Mutated

by Joe McKinney

  She nodded.

  “I had come to think of myself as this sort of roving camera. I used to tell myself that when I saw fucked-up shit. Roving camera, I’d say. Don’t get involved. Just watch. Process it. Save it.”

  “Burn out,” she said. “The feeling like you’re going round in circles.”

  “That’s right,” he said, pointing at her. “Picture this: I’m working on this book, right? It’s supposed to be the definitive history of this crisis we’re all living through. I’ve been from one corner of the country to the other. I’ve broken laws, lived through mass suicides, talked to crazies and politicians and crazy politicians . . . I’ve seen it all. I’ve collected thousands of interviews. I’ve heard every single possible point of view and I’ve dutifully put them all down. And you know what?”

  He looked to Sylvia.

  She shook her head.

  He looked to Avery, who simply stared back at him, eyes shrink-wrapped as though from incipient tears.

  “Tell me,” Nate said. “You began to wonder who the fuck would ever care.”

  Richardson seemed on the verge of tears. “Yes,” he admitted. “Yes, goddamn it. That’s it exactly.”

  He looked around the empty hallway, and there was no dread, no fear, no sense of being in way over his head. This place was just empty. Doorways leading onto quiet dead ends . . . though, strangely, Nate didn’t see the same pointlessness that Ben seemed to be feeling.

  Ben said, “Everything was still there. All my old writing skills. I could still type. I could still get someone to tell me their story, trust me. I could still find the right words. I could keep an interview lively. I could transition from one thought to the next like nobody’s business.”

  “But . . . ?” Sylvia said.

  Ben didn’t say anything.

  “What was missing, Ben?” Nate asked.

  He had been looking at the floor. When he met their gaze, his eyes were bloodshot and wet.

  “Curiosity,” he said.

  Sylvia didn’t get it. Nate could see that from her frown. But Nate was pretty sure he understood.

  “You sold out, didn’t you?”

  Richardson flinched. He turned on Nate and balled his fists. But there was nothing beyond his posturing, and they both knew it.

  He bowed his head.

  “Yeah. Okay. That’s fair. I was speaking the words, but there was no real content.”

  “Has something changed?” Sylvia asked.

  “We have, I guess.”

  Nate frowned. At first, he didn’t understand. But then he looked at the others, at Sylvia and Avery, and he saw understanding in their nods. And he too understood. They had come together for a reason. The whole world was butchered and damned. Gone, in the wink of an eye. Yet, despite the seeming futility, the emptiness, the pointlessness of it all, the four of them were together, and they were on the verge of something important. Something that actually had some content to it. This was humanity doing what it did best. What it had always done.

  They were fighting back.

  After a long time, they had finally found something worth fighting for.

  They stood there, processing this new understanding of each other, and themselves. Nate felt good. He hadn’t felt this kind of energy going through him in a very long time.

  “I guess we go that way?” he said.

  “I guess so,” said Avery.

  Sylvia and Richardson both nodded.

  “You want to lead?” Nate asked Sylvia.

  She shook her head. “You go, Nate. You’re doing fine.”

  They made it to the end of the hall without incident.

  And the next one.

  And the one after that.

  The place was deserted, it seemed, the only sound the sighing breeze working its way through busted windows and down empty hallways. Nate was up front, Avery and Richardson behind him. Sylvia was bringing up the rear. Everywhere they went they had to step over ceiling tiles that had crumbled and fallen to the floor, making it nearly impossible to walk quietly.

  Still, Nate tried. He was, frankly, tired of feeling dumb.

  But by the fourth or fifth empty hallway, and entering yet another empty landing, Nate started to get bored. The miserable, torpid heat that had settled inside the building was getting more of his attention than his tactics.

  He stopped and wiped his face with the belly of his shirt. They were standing in the middle of another large meeting room, much like the one they’d first stepped into when they entered the building, though this one seemed to have been cleared of most of the furniture. A few busted chairs stood out amongst all the fallen ceiling tiles, and one big wooden desk was covered with a thick layer of white dust, but aside from that, it was just another empty room with no air circulation.

  Nate walked to the center of the room and stopped. The side of the room from which they’d entered had only one door. But the opposite side of the room had six. Two of those were bathrooms. He could see the dust-covered MEN’S ROOM sign hanging from a single screw next to one of the rooms. But the other four doors could lead, well, anywhere. He looked from one to the other to the other and had no idea which one to take.

  He was about to ask Sylvia which way when one of the doors fell open with the groan of seldom used hinges.

  They all flinched.

  A girl child stepped through the door, leaving it open behind her. She looked to be nine, or maybe ten. She was shabbily dressed in a tattered yellow dress, no shoes, her hair a wild tangle on her head. Her arms hung limply at her side, and from one hooked finger depended a plastic bag filled with half a loaf of bread and some oranges.

  She shuffled across the floor, one leg obviously injured.

  “Stand back,” Richardson said, pushing his way past Nate.

  He drew his pistol and leveled it at the little girl.

  “No!” said Sylvia. She stepped forward, put a hand on Richardson’s arm, and eased his weapon down. “Look at her,” she said.

  Nate did.

  The left side of the girl’s face was all chewed up, but it had been cleaned and had already started to heal. The eye on that side of her face was ruined. The other eye was webbed with white lines, like incipient cataracts. She made her slow, shuffling way across the trash-covered floor and for just a moment turned her one good eye toward Nate. There was a haunted, uneasy vacancy in the back of her stare.

  But the girl didn’t stop. She kept going across the room, fumbled at a doorknob with a hand that didn’t seem to work just right, and finally got it open.

  The next instant, she was gone.

  Richardson had taken a few cautious steps after her, but now he turned and looked at the rest of them.

  “What was that? Why didn’t she attack? Why didn’t she start moaning?”

  Nate shrugged.

  Avery grabbed Nate’s hand. “I don’t like that,” she said. “That’s not right.”

  “No,” Sylvia said. “No, it’s not.”

  “Anybody want to take a crack at what the hell we just saw?” Richardson said.

  Sylvia said, “I think we should go after her.”

  “What?”

  “It looked like she was being led, didn’t it?”

  Richardson shook his head, scowling like her suggestion was utter lunacy.

  But it made sense to Nate. Once again he sensed his thoughts coming together. Something had clicked for him. “It did look like that,” he said. He nodded to himself. “Yes.” Then, to Avery: “She was carrying food. That was what was in that bag, right? Food?”

  “Yeah,” Avery said.

  “So who was it for?” Nate said.

  Richardson shook his head.

  Nate frowned at him. It wasn’t like Richardson to miss something that seemed so obvious, but he either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand.

  “We need to follow her,” Sylvia said. “I bet she’ll lead us to Niki.”

  “Exactly,” Nate said.

  “That’s crazy,” Richard
son said.

  “Ben,” Sylvia said, “she was being led, directed. The Red Man is controlling her. You have to see that, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why do you find it so hard believe? You yourself told me you’ve seen Stage III zombies using Stage I zombies like hunting dogs to flush out prey. How is this any different?”

  “Because there’s a physical agency involved in the way Stage III zombies control the lesser ones. They’re exactly like hunters with their dogs. They point them where they want them to go and they let native instincts take over. What you’re suggesting would take some kind of psychic power. I refuse to believe that.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it’s not rationally consistent.”

  “I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. These are zombies, Sylvia. Zombies. Their minds have been cooked to mush by the necrosis filovirus until there’s nothing left. They have no intellect, no consciousness. They don’t make plans. They don’t play puppeteer with other zombies. And you know why? Because there’s nothing for a puppeteer to hook his strings to. You can’t control a mind that isn’t there.”

  Sylvia just stared at him.

  He huffed back.

  “These are zombies, Sylvia,” he said again. “When you start giving them psychic powers or whatever the hell you claim this is, they stop being zombies. They become something else, and that’s just not consistent with this world.”

  “I don’t see how that makes any of this any less real,” she said.

  “Enough,” Nate said.

  He went over to the door and looked down the hallway. The little girl was slipping around the corner at the far end.

  “We’re gonna lose her if we stick around here arguing.”

  “He’s right,” Sylvia said to Richardson. She took Avery by the hand. “Come on, sweetie. Let’s go get Niki.”

  They slipped past Nate at the doorway.

  He pointed them down the hall.

  “She went around that corner,” he said.

  Nate turned to Richardson, who was standing in the middle of the empty room, looking frustrated and dour.

  “You coming?” Nate said.

  CHAPTER 19

  They followed the little girl, but stayed well back in the shadows, far enough away—Nate hoped, anyway—that they could turn tail and run if it came to that.

  But the girl seemed to be the only thing moving through the hotel. She went from one hallway to the next, winding her slow and steady way through a maze of passageways, never once getting lost, like she was following an old familiar path.

  Nate got bored again. His head felt soupy from the heat, which was becoming oppressive the deeper they went. He smelled bad, too. Several times he tried to drive the cloying mustiness of the river out of his nostrils by shaking his head, but the smell enveloped him like a living thing.

  He couldn’t tell if the others smelled as bad as he did. Probably they did. But they were definitely feeling the heat. He could tell from the labored sound of Richardson’s breathing and from the way Sylvia had given up trying to push the hair from her face. It was an unaccustomed look for her. In the week or so he’d been running around with this group, he’d come to expect a certain unflagging resiliency from her. But now her shoulders were drooping, like the weight of this place and the job they’d set for themselves was weighing down upon her.

  Poor Avery, though. She was a different matter altogether. She was soaked with sweat. He could tell it was sweat and not river water because it was popping out all over her skin and running down her cheeks like tears, cutting clean scars through the dirt that covered her pink face. Every step she took looked like it was bought with pain. He wanted to reach out and touch her hand, tell her that—

  “Nate, stop!” Sylvia said.

  He froze, shook the thoughts from his head. He turned around. The others were three or four steps behind him.

  Richardson nodded down the hallway.

  The little girl in the yellow dress was about to round a brightly lit corner. Nate could see a flickering orange light spilling across the floor there, setting the girl into relief.

  “Go quietly,” Sylvia said. “No surprises.”

  Nate nodded.

  They got to the corner in time to see two black shirts opening a large wooden door for the little girl. She walked through, still carrying the plastic bag full of bread and oranges, and never even looked at the two uninfected men. To Nate it was unbelievable, zombies and humans working together like that. It seemed unreal.

  A few moments later, the little girl came back through the same door, turned to her left, and walked away down a side corridor.

  “That’s pretty weird,” Nate said.

  “I bet she’s in there,” said Avery. She was trying to be quiet, but the excitement in her voice was unmistakable.

  “I bet you’re right,” said Sylvia. She smiled and patted the younger woman on the shoulder. Sylvia was more restrained than Avery, but she too was giddy. These two, they’d been through hell to find Niki. Now they were like kids at Christmas, the anticipation almost too much to bear.

  But then Sylvia’s smile wavered.

  “What?” Avery said.

  “We need to get in there somehow.”

  Nate didn’t like the sound of that. The two black shirts had machine guns.

  He pointed at the pistol at Richardson’s hip. “Could you shoot them?”

  “I’d never get them both,” Richardson said. “One of them probably. I might even be able to get the second one, with a lucky shot. But even if I killed them both, the noise would just bring more.”

  Nate nodded.

  Sylvia said, “Well, there may be another way.”

  “What are you thinking?” Richardson asked.

  She glanced down at the baton in her hand and seemed to be turning options over in her mind. “A diversion, I guess,” she said at last.

  She looked at Nate.

  “Do you think you could fool those guys long enough to turn their backs to me?”

  “Fool them?”

  Richardson chuckled softly, shaking his head.

  “What?” Nate said. He was starting to get angry.

  “You sure look the part,” Richardson said. “I think it could work.”

  “The part? What the hell are you guys talking about?”

  “It’s okay,” Richardson said. He pulled his blackjack from the waistband of his jeans. “Here,” he said, handing it to Nate. “Take this. Palm it as long as you can, tucked up into your sleeve.”

  He showed Nate how to hold it out of sight.

  “There, like that.”

  Nate was utterly perplexed.

  “Don’t worry,” Richardson said. “I know what she has in mind.”

  Nate stepped into the open, certain he was about to get shot. This was stupid. He struggled to put some label on how he felt, but the only word that came to mind was transparent. Nate didn’t know if that was right or not, but it felt right. He did know that these black shirts would have to be idiots to mistake him for one of the zombies. Shuffling toward them, dragging his feet, arms at his side, Nate watched the men without trying to make it look like he was watching them. He turned what he hoped was a dead stare on a spot somewhere near the middle of the door between them, letting his head loll and jerk, his mouth hanging open just a little.

  The black shirts weren’t expecting anything. That much was obvious from the way they tensed, hands flexing on their weapons, the nervous glances that passed between them. But Nate ignored them. He got to the middle of the hallway and turned slowly to his right.

  He started walking.

  He made it a few steps into the new hallway when one of the guards said, “What the hell is that all about?”

  Nate stopped.

  He let a moan escape his throat.

  One of the guards had been about to speak, but quickly smothered the sound. Nate slowly
turned his head, just as he’d seen countless zombies do during his wanderings. A runner of drool gathered at the corner of his mouth and fell down his chin. Nate fought back the instinct to wipe it away. He took a lurching step toward the guard, and he hoped the vacant look in his eyes was believable.

  He would find out any second now, he supposed.

  “Ah, shit,” the guard said. He slid the machine gun off his shoulder as his partner came around to stand next to him.

  But before either man could raise his weapon, Nate let the blackjack drop, his fingers settling into the leather strap. What happened next seemed to happen all at once. His arm came up, the blackjack raised high. The first guard’s eyes widened, almost comically. The blackjack came down on the man’s chin, accompanied by the sickening crack of lead on bone. The man sagged to the floor.

  Sylvia erupted from the shadows, swinging her baton at the back of the second guard’s head.

  Nate looked down at the first guard, who was writhing lamely on the carpeted floor, groaning in pain. Nate knelt down, his knees either side of the first guard’s chest. He brought the blackjack down again and again on the man’s face, smashing it to a bloody pulp.

  When Nate rose from the man’s corpse, he had blood on his hands and in his eyes.

  He coughed, not quite believing what he’d just done, and then laughed. “We did it,” he said. “Did you see that? They actually fell for it.”

  Sylvia pushed him out of the way.

  “Come on, there isn’t much time.”

  She opened the door the guards had been covering and went inside. Avery and Richardson followed.

  And after a pause, so did Nate.

  Just enough light spilled in from the doorway for Nate to see the outlines of a bell-shaped cage hanging from the ceiling. It was empty, and the floor below looked wet. He couldn’t tell for sure, though.

  And he didn’t want to find out.

  The others were just ahead of him, moving around the cage, giving it a wide berth.

  “I have a penlight,” Richardson said. “Should we chance it?”

  Sylvia stopped and looked back. Her eyes caught the light, flashing like a cat’s in the dark.