by Joe McKinney
But her anger evaporated when she saw what lay before her. And despite her best efforts to look like she could handle herself come hell or high water, she couldn’t help but gasp.
She was standing on a gravel road that led down to the dock at the riverside. A forest of heavy stakes—there were two hundred, maybe more—rose up on either side of the road. Most were topped with the naked bodies of dead men who had been impaled through the rectum and allowed to slide down the spikes. Each body had its hands and feet bound together, their mouths hanging open in eternal screams. Some had been burned from the feet up, the ground around them blackened by the fire. Others had been partially eaten by the infected. The air swarmed with black crows and flies. There were more of the loathsome birds roosting on the impaled bodies, while still others fought over scraps of rotten flesh on the ground. The smell was enough to make the bile rise to the back of her mouth, but she managed to keep it down; and somehow she was able to maintain that control right up to the point where she saw the mouth of one of the men on a stake near her start to move. One look at the man’s eyes and she knew he was still conscious, aware of every bit of the hell he was experiencing. At that point Niki doubled over and vomited.
When she looked up again she saw one of the guards watching her, smiling, like he was enjoying her suffering.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “These are men. You’re a man. How could you do this?”
The smile left his face.
Behind her, she heard a chorus of moans. She turned and saw Loren Skaggs leading an enormous troop of zombies toward them. Niki began to back away, but one of the guards stepped close to her and grabbed her arm tightly.
“It’d be a mistake,” he said. “Stand still. Don’t move.”
She looked at the man as she struggled to break his grip. He wouldn’t let go. Loren and his zombies were almost on them now, and she could smell them. Their moaning had blotted out everything, even the squawking of the crows.
“Hold her still,” Loren said, and the sound of his voice sent a chill through her.
She stopped struggling and watched him as he passed, the red flesh on his bald head glistening like a puddle of oil.
“Bring her over with us on the ferry,” Loren said to the guard.
“Yes, sir.”
And with that Loren walked on down to the river and the waiting ferry, his zombies following behind like a congregation headed for baptism. They passed on either side of Niki, so close she could have reached out and touched them had her hands not been cuffed behind her back.
“Let me go,” she pleaded to the guard.
“Stand still, girl. Don’t you move or we’ll both die.”
“Please,” she said. She heard the whining in her voice but she didn’t care. She felt utterly defenseless and more terrified than she had been since her father died, leaving her to fend for herself and for Avery in the wilds of a blasted landscape. Her skin was crawling, the gooseflesh rising on her arms and neck. She was holding her breath, trying not to scream.
“Easy,” the guard holding her arm said. “Almost through them.”
A zombie—a woman in her late fifties—passed just inches from her. The zombie turned to look at Niki as she staggered by. Her face was covered with boils and abscesses and swarming with flies that probed her sores and the oozing fluid at the corners of her milky white eyes.
Unable to stand it anymore, Niki squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn’t stop trembling.
When the zombies were loaded onto the ferry, two guards led Niki aboard. The guards put her in a chair in the back of the boat and she didn’t resist. In front of her the zombies swayed with the motion of the boat. Loren Skaggs stood at the head of the ferry, looking off toward the crumbling ruins of the Kirkman Hyatt and Convention Center on the opposite bank. The two guards pulled on the guide rope that connected the two sides of the river, and slowly, the ferry inched its way across, the only sounds the creaking of the ropes and the squawking birds behind them.
Before her, silhouetted by the setting sun, was the hotel that Loren had turned into his own private hell on earth. Niki watched as it grew closer, and a feeling of deep despair washed over her.
Into the land of the dead, she thought.
Flanked by guards, with zombies in front of and behind her, Niki Booth was led up a concrete ramp to the ruins of what had once been the loading dock for the Convention Center portion of the hotel. The building was falling apart now. Everywhere she looked she saw broken windows. The floors were covered with mud and leaves and trash, the walls spray-painted with fading graffiti.
But there was no furniture, no equipment, no signs that an army was using this place as its headquarters. It took her a moment to notice that. All she felt walking in to the facility was a distinct sense that something was off about it. And then a soldier ordered her to stop and his voice echoed inside the two-story-high emptiness of the loading dock and it hit her. There’s nothing here, no signs of occupation.
“What is this place?” she said.
No one answered her, and she knew she’d made a mistake. Don’t show them you’re afraid, kiddo. Keep ’em guessing about you.
She sensed the guards behind her had stopped and she tried to turn around.
Somebody hit her in the shoulder. “Don’t turn around,” one of the guards said.
“Come a little closer and say that.”
A different man spoke, this one older, and a smoker, Niki guessed. His voice sounded like gravel. “You heard the lady. Uncuff her.”
Niki tensed. So they wanted to have some fun with her, eh? Well, bring it, assholes.
One of the guards grabbed her handcuffs and worked the key into the hole. He was a bundle of nerves. She could feel it in the way his hands fumbled with the key and hear it in his breathing.
Niki curled her fingertips up into the man’s palm and smiled when he jumped. But she didn’t move. She just waited for him to come back, and when he did she curled her fingertips into his palm again and gently stroked the length of his index finger, purring under her breath as the muscles in his finger relaxed.
She heard him swallow, and then one of the cuffs fell away.
It was the break she was waiting for. She slammed her elbow back into the guard’s face and felt the satisfying crunch of the bridge of his nose. Blood gushed from the man’s face. He bent forward, screaming, his hands over his nose. Niki raised her boot and brought it down hard on the side of the man’s knee, breaking it. He sank to one knee, the other leg bent the wrong way, eyes rolling wildly in his head. His mouth was hanging open in a scream that he couldn’t quite get out. Niki still had one cuff around her right wrist, the swing arm on the left cuff dangling free. She swung the open cuff down on the man’s face and the exposed swing arm caught inside his cheek like a fishhook snagging a river trout. She yanked back on the cuff and it tore through his cheek, widening his mouth by a good two inches. The man fell to the floor, writhing in pain.
Two other guards were charging her from the left. She swung the dangling handcuff at the closer of the two, catching him across the side of his face, dropping him to his knees.
The other guard had his hands up like a boxer, ready to block her next swing. Niki feinted with a backhand, then stopped midway through the arc and mule-kicked him in the balls. He doubled over with a gasp, and when the back of his head was exposed, she slammed the handcuff down, catching the swing arm around his ear and yanking back as hard as she could. The man barrel rolled in midair, landed on his face, and didn’t move.
Niki didn’t know if he was dead or just passed out and she didn’t care. One of the guards yelled, “Beanbag her!”
She spun around to face the rest of the guards and got a glimpse of a shotgun’s muzzle blast. The round hit her in the stomach and doubled her over, the pain blindingly intense. Every muscle in her gut and her chest had constricted and she couldn’t breathe. She fought with her body to pull in the air she needed, but couldn’t make it happen. All she
managed was a thin, croaking groan.
She coughed up blood on the floor and a wave of dizzying nausea overtook her. She nearly fell over on her side.
Come on, kiddo, she told herself. You gotta fight. Get up.
She lifted her gaze to the narrowing circle of guards around her and tried to stand up straight. One of the guards racked a shotgun and Niki had just enough time to mentally brace herself when the second beanbag round hit her in the chest and dropped her to the ground, unconscious.
When she awoke, one of the guards had her by the ankle and was dragging her across faded red carpet. “What are . . . stop,” she said, still feeling groggy. Her vision was a blur. She tried to grab hold of something, anything, but the floor beneath her had been worn smooth and all she managed to do was rake her fingernails across Berber.
The guard glanced back when he felt her start to squirm and jerked her leg even harder. “Fucking little bitch,” he said.
The side of his head was dark with a livid bruise and dried blood where the handcuff swing arm had caught him. Beyond him was a large room. He was dragging her straight for it.
“No,” she said. “No, stop.”
“Stop my ass,” he muttered.
He reached the middle of the room and grabbed her ankle with both hands and flung her across the wooden floor.
“Stay down, you little bitch,” the guard said.
She looked up at him in time to see his heel come crashing down on her face, and then her world went black again.
Niki hurt everywhere. She curled into a fetal ball and cried. She had never been hurt like this before. Every muscle ached, and her mouth was thick with the coppery taste of blood.
The room was dark. Dark, and heavy with the smell of rot. The floor beneath her was cold. She blinked the purple spots from her eyes and tried to peer into the darkness. She could see dim shapes, people, but couldn’t make out details.
“Hello?” she said, her voice coming out like a groan.
Her call was met with a chorus of moans. The moans rose and fell in an uneven, but urgent, ululation that she had come to know all too well over the years.
“No,” she said, shaking her head.
She pulled herself to her feet, forcing her way through the pain, pivoting around in a circle, waiting for the attack she knew was sure to come.
The moaning grew louder and louder. The zombies in the dark were in a frenzy now. She heard the musical clinking of a chain-link fence, and in her mind she remembered visiting the St. Louis Zoo as a child, holding her father’s hand as the two of them stared at a chimpanzee shaking furiously at the bars of his cage with both hands. She was hearing the same kind of noise now and knew there was a terrifying, frustrated, insatiable rage fueling it. But the question that mattered—indeed, the only question that really mattered—was which side of the cage was she on?
Turning in a circle, she bumped into something heavy hanging from the ceiling. Her shoulder hit the bottom edge of the object and it rocked away from her. It felt like a huge birdcage. And as soon as she moved it, the zombie inside it turned wild. Its moans rose to a fevered panting as the ghostly shape of its diseased arm shot out at her from between the bars.
Niki jumped back, her heart in her throat, her hand over her aching chest.
“Oh Jesus,” she said. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.”
She staggered backward and fell, landing on her butt. She was surrounded, and for the first time in her life she found that she couldn’t make herself get back up. This was the end of the line. Her train stopped here. She was down in the bowels of the zombie king’s lair and she was going to die here. The realization made her feel like she’d been run over by a truck. It flattened her, numbed her to the point that she was prepared to just let it happen. It wasn’t scary anymore. All she had to do was sit still and wait for death to clamp its filthy jaws on her.
She was crying, sobbing, when a series of bright lights came on. Black shirts, she realized, standing on the edge of the room holding hand-cranked spotlights.
Niki lifted her head and saw at once that she was in a large room, lined on either side by improvised cells constructed of chain-link fencing strung over recessed chambers in the walls. Leering from behind the fencing were hundreds of zombies. They pressed against each other, clawed at each other’s ruined faces, trying to squeeze through the diamond-shaped holes in the fence to get to her.
And hanging from the ceiling were three large bell cages, each one containing a zombie. It was the middle cage she had run into. The zombie inside was on his knees, his face wedged between the bars, his hands reaching for her, clutching at the empty air between them. Its milky white eyes never blinked, never looked away from the vein throbbing in her neck.
Horrified, she crawled away from it.
A door at the far end of the room opened a moment later and Loren Skaggs, the Red Man, strode into the room.
Instantly, the moaning stopped. A calm spread over the zombies as each one focused on Loren.
He walked straight for her, stopping at her feet and looking down at her with a murderous hunger in his eyes. For a terrifying moment, Niki wasn’t sure if he intended to eat her or not. He just stood there, breathing heavily, watching her.
“You’re bleeding,” he said at last.
She didn’t respond.
“What? No nasty comeback? Where’s the fire, Niki? What happened to Niki Booth, the ferocious zombie fighter?”
“Your soldiers hurt me, Loren,” she said. It was suddenly very difficult to keep her eyes open. She wanted to pass out.
“My soldiers haven’t even started to hurt you, Niki. The worst is yet to come. There’s so much more.” He knelt down so that he could look her in the eyes. “But you could stop that from happening. You know that, don’t you? You could tell me where Don Fisher is. Tell me where he is, Niki.”
“Or what?” Niki said. Being threatened woke something primal in her, something that refused to be cowed by Loren Skaggs. Zombie king or not, he was still the same old meth-head loser she’d known back in Gatling. “Or what, Loren?” she repeated, her voice stronger this time. “What do you think you can do to me that will make me betray everything I’ve worked for?”
He smiled.
“Niki, don’t fool yourself. You’re brave now. You’re full of anger and meanness. You even dare to look me in the eye. But I can take away everything.” He motioned toward the wall of faces watching them from between the bars. “Do you see them, Niki? There’s nothing behind those eyes but what I put there. They have no will but the purpose I put in their heads, and they will obey it, even if it means their own death. I can make you like that, Niki. I can take away your very soul. And when I do, there will be nothing left inside but what I put there. I will own every inch of you. I will do everything I ever dreamed of back in school.”
“Go to hell, Loren,” she whispered.
He laughed as he stood up straight.
“Niki, I heard you say earlier that I have gone insane. I don’t think you’ve judged the situation right. You see, I can be reasonable.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want Don Fisher. You know that. I know you can give him to me. And so, I propose to make a trade.”
“You’ve got nothing I want,” Niki said.
“Oh, I think I do.” He walked over to the hanging cage and stuck his hand through the bars. He waved away the flies that swarmed around the zombie’s sores. Then he turned back to Niki. “I remember you back in high school, Niki. You were everybody’s darling, weren’t you? A cheerleader, class valedictorian, volunteer at the Special Olympics. You were all kinds of hot shit.”
“The past is what it is, Loren. We can’t do anything about who we used to be.”
“That’s true,” he said. “But the past can tell us about who we are now. It can tell us the kind of things we’re likely to hold dear.”
“You’re not making sense, Loren.”
“Aren’t I? No? Then let me put it to you
this way. Tell me where Don Fisher is right now, or I will pull every zombie for a thousand miles and use them to overrun Ken Stoler’s compound. Is that plain enough for you? Every person you have come to care about, every man, woman, and child, will be gnawed to the bone. There will be nothing left of your home. What happened to Calimar, that will be a mercy killing compared to what I do to Union Field.”
His face was lit with madness, and it rattled her. But it wasn’t the looming threat of his red body that frightened her. No, it was more than that. She had been a member of Union Field since she was twenty-two. Ken Stoler had taken a nearly wild young woman in charge of a twelve-year-old little girl and turned her into a leader among men. She had made friends there. No, don’t mince words, she thought. They’re your family. The people there in Stoler’s compound had become her family. Her recent fights and falling-out with Stoler were beside the point. They didn’t change anything, at least not where it counted. When she left Union Field, she left a lot more than a safe haven. She left her family. And the idea of Loren’s zombies killing them, improbable as it was, rattled her to her core.
“Do whatever you’re gonna do,” she said, praying that he would believe her. “I’ve got nothing there anymore.”
A sneer played at the corner of his mouth. “You fight better than you lie, Niki. I know what you’re really thinking. You’re scared, but not scared enough. You don’t think I can make good on my promise, and that’s why you think you can lie to me. You’ve seen what, a hundred, two hundred zombies? You think that is all I control. You’re wrong. Niki, I control them all. Have you ever watched an enormous flock of birds in flight? Seen the way they wheel and turn, like one mind is working them all? It’s morphic fields. I don’t know how, but I can see those fields. It’s like a fog that I can move and push. I can control it.” He gestured to the zombies behind the chain-link fencing. “I can control all of them without making a sound.”
“You believe that? Loren, you really are insane.”