by Joe McKinney
“Who are you talking to?” Richardson asked. “Who’s Doc?”
No answer.
“Hey, can you hear me? Who’s Doc?”
“Zombies can’t hurt me,” the man said. “Nobody can hurt me. Doc said so. I’m immune.”
Richardson wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly. “You’re what? Hey, can you hear me?”
The man’s head lolled on his shoulders and his face blanched. The gun fell from his hand. Richardson rushed forward to grab the man before he too fell to the ground, but he didn’t make it in time.
The man hit the ground like a bag of rocks.
Later that afternoon, Richardson was back in the driveway, this time with a wooden baseball bat in his hands. They had hoped most of the zombies wounded during the fighting that morning would die off within a few minutes, but that hadn’t happened. More than a few had gone on moaning throughout the day, and those moans had attracted other zombies who were not injured. One of those zombies had come crashing through the front door and Richardson had been forced to put it down before it got a chance to take a bite out of Avery.
After that, he’d gone outside with the bat to finish what they should have done as soon as the Red Man and his soldiers left.
“Ben.” It was Sylvia, calling to him from the front porch of the abandoned farmhouse. He looked away from the zombie skull he’d just turned into mush and saw her waving at him. “He’s starting to come out of it a little,” she said.
He nodded, then looked back to the dead zombie at his feet, and his continued existence suddenly seemed so pointless. The wandering, the stories, the fight to survive—why was he bothering with it? Wasn’t he just going to end up like this poor bastard? They all would, in the end; and everything he’d done, all the interviews, all the thinking, all the friends he’d lost since the first zombie rose up from the flooded ruins of Houston eight years ago, all of it would be for nothing. Just wasted effort.
“Ben?”
“Coming,” he said, and with a sigh he turned away from the dead zombie and trotted to the farmhouse porch.
Sylvia was waiting there, leaning against a doorway that had no door. “Are you okay?” she asked. She nodded toward the driveway and the dead zombie he’d just pounded into a bloody puddle. “Did something happen?”
“No,” he said. He was aware of what she was asking, but he didn’t feel like getting into it with her. Not now. “We’re good, I think. I checked to the edge of the corn all the way around. I didn’t see any movement.”
She took a long time to answer. “Okay. Well, that man is starting to come around. He’s still burning up, but I think the fever will break soon. Especially once that Tamiflu kicks in.” She glanced at the sky, the air already turning hazy and golden beyond the farmhouse. “Ben, I think we ought to head out as soon as we can. I’d like to be away from here before it starts getting dark.”
Richardson stepped over to the doorway and glanced inside. Looters had taken most everything that wasn’t nailed down. They’d left trash scattered in with the bits of the ceiling plaster that had fallen to the floor over the years. Avery had cleared away a clean area on the floor. The man was lying in the middle of that clear spot, groaning miserably, with Avery on her knees next to him. But his groaning was an improvement over the tossing and turning and constant fevered babbling he’d been doing most of the day.
“And what about him?” Richardson asked.
“What about him?”
“You’re not seriously suggesting we leave him here, are you?”
“What would you have us do with him, Ben? We need to go. Avery and I, we have to get to Herculaneum and charter a boat to Chester. We don’t have time for strays.”
“But he’s important, Sylvia. You’ve heard him calling out for Doc. He’s got all that Tamiflu, and those antibiotics. He got those from somewhere, from somebody who knew what they were doing.”
“Well, why didn’t those people take care of him?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you think we should take care of him? Ben, how are we going to do that? We can’t even defend ourselves. And somehow we have to find a way to rescue Niki.”
“If we leave him here, he’ll die.”
“You don’t know that. He’s survived since the outbreak. Obviously he can take care of himself.”
He grunted. Shook his head. “You were the one who tried to tell me that the infected were worth all this effort to save. Well, he’s not infected. He’s a human being, a living, disease-free human being. Shouldn’t he be more important than those zombies out there?”
“You’re being overly dramatic, Ben.”
“And you’re being a coldhearted bitch.”
She chewed on her lip while she considered him. “I’d slap your mouth if I thought you meant that,” she said.
Let it go, he thought. Make a bubble. Count to ten.
“Look,” he said, “that guy is immune to the necrosis filovirus. That means something huge. In all the wandering I’ve done, I’ve never met anybody like that. Hell, I’ve never met anybody who even thought that was possible. And then, I meet you and Avery, and you guys tell me you’re looking for somebody who’s immune. Well there he is, Sylvia. He’s right there. All we have to do is take him with us.”
“All you’ve got is his word that he’s immune,” she said.
“And the fact that he’s right there. Sylvia, you saw the Red Man try to turn him into a zombie. He should have changed by now. But he hasn’t. Can you think of any other way to explain that?”
Richardson stopped there, waiting for her to reply. But when she didn’t, he threw up his hands in exasperation.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “You’re as obstinate and bullheaded as you ever were.” He shook his head, turned, and went inside.
“What are you doing?” she said to his back.
“What does it look like? I’m going to talk to him.”
“You can’t talk to him. You heard him raving in there. He’s out of his head.”
Yeah, Richardson thought. He’d heard him raving. He’d heard him talking to Doc, whoever that was. He’d heard him talking to himself, saying not to ever tell anybody anything unless you know more about them than they do about you.
“I’ve got an idea,” Richardson said.
Avery rose from the scraggly man’s side and gave Richardson a wide berth as she made her way back to Sylvia. Richardson, meanwhile, knelt by the man’s side and shook him gently.
“Hey, can you hear me?”
The man’s eyes fluttered open. He took a look at Richardson, and then he crab crawled away from him.
“Easy, easy,” Richardson said. “I don’t want to hurt you. My name’s Ben Richardson. That’s Sylvia Carnes over there, and Avery Harper there.”
The man’s eyes went from Richardson to the women and then back to Richardson, but he said nothing.
“What’s your name?”
The man seemed to consider it, then, with effort, he said, “Nate.”
His voice was soft, barely a whisper. Avery had been giving him water from a plastic bottle, and there were little bubbles of water trapped in his beard.
“Nate,” Richardson said. “Okay. It’s good to meet you, Nate.” Richardson sat down on the floor, grimacing at the stiffness in his joints. “It sucks getting old, Nate,” he said, laughing.
Nate’s expression didn’t change.
“You’ve been feeling sick lately, haven’t you?” Richardson said. “I saw that Tamiflu in your backpack, and those antibiotics. And you were talking to somebody named Doc while you were sleeping.”
Richardson was watching Nate carefully, expecting him to glance over at his backpack. When you lived on the road, as Nate surely did, you guarded your stuff like your life depended on it . . . because it did. But to Richardson’s surprise, Nate never even glanced at it. Instead, he reached to his chest and clutched something under his shirt, like he was checking to make sure it was still there.
“You don’t talk much, do you?”
“No,” Nate said.
“Well, that’s okay. Sometimes, it’s best not to say anything until you know a little bit about who you’re talking to, you know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, of course you do. So I’ll make it easy for you. You know my name, Ben Richardson. Before the outbreak, I was a staff writer for the Atlantic. That was a magazine. Ever heard of it?”
“I’m not much of a reader,” Nate said.
“Ah,” Richardson said. “Well, that’s okay. It was a magazine, and I was a reporter. My job was to write a book about the zombie outbreak. As part of my research I went into San Antonio with Sylvia Carnes there. That’s her there.” Sylvia raised her hand and smiled. “San Antonio didn’t work out so well. After that, I went to Houston to interview members of the Quarantine Authority. I was in a helicopter that crashed into the ruins of Houston. I met a couple of survivors and together we slogged our way to the wall. We didn’t know it, but we were right in the middle of the second wave of the outbreak. We got to the wall right as it was coming down.”
Richardson studied Nate’s face for some sort of reaction, but there was none.
“Well,” he said, pushing on, “after we reached the wall we just decided to keep going. I mean, we couldn’t stay there, you know? So we wandered north until we saw signs for a community this preacher named Jasper Sewell was forming.”
“The Cedar River Grasslands.”
The words stopped Richardson cold. “That’s right,” he said. “You heard what happened at the Grasslands?”
Nate didn’t answer right away. He looked around the bare, dilapidated farmhouse. He wouldn’t meet their eyes.
Finally, he said, “I was there.”
“You were there?” Richardson said. “At the Grasslands?”
Nate nodded.
“Uh, look,” Richardson said, “it was kind of a small community. And I was there for about three months. I got to know pretty much everybody. I don’t remember you.”
“I was there,” Nate said. A slow struggle seemed to be going on behind his scraggly beard and dirty face, like he was arguing with himself about how much to say. But at last he said, “I was at Minot Air Force Base. The doctors there were working on me because I’m immune to the disease that makes people into zombies.” He ducked his head slightly and reached under the collar of his shirt and pulled out a flash drive hanging from a lanyard around his neck. “They were using me as a guinea pig to find a cure. There was a doctor there named Mark Kellogg. He managed to find the cure, and he put it on this right before the base was overrun. They all died. All of them except for a few of the officers. They put me on a helicopter and flew me to the Grasslands, hoping to keep me safe.”
“Oh my God,” Richardson said. “Now I remember you.” His past was rushing up to meet him, and it was coming faster than he could process. First Sylvia Carnes, and then this guy, another survivor of the Grasslands. He didn’t know what to say.
But Sylvia didn’t give him a chance to say anything. She knelt down beside him and said, “Nate, you said there was a cure. You have it? You have the cure there?”
Nate made a fist over the flash drive.
“This doctor,” she said, her voice almost trembling with excitement, “is he the one who gave you the Tamiflu and the antibiotics?”
Nate shook his head. “No, some guy gave me those.”
“Who?” Sylvia said.
“I forget. Some guy. I met him down by the river. He was camping there with his family.”
“What was his name, Nate? Did he tell you his name?”
“Yeah, uh, something Fisher. Weird dude. Looked like he was crippled or something. His legs didn’t work. He had to pull himself around, like a snake, you know? It was kind of creepy.”
Sylvia made a sound that was part laugh, and part disbelief. “Don Fisher,” she said. “Was that his name, Don Fisher?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Nate said. “Sounds right.”
“Did you tell him about the cure? You told him that you were immune?”
“Uh, no,” Nate said.
“You didn’t. Nate, please tell me you’re kidding. You met the man who could have interpreted that flash drive, who could have produced a cure, and you didn’t say anything.”
Nate didn’t speak, which Richardson figured was probably for the best, for the next moment Sylvia grabbed two big handfuls of her own hair in fists clenched so tightly the knuckles cracked. Her body was shaking with anger. Then she stood up and stormed out the front door, giving the wall a good solid kick as she left.
“I’m sorry,” Nate said, turning to Richardson. “I didn’t know. Doc Kellogg, he told me to never tell anybody about the cure unless I was sure they were on my side. And after the Grasslands, everything’s been so confusing.”
“It’s okay, Nate,” Richardson said. “It’s nothing we can’t fix. I hope.”
CHAPTER 12
Two days later, after Nate was well enough to travel, they entered the outskirts of Herculaneum. It was late morning and already hot. There wasn’t much of a breeze, just the muddy earthy smell of the river nearby, and the sun was beating down on the back of Richardson’s neck. He felt like he was being punished.
Richardson and Sylvia were out in front, while Nate Royal and Avery Harper followed about twenty steps behind. Richardson, breathing hard, wiped the sweat from his face with a rag and then folded the rag into a small square and stuffed it back into the pocket of his jeans. He was carrying his own pack, plus all the rifles they’d collected from the dead soldiers at the farmhouse battle, and the weight was starting to drag him down.
“You mind if we stop for a sec?” he said.
Sylvia looked at him. She was frowning with frustration.
Richardson was certain he saw fear there as well. With good reason, too. The night before she’d told him it had been years since she’d been this far from the compound, so this was all new to her. And the carefully constructed plan Niki Booth had set up for them was falling apart. For the first time in a long while, Sylvia Carnes was working without a safety net.
It probably didn’t help matters that he’d been with her the last time she did that, back in San Antonio.
Sylvia looked over her shoulder at Avery and said, “How much farther?”
They were standing in the middle of a long, straight street, ruined buildings on either side of them. Most of the wooden telephone poles that ran the length of the street were still standing, but here and there a few had fallen and were blocking the street. Weeds and spindly shrubs grew out of cracks in the sidewalk and along the base of the buildings. In the distance, they could see the shadowy outline of a big industrial wreck, the remnants of a lead smelting plant.
Avery Harper pointed at the smelting plant and said, “We’re almost there. We just keep going toward that. The free trading market is just around the right side of it.”
“Okay,” Sylvia said, irritably. “I guess we can rest for a second. But just for a moment.”
She shook the hair off her shoulders and then pulled it back into a tight ponytail. Richardson watched her as she tied it off with her black ribbon, wondering why she bothered. The way her hair frizzed up on her, she’d be retying it before they made ten blocks.
He tried to remember her the way she’d been back in San Antonio. A little heavier maybe, softer looking, her hair still black. The years since then had made her lean and given her face an almost birdlike angularity. A funny thought occurred to him: at times, she looked an awful lot like the lawyers in the pen-and-ink drawings in the Charles Dickens books he’d had in his apartment before the outbreak. He smiled inwardly at the thought. She would be offended by the comparison, even though he didn’t intend it that way. Far from it. She was actually quite pretty, knobby elbows and hooked nose and frizzy gray hair notwithstanding.
“What are you looking at?” she said, not even trying to disguise the petulance in her
voice.
“I was trying to remember if you wore glasses.”
“What?”
“Did you? Wear glasses, I mean? I’ve been thinking back to San Antonio and I can’t remember if you wore glasses back then.”
“ No.”
“You didn’t? I could have sworn you did.”
“I said no. Besides, you just said you couldn’t remember.”
“I was just asking.”
“No, you weren’t. You weren’t making any sense. First you say you’ve been trying to remember but you can’t. The next minute you’re swearing that I did. You don’t make any sense, Ben.”
He didn’t know what to make of that.
“I was just asking,” he said.
She let out a frustrated sigh and rolled her eyes. She was carrying their water and she slid off her pack and took out a bottle of water and drank from it.
“You want some?” she asked.
He took the water and drank from the bottle and handed it back to her.
“Thanks.”
She handed the bottle to Avery.
Sylvia scanned the buildings and the side streets for signs of movement. They had already seen a few turkey farmers driving their flocks to market and vegetable dealers with their carts and several people hauling wheelbarrows full of pecans and walnuts, and the increased activity had them all on edge.
“Just out of curiosity,” he said, “what did you guys do for people who needed glasses? Did you have an optometrist in the compound or something?”
“What?”
“It must have come up, right? I mean, Ken Stoler wears glasses. I remember that from Eddie Hudson’s book. I’m sure you had other people there who wore glasses, right? Prescriptions change over time. Glasses break, get scratched. People need new ones all the time. How’d you guys handle that?”
She stared at him, her mouth agape. “What are you asking me for? I told you I don’t wear glasses. How the hell should I know what people do to get new glasses?”