by Joe McKinney
Barely.
He reached the rifle in the tall weeds and tried to swing it around like a club, but one of the zombies had closed the distance between them and was able to grab hold of the barrel and shake it back and forth so that Richardson couldn’t gain control of it. The zombie managed to shift its grip forward and grabbed hold of Richardson’s wrist. The gun and the zombie both fell to the ground as Richardson pulled himself loose, and he found himself standing over the zombie.
The zombie was on his knees, reaching for him, as Richardson backed away. The other zombies were still a few feet behind the one on its knees, but they were close enough to keep him from retrieving his gun and his machete. Still backing up, Richardson slipped on one of the bricks and nearly lost his footing. He reached down and scooped up a brick and smashed it down with both hands on the kneeling zombie’s face, the brick connecting with a muffled clank and then crumbling.
He let the ruined bits fall from his fingers.
He was out on the sidewalk in front of the Pizza Hut now, stunned by what had just happened to him. In eight years of fighting the infected, he had never seen one use such a complicated ruse as pretending to be a slow mover. The implications of that were staggering.
Richardson turned away from the two remaining zombies, looking for a place to run, and froze when he saw the Red Man watching him. The Red Man had been kneeling at the body of the dead man in the St. Louis Cardinals hat, but when he saw Richardson he stood up and took a few steps forward. There was no self-assured smile on his face now. Just a steady, unyielding stare. He stepped forward again, eyes narrowed on Richardson.
Behind him, Richardson heard footsteps in the grass. He glanced quickly over his shoulder and saw the two zombies coming out of the alley. When Richardson looked back to the street, the Red Man was pointing in his direction. Then the Red Man threw back his head and began to moan. The zombies in the street all turned their heads in Richardson’s direction. He made a quick scan of the street, all those dead eyes looking at him, and he swallowed.
One of the Red Man’s soldiers fired at Richardson, hitting the wall behind him, peppering the back of his neck and scalp with bits of brick and mortar.
He ducked his head and ran.
Behind him, he heard the hacking cough of automatic weapons. The air around his head filled with high-pitched whines, like a swarm of invisible hornets. Bullets tore into the façade of the Pizza Hut, blasting off bits of wood and brick that sizzled against the sleeves of his Windbreaker. He rounded the corner where he had first seen Sylvia Carnes and veered to his left as the wrecked car ahead of him exploded beneath a hail of bullets.
Four zombies were staggering toward him from the overgrown alley behind the Pizza Hut. Richardson veered to the right of a pickup to avoid a zombie and kept on running, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. There was a ruined wooden fence to his right that ran the length of the property back to the alley, bright green weeds growing along the base. Without breaking stride he pulled his pistol and fired at the zombie that stepped around the back corner of the fence. The zombie sank to its knees but didn’t fall.
A moment later he was in the alley, facing another crumbling wooden fence and a three-story apartment building beyond that. He looked to his left and saw two zombies coming at him through the grass. On the next street over he heard the sound of a truck engine revving loudly, coming closer. To his right the alley was thick with trash and weeds. A wooden light pole had fallen across the alley and it was covered with what looked like lilac. Beyond the pole was a zombie in the remnants of a red T-shirt and jeans staggering clumsily over a mounded pile of garbage.
Tires skidded on the pavement behind him. Men shouted. Again he heard the stuttering cough of automatic weapons, the bullets slapping into the brick wall to his right. He moved to the opposite side of the alley and ran toward the fallen light pole. His chest was heaving, his breath hitching in his throat, but he forced himself to stop, breathe, and focus on putting his pistol’s front sight on the zombie’s chest. Richardson fired twice, dropping the zombie, before ducking under the light pole and running through the trash-strewn alley.
He made it to the next corner and turned left. A long gray street stretched out ahead of him, the concrete cracked into oddly symmetrical squares and choked with weeds and rolls of carpet, insulation panels, soggy paper, plastic bags, and endless piles of concrete scree and lumber. To his left was a six-story brick building with nearly every window broken. To his right was the fossil of a parking garage, its gray concrete frame cracked and crumbling. Shrubs grew from the ledges. The bottom story had been walled up with a mismatched assortment of bricks, parts of the wall covered with the faded ghosts of graffiti from before the outbreak. One section of the wall had collapsed, creating a way in, and he ran for it.
“There he is!” came a man’s voice from behind him.
Richardson turned and saw one of the black trucks turning the corner behind him. A soldier standing up in the bed was banging on the roof of the cab and pointing right at Richardson.
“Damn it,” Richardson muttered.
He ran for the collapsed section of the wall and dove inside it as the truck roared to life and started down the alley.
Inside the parking garage he suddenly found himself in near total darkness. Here and there he could make out the silhouette of wrecked cars and he could smell the rancid odor of a dead body propped up against the wall to his right.
“He’s in there,” a man’s voice said.
Richardson spun around and faced the patch of sunlight that led back out to the street. Two man-sized shapes appeared in the opening.
He pulled his pistol and fired.
One of the men let out a grunt, like he’d been punched in the gut. The other ducked back behind the corner.
“Choke on it, asshole,” Richardson said.
He ran for the opposite side of the building, found a stairwell, and ran down it. He emerged onto another ruined street, a tall chain-link fence straight ahead of him. He ran for the fence and found a section that was peeled back from the post and he pushed his way through the hole into the overgrown alley beyond.
The alley was little more than an easement between two brick buildings. He had to turn his shoulders to fit through. On the far side of the easement he saw another building and he slipped inside one of its broken windows and stopped for a moment to listen to the silence and the shadows that had swallowed him.
Come on, he told himself. Breathe. Think. Come on, you have to think.
The room in which he found himself was large and empty, save for a few overturned chairs and ceiling tiles that had fallen to the floor and turned to powder. Electrical wires hung like vines from the exposed rafters in the ceiling. A gray haze hung in the air. The place smelled of rot and dust.
Richardson crossed to a window on the far side of the room and looked out. He could see a patchwork of vacant lots, the vegetation dead and brown. Gray streets led down blind alleys between endless red brick buildings. He couldn’t remember ever seeing so much red brick in his life.
But he could breathe again. At least he had that much. He looked down at the pistol in his hand and opened the cylinder and ejected the spent shell casings onto the floor. He took a speed loader from his belt and was about to drop it into the cylinder when he suddenly smelled the odor of rotting meat.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw a child, no more than ten years old, staggering toward him, dragging a useless leg behind him.
Richardson groaned.
The boy dragged himself forward, one arm coming up, the fingers too mangled to work. The other arm hung uselessly at his side. It too had been partially eaten. The boy’s face was crusted over with dark splashes of dried blood, his eyes milky white with cataracts. He was obscenely thin. He began a long, low growl that ended with a snarling, snapping cough. Then he fell forward.
Richardson stepped to one side, coming up behind the boy and pushing him face-first into the wall next to the window. E
lectrical wires hung down around them and Richardson balled up a section of them and looped the ends around the boy’s throat. The boy’s arm flailed against the wall, smearing blood on the bricks. Richardson kept pulling the wires down and down until he heard the long, low growl cut off abruptly. Then he stepped back from the wall and staggered back toward the center of the room.
The boy turned clumsily and came after him, his head snapping back as the wires went taut. He kept reaching for Richardson with his one working arm until there was no more air left in his lungs.
He jerked against the wire and a choking gurgling noise came from him. Then his legs bent and his body sagged, though his knees never quite reached the floor.
The head lolled to one side, the dead, white eyes still open, watching Richardson.
Richardson stood there, unable to look away from the dead boy. This was too much. This was just too much. There was no sound, save for the creaking of the wooden rafters as the boy’s body swayed back and forth, and all Richardson could do was stand there, shaking his head.
He could hear voices outside the window, but they were not close. A truck raced by, shifted gears, and the sound faded away into the distance until it was indistinct.
He’d lost them, at least for now.
He went to the window and put a hand on the brick frame and watched the vacant lots outside. A few zombies roamed between the apartment buildings; but for the time being, Richardson felt safe enough to relax a little. God knows he needed it.
He glanced back at the dead boy, then lowered himself to the dust-covered floor and slid the straps of his backpack off his shoulders and removed a plastic bottle of water and leaned against the wall while he drank. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he pinched it away. He was so tired. He wanted so badly to rest. But he couldn’t. He could never stop, never rest. He hated living this way.
A large black bird—a crow, judging by the size of it—landed on the window ledge.
Richardson regarded it without moving. The bird squawked at him, a harsh, rude sound. Another landed beside it, and another.
He stared at them; they back at him.
Another flew inside and lit near the dead zombie boy’s feet. It squawked at Richardson, then jumped onto the dead boy’s shoulder and pecked at one of his eyes until it pried the thing loose.
The bird held the boy’s eyeball by its trailed bundle of severed optic nerves, then tossed it up in the air and gulped it down. Another crow was already prying the second eyeball loose.
Richardson turned to the window. The first three crows had become dozens. Beyond them were hundreds more. Thousands. They sat on the telephone poles and wires and in the street and on the roofs of the ruined apartment buildings. All of them stared back at him with dull black eyes, empty as a void, empty as forever.
A crow squawked.
Another answered.
The sound grew large, bird answering unto bird. It became a din, became a living, breathing thing trying to cover him, beat him down, snuff him out. It was a painful thing, that noise, huge, godlike in its aspect.
He clapped his hands over his ears but it did no good. The noise was all around him. It was inside him.
He closed his eyes and pulled his knees up to his chest. He hugged them. He pressed his face into his thighs and thought: No! Stop it. No!
Richardson sat there, whimpering, for a long time.
When at last he opened his eyes, the birds were gone. The dead boy was still hanging from the electrical cords, still creaking with his slow pendulum movements in the torpid heat of the darkened building.
Richardson mopped a hand over his face. He was sweating badly. He finished off the last of his water and sat watching the beads run down the inside of the bottle. He was numb. Mentally drained and numb.
He tried to clear his mind so he could figure out what to do next. Over the last eight years he had seen so many messed-up things, so many lives wasted. But he had never seen anything like the Red Man. Sitting there, his head between his knees, Richardson asked himself again how it was possible for a man to control the infected the way the Red Man had, and he didn’t have any answers.
You have to think about this, he told himself. You have to. This is important.
But he couldn’t. His eyes burned. The muscles in his lower back ached. He was unable to concentrate on anything but the stiffness in his body.
From outside he heard the familiar sound of a wooden door getting smashed open. That wasn’t good. The zombies were searching the surrounding buildings—maybe looking for him, maybe looking for Sylvia Carnes and the two younger women she had with her. But it didn’t matter who they were looking for. Whoever they found was as good as dead.
He pulled himself up to one knee and looked out the window. From where he stood he could see row upon row of red brick apartment buildings, with vacant lots between them. So many broken windows. Here and there was a fire-damaged roof. The brown weed-filled yards were starting to encroach through the ground-floor windows.
He was scanning the buildings for the broken wooden door he’d heard when he saw a zombie falling from a second-story window off to his right.
A small crowd of the infected was fighting to get through the front door.
Framed in the window above them was the young, dark-haired woman he’d seen back at the Pizza Hut, the one who had seemed to be in charge of Sylvia Carnes’s group.
Get out of there, he thought.
But she seemed to know already that the zombies were coming for her. She turned from the window and he thought he heard the sounds of a struggle. A moment later she burst out of the front door with a wooden baseball bat in her hands. Sylvia Carnes and the other young woman emerged behind her. The dark-haired woman sidestepped one of the zombies, came up behind it, and swung the bat at the back of the zombie’s head, dropping it with one blow. It was the same practiced move he’d seen Sylvia Carnes do in front of the Pizza Hut, but this woman did it with an athleticism that Sylvia Carnes could only try to mimic.
And I bet this is the one who taught it to you, Sylvia, he said to himself. Not bad.
There weren’t many zombies around them now, maybe twenty, and the women worked quickly to put them down. When the last zombie fell, the women formed up back-to-back-to-back and surveyed the field. They had an easy escape route to the south, lots of wide open ground. The nearest zombies were still a good 150 feet away.
But just as it looked like they were going to make it, Richardson heard the sound of a truck engine racing, tires skidding. He turned to his left, following the noise, and saw one of the Red Man’s trucks coming up the street toward them.
“No,” he said. He looked at the women. “Run. You have to run.”
The women heard the truck, too. The dark-haired woman lowered her bat and turned. She watched the truck approach.
“Come on,” Richardson muttered, “what are you waiting for?”
Then she tossed the bat to the ground.
“No,” Richardson said. “What are you doing? Run!”
Niki Booth counted the black shirts on the truck racing toward her. Four men in the back, probably two more in the cab. Nothing she couldn’t handle.
“Niki?”
She turned. Sylvia Carnes was looking at the bat on the ground. Beside her, Avery Harper was scared. It was a bad idea bringing her. She looked like she was holding on to her self-control with both hands.
But of course she’d no choice in that. She couldn’t leave Avery behind. Not the way things were back home.
This has gone far enough, Niki realized. She had to do something now or they were all going to be murdered by the black shirts. And that just wasn’t going to happen.
“You two need to run. Go, hurry.”
Sylvia looked at her. “Niki, what are you going to do?”
“Don’t ask me any questions, Sylvia. You and Avery, you need to run. Please. I won’t let you get caught.”
“Niki,” Avery said, “you can’t.”
Ni
ki nearly barked at her, but she caught the words in her throat. This wasn’t a patrol, and Avery and Sylvia sure as hell weren’t soldiers. She breathed out slowly, getting herself back under control.
To Avery, very gently, she said, “Baby, I mean it. Run. If I don’t catch up with you on the road, I’ll meet you in the trade market down in Herculaneum. Now go.”
“They’ll kill you,” Sylvia said.
“These idiots won’t even get to first base. Now look, whatever happens to me, you get to a little town called Chester, you understand?”
“Chester? Is that where we’re going?”
“You need to be there by Wednesday of next week, understand?”
Sylvia shrugged helplessly. “I . . . but, what about you?”
“I’ll be fine.” Niki glanced over at Avery and made sure that Sylvia saw the look in her eyes. “You take care of her, okay?”
“Niki . . .”
“Promise me. That’s all I ask.”
Sylvia nodded.
“Good enough.”
“But Niki . . .” Avery said.
Niki took her younger cousin by the hand. “Listen to me, Avery. It’s like when you were a kid, remember? I’d tell you to lay low while I took care of the bad guys? Remember that?”
Avery nodded.
“It’s like that now. I got bad guys that need takin’ care of. You go with Sylvia. You stay close to her. Understand?”
Avery nodded.
“I need to hear it, Avery.”
“I understand.”
“Alright.” She turned back toward the black truck and pulled both her pistols. Then she looked back over her shoulder at them. “Go,” she said, “both of you.”
Richardson’s pulse raced. He could feel it pounding at his temples. From where he stood he could see the truck barreling down on the women. He could see the young dark-haired woman with a pistol in each hand, running at the truck. Sylvia Carnes was yelling something. He couldn’t catch all of it, but he heard her call the dark-haired girl Niki, and he figured this was Niki Booth, the name he’d heard the Red Man mention while he was interrogating the two men that had been with them.