedy twinkle appeared in the quartermaster’s eye. He was a squat man, broad through the shoulders and narrow at the waist, pale skin, shaved head, wearing a neatly pressed uniform and clean boots. The nametag on his chest read, SWANSON.
“What can I do for you, fellas?”
“Need passes into the market district,” Gabe said.
“For what purpose?”
Gabe’s eyes narrowed. “Trade.”
“And what are you trading?”
I looked at Spike. “H
e always ask this many questions?”
“No. He doesn’t.”
Swanson glared at Spike. “It’s part of my job.”
“Listen,” Gabe said. “We already went through inspection. Spike is known here. I’m registered in the Archive and will sign a waiver of responsibility for the rest of my party. Last I checked, those were the only requirements to obtain passes in a federal safe zone.”
Swanson’s grin was as greasy as a skillet full of lard. “That and the approval of the quartermaster. So what are you trading?”
Gabe chuckled. “So you want to play that game? No problem. I’ll just head over to the radioman and send a message to General Phillip Jacobs, head of Army Special Operations Command. He’s a friend of mine. I’m sure he’d be thrilled to know one of his quartermasters is extorting traders in a federal safe zone.”
The grin vanished. “Now hang on, no one is trying to extort anyone.”
“Bullshit,” Gabe said, pressing his advantage. “I know your type. You’re a fucking worm. You abuse your position for personal enrichment. You bully traders and force them to pay bribes in order to access facilities and services they have every right to as Union citizens. And I’m willing to bet the poorer and weaker they are, the more you take. It’s little shits like you that make it hard for honest traders to earn a living.”
Swanson’s face turned bright red. “Now listen here-”
“No, you listen. You’re going to go to the guard shack and fill out five passes. You’re going to bring them to me. I will pay the standard fee; the equivalent of twenty-five federal credits is twenty grams of salt. You will take it with a smile and a thank you. And if you don’t, I’ll call General Jacobs, and by the end of the month you’ll be busted down to specialist and manning a watch tower in the Nevada outposts. Do I make myself clear?”
Swanson sputtered a few times, too enraged to speak. One of the Blackthorns flanking Spike rubbed his mouth to conceal a smile and said, “You better do as he says, Swanson. I’ve heard of this guy. He’s got pull.”
Surviving the Dead (Book 7): The Killing Line Page 15