by Joe McKinney
“Why are you here, Avery? I get why Sylvia’s here. I even get why I’m here, sort of. But you’re a mystery to me. What are you doing here?”
She didn’t even hesitate. “Because I believe in Niki, Nate. Haven’t you been listening? She is everything to me. Without her, I’d be dead. Oh I might have gone on living, but inside. . . I’d be dead. She did more than take me in.” She smiled, and for a moment, her eyes shone with the light of admiration. “You should hear her talk. How passionate she is about saving what’s left of this world. Every time I hear her speak, I feel this chill. She’s like a battery. Do you know what I mean? When you stand next to her, you can feel the energy coming out of her. It’s impossible to be around her and not feel like the world is worth saving.”
Nate didn’t answer her back. He nodded, but inside he was doubtful that Niki had done Avery any favors. Most of the people who had survived this long had developed a hard inner grain of resiliency. But Avery seemed soft. He liked that about her, but it worried him, too. Was she too much in Niki’s service? Anybody who relied so heavily on another to define them couldn’t be entirely healthy, could they?
“Avery, honey.”
It was Gabi. Both Nate and Avery stared up at her. The woman had a wonderfully comfortable smile when she wanted to, like a friendly grandmother.
At least Nate imagined it as a grandmotherly smile. He had never known his.
“I’m gonna go down to the galley and cook up some eggs. You wanna join me?”
Avery looked at Nate and he smiled and shrugged.
“Okay,” Avery said. “Yeah, sure.”
When the woman went downstairs, Nate turned toward the prow and saw Jimmy Hinton still sitting there, staring off into the darkness.
“Jimmy?”
Jimmy looked up over his shoulder at Nate and grunted.
“You mind if I sit down?”
“I don’t care. Do whatever you’re gonna do.”
Nate sat down in the chair Gabi had just vacated and tried to see what Jimmy saw when he looked out into the predawn darkness that covered the river and its environs, but whatever the man saw there was a mystery to him.
“You don’t like me much, do you?” Nate said.
Jimmy slowly turned to him, his mouth pinched together like a man who keeps getting interrupted every time he sits down to read the morning paper, and said. “Nate, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve flushed turds smarter than you. I think an awful lot of good, intelligent folks have died since the outbreak, and it breaks my heart sometimes looking at the folks God decided was good enough to go on living.”
Nate cleared his throat. He wasn’t mad. He’d never had any illusions about the brains he’d been given, and he actually found it refreshing to hear people talk about his lack of smarts. There was something honest in it.
“I guess that’s fair,” he said. “I’m sorry if I’m not the man that whoever you lost was.”
Jimmy turned to him. He was frowning, at first, but then the frown turned into a slow smile. “It was a woman, actually. My daughter. And my granddaughter.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.” Jimmy didn’t look away. He looked Nate over, then hooked a thumb toward the cabin. “You’re kind of sweet on that girl, aren’t you?”
“A little,” Nate said. “What do you think? You think I got a chance there?”
“A chance? Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe. Women are idiots, you know.”
That made Nate laugh. “I haven’t found that to be true.”
“No, I reckon not. I imagine you’ve met dead dogs with more brains than you got. It’s true, though. Women are idiots. Nate, you ever looked at a man? I mean really looked at him? You ever put yourself in a woman’s mind and wondered why she’d ever wanna fuck something that looked like an anemic pink gorilla? Look at a woman. She’s got all those curves, all those beautiful curves. She’s got breasts. She’s got hips that feel like the steering wheel of a brand-new Buick. She looks like a fucking piece of art in blue jeans. Hell, she even smells nice. Then look at a man. He’s all angles and dangling parts. He looks ridiculous. He farts. He scratches his ass. He’ll live like a billy goat if you let him. I tell you the only real mystery in life is why every woman on this planet isn’t a lesbian.”
Jimmy laughed. He picked at a piece of skin at the corner of his thumbnail and flicked it over the side.
“And don’t even get me started on the actual act of sex,” he said suddenly. “Have you thought about that? For a man, it’s hurry up, hurry up, unh uh, I’m done. But think about what a woman’s got to look forward to. She’s got this big clumsy oaf climbing up on top of her, sticking his pork in her, and then banging away like it’s a sprint to the finish. For a man, an orgasm is kind of like a moment of freefall. But I’ve heard women describe an orgasm like every part of her body is sending up fireworks. I hope that’s true. I hope they get at least that much from us. God knows they need something special to make up for the shit we put ’em through. Don’t seem like nearly enough to me, though.”
From downstairs in the galley they heard a sudden staccato of laughter. In the darkness, Nate could just barely see Gabi and Avery laughing over something.
“I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “Maybe motherhood’s got something to do with it. I loved being a dad. I really loved being a granddad. But I don’t think I got near as much from it as Gabi got from being a mother and a grandmother. Being a dad can sometimes feel like a spectator sport. You’re working most of the time. You get to spend a few hours here and there in the evening, a little more on weekends. You crack jokes and if you’re lucky your kids think you’re cool. At least some of the time. But it’s the mother who does all the real kid raising. When they’re hurt, it’s Mama they’re crying for. When they crawl into bed in the middle of the night, they cling to Mama like barnacles. A man can feel like a man for keeping a roof over his kids’ head, but there ain’t nothing a man can do that can top what Mama does.”
“My dad was an asshole,” Nate said. But there wasn’t any bitterness to it. All of the screaming and the hitting and the bullshit that was life in the Royal household was a long time ago, and if Nate hadn’t yet forgiven the bad times, he had mostly forgotten them. It was just like what that porn star, Bellamy Blaze, had said to Ben Richardson. The end of the world had pretty much given her a new life. It had done the same for him.
“Dads have a way of seeming like assholes,” Jimmy said. “It is their special skill. I know I sure fit that description some of the time. Hell, maybe most of the time.” He shook his head, his gaze still locked on Gabi. “But you know, when I think of all the shit she has to take being married to me, I figure she must be an idiot. There ain’t no other reason why she’d stay with me. My thinking is, if you’re truly sweet on that girl in there, she’s probably dumb enough to find something she likes about you.”
Nate nodded. “You’re an encouraging guy, Jimmy. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
When the morning finally came, Nate was sitting next to Ben Richardson down in the cabin. After each of them had finished a plate of eggs, Richardson took out his iPad and handed it to Nate.
“Go ahead,” Richardson said, “fire it up.”
Nate turned the device on. Slowly, aware that Richardson was watching him carefully, Nate ran his fingers over the grimy screen, tapping files until he had all the hundreds of interviews that Richardson had collected over the years displayed on the screen. He had seen Avery’s down at the bottom, but he hadn’t looked at it yet. He wanted to, but at the same time he felt kind of creepy because of that want. Somehow, the idea of watching her interview felt improper, sort of like watching her change her clothes when she didn’t know she was being watched.
It was an odd feeling for him.
“I’ve been thinking about these interviews a lot lately,” Richardson said, and there was a solemn tone in his voice that immediately made the hairs on the back of Nate’s neck stand up. “I’ve been thin
king about what they mean, what they’re worth.”
Nate didn’t speak. Though he’d never been a particularly sensitive man, he was aware that the conversations he’d been having with Richardson over the past few days had been leading up to something, and whatever that something was, this was it. Richardson was struggling to get something out, and nothing Nate could say would hasten that.
“I want you to have that, Nate. The iPad.”
“You what? But what about your book? All your notes are on here.”
“That’s true. I still want you to have it, Nate.”
“But why?” Nate looked at him, honestly and completely confused. But then it donned on him. “You’re not gonna finish it. You never had any intention of finishing it, did you?”
Richardson smiled. “Maybe in the beginning I did. Certainly not lately. Lately, it’s just been a thing I do, like a condemned man putting hash marks for the passing days on the walls of his cell. Does that make sense? It’s something that you do because your mind won’t let you rest. You do it because your mind has more stamina than your body.”
“What are you saying? Are you . . . you’re not gonna . . . do anything stupid, are you?”
“No, Nate. No, you don’t need to worry about that. But I am being a realist.” He pointed to the iPad. “This is what’s been keeping me afloat for the last few years. I think that’s why I’ve made it a point not to finish it. But you, I think you’re finally coming into your own. I’ve listened to your story about where you came from, all the troubles you had growing up. You’re not that guy anymore, Nate. You may not feel like it, but you’ve grown up. This world, for all its faults, has made you a man. You’re the pony to bet on. That’s why I’m giving this to you. Do what you want with it. Do what you think is right. I have a feeling it’ll be the right thing to do.”
Nate stared at the iPad in his hands. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t, look Richardson in the face. He looked back over the last few days, over all the things he had told Richardson while the two of them followed along behind Sylvia Carnes and Avery Harper. He had told him all about his life, from a high school dropout living in the shack behind his father’s clapboard house, to Air Force medical experiment, to transient searcher for the meaning of life, and finally to nitwit messiah with the fate of mankind coursing through his veins. It had been, like that old Grateful Dead song said, a long, strange trip. And though he hardly grasped the full scope of it, he felt that, somehow, Richardson had. Perhaps he saw in Nate that which he couldn’t himself become. Perhaps he was simply tired. But whatever the reason, he had given Nate the iPad that contained so much, and it felt right that he should have it.
But still, for all the rightness of it, Nate didn’t like the way Richardson was talking. In the short time he’d known him, Nate had come to think of Richardson as a survivor. He was simply too well put together in the brainpan to short circuit. But what he was hearing now sounded like a man teetering on the verge of emotional collapse. Nate was hardly an expert on such things, but he had lived in the wastelands of America for six years. He had done his share of wandering. He had come to learn that, when it came to men and the minds of men, there was broken, and there was broke. He’d met some who were flat-out crazy. He’d met others who’d gone wild, feral. Still others who seemed to be in love with self-destruction. But the really scary ones, the ones you didn’t dare trust, were the ones backsliding into a cocoon of depression and exhaustion. Those were the ones you could never predict. They were truly dangerous.
And Richardson . . . he seemed to be going down that road.
“Hey, you guys need to come up here.”
It was Avery, staring down at them from the top of the stairs. She had a funny way of holding her mouth when something was wrong that Nate had come to like, like she had just taken a big bite of a lemon. He saw the look on her face now.
“What is it?” Richardson said.
She seemed like she was searching for the right words, but they just weren’t coming. All she could manage was a quick shake of her head.
Then she turned and went back up on deck.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Richardson said.
“No, it doesn’t.”
Nate got up to go topside, but Richardson put a hand on his arm.
“Hey Nate . . .”
Richardson had the iPad on his thigh, holding it as though he was about to thrust it into Nate’s hand but wasn’t sure if the younger man would accept it.
“I’ll take it,” Nate said. “If that’s really what you want?”
Richardson nodded.
A moment later, they were both topside, and what they saw made them both stiffen. A thick morning fog drifted over the water, white fingerlike clouds inching over the swampland that made up the country in this part of Southern Illinois. On the shore they saw a winding dirt road leading down to a ferry house, and beyond the ferry house, rising like horrid scarecrows over dead fields, were hundreds of rotting corpses impaled on spikes. Circling above the bodies were thousands of shrieking birds, and when the wind shifted, the assembled crew and passengers of the Sugar Jane got the stench of all that death full in the face.
Jimmy Hinton turned from the scene. “No way,” he said. “Out of the question. You people hired me to take you to Chester, but this ain’t part of our deal.”
“Jimmy,” Gabi said.
“One second,” he said. He turned on Richardson. “You lied to me. You said Chester. This wasn’t part of our deal.”
“Jimmy.” It was Gabi again, her voice more insistent this time. She was trying to grab his shirt, but couldn’t seem to make her fingers work like they were supposed to.
“What is—” The rest of the question broke off in his throat. He was staring straight ahead, into the fog, his mouth hanging open.
Nate followed Jimmy’s gaze, and he too stood speechless.
There were shapes emerging from the fog, hundreds of zombies wading into the shallow water.
And the Sugar Jane was drifting into their midst.
CHAPTER 16
One by one the zombies separated from the fog and shadows, their tattered bodies curdling the river water and sending up the deep, fetid odor of mud and dead things as they surrounded the Sugar Jane.
“Get down!” Jimmy shouted.
Nate didn’t move. He couldn’t. He was frozen by the sight of all those zombies wading through the dark water, black silhouettes stirring in the shadows of the overhanging willow trees, their eyes glinting, teeth bared, full of the promise and the emptiness of death. Their moaning was deafening.
They never blinked, never showed any sense of urgency, or fear, or hunger. There was nothing in their expressions but a bottomless, soul-sucking emptiness. For Nate, it was like looking into the mirror during his darkest moments while he was still Dr. Kellogg’s lab rat back at Minot. He was transfixed, not by fear, but by the reptilian emptiness of all those eyes turned up toward him.
“I said, get down!”
Jimmy was pulling on his shoulder, trying to get him away from the railing. Nate turned toward Jimmy. The younger man was confused, and for a moment none of this made sense. It was as though the fog that rolled over the river was creeping into his mind as well. He didn’t understand. Seconds before, everything had been so quiet. But now, it was like he was standing still and the whole world was swirling around him, too fast for him to make any sense of it. Jimmy was yelling at him again. Really yelling. The old hippie had a wild look in his eyes. His hair was standing on end, and with the morning sun behind his head he looked like his head was on fire.
“What the hell, boy? You wanna get shot? Get your head down.”
Shot? What was he talking about?
Only then did Nate see the AR-15 that Jimmy was trying to point over the bow.
“Move!”
Nate took a few steps out of the way and the next few moments went by, not like a smooth, movie-scripted action sequence, but in flashes of horrible violence, disjointed images rus
hing at him without context.
He saw Jimmy Hinton, the rifle held over his head, flecks of spit flying from his lips, a scream frozen in his throat as he kicked one of the lawn chairs out of the way and leaned over the side, firing as fast as he possibly could.
Zombies were scrambling up the railing, their mangled hands and faces visible in the searing orange light of Jimmy Hinton’s muzzle flashes, mud and sludge oozing from their hair and tattered clothes.
Gabi screamed something at him. Nate was looking right at her, only a few feet away, though he heard nothing but the indistinguishable roar of noise.
From somewhere off to his left, he heard the crash of broken glass.
Nate looked that way and saw Avery Harper and Sylvia Carnes on their knees, Avery’s face buried in Sylvia’s chest. Behind them, a zombie had fallen from the railing into one of the port windows, shattering the glass. It pulled itself loose from the broken window, its right arm a bleeding mass of deep cuts, and staggered forward, reaching for the two women.
But they couldn’t back away from it.
They were trapped by two more zombies climbing over the railing right in front of Nate.
At that moment Avery looked up at him, and the confusion that had clouded his mind was swept violently away. Anger supplanted confusion and he surged forward, his fingers curling into fists. None of these rotting bastards were going to touch her, not while he was around to do something about it.
The two men closest to him were bone skinny, both of them stinking of rotting meat and river mud, their heads lolling on their shoulders. Nate rushed forward, determined to shove them back over the railing and pull the women to safety, but he hadn’t taken more than two steps before somebody threw him sideways into the cabin wall.
“Get your head down!” Gabi Hinton said. She pinned him against the wall with one massive arm. “Stay there.”
She let go of him long enough to bring her rifle to bear on the two zombies, dropping both of them with a single shot to the forehead.
“Don’t move,” she said.