by Joe McKinney
He woke the next morning with sunlight on his face. Nate listened for the sound of voices, and heard nothing but birds squawking at each other. Slowly, he rose to his feet. He was still stiff in his shoulders and in his lower back, but his head was clearer. He touched his forehead and it was cool. And, he realized, last night had been the first time in two or three days where he hadn’t woken in the middle of the night trembling from head to foot. Had the fever broken?
“Hello?” he called out.
No answer came back to him. He turned up the path and climbed to the campsite, but no one was there. There wasn’t a single piece of trash anywhere. The stones that had ringed the fire were still in place, but the embers had been buried in dirt. Here and there he saw faint footprints and the impressions of bedrolls where the individual members of the family had slept. The only thing they’d left behind was a cardboard box, tucked just out of sight of the side path that led back to the main path between the road and the river.
Nate pulled the box out and looked inside. He found a bar of soap sitting on top of a change of clothes, a blue backpack, a bedroll, a pair of scissors, some razors, a Mason jar, a small cast-iron pan, a can of Wolf Chili, and the rest of the medicine Fisher had given him the night before. The blister packs were stashed inside a plastic zip-top Baggie with a handwritten note under the baggie.
It read:
Hope this helps. Cut your hair and beard and take a long bath in the river with the soap. You’ll feel better, I promise. Also, don’t forget to take one of the yellow and white pills in the morning and at night, and one of the pink in the morning. Take them all, even when you start to feel better. Good luck to you, son, and remember: the sooner you learn to trust others, the sooner you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Best,
Don Fisher
Nate took a long time working his way through the note. Even back in high school, when they were putting him through those special classes and working with him every day, he had a lot of trouble deciphering something that was more than four or five words long. But eventually he got the sense pulled out of it and put the note aside.
Then he picked up the scissors and the soap and headed down to the river.
CHAPTER 10
Richardson awoke to the muffled pop pop pop of automatic weapons fire.
At first he didn’t recognize it for what it was. He lay still, his eyes open wide, listening, trying to zero in on the sound and identify it. His eyes were itchy, watery, his sinuses congested. The hay and dust in the barn’s loft were playing havoc with his allergies, and his senses seemed wrapped in a fog that wouldn’t dispel.
Pop pop. Pop pop pop pop.
The second time there was no mistaking the sound. Guns, lots of them. And he could hear men yelling, too. Richardson sat up and looked around.
“What was that?” Sylvia said. Like him, she was sitting up, a startled expression on her face. There was hay on her clothes and in her shaggy mass of gray hair.
Avery Harper had slept next to her, curled up like a child. All the walking they’d done the day before had left her exhausted, and she’d been the first to fall asleep. But now even Avery was coming around. “What’s going on?” she said groggily, rubbing the side of her head.
“Gunfire,” he said.
Richardson scrambled to the wall on his hands and knees and peered through the slats. He could see a corner of a farmhouse and a large, overgrown field on the other side of the house. Before the outbreak, the field had been used for corn, and he could still see remnants of that crop out there, though now the ordered rows were rangy and crowded with spindly shrubs and weeds. Looking closely, he saw a dozen or so men crouched in the field, using the tall weeds for cover. They were firing in every direction, pinned down by a squad of black shirts.
“That’s Jude McHenry,” Sylvia said. “Damn it. How did they find us?”
Richardson let out a sigh. Looking back on it, it wasn’t much of a mystery. The scraggly looking man the soldiers pulled from the gas station’s service bay had saved their lives. He’d led the Red Man’s soldiers away on a wild chase, and when the soldiers returned empty handed, the Red Man and his caravan moved out, leaving Richardson, Sylvia, and Avery a little confused by what had just happened, but still conscious of the fact that they had dodged a mighty big bullet. Foolishly, he realized now, Richardson had let himself think they were in the clear. They’d walked the remainder of the day, eating fruit they found growing along the road and chatting happily, eventually coming to this farmhouse, where Richardson managed to shoot a small turkey hen with his pistol while the women gathered wild corn and oranges. They roasted the turkey over an open fire on the driveway that led up to the farmhouse. The oranges were small and full of seeds and almost as tart as a lemon, but they were very good, and very juicy. They ate until they were bloated and tired, then they crawled up here to this hayloft to sleep.
But it was the smoke from the fire that had given them away. That’s where they had screwed up, he realized. The evening had been a clear one, and the white column of smoke from their campfire must have been visible for miles. They might as well have put up a neon sign. Stupid, he thought. He knew better.
“We’ve got bigger problems than that,” Richardson said. “Look over there.” He nodded toward the road. The Red Man’s caravan of trucks was parked there, and a few of his soldiers were offloading the zombies.
“What are they doing?” Avery asked.
The answer seemed obvious to Richardson. If the Red Man could control zombies, he’d obviously use them to fill the front lines of an attack on McHenry’s squad. He was more worried about how they were going to escape.
Richardson crawled over to the far side of the hayloft and peered out of the west side of the barn. The cornfield stretched into the distance some four or five hundred yards, terminating at a line of trees, the edge of which was thick with early morning fog. He saw the zombies right away, forty or fifty of them at least, stumbling their way through the rows.
“Damn,” he muttered.
“What is it?” Sylvia asked.
“No go,” he said. “They’ve got us surrounded.”
He moved back to his previous position next to Sylvia and squeezed the hay and dust from his eyes.
“You okay?” Sylvia asked.
“Allergies,” he said.
“Yeah, well, do us all a favor and don’t sneeze, okay?”
He gave her a halfhearted smile and then went back to watching the battle develop down below. Roving camera, he thought. Don’t get involved. The mantra that had carried him through so many dangerous situations over the last few years seemed ridiculous now. He was in this up to his eyeballs.
He leaned forward through shafts of sunlight and put his face up against one of the gaps in the barn’s wall. They were in a unique position to see the battle develop, like a high school marching band director up on a ladder stand. A group of black shirts ran forward, firing their guns into the weeds, sending up a spray of exploded corn in the process. McHenry’s squad just hunkered down on their bellies, letting the shots tear up the corn over their heads. They didn’t return fire until the black shirts broke through the corn rows right in front of them, and then they started shooting back.
It was, Richardson saw, a deliberate feint on the part of the black shirts. As soon as McHenry’s squad started shooting, the black shirts fell back. One of them popped a canister of orange smoke and threw it at McHenry’s location. Immediately, a column of smoke rose into the air. A moan went up from the west side of the barn, and the zombies moved forward, converging on the smoke.
Beside him, Avery groaned. “They’ll be slaughtered,” she said.
Richardson was thinking the same thing. This wasn’t going to be pretty. There were even more zombies in the corn than Richardson had at first thought. They were everywhere. The corn rows were writhing.
McHenry’s men had already spotted the first few zombies coming at them and were forming themselves into
a defensive circle. The men were keeping their cool, firing in controlled bursts at the zombies as they appeared, perhaps because they didn’t know exactly how outnumbered they were. But from his position in the hayloft, Richardson could see that the end was a foregone conclusion. It was just a matter of time.
“Where did all those zombies come from?” Richardson asked. “There’s way more down there than what he brought in those trucks of his.”
“He collects them as he goes,” Sylvia said. “That’s why he’s so strong. No matter where he goes, his army comes to him.”
Her voice seemed strangely flat, and Richardson turned to look at her. Sunshine was slanting down into the shadows of the loft through the gaps in the slats. Dust and bits of hay floated around her hair. Her beauty surprised him for the second time, and it was all the more striking for the somber expression on her face.
From the cornfield down below, a man let out a sudden, terrible scream, and Sylvia flinched. And in that moment, the tone of her voice and the sadness in her eyes made sense to him.
“You know those men down there, don’t you?”
She nodded. Then she closed her eyes and ducked her chin to her chest as she tried to shut out the noise of the screams and the constant roll of the gunfire.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“They came here because of us.” She rubbed her knuckles into her forehead, as though trying to scrub away a mounting headache. “Why do so many people have to die because of what I believe, Ben?”
Her question was spoken so faintly he had trouble hearing it. He started to tell her it was going to be okay, that what was going on down there was not her fault, but the end result of a course of action those men had chosen themselves, but then he realized that she wasn’t talking about those men down there.
He had driven the bus out of San Antonio eight years ago, when she lost all the students that came with her as part of the People for an Ethical Solution expedition, and he had stolen a few glances at her as they trundled through the ruins. She hadn’t spoken a word, and that had bothered Richardson at the time. It more than bothered him. He’d been offended to the core by what he perceived as her icy indifference to the deaths she had just caused. Forty college kids were dead because they had placed blind faith in her. Richardson knew she hadn’t planned on their dying. If anything, their deaths would be a mortal blow to her cause. So no, he didn’t believe she had intentionally caused their deaths. But she had used her position as a professor, as an intellectual authority in their lives, to lead them into a meat grinder, and wasn’t that just as bad?
At the time he thought so. And a part of him hated her because she sat there on that bus refusing to utter a word. She simply sat there, her chin in her hand, watching the ruins of San Antonio slip away outside the bus.
At the quarantine wall, they’d been stopped by the military. Soldiers had led them off the bus and checked their papers and stripped them and checked them for injuries and then sprayed them down with antivirals and disinfectant. Right before they were separated, he had asked her, “What are you going to tell them?”
She wouldn’t look at him, even then. “Tell them whatever you want,” she said. “I don’t care what you say.”
And then the soldiers led her away for her debriefing, and he watched her go, feeling angry and, for some reason that he couldn’t quite fathom, betrayed. He had no idea what he had expected her to say, but it hadn’t been that.
Sylvia turned from the slats in the wall and looked at him. She looked ill, and it occurred to him that he had forced the old wound open by coming back into her life like this.
Good, he thought, surprised at how fresh the anger still seemed, I hope it hurts.
She said, “I told myself I would go to the parents of each of those kids on that bus, Ben. That was the promise I made myself. I figured those kids deserved it for believing the way they did. I knew none of those parents would understand but I told myself I would do it anyway.”
“But you never went,” he said. He intended the words to have more heat than they did. She was tearing herself up inside, he realized. She was doing more damage to herself with her memories than he ever could with his harsh words.
“No,” she said. “I never went. I had all their names, all their addresses. The university fired me, of course, so I had nothing but time. But then the weeks slipped by, and I hadn’t visited a single one. All I did was stay in bed and cry. I told myself I’d at least write a letter, but . . .”
She trailed off there, shaking her head at the memory of her failure.
A bullet struck the slats down at the other end of the loft and a laser of light lanced into the darkness. The yelling was getting louder now, the fight spilling into the driveway in front of the farmhouse. Just a quick glance was enough for Richardson to see that McHenry’s squad had completely broken ranks. They were fighting hand to hand now, totally unorganized.
“Sylvia,” he said, “you two come over here with me. We need to stay—”
There was a crack and something sliced the air in front of his face. He felt a tingling spread across his cheek that suddenly turned into a burn. His first thought was, I’ve been shot: and then, as shock gave way to denial, he touched his fingers to his face and felt small bits of wood splinters stuck in his skin. Only splinters, he thought. Oh thank God.
He turned to the wood slats and saw the jagged hole left by the bullet that had narrowly missed his head. Looking through it, he could see one of the last of McHenry’s squad down there on the road, swinging his rifle like a club at a zombie.
The zombie went down, but there were more pouring out of the corn every second.
Richardson heard men yelling orders off to his right and turned to see several of the Red Man’s soldiers running toward the farmhouse. One of the black shirts raised his rifle as he ran and fired at the last of McHenry’s squad.
The man who had been using his rifle as a club was struck in the chest and was flung backward, with bloody bits of flesh and fabric spraying up from the wound. One of the zombies behind him twisted suddenly and stumbled to his knees. The zombie’s hands were swatting at the air like he was being attacked by bees, bright gouts of blood oozing down his chest from the wound where his face had been.
When the zombie fell over dead, Richardson turned back to Sylvia. She and Avery were still holding each other.
“Get down,” he hissed. “Both of you get down.”
Avery looked at him from beneath Sylvia’s mass of hair. Her eyes were shining with tears.
He motioned to her to lie down in the hay, and after a moment, she and Sylvia both lowered themselves down on their bellies.
A pair of trucks pulled up to the driveway below them and Richardson crawled back to the wall and looked through the bullet hole. The Red Man was standing next to one of the trucks, surveying the destruction. There were bodies all around him. Most were zombies, but here and there Richardson could see a few of McHenry’s squad and even one or two of the black shirts. He could also see a lot of wounded zombies, some of them so badly shot up they couldn’t even crawl, while others, dragging dead legs or waving armless stumps, staggered toward the trucks.
The Red Man let out a low, rattling moan, and all the zombies stopped. None of them blinked. They just stared at him, swaying on their feet as though drunk. Then he motioned toward the truck and two of his soldiers pulled Niki Booth from the cab.
“Oh my God,” Avery said. “Niki.”
“Shhh,” Richardson cautioned her. “Not too loud.”
The Red Man held out a hand and one of his soldiers handed him a knife. Then he crossed the driveway to where one of McHenry’s squad was dying. The man was on his back, twitching and moaning, trying to point a finger at Niki Booth.
Two of the black shirts grabbed Niki and pulled her over to the Red Man, who knelt down next to the dying man and began carving one of the ears from his head. Screams echoed over the corn.
Niki tried to turn her head, but the soldi
ers wouldn’t let her.
“This was Ken Stoler’s mighty rescue party,” he said, holding up the bloody ear. Black blood dripped off the Red Man’s fingers. “Nobody’s coming for you, Niki. You realize that now, don’t you? Do the right thing and tell me where I can find Don Fisher right now.”
Niki said nothing.
“No?” The Red Man held up the ear he’d just cut from the dying soldier’s head. “You know that man, don’t you? I bet you trained him yourself, didn’t you? Well Niki, you have the power now to decide how he’s gonna die.” Then the Red Man turned and flung the man’s ear between two zombies, who immediately fell on the morsel like snarling dogs in a pit. “He can die like that. Or you can tell me where I can find Don Fisher, and I’ll have my soldiers shoot him in the head. It’ll be over in one shot.”
Even from the hayloft, Richardson could see Niki Booth steeling herself against the decision she was forced to make.
She shook her head.
“You sadden me, Niki,” the Red Man said. “You truly do.”
He let out another low, rattling moan, and the zombies who had been waiting at the edge of the corn moved forward like a wave and descended on the dying soldier, whose panicked whimpering had turned to screams once more. They ripped him open in seconds, pulling him apart, leaving nothing but a bloody puddle in the dirt. Richardson nearly threw up watching one of the zombies drag an arm across the driveway and into the ditch, where it started feeding.
Roving camera, he thought. Roving camera. I’m a roving camera. He repeated it in his head again and again, as though in the repetition of it he could force the images of the man’s death out of his head.
A moment later the black shirts were stuffing Niki Booth back in the truck and the whole caravan was driving away, leaving a driveway full of bodies and zombies too wounded to climb into the trucks.
Richardson fell back on his butt in shocked disbelief. Had life become so cheap that it could be tossed aside like that? He turned to look at Sylvia and Avery, but they were as horrified as he was.