Mutated

by Joe McKinney

  The metal bar came down five more times before the woman stopped moving.

  Niki was about to turn around when a tight, cold grip clamped down on her wrist. She let out a bark of surprise to see the other two zombies right on top of her.

  But they were so far away, she thought. How did they close the gap so quickly?

  They’re both Stage III zombies, she realized all at once. They can move.

  Whirling around she saw the man who had her by the wrist. His face had rotted around the nose like a leper’s, pulling his upper lip into a clown-like, impossibly huge grin, exposing blackened teeth and a tongue oozing with sores. She couldn’t get the bar up—they were too close in for that—and so she dropped it and spun around, throwing the grinning man off balance.

  He lunged for her arm, mouth open for a bite, but she slapped him across the forehead hard enough to cause his brain to skip a gear. For a crazy second he stood there, grinning at her, holding her wrist like she was a struggling child.

  That was the opportunity she needed.

  She whirled around again, pulling him forward, and at the same time kicking the back of his knees so that his feet disappeared from under him, causing him to land flat on his butt.

  The third zombie was a middle-aged woman whose green dress was ripped from the neck to the waist, exposing a pair of heavy dugs laced with the scars of old bite marks. With her hands free, Niki did a skipping side kick that caught the woman in the windpipe, crushing it. The zombie dropped to the ground, gasping, choking on its crushed airway.

  Niki turned on the grinning man, who was climbing back to his feet. She picked up the metal bar and advanced on the man. He had his mouth open for another bite, but Niki didn’t give him the chance. She swung hard for his face, connecting with his jaw and snapping his head around. Teeth went skittering across the wet pavement.

  She hit him three more times just to be sure, then stood there, looking at the two dead zombies and the third who was still choking on her own throat as the rain fell all around her.

  “Alright then,” she said. “To the river.”

  Off to her left a crowd of zombies pressed inward, toward the platform. Nate was still moving; that was good. As long as he was moving he stood a chance.

  She, on the other hand, had pretty much a straight shot to the river.

  No more zombies.

  She was almost there when she got a glimpse through the smoke that covered the river. She had only seen Jimmy Hinton once before, and that was at the docks at Herculaneum while she was busy coordinating her squads, but she recognized him at once. And the woman next to him, the one holding his hand, a bloody wound on her arm, had to be Gabi, his wife. The two looked resigned, but content in each other’s company, even as the bulk of the Red Man’s fleet barreled down on them.

  Were they giving up?

  From the things she’d heard about the Hintons she found that hard to believe. They were dirty business partners, yes, but certainly not the kind to just give up.

  And then the gap through the smoke was gone, and once again the river was covered by a churning black fog.

  The explosion came a few moments later, and it nearly knocked Niki off her feet. Instinctively she turned her head away, shielding her eyes. When she looked up again, there was nothing left of the Hintons’ boat but a burnt, soap dish–shaped piece of hull floating on the water.

  Impressive, she thought.

  The black shirts were coming in their boats. Soon, she realized, they would be all over the area. If she was going to find a boat, she needed to do it in a hurry. Otherwise, they could forget about getting away from the Red Man’s compound.

  And then she saw it, the little speedboat with the dead black shirts in it.

  “Hello,” she said.

  She looked around to see if any of the Red Man’s zombies were close by and felt a sharp pain in her right side. Niki touched it gingerly and winced. Up to now she’d convinced herself the ribs there weren’t broken, but it was getting harder and harder to lie to herself, and now that she was standing here, with escape so close at hand, the pain was catching up with her.

  She closed her eyes and forced it down one more time. Just one more time, she pleaded with herself. Just once more.

  Then she opened her eyes and waded into the river.

  CHAPTER 27

  Amid the wreckage of the Red Man’s lunacy, Nate stood, letting the rain hit him full in the face. The zombies, an ocean of them, stretched out before him. They hadn’t seen him yet—he was still too far behind the rearmost of the crowd for that—but they would notice him soon enough.

  Nate smiled grimly.

  Somebody was moving through the standing ranks of zombies, coming toward him. It took a moment for Nate to recognize Doc Kellogg, but when he did, his grim smile turned warm.

  “I thought you’d stopped coming around,” Nate said.

  Kellogg cleared the last of the zombies, then half turned and gestured at the waiting army. “And miss this?”

  “You think this is suicide, don’t you?”

  “What do you call it, Nate?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  Kellogg shrugged. “I call it stupidity, but . . .”

  “You can do better than that.”

  “Okay,” Kellogg said. “I think life is a struggle to test the fragility of man against the rock of the world.”

  Kellogg had always talked like that. When they first started having their regular chats at dinner or in the lab, Nate figured the man was making fun of him. But it didn’t take him long to figure out that Kellogg simply wasn’t capable of talking any other way. He was as dense in his education as Nate was in his ignorance. There was a gulf between them, a gulf far wider than that between brilliant doctor and penitent criminal.

  “Now you’re starting to sound like the Kellogg I remember, but I still don’t understand. I’m sorry. I don’t. I want to know what I’m supposed to do. I want somebody to draw me a picture. I need answers, not poetry.”

  Kellogg nodded. The man was not without pity.

  “I’m sorry, Nate, but there are no answers. No pat, easy ones at any rate.”

  “So I go through life like one of those things out there?”

  “No, not that either.”

  “What then?”

  “You have to answer for yourself what your life is worth. It’s a journey, Nate. Sometimes it’s an easy one. But sometimes it sucks too. Most of the time it sucks. That’s the kicker. You can be a coward, and never find out what your life is worth, or you can show some moral courage and come up with an answer.”

  “And what if I find out my life ain’t worth shit?”

  Kellogg had laughed. The rain went right through him. “There’s always that chance, though I suspect the harder you look for an answer, the less likely that that’ll be the case.”

  “Thanks a lot, Doc.”

  Nate looked past Kellogg for a moment, toward the field where the zombies stood waiting on the Red Man to tell them what to do.

  He wasn’t like them at all, Nate realized. They stood and waited. But Nate, he moved.

  Kellogg was gone. Nate knew he would be, just like he knew that this was the last time he would probably see the man.

  He breathed out slowly, trying to calm the heart pounding in his chest.

  “What is my life worth?” he murmured. “Time to find out.”

  He took a step forward, and another after that. And soon he found himself closing the distance between himself and the rear guard of the zombie crowd.

  Any second now.

  Before he knew it the zombies were all around him. He could hear rain drops slapping against their clothes, all tatters and dingy gray. He could hear coughing, too, and that surprised him. In all his travels, and despite all the craziness he’d seen, he’d never seen so many of them all together, and so quiet. It hadn’t occurred to him that they still coughed, that they could be so like a congregation at church, all with
their eyes turned to God. Or, at least, what passed for God in this wasted land. He passed a man with his mouth hanging open, rainwater dripping from his cracked and peeling lips. The woman just beyond him was twitching slightly, as though her body were being hit with a weak electric current. When frozen like this, they could almost seem human. Broken, but human.

  Except for the smell.

  This close, surrounded by them, not even the rain and the rich pungency of the river could mask the smell of their rotting wounds and the sour stench of excrement on their clothes. He had forgotten how bad so many of them together could smell.

  Already the zombies around him were starting to stir, alerted to his presence. Their moans rose above the driving rain, and more and more were breaking ranks to follow him.

  This is it, he thought, and quickened his pace.

  In the distance, a muffled boom rolled across the river. The rain-streaked sky above the brown expanse of the water filled with a black, oily smoke. Nate wondered briefly what it might be, but the thought was gone as quickly as it occurred to him. All around him, zombies turned in his direction. He kept moving, threading his way through their ranks like a man trying to work his way up through a concert crowd to the front row. But his fear was mounting with every step. The energy of the crowd was turning inward, pulsing through the assembly like an electric current. It was always the same when they sensed a meal.

  A woman, her legs bent and her face a rotting mess of abscesses and open sores, stumbled into Nate’s path. He huffed in surprise and only just managed to catch her by the shoulders, holding her snapping teeth at bay.

  She groaned, her hands slapping at his elbows.

  Grunting, struggling against the suddenness of her attack, he had a hard time tossing her away. He was off balance and falling over backward.

  A huge man shambled toward him, his arms outstretched. Nate rotated, hoping that his old ankle injury from his high school track days wouldn’t choose this moment to blow out on him, and tossed the snapping woman into the man’s waiting grasp. To Nate’s surprise, the man fell on her and started feeding, pulling her apart with his teeth even as she kept her eyes on Nate and struggled to get back up.

  Nate stumbled backward. Another zombie, this one a teenager in jeans and part of a Lakers basketball jersey, bumped him and shuffled past. The teenager fell on the woman. Several others joined them. She made no sound, even as they began to rip strips of flesh from her arms and back. Her head was thrown back, her neck exposed. Teeth found out the soft spot below the chin and a stuttering gurgle escaped her lips.

  She stopped struggling after that, though her corpse continued to jerk and twist as the others pulled her apart.

  Nate had never seen anything like that. This was something new, zombie attacking zombie. In eight years of wandering, he’d never seen them do that. The zombies continued to surge past him, falling on the corpse, opening her torso like the belly of a canoe.

  Soon the tangle of bodies was the color of mud. He couldn’t tell one from the other. Not even the dead woman’s blood was visible in that orgiastic mass of writhing flesh. It was just mud and tangled limbs.

  He turned away, back toward the platform.

  Hundreds of dead, vacant eyes met his. His gaze darted from side to side. He pivoted in a circle, staring all about him. But the dead eyes were everywhere.

  “Ah, shit,” he said.

  Zombies surged toward him from every side. Nate swung the metal bar Niki had given him, but hands were already on him, clawing at his shoulder. The metal pipe was pulled away. He was bleeding, his shirtsleeve ripped away. He turned to run, but there were no open lanes through the mass of bodies. They tackled him, slipping on slimy ground. He tried to kick them away but his feet were mired in the mud, and when he went down they came down on top of him in a mass of limbs.

  They pulled on his arms and legs, trying to get their mouths on him, but still he kept fighting. He rolled from one side to the other. He jammed his right knee into a man’s chin, knocking him back into the throng. The zombies moaned and surged forward, reaching for him. He pushed his way back to his feet, and for a moment he felt like he was moving with all the speed and confidence he’d possessed as a seventeen-year-old track star racing through the Pennsylvania woods. It was as though he’d never left the thrill of the run or the joy of knowing you still had more reserves deep inside.

  A zombie reached for him and he threw it into the mud, stepping on its back as he hurtled through the crowd. The lacerations on his back and arms and face sizzled like splashes of hot grease against his skin, but they didn’t slow him down. He kicked and punched and shoved his way through, pushing the zombies into each other with strength he thought he’d lost long ago.

  Four zombies grabbed his shirt and pulled him toward the ground. His swung his elbow, trying to knock their hands away, but one of them had its fingers tangled up in his shirt. The hand wouldn’t come loose. Nate raised his foot to kick the zombie away, but he lost his balance and stumbled. Another zombie slashed his cheek with its fingernails and blood flew into Nate’s eyes. He staggered again. The ground rolled beneath his feet and his arms pinwheeled as he fought to keep moving.

  More zombies pulled on his clothes. He could hear them tearing. Nate lashed out with a wild punch, knocking a zombie down, but it wasn’t enough. He knew it wasn’t enough. The press of bodies was overwhelming now and a violent, claustrophobic panic surged through him. His heart was racing. He lurched to one side, throwing a shoulder into a zombie’s chest and bouncing off. Their hands kept reaching for him, pulling on him, turning him around. His foot slipped out from under him and finally his ankle couldn’t take any more.

  He sagged to the ground.

  Fingernails tore at his shirt, ripping it away, ripping into his skin, his ears, his lips. He screamed, but couldn’t find his legs. Every time he tried to stand, they pushed him down again.

  Nate didn’t even feel the last shove, the one that landed him flat on his back.

  He looked up, and saw a huddle of torn and snarling faces staring down at him, hands reaching downward.

  CHAPTER 28

  The rain was cold. Sylvia sat against the back railing of the platform, shivering and miserable, her arms wrapped around her knees. The world seemed to swirl around her in a blur of muddy images. Since being led up to this platform she had managed to hold herself together, but that was becoming harder with every passing second. The thought that she was going to die here couldn’t be pushed down anymore, and with it came nausea and a fear that prickled her skin and made her lips tremble.

  She glanced over at Avery, and for a moment, the girl was ten years old again, a plump little waif in ruined clothes hiding behind Niki, so fragile it made her heart break for all the good that had been drained from the world.

  Avery was staring back at her. What are we going to do? she said, silently mouthing the words.

  Sylvia wanted to answer, but couldn’t.

  She didn’t know, and the memory of the last time she had tried to scoot over next to Avery rose up in her mind, the way the Red Man had whirled around on them when he saw them together. She remembered the way his filthy hands had felt on her skin, the stink of his breath. And the words he’d whispered into her ear.

  “Think about this as you wait for Niki Booth to come for you. Think about life. Did you love it like you should have, while you were holding it in your hands? Did you love it enough to go into this moment with an open and a ready heart?”

  The sting of those words was still hot on her cheek, for she knew the answer was no. There were too many regrets and too many broken hearts.

  She looked again at Avery and shook her head in resignation.

  Avery’s gaze sank to the plank boards under them, and when she started to sob, it felt to Sylvia like the worst sort of accusation.

  It had been like this after San Antonio all those years ago, her greatest failure. She became a college professor because she loved the glory of a young mind opening to
the world. Ben had been wrong, all those years ago, when he condemned her motives. She really did set out to teach, not just to publish her way to tenure, but to teach. She loved the vitality of youth, its blind trust and violent rebellion. She loved its innocence, and its skepticism. She loved all the contradictions that made a college student a child on the cusp of adulthood; and yet, despite that love that had shone so brightly and so intensely, she failed the youth who had trusted her back then, just like she was failing Avery now. But the real tragedy of it all, the thing that really made her angry, was that she didn’t even know why she failed. She couldn’t fathom it. Love was supposed to find a way.

  Feeling like she was groping blindly for an answer that would always elude her, she glanced up at the Red Man. His back, dripping with bloodred rainwater, filled her with dread. There were no answers there. A part of her wanted to ask what he was waiting for, but in truth she already knew. He was waiting for Niki to come to him. And why shouldn’t he? He had his black shirts on their boats watching the riverbanks, and on land he had his army of rotting slaves. There was no way for Niki to get to him. And that meant that time was on his side.

  A sudden crackle from over by the river broke her thoughts off clean. It took a moment for her mind to realize that she was hearing gunfire, but that’s what it was. It had to be.

  And something else, too.

  Men yelling. Yells turning into screams of rage and pain. Even over the pounding rain, she could hear the emotion in those screams.

  Niki, she thought, and perked up. She looked over her shoulder, toward the river.

  Not Niki. It was the Hintons!