by Joe McKinney
But a rude squawk made him freeze. He’d been kneeling next to the rain trap, but when he heard the bird sounds, he closed his eyes and steeled himself against the horror he knew was waiting for him.
He opened his eyes.
The crows were back, staring at him. There were hundreds of them. They sat on the patio railing, on the light poles and wires, on the edges of roofs, on derelict cars and in trees and on signs, hundreds, thousands of eyes turned on him in silent judgment.
He stared back at them, trembling. He remembered what it was like when he came back to the Paradise compound six years earlier to find everyone he cared about getting fed upon by crows. Remembered the sight of all those people, twelve hundred in all, getting picked clean to the bone by birds that squawked and fought over the scraps.
You won’t get me, you carrion birds, he thought. You missed me when you came for my friends in Montana, and you won’t get me now. You ate the people I loved most in this world, but you didn’t eat my heart. That you won’t ever have.
Though even now the memory of all those carrion birds, black as soot, glassy-eyed and squawking furiously at each other, made him cower in fear. Richardson and a few others had gone down to California to get seeds for the coming spring. They were gone four months. When he left, Ed Moore and the blind girl Kyra Talbot and Billy Kline and Jeff Stavers and all the others were alive and well, arguing about whether or not to open the compound to the hundreds of refugees coming north because they had heard of the wonderful things Ed Moore was doing in Paradise Valley. Billy had warned refugees would bring diseases, but Ed had overruled him. Fate had proven Billy right. Richardson never figured out what had done the killing. Bubonic plague? Cholera? Yellow fever? Anything was possible. But when he was standing there in the middle of the compound, snow swirling around his feet, he remembered thinking that causes didn’t matter, not when everyone you loved was dead. How he had loved those people. He and Robin Tharp and a few others from the original Grasslands group had walked from body to body, shooing away angry birds and trying to figure out who was who, but all Richardson could think about was how much love had just gone out of the world.
“Ben?” Sylvia said from behind him. “You okay?”
Richardson stiffened, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Fine,” he said, without turning around. “You guys about ready to leave?”
“Just about. How much water did we get last night?”
He turned, sniffled, and handed her the trap. “Looks like about a gallon.”
She took it from him. She looked at him curiously, watching his eyes. “Thanks,” she said. “You want to have that breakfast now? Green beans and beef jerky?”
He nodded, grateful she had the good grace to leave his grief alone.
Later, when they were packed and ready, Richardson dangled his rope over the balcony. They scaled down to ground level and he pulled the rope down after them and stowed it in his backpack. Then they set out, walking through the darkened ruins without speaking, their feet sloshing in the muddy puddles left by the rain.
The ruins seemed deserted, as Richardson expected them to be. Most of the infected, he knew from long experience, preferred to hunt in the daytime. Walking under cover of early morning darkness, they hoped to get out of the city proper by dawn.
They got on Interstate Highway 55 and followed it all the way to the southern edge of town without seeing anything. There weren’t even any rats scurrying around. Even still, Richardson couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching them. He kept stopping, and turning, scanning the road behind them.
Once, it took him so long to start back up that Sylvia and Avery had to double back to him.
“What is it?” Sylvia asked.
Richardson strained his senses against the darkness. He heard the dull drone of cicadas in the overgrown fields on either side of the highway. The chatter of birds. The wind whistling through the holes in buildings. And something else. A wet, rattling sound. Like a man struggling to breathe through lungs nearly flooded with phlegm.
“We’re being followed,” he said.
She scanned the road behind them, and then the buildings off to the west. “Yeah, I think you may be right.”
Richardson glanced east. Daylight was overtaking them. Already he could see reds and oranges spilling over the horizon. Up and down the highway, the ghostly shapes of long-abandoned cars waited silently for nothing.
“I don’t like this,” Sylvia said. “We’re too easy to spot out here.”
“It can’t be the Red Man, can it? Following us, I mean. If he had us in sight, wouldn’t he just overtake us with his trucks?”
“I would think so,” Sylvia said.
“Could it be Ken Stoler?”
She grimaced. “God, I hope not.”
They passed a ruined movie theater on their left and Richardson slowed to look at it without even realizing what he was doing. Abandoned buildings like this fascinated him. Pulled him in. Even before the outbreak places like this had held a special fascination for him. Now, they were everywhere. Like this theater. Grass had grown up in the parking lot. There were a few cars abandoned there, but they had been stripped and a few had been burned. He could see skeins of metal wire encircling the wheels where the tires had melted. Beyond, the building was a mess. Gone were the windows and the glass front doors, all of them smashed. The lobby was a black maw that resembled the entrance to a cave. They had been showing Duma Key when the outbreak swept through here, but the D was missing now.
“What is it?” Sylvia asked. “You hear something?”
“No, just looking.”
“At what? The movie theater?”
He nodded.
“Do you miss it?”
“Hmm? Miss what?”
“You know, the world. Going to the movies? Tater tots from Sonic. A McRib at McDonald’s? Concerts, picnics in the park, going to the bookstore, catching a favorite song on the radio?”
“And paying bills and traffic jams and politicians?” he said, smirking at her.
She had seemed playful when she brought up the topic, but her smile slowly dried up. “I guess not.”
“No,” he said, suddenly turning serious. “I’m not being fair, Sylvia. I do miss it. Sometimes. Every once in a while, I dream about how good things used to be. Do you do that?”
She didn’t answer, but he could tell by her expression that he’d touched a nerve.
He went back to looking at the movie theater, and for a second, he almost told her about a piece he’d written comparing zombies to abandoned buildings. Thinking about it now, there was actually something to it. Both, after all, were crippled wrecks somehow still on their feet. But beyond that, both were single serving–sized doses of the apocalypse. Both existed in a sort of temporal neverland, so that you could see their present reality, that of the wreck, but also hints of what they once were and the potential of what they could be in the future, all three realities existing at the same time, overlapping each other.
But he knew where the conversation would lead. Where Richardson saw the zombie as a dead end, a being whose only future was a long, slow trek into the grave, Sylvia saw a cause, a soul to be reborn. She was a dreamer; he was a realist. What could possibly come of that but another fight? Yesterday, he’d have been up for it, but today, he was too tired. And from her expression, so was she.
“You still looking at that thing?” Sylvia asked.
“It’s hard to look away,” he admitted.
“I thought you were collecting stories of people, not buildings.”
“I am.”
Sylvia considered the movie theater for a long moment. Then she said, “But there’s no passion in it, Ben. Last night, when you were telling us about what you’ve been doing, all the interviews you gathered, you sounded tired. You sounded like you were on autopilot. But I look at you now, the way you’re looking at that thing, and I see your eyes on fire. There’s passion there.”
&nbs
p; He started to answer, and then realized he couldn’t figure out if she’d actually asked a question.
“You know what I think?” Sylvia asked.
“What?”
“I think you’ve been reading too much Wordsworth.”
He hadn’t expected that, and the smile that came to his face was cracked.
And, as though she possessed some kind of rudimentary mind-reading skills, she said, “I saw that copy of the Lyrical Ballads in your backpack last night. Let me guess, ‘Tintern Abbey.’ ”
He shrugged. “Guilty as charged.”
Sylvia turned away from the building to where Avery Harper was sitting on the tailgate of a rusting pickup truck, her feet dangling in the air like a little kid sitting in a big chair. The girl looked very hot and very tired. Her chin was resting on her chest and she looked like she was having trouble catching her breath.
“Avery, honey, you okay?” Sylvia called.
The girl looked up. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “Just resting.”
“Okay, go ahead and get ready to move out, okay? We’ll be leaving in a few.”
The girl waved a halfhearted acknowledgment.
Then Sylvia lowered her voice so that only Richardson could hear. “Ben, you want some advice?”
His cracked smile grew wider. “You’re offering me advice? I can’t wait to hear this.”
“I’m serious, Ben.”
He waited.
“Put away the Wordsworth. Read some Whitman instead.”
He let out a disappointed huff of air. “That’s your advice? Sylvia, you should know this about me. I despise Whitman. He was great at first lines, but piss-poor in the follow-through.”
“You’re not being fair to yourself, Ben. Don’t you see? You’ve lost touch with your real purpose. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you love the rubble more than the people.”
“Sylvia, the people you’re talking about, the ones I’m supposed to love more than the rubble, they’re eating each other. In a way, I guess that’s an improvement over the way things used to be. At least now there’s no duplicity. I mean, what you see is what you get, right? A zombie, all it wants to do is eat you. It’s not going to try and wine and dine you first, you know?”
But he couldn’t put her off track with sarcasm. He realized that as soon as the words left his mouth.
She leaned in closer to him. “Ben, I told you to read Whitman. I wasn’t kidding about that. You need to see that the zombie and the abandoned building are exactly the same. They are both in need of restoration. They are both in need of us to make the connection with them. Have you read ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’?”
He was startled at hearing his thoughts spoken aloud. But at last he shook himself and answered. “Uh, yeah, I guess. A long time ago.”
“Remember how he addresses his future readers. ‘It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall / The dark threw its patches down upon me also / The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious / My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meager?’ Ben, he’s talking about the same kind of personal negativity you’re experiencing. He’s talking about making connections between generations. He’s talking about the kind of continuity you’re craving, whether it’s with the person living a hundred years ago, or a thousand years from now. What he’s saying is that people are the only kind of continuity that truly matter. It’s what you’re doing with your stories, but I think maybe you don’t believe it anymore.”
She stopped there, as though she was waiting for him to argue, but he didn’t. Instead, he smiled.
And then a thought came to him. Shortly after the quarantine fell, he and a small group of refugees from Houston had made a cross-country trek to the Cedar River National Grasslands, to live in the compound built by a mad Mississippi preacher named Jasper Sewell. That had ended in a nightmare, with the senseless suicide of over a thousand people.
But for all of Jasper’s madness, he did have the gift of leadership. He had taken a weary collection of suffering survivors, and made them into a thriving community, a John Winthrop–style City on the Hill. And he had done it by identifying that glowing spark of talent within all of them, that one thing they were meant to do. He had made a porn star into an elementary school teacher, a Harvard-educated millionaire playboy into a manure-shoveling cabbage farmer, and a retired U.S. Deputy Marshal into an outlaw. What would he have made of Sylvia Carnes, Richardson wondered. The way she so doggedly held to her faith in the cure that might one day turn all these shambling hordes back into the humans they had once been humbled him. She was a teacher at heart. With her unbridled confidence in the potential of the human spirit, could she be anything but?
“What are you thinking?” she asked him.
“I was wondering if Ken Stoler put you to work teaching poetry in his compound.”
“Not quite,” she said, chuckling to herself. “I do a little carpentry. Some gardening. I can also make a fairly good bottle of beer, believe it or not.”
“Well, you did spend an awful lot of time on a college campus.”
“True.”
“But no teaching?”
Sylvia pulled the black band from her pocket and used it to tie back her frizzled mass of gray hair into a ponytail. “I’m afraid not,” she said. She looked at Avery Harper, who was finally starting to look ready for the road again, and said, “Besides, you have any idea how hard it is to make Wordsworth relevant to twenty-year-olds? It was hard even before the world ended.”
A little farther up the road they saw sunlight glinting off something in the trees lining the left side of the highway.
“Could be broken glass,” Avery said.
Richardson wasn’t so sure.
They were kneeling behind a heap of wrecked cars, watching the trees for signs of movement. The plan had been to follow IH 55 all the way down to Herculaneum if they could, but now Richardson didn’t think that was going to be possible.
“Should we chance it?” Avery said.
“Hold on,” Richardson said.
He retrieved the binoculars from his backpack and scanned the trees. He saw a group of six men in BDU-style pants and dark T-shirts sitting around a campsite. They were drinking coffee, laughing. At least two of them had hunting rifles. The others had AR-15s.
“Damn it,” Richardson said.
Sylvia looked over at him. “What is it?”
He handed her the binoculars. “Look for yourself. Over there, by that patch of sycamores.”
Sylvia took the binoculars and pointed it at the camp. Then she lowered the binoculars. “That’s Jude McHenry’s squad,” she said to Avery.
The younger woman groaned.
“Friends of yours?” Richardson asked.
“That’s one of the squads from the Union Field. Niki trained him. McHenry’s about as dumb as the day is long, but he’s focused. Once he gets on our trail, he won’t lose it easily.”
“They don’t exactly look like they’re ready for an ambush.”
“That’s not their job,” Sylvia said. “Remember, they’re used to hunting zombies. The way Niki trained them, they’ll wait for us to get on the bridge over the river. Most of the force will be on the other side. Once we get on the bridge, McHenry’s squad will come up behind us and we’ll be trapped.”
“So Niki taught them that, and now they’re trying to use it on her? I guess they assume she’s still with us.”
“I said he was focused, not smart.” Sylvia turned to Avery and said, “Honey, we need a way out of here. Where do we go?”
The question surprised Richardson. “I’ve got a map, Sylvia.”
“And I bet it’s nowhere near as good as the one I’ve got. Avery?”
The girl looked behind them, then to the west. “That’s Meramec Bottom Road up there. We can follow that to Highway 21, which will take us to State Highway M. From there, we head east and cross back to 55.”
“Whe
re does that come out?” Sylvia asked.
“Just north of Barnhart. That’ll put us about a day’s walk from Herculaneum. Assuming, you know, we don’t run into any other problems.”
Richardson was staring at her. Avery noticed it and looked away bashfully.
“You have a map of this whole area in your head?” he said, amazed.
She nodded.
“What are you, Rain Man?”
The girl cocked her head to the side. “Who’s Rain Man?”
“A joke,” Richardson said. It was suddenly clear to him why Niki Booth and Sylvia Carnes brought the younger woman along. “How much of this area do you have memorized?”
“All of it,” Avery said. “I like maps. If I see one, I can usually memorize it in a few minutes. City maps take a little longer, because of all the streets. But maps for areas like this, out in the country, they’re easy.”
“Impressive,” he said. And then, to Sylvia, “Sound good to you?”
“If Avery says that’s the way, I trust her.”
“Fair enough,” Richardson said. “After you.”
Meramec Bottom Road was a gently curving two-lane blacktop that had faded to gray from exposure and the constant scouring action of the dust that blew in from the open fields on either side of it. Here and there it passed through some thickly wooded areas, and occasionally they saw the remnants of big houses behind screens of trees in the hills above the road, but nothing moved. In the early morning sunlight, the air hazy and golden, it seemed perfectly peaceful.
As they walked, Avery began to open up. She made small talk to Sylvia, and sometimes to Richardson, telling him about the country they were passing through.
But she didn’t have his full attention. Ever since they’d left the highway, the feeling that they were being followed had intensified. At the limits of his hearing he could almost make out a faint doubling of their footsteps on the road, and while it might have been an echo from the tree line, he doubted it.