by Joe McKinney
But Kellogg was different. He had taken the time to talk with Nate, really talk with him. He explained how sometimes the world didn’t make sense. He explained how the only thing that really mattered was looking for a way to make life make sense. The answer itself didn’t matter, because there probably wasn’t one. Not a perfect one, anyway. Only the looking for an answer made any difference, because when you stopped looking, you started dying.
Sometimes, Kellogg spoke to him. Nate, from time to time, saw him standing next to him, heard him talking with him. He had met a Thai man around Phoenix several years back who told him that holy people sometimes communed with the ghosts of those who had been important in their lives and still had lessons to teach, and sometimes Nate liked to think that the vision he saw was really the ghost of Kellogg trying to keep him alive. It was a pleasant thing to believe.
But of course Kellogg hadn’t appeared to him lately.
Nate closed his eyes, and he could almost hear the man saying, “Even a world defined by bad reasons can give you cause to live. You must find those reasons, whatever they may be.”
“But I tried,” Nate said. He opened his eyes and scanned the crumbling gas station around him. “I tried really hard.”
Kellogg was standing there, smiling calmly.
Nate smiled back. “Hey, Doc.”
“The cure, Nate. That’s your reason. You have to get it to somebody who knows how to use it.”
“But what else am I supposed to do? I can’t go much farther.”
But Kellogg was gone.
Nate waved a fly away from his face. He heard the noise of a young woman’s voice coming from the road, and instinctively, he stepped back into the shadows. Stop, watch, and listen before you meet new people. Be careful what you tell them. Know who they are before they know you. That had been some of Kellogg’s best advice to him. It saved him numerous times over the years, and he followed it now without hesitation.
Turning toward the gas station, he happened to catch his reflection in a grimy, jagged triangle of glass still clinging to the edge of the window, and he sucked in a shocked breath. It was a world without mirrors, and it had been a long time since he’d seen his reflection. He hadn’t been a bad-looking guy back in the day. He’d had a few girlfriends. But he looked bad now. He’d lost so much weight. His hair was down past his shoulders, ratty with oil and dirt, as was his beard. Flies swarmed around his face, dipping now and then toward the raw sunburn cracks in his skin.
No wonder they didn’t attack you, he thought; then waved the flies away from his face and disappeared into the shadows of the station’s service bays, where it was hot and smelled dusty and stale.
There were three of them, a man and woman who looked to be in their fifties, and a younger girl, who looked to be about twenty. The girl looked nice. A little thick around the middle, maybe, but nice. She had pretty blond hair, and Nate hadn’t seen that in a long while.
The man and the woman were out front as they approached the service station, and only then did Nate realize he’d left all his gear strung up out there.
They’d steal it all, he realized; and then, Christ, not again. Why couldn’t he hold on to his gear?
He thought maybe he had time to dart out and grab it before they saw him, but then the pretty blond girl stepped around the man and the women and pointed at the hammock and said, “What’s that?”
Dammit, Nate thought.
“A hammock,” the man said.
Nate studied the three, and it took him a long moment to realize that the man was dressed differently from the two women. The women wore baggy sweatshirts and BDU-style pants over Magnum Hi-Tec boots that looked practically brand new. But the man wore jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt and tennis shoes that were held together near the toe with duct tape. He carried a heavy-looking backpack and a pistol at his belt, and he looked to be the only one who was armed.
Maybe they were okay. They looked okay.
The man came forward and examined the place where the hammock’s ropes were tied on to the gas pumps. “Hello?” he called out.
“Ben!” the older woman hissed. “What are you doing?”
Kellogg appeared at Nate’s shoulder. “Wait a moment,” he said. “Just wait and watch. Know who they are before they know who you are.”
“Okay,” Nate whispered.
He watched them. They were looking around, studying his meager possessions on the ground when a glass bottle scraped along the asphalt down at the road. All three of them turned at the same time. It was weirdly similar to the way the zombies had turned. But where the zombies had stared in eerie silence, these three newcomers gasped.
Nate followed their gaze down to the road and saw the little girl zombie standing there, waiting for them. She’s trying to lure them out in the open, Nate thought: and answered that thought with the same mental breath, It’ll never work. They can tell she’s infected.
“Ben,” the older woman said, “what do you think?”
Then the younger woman muttered, “Poor thing,” and broke into a trot down the length of the driveway.
No, Nate thought. What are you doing?
“Avery, no!” the older woman yelled.
The man—the one called Ben, Nate remembered—took off running after the girl. Nate leaned forward, watching them, his hand reaching involuntarily into the empty air in front of him, pantomiming the man’s actions as he tried to stop the girl before she ran right into the zombie’s waiting arms.
Just as he reached her, the girl stopped, turned toward the thicket next to the driveway, and let out a little scream as she staggered away from the two zombie women who had just emerged there. The man pulled the blond girl behind him and drew his pistol and shot one of the zombie women with his pistol.
The zombie crumpled to the ground.
He turned and shot the other zombie, but his aim was bad and he managed to hit the woman in the shoulder, spinning her around without dropping her. The older woman with the wild gray hair yelled, “Get back, both of you.” She grabbed the blond girl and pulled her toward the building.
The child was attacking the man by then. She lunged for his arm and knocked the pistol loose. It went skittering across the driveway, out of reach. The man backed away, then turned and ran for the old rusty car that was just beyond the awning. Nate watched, horrified, as the man barricaded himself inside the wreck. The little girl zombie climbed up onto the hood and started beating on the windshield. Then it caved in with a crash of breaking glass and the little girl fell in with it and landed on top of the man inside the car. She was trying to claw her way through the busted windshield when the woman with the wild gray hair shot her in the back of the head.
And then, everything went still.
The sound of the pistol shot faded away, and seemed to take all the sound in the world with it. The two women pulled the man out of the wrecked car and led him down the driveway, where they studied something on one of the female zombie’s legs.
“What do I do, Doc?” he muttered.
“Wait, Nate,” Kellogg said. “Just wait. And watch.”
He heard a rumbling coming from a long ways off, and it took him a moment to realize that it was the sound of a truck coming toward the service station. Nate thought maybe he was imagining it, but then he saw the man and the two women looking at the road too, and they seemed frightened.
The three of them started talking as one. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the pretty blond girl was gesturing toward the service bay where Nate was hiding. “No,” he said. “Not here. Not here.”
The man was motioning toward the road. He pulled something that looked like a shaggy carpet from his backpack and the three of them took off running.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he said. “Get going. Don’t send their attention my way.”
With a great deal of difficulty he pulled himself to his feet and stumbled to the edge of the service bay, watching them go. Now that the sound was very close, he c
ould tell that it was coming from several trucks. A caravan, he thought. Jesus.
“You think it’s a foraging party, Doc?”
“No way to tell, Nate. Stay out of sight for now.”
“Right—Oh shit! My stuff.”
He ran over to his hammock and started wrestling with the ropes that secured it to the pumps. “Come on, come on,” he said, tugging at the knots. “Please.”
Nate heard the sound of tires moving across the blacktop and he looked to see a line of four trucks trundling into sight. They were Fords and Chevys, big black work trucks with oversize tires and loud exhausts. Black-clad soldiers with rifles rode in the first and last vehicle, while the middle two, with slatted wooden rails around the beds, seemed to be packed with zombies. The trucks rolled to a stop in the street in front of the station and the soldiers jumped down from the beds of the trucks and set up a perimeter.
“What in the . . . ?” Nate said, ducking quickly back into the service bay.
Two of the soldiers ran over to the dead zombies in the driveway while another pair checked out the car where the little girl zombie had died. Nate pressed himself all the way back into the corner, murmuring a prayer that they wouldn’t come inside the bay and find him.
But as he did he saw something odd. A man, painted head to toe in red, stepped from the second truck and walked part of the way up the driveway. He was bald, and his face looked bad, like maybe it’d been scarred by acne when he was a teenager. He walked with a slight limp, and he didn’t carry a weapon, but every black-clad soldier hurried to get out of his way. There was something menacing about the man that chilled Nate to the core, and it didn’t help that the zombies in the trucks watched every move he made with unblinking attention.
One of the soldiers removed the black thing from around the dead zombie’s ankle and brought it to the Red Man. The Red Man took it without a word, turned it over in his hands as he examined it, and then handed it back to the soldier.
Nate was so busy watching the exchange that he failed to notice the two soldiers up near the wrecked car where the little girl’s headless body still protruded from the busted windshield. They had spotted the hammock and the gear on the ground and were silently peering into the service station’s lobby. Nate finally noticed them when they looked around the corner and into the service bay.
“Let me see your hands,” the soldier shouted, swinging his gun up and pointing it directly at Nate’s face.
A flashlight mounted below the gun’s barrel came on, blinding Nate.
He put up his hands and said, “No, wait, dude. I didn’t do—” But the words were cut off mid-sentence as the soldier came forward and planted the butt of the gun’s stock squarely into Nate’s teeth. An explosion of pain went through him, and his legs turned to sand. He sagged forward into the soldier’s arms and a moment later he was being dragged into the daylight and dropped at the Red Man’s feet.
“What the hell is this?” the Red Man said.
Nate looked up at the Red Man. Sunlight glistened off his bare chest and off the dome of his bald head.
“We found him hiding in the service bay,” the soldier said. “Looks like he killed these other three.”
“You idiot,” the Red Man said. “Look at him. He can’t keep his balance. He’s not even wearing a weapon.” The Red Man yelled up toward the station. “Did you find a gun?”
“No, sir,” another soldier answered. “Just a bunch of trash up here. His clothes and stuff.”
“What’s your name?”
“Nate Royal.”
“And the others?” the Red Man said. “Where are they?”
Blood was oozing out of the corner of Nate’s mouth and into his scraggly beard. He blinked a few times, trying to clear his head. Things were getting hazy again.
“Dude, why are you all red?”
“Where are the others?”
Nate blinked at him. “I dunno.”
The Red Man grabbed him by the throat and hauled him to his feet. “I won’t ask you again. A man and two women came this way. Where are they?”
“Ask me all you want,” Nate said. “I didn’t see shit.”
The Red Man glared at him. His nostrils flared with every breath he took. And as Nate struggled to breathe through the Red Man’s iron grip around his throat, the Red Man bit the index finger of his own right hand. When he took it away, it was dripping blood.
“I will own you,” the Red Man said, and jammed the bleeding finger into Nate’s mouth.
At first Nate resisted. He tried to turn his head away, but the Red Man had too tight a grip around his throat. Desperate for air, he spread his clenched teeth apart and bit down on the Red Man’s finger with everything he had—and he went on biting until he heard the sickening crunch of bone and a gout of blood jetted over his tongue as his teeth ripped the finger off at the knuckle.
The Red Man’s howls filled the air. It was an unearthly sound, part rage, part lowing moan, but all of it echoing with pain.
He dropped Nate to the ground and staggered backward, holding his bleeding hand in shock. Nate, for his part, didn’t lose any time. There was a soldier advancing on him from behind. Nate leaped to his feet and spun around, throwing an elbow into the soldier’s face and catching him cleanly on the jaw. The soldier dropped his weapon in surprise and Nate was off, running toward the thicket as fast as he could run.
He heard the Red Man screaming at his back, and a moment later, the soldiers yelling commands.
They started firing as he slipped into the thicket. The next instant, the air around his head filled with the high-pitched whistles of ricocheting bullets.
Nate didn’t stop. He ducked his head and ran with everything he had.
CHAPTER 9
Bullets chewed up the branches around his head. A wall of sound, like a wave, tore at his heels. Nate, breathless and sick, was panting in terror; his vision tunneled; eyes went wide with terror; spittle flecked on his lips; every muscle strained to carry him faster, faster from the Red Man’s soldiers as they bore down upon him with their guns roaring and their screams swelling up behind him like some huge beast, gaining on him with every step.
He found a pig trail. Running blind with his hands in front of him, swatting at the endless tangle of branches in his face, he twisted through the underbrush. The soldiers were on either side of him, closing on him, and above it all he could hear the Red Man roaring in his pain and rage. “Get him back here! I want him now!” And the soldiers, their voices like an echo, yelling, “Get him!” “He’s over there.” “I see him over here.”
The steady roll of the guns slacked off to a series of scattered pops and he turned quickly to look behind him.
The Red Man’s soldiers were entering the woods right behind him. He could see their hunched-over black silhouettes moving through the thicket with terrific speed.
Panting, sticks and leaves caught in his scraggly beard, Nate Royal ran with no idea where he was going. The will to live that had been lacking earlier, when he was caught in his hammock by the zombies, came back to him as a full-blown blind panic adrenaline surge, and though his skin was laced with cuts, he felt none of it. The world was a wolf pack snapping at his heels, driving him deeper into the woods.
He crossed a muddy creek bed and when he came up on the other side, the pig trail had vanished. The air was full of leaves and thick with the smell of rotting vegetation. Ahead of him, the ground rose abruptly to a small ridge, the slope a slick carpet of wet, brown leaves.
Chancing a look behind him, he saw one of the Red Man’s soldiers closing fast. Nate let out a startled yelp and ran up the slope. He lost his footing and had to scramble up to the top of the ridge with his fingertips digging into the damp earth.
The soldier clamped a hand down on Nate’s shoulder as they crested the ridge and Nate screamed. Their momentum carried them over the top and then they were falling down the slope on the other side.
Nate landed in a thick layer of dark mud. The soldier
came down next to him, his forehead striking a jagged corner of a large rock with the sickening crunch of broken bone.
Breathing hard, Nate looked at the soldier. The man’s eyes were wide open and frozen in sightless surprise. Part of his skull, thick and jagged and honeycombed inside, jutted up from the wound amid a thick black spreading ooze of blood. He could see the brain inside, grayish-yellow, like old cheese.
Nate drew back in horror, his breath hitching in his throat.
More soldiers were coming. He could hear them just on the other side of the ridge, and Nate was scrambling to his feet when he saw the dead soldier’s AR-15 poking out from under his body.
“Hot damn,” he muttered.
He pulled on the weapon and managed to free it from the soldier’s weight. But it was caught on something. He yanked on the gun again and again until he saw the black nylon strap still securing the gun to the soldier’s shoulder.
“No,” he said, still tugging on the gun. “Come on, please.”
Three more soldiers crested the ridge above him. Without aiming, Nate raised the rifle and emptied the entire magazine into their guts.
All three doubled over and slid face-first into the thick carpet of leaves. The whole thing took less than two seconds, and though Nate saw every detail, it was as though he was outside of himself, looking down. The guns made no sound. All he could hear was the rush of blood in his ears, his heart pounding in his chest. The moment seemed to stretch on forever.
And then, suddenly, the spell was broken. His senses opened up and it was like a wave breaking all around him. Time accelerated to normal speed. More soldiers were yelling, coming closer. And meanwhile Nate, stunned and light-headed, was looking down at two dead soldiers and a third who was groaning like an animal struggling to give birth. He’ll be dead in less than three minutes, Nate thought, surprised by his detachment.