by Joe McKinney
They definitely didn’t come prepared for this, Richardson thought as he watched Sylvia drink. She had her eyes closed, savoring the taste of the water. He was about to ask her what they were doing out here when she opened her eyes and extended the bottle to him.
“We need to get going,” Sylvia said.
“Uh, okay,” Richardson said.
He took the bottle and screwed on the cap. Sylvia and Avery started walking while he slid the bottle back into his pack and zipped it up.
And then he stopped, and listened. A faint rustling, like rubble shifting underfoot. He scanned the surrounding buildings, looking for signs of movement, and saw only a vast, empty city.
“Hey,” Sylvia called back to him. “You coming?”
“Yeah,” he said. He took one last look at the empty street. “Yeah, on my way.”
They walked south, and soon fell into a marching order, with Sylvia and Richardson out front, and the younger woman trailing along about ten feet behind them. Richardson tried to make room for the girl next to them, but she seemed to prefer to be by herself. Richardson let her be.
They stayed on Florissant Street wherever they could. Occasionally, they’d hear one of the infected chasing after a rat or a dog and they would hide, but the infected down here didn’t seem to move as packs, and so they were easy to avoid. Gradually, the feeling they were being followed began to fade.
“I think if we keep at this pace we can reach some of the open farmland south of town by nightfall,” Sylvia said. “The Red Man’s troops will be searching the area north of here for us for the rest of the day. When they don’t find us, they’ll head back to their home base.”
Richardson was suddenly interested. “Where is that?”
“About a hundred and fifty miles south of Herculaneum. The Kirkman Hyatt Hotel and Convention Center.”
“And you’re sure he’ll go there? He won’t stay around here and try to hunt us?”
“We’re not his priority. Niki Booth is.”
“That’s the woman you were with?”
Sylvia nodded. “We’re not out of the woods yet. We need to stay off his radar for the next day or so. After that, we’ll be able to move around a little easier.”
Richardson shook his head. There were a thousand questions he wanted to ask her, but he kept coming back to what she said about the Red Man. “You said he was a zombie. What does that mean?”
“What do you think it means? He’s a zombie. He’s infected.”
“I know what a zombie is, Sylvia,” Richardson said.
“So then what’s your question?”
He bristled at her tone. Eight years had passed but Sylvia Carnes was still the same old bitch. Everything out of her mouth was just plain wrong.
Richardson forced himself to smile. “How is it possible?” he said. “That’s what I want to know. I watched him walking around. He limped, but he was as coordinated as any of us. And he talked. Zombies don’t talk. They don’t think. That guy—he may be crazy, but he was capable of carrying on a conversation. I heard him.”
“That’s true.”
“So how is it possible? It’s not.”
“You saw him control those other zombies.”
“I don’t know what I saw,” he said. “But it couldn’t have been him controlling those zombies.”
“They didn’t attack him, did they? They didn’t attack his black shirts. If not him controlling them, what exactly do you think you saw?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He huffed, but it came out a laugh. “No, Sylvia, we’re not gonna go over this again.”
“Go over what, exactly?”
“We’re not gonna do San Antonio all over again. I’ve seen Stage III zombies, Sylvia. I know they can use Stage I zombies as tools. But that’s not what I saw back there. You keep wanting to ascribe abilities to zombies that they just don’t possess. Their brains are gone, Sylvia. For all intents and purposes, they’re dead. And they aren’t coming back.”
“You’re an idiot,” she said.
“Calling me names doesn’t prove your point, Sylvia. Tell me how he controls the zombies. You can’t, can you?”
“He controls them because he’s a zombie, just like they are.”
“But what’s the mechanism? There has to be a mechanism. You see that, right? If he’s controlling them, how does he do it?”
She looked mad. Her eyes were drilling holes in him, but he didn’t look away. Damn it, he’d forgotten how much fun it was to fight. He was actually enjoying himself.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I don’t.”
They had arrived at an intersection. Sylvia stopped beneath a faded yellow traffic light and looked left, then right. There was a park to their right that stretched south several blocks. It was overgrown with weeds, the tall grass swaying in the wind. Richardson breathed deep and could smell the approaching rain and the musty vegetable rot of river scent.
And something else, too. Something unpleasant. The sour-sweet stench of decayed flesh.
Once again that feeling that they were being followed sent a sweaty chill down his back. But there was nothing moving out there amid the wrecked buildings and abandoned cars.
Sylvia wiped the sweat from her forehead, then retied the black ribbon that held her ponytail in place. Her hair was wiry as a bird’s nest.
A part of Richardson wanted to engage again. He had her on the ropes and it wasn’t his nature to stop when he got under an opponent’s defenses. But the feeling that they were being followed had sapped some of the flavor out of the fight. He held his peace.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” she said, pointing toward the park. “Better veer left, toward the river. We’ll be going through more buildings, but that’ll also give us more places to hide if we need it.”
“Okay,” Richardson said, though he got the distinct impression that she wasn’t asking for his advice. “Where are you planning on going?”
“The free trade market down in Herculaneum,” she said.
“That’s where I was planning on going, too.”
She looked at him, but said nothing. She turned to Avery. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Avery said, though it wasn’t a convincing act. Her face was flush. There were sweat stains all down the front of her baggy shirt.
They moved out again, this time at a walk, and entered a wider section of the street. Richardson had the distinct impression that they had crossed some kind of cultural or economic dividing line in the old city’s demographics. The red brick buildings were fewer and farther between. He saw more and more banks, modern two-story houses that had originally been painted white but were now peeling and faded, and here and there a dry cleaners and a grocery store and a theater. There were also lots of wrecked cars, most of which had been cannibalized for parts or destroyed by fire. But luckily, no zombies.
“I remember what you told me when you asked permission to come along with my group in San Antonio,” Sylvia said. “You said you were trying to write the definitive history on the zombie outbreak.”
Richardson remembered the conversation well. It had taken place in her office at the University of Texas in Austin. Her office was a small room in Parlin Hall with a window overlooking a wooded courtyard, and beyond that, Guadalupe Street, known affectionately on campus as “the Drag.” The walls were one continuous bookshelf, each shelf sagging beneath dusty rows of novels. She had been a moderately attractive middle-aged woman then, maybe a little plump, a little pale for his taste, but smart.
He’d sat in the one chair in the room that wasn’t mounded with books. On the desk between them was the court order signed by Justice Allen Woods. The order allowed her to take forty college kids who didn’t know the first thing about the risks involved inside the quarantine wall around San Antonio.
Back then, before anybody really had any idea at all about what was going on with the infected, there were strong feelings on both sides about the proper way to handle t
he problem. Most of America wanted to eliminate the infected by any means necessary. Dr. Carnes, and a few very vocal people like her, disagreed. The infected were victims of a plague, she said. We wouldn’t be talking about wholesale murder if this was a flu outbreak, or rabies, or anything else.
“But you’re leading them into a meat grinder,” he said to her.
“I disagree. All my students are dedicated members of the People for an Ethical Solution. They have made informed choices. They believe, as I do, that the infected are still human, and therefore have the same rights and expectations that any human being has in an enlightened society. This trip will show that we don’t need to be afraid of them. This trip will show the U.S. government that the time has come to send in researchers to try to combat this outbreak.”
“Sounds like you rehearsed that.”
She simply stared at him.
“Your students are just kids,” Richardson went on. “How can they make informed choices?”
“Each member of my group is over twenty-one. They’re legally adults, capable of making their own choices.”
Richardson choked down his objection. He’d never met a twenty-one-year-old kid responsible enough to shop for groceries by himself, much less make an informed choice on an issue where the stakes involved life and death. But he knew it wouldn’t do any good to tell Dr. Sylvia Carnes that. She was a zealot, and arguing with a zealot did about as much good as pounding your head against a wall.
“You think this is a mistake, don’t you, Mr. Richardson?”
He shrugged. “I thought I’d been pretty clear on that point, yes. I think you’re going to get those kids killed. I think we’ll probably all get killed.”
“And yet you’re still going?”
Richardson smiled. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Why? You know why I’m doing it. Why are you doing it?”
He just went on smiling. “Because Simon & Schuster asked me to write the definitive history of the zombie outbreak. And because they backed a dump truck full of money up to my door.”
But it wasn’t the real answer, and both of them knew it.
Now here he was, eight years later, and the world was a completely different place. Everything had changed. Off in the rubble to his left he saw a zombie trying to wade its way through the debris, but it was no threat. Its injuries were too severe for it to do anything but fall over. It couldn’t even moan. It was, in many ways, a lot like the world it haunted.
“Did you ever write your book?” Sylvia asked.
The question surprised him, and he wasn’t really sure how to answer her. “I never really stopped,” he finally said. “These last few years, I’ve been wandering the country, talking to survivors, building up a library of stories. That’s what has kept me alive.” He laughed, an unpleasant sound with a note of bitterness beneath it. “It’s given me a reason to get up each morning.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“That zombie you were just looking at,” she said, gesturing with her chin toward the building on Richardson’s left.
“Yeah?”
“That’s a Stage I. If I had to guess I’d say he got turned sometime this summer, maybe even a few weeks ago. You know the difference between a Stage I, II, and III zombie, right?”
He nodded.
She started walking, and Richardson and the girl fell in with her. “Then you know how they are nearly back to where they were before they were infected. Mentally, I mean. They are capable of extremely complex actions, such as—”
Richardson frowned. “Now hold on for a second. I don’t think I buy that at all. Perhaps they regain some limited cognitive faculties, but to say they—”
“Such as manipulate other zombies,” Sylvia interrupted. “Use strategy to hunt prey. You even mentioned that one yourself. If you ask me, it sounds an awful lot like near-full use of cognitive faculties. But have you ever wondered what comes next?”
“After what? You mean, after Stage III?”
She nodded.
Richardson’s mind didn’t want to take in the possibility. “Are saying the Red Man is . . . what, a Stage IV zombie?”
She touched the tip of her nose.
“That’s . . .”
Richardson wanted to say that it was impossible, but it did make a weird kind of sense. Was that really the next step?
“Oh my God,” he said.
Sylvia nodded. “Yeah, well, the zombies sure seem to think so.”
CHAPTER 6
By late afternoon the rich, muddy smell of the river was thick in the air. The sky above them was churning with storm clouds and Richardson could see lightning off to the east. He hadn’t eaten since before daybreak and he was about to recommend they stop when Sylvia did it for him.
“What do you think?” she said to Avery.
Sylvia was pointing at a small, two-story office building with an upstairs balcony that looked like it might afford a pretty good view of the street. Her hair had once again worked itself loose from her ponytail so that now it resembled the ball moss that hung from the pecan trees down by the river, but otherwise she looked as solid as ever. Richardson imagined she could walk all night if she had to.
By contrast, Avery looked even worse than Richardson felt. Why in the world did they bring her along, he wondered, and not for the first time. Niki Booth, the other woman they’d had with them, had handled herself pretty well against the Red Man’s troops. And Sylvia was no slouch herself. But this girl was about to fall apart.
And then she surprised him.
“There’s no outside staircase,” she said. “That’s good. And it’s small enough that there’s probably only one on the inside. It shouldn’t be too difficult to secure.”
“I agree,” Sylvia said. She scanned the sky. The wind was out of the east and carried the smell of mud and humus and wood smoke over them. “Rain’s coming this way. If we set up a water trap on the balcony we should be able to get as much drinking water as we need.”
But Richardson wasn’t watching the building. He had turned to the old fire station across the street. Its red brick front, with its dark, empty windows, was absolutely still. And yet he was certain he had heard something.
“Something wrong?” Sylvia asked.
“Huh?” He turned toward her. “Did you hear something ?”
Both women stopped and listened. The street was absolutely silent for a few moments, and Sylvia slowly shook her head.
“Nothing,” she said. She looked to Avery, who also shook her head.
“Let’s just hurry up,” he said.
They went inside and looked around. Like every other building they’d seen, most of the windows were busted out. Rainwater had entered the building, and in places had mixed with fallen ceiling tiles to form a muddy gray sludge on the floor. The wallpaper had blistered, and in a few places it sagged to the floor in loose scrolls. But overall the building looked to be in pretty good shape. It would certainly do for an overnight shelter.
Avery Harper was right about there only being one interior staircase. They used furniture from the offices to block it off, making it all but impassable to any zombie that might happen to find his way in during the night. That done, they retreated upstairs and Richardson cleared out spaces for them to sleep while the women went out on the balcony and set up the water trap in case it rained.
When they came back inside Richardson was unloading his backpack. He removed two cans of pork and beans, a small wire rack he’d made from a coat hanger, and a can of Sterno.
“You guys hungry?” he asked, lighting the Sterno.
“God, yes,” Avery said.
Sylvia nodded, her eyes on the open can of pork and beans.
“Have a seat,” Richardson said, as he arranged the wire rack over the can of Sterno. “This thing’s only big enough for one can at a time. Takes about five minutes.”
“Five minutes is just fine,” Sylvia said. “I thought it was going to be beef jerky again tonight.”
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“You have beef jerky?”
She reached under her shirt and removed a belly band. Inside the band were several sheets of dried beef wrapped in cellophane. “Road food,” Sylvia said.
“I’ve got a can of green beans. If you want to save it, we can have the beans and the jerky for breakfast.”
“Deal,” she said.
“Mr. Richardson?” Avery said. She was looking over the things he’d removed from his backpack. “What is all this stuff ?”
“Just supplies. Things I’ve picked up over the years.”
But it was quite an assortment, honed from years of living on the road: extra socks; canteen; water purification tablets; matches; compass; small LED flashlight; waterproof poncho; a large tarp he’d made from an Army surplus Gilley suit; signaling mirror; bedroll and blanket; a fifty-foot length of nylon rope; a slim collection of Wordsworth’s poems he’d found in a small-town library in Nebraska; first-aid kit; Swiss Army knife; binoculars; ammo and cleaning kit for the rifle he’d lost earlier that morning; jacket; BDU pants; a T-shirt; long underwear.
“Living on the road,” he said, “you never know what you’re going to need.”
She examined the gear with obvious fascination, and it occurred to him that she had never spent more than a few nights away from her compound, wherever that was.
Then she picked up his iPad and said, “What’s this?”
“It’s an iPad,” he said. “It was state of the art back before the outbreak. I found it in a computer store in Seattle, Washington, about five years ago.”
“What do you use it for?”
“I store my interviews on it.”
“Interviews? Of who?”
“Anybody. People I meet.”
“What do you interview them for?”
“To get their stories,” he said. “It’s what I do.”
“Mr. Richardson was a reporter before the outbreak, Avery,” Sylvia said. “That’s how we met. He was writing a book about it.”
“That’s right,” Richardson said. “But call me Ben, please. I mean, if that’s not too weird for you.”
Sylvia took a long time to consider it. “I guess that’d be okay,” she said finally. “You did kind of get us out of a bad spot today. Yeah, I guess that’d be okay.”