by Joe McKinney
And then confusion set in. What were they doing? Were they leaving? Abandoning them? She could see the Sugar Jane backing up, Gabi down in the rear deck firing at the black shirts on the nearby boats. Sylvia looked over at Avery to see if she was seeing this. Avery’s eyes were wide, staring down through the smoke swirling over the water, absorbing the slow, cumbersome movement of the boats.
The Red Man slowly crossed the platform and put his hands on the railing. But to Sylvia’s surprise, he wasn’t upset. At first he showed no emotion at all. But then a slow, sly grin tugged at the corners of his mouth, exposing the tips of his brown teeth.
Sylvia looked away, focusing instead on the boats.
The river battle pondered on. From up here, the battle developed with the rigid predictability of flotsam caught in a river of molasses. Sylvia found herself strangely torn. She saw the violence unfold, and she cheered under her breath as the Sugar Jane destroyed three opponents in turn. But at the same time another part of her, the skeptic, was burning with the rage of betrayal.
And then the Red Man laughed. Even as the Sugar Jane pulled away, he laughed.
Sylvia looked up at him, and was surprised to find him meeting her gaze.
“Looks like your friends have had enough,” he said. “That was your ride, wasn’t it?”
“They’re beating your men,” she countered.
He shrugged. “That matters to you, does it? The lives of a few dozen men?”
She almost snapped off an answer, but was horrified by what she realized she was about to say. Not your men. As if the loss of a certain class of men was somehow a good thing. She recoiled at the heresy that nearly passed her lips. She had devoted her life, and especially her life after the outbreak, to the belief that all life was precious, even that of the zombies. And now look at her.
But she was more horrified by the look on his face. All the red paint in the world couldn’t hide the smug superiority, the knowledge that he had reduced her to his level.
The wind stirred, gusting all around her. It blew a strand of her wet gray hair into her face. She brushed it aside.
He looked amused by her distress.
“You’re a bastard,” she said.
He shrugged again.
Suddenly bored with her, his attention drifted back to the river battle. The screams had stopped. The river was enveloped by a foul, roiling black smoke, but the Sugar Jane’s progress was still easy to see as it tracked its slow course out to the middle of the channel. The Hintons were standing in the stern, watching the black shirt fleet that was rapidly overtaking them, hand in hand.
“Your friends have not only abandoned you,” the Red Man said. “Looks like they’ve given up entirely. This part should be fun.”
On the bow of the approaching boats Sylvia could see black shirts on their bellies, their rifles flashing as they fired on the fleeing Sugar Jane. It was only a matter of time now, she knew.
She was watching one of the black shirt snipers when the Sugar Jane exploded. The power of the explosion caught her off guard, but she did not flinch. Instead, her gaze rolled slowly across the smoky water, across the burning debris still streaking through the air, trailing smoke like little comets, and finally settling on the blackened, rectangular raft of fiberglass that was all that remained of the Sugar Jane’s hull.
There was no sign of the Hintons.
The Red Man sighed and turned away. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I was hoping for a bit more than that.”
Sylvia stared up at him, dumbstruck. There was so much rage coursing through her, so much horror and resentment, that she couldn’t put it into words. And for a moment, it almost overcame her.
Perhaps he saw it in her face, for his smile suddenly evaporated, and his bloodshot eyes narrowed.
“I wouldn’t,” he said.
“Sylvia, look!”
Sylvia looked past the Red Man to Avery. She was crawling forward on her knees, mouth open as a smile started to form there.
“Get back,” the Red Man snarled at her, his hand raised like he might backhand her across the cheek.
Avery froze, but the half-formed smile remained.
“It’s Nate,” she said.
Sylvia followed Avery’s gaze out to the muddy field before the platform. Her eyes were immediately drawn to Nate, fighting his way through the center of the zombie crowd. She gawked at him, pushing and shoving and kicking his way through the throng of zombies. They were surging after him as he passed. Ahead of him, a few heads turned to investigate the moaning of their brethren.
“He’s coming for you,” Sylvia said.
She meant it to sound derisive, baiting; but she couldn’t help but wonder where Niki was. Sylvia scanned the field without trying to be obvious—and then she saw her! She was moving along the far side of the field, near the hotel, looking for a way to flank the zombie crowd.
It’s perfect, she thought. Nate draws the zombie crowd like a magnet dragged through metal shavings while the Hintons draw the black shirts away, down the river. And meanwhile, Niki creeps silently along the riverbank, coming up behind the Red Man. It was perfect.
“Oh,” said the Red Man.
Sylvia heard that startling smugness in his voice and turned her attention back to the field.
“No,” Avery said. “Nate, no!”
Nate was faltering down there. He stumbled, went to a knee, and the next instant, four zombies waved over top of him, dragging him down into the mud.
More zombies fell on top of him. The scene, perversely, reminded Sylvia of football games she’d seen in long-gone days. Adults rolling around in the mud like children. But this was no game, and she didn’t need the hitching whine in Avery’s throat to remind her of that.
Nate was down there.
And he was dying.
He fought to his feet, shucking his elbows from side to side like some huge wounded beast. Nate stood there for four, five, six seconds . . . and then he was down again. The pile of bodies on top of him grew ever larger, and soon all she could see was a heap of writhing figures squirming around in the mud like worms. Even the blood was lost beneath the mud.
“And he’s dead,” the Red Man said.
Avery climbed to her feet.
“Sit down,” the Red Man said.
“You killed him,” Avery said. There was a wounded rage in her eyes that Sylvia had never seen before. It both startled and amazed her, like someone had ripped away a mask, revealing some new wonder of creation.
“Sit down,” the Red Man said, this time through gritted teeth.
Avery took a clumsy swing at him.
The Red Man sidestepped it easily, then lashed out at Avery with a fierce backhand, his knuckles cracking against the line of her jaw.
“Avery!” Sylvia cried.
She jumped to her feet and rushed the Red Man. He turned just as she made contact and the two of them flew into the metal railing, shaking the whole platform and nearly sending them both over the railing.
Grunting, he threw her back.
She struggled to regain her footing on the slick platform. He loomed above her, red and strange and fierce, but her fear gave her strength. She lunged for him again, this time meaning to throw her shoulder into his gut and send him sailing over the edge, knowing that she had just this one chance to get it right or they were both dead.
She never saw the foot that swept her legs out from under her. One moment she was rushing headlong toward him, and the next she was flat on her back, staring up at him, at his red face and leering black smile.
“You do not get to win,” he said. “Not today.”
And the next instant he fell on her, his hands turning her face to one side as his teeth pushed their way through her hair and over her ear.
The pain was intense.
She felt as though the whole side of her face were being ripped away. She screamed up into the rain, hands instinctively moving to the torn flesh that only a moment before had been her ear.
Through tears and rain she blinked at her hands. They were bloody and her face felt like someone had pressed a hot iron against her flesh.
Then the Red Man came into focus.
He was holding something white in his bloody fingers. Her left ear.
He took another bite and chewed it while he watched her writhe on the platform. “You don’t get to win,” he said. “I told you that. Not today.”
But all she could think of was her life.
How she didn’t love it nearly enough to meet this moment with an open and a ready heart.
CHAPTER 29
The boat was a white-over-yellow Moomba Mobius with a raked-forward canvas canopy over the steering wheel. The canopy was in tatters now, flaps of it fluttering slightly in the breeze. Niki could see three dead black shirts sprawled out over the seats and a rifle hanging from one of the dead men’s hands.
She stopped, knee deep in the water, studying the corpses. Something didn’t feel right. She had that familiar prickling feeling along the back of her neck, a sudden alertness that she had come to trust over the years.
Where were the other rifles? Every black shirt she’d ever seen had carried a rifle, yet she saw only one here.
She waited, but none of the men moved. And judging from the amount of blood pooled on the seats and dripping down the sides of the boat, they weren’t likely to do so any time soon.
She was getting paranoid, she decided. Of course they’re dead. They’d have gone after the Sugar Jane if they weren’t— or at least sought some medical attention from the other boats if they were wounded. Of course they were dead.
She took another step into the river, but the sounds of moans behind her made her stop.
She whirled around. Not all the zombies had gone after Nate, it seemed. Twenty, maybe twenty-five, were staggering down the grassy slope toward the river, their vacant stares locked in on her.
“Shit,” she said.
She looked back to the boat, and her eyes settled on the rifle hanging from the dead black shirt’s hands. Niki glanced out to the river, where smoke from the Sugar Jane had lowered a curtain of inky blackness over the water. The Red Man’s boats were heading into that veil, disappearing inside it. That meant the Red Man’s back was exposed. A thrill went through her. The rifle—it would be an easy shot from the water. But she would have to hurry. The boats would be returning soon.
She ran for the little speedboat.
One of the black shirts was bent facedown over the gunwale. He had a pistol on his hip, as did one of the other soldiers, who was lying facedown in a thick pool of blood. She grabbed the gray hair on the back of the man’s head and pulled it up so she could see his face.
Niki sucked in her breath.
It was the older guard from the bed of the pickup, from back in St. Louis. The same one she’d kicked in the jaw when she tried to make a run for safety. The same one who had shot her in the ribs with a rubber slug from his shotgun.
“Not so tough now, huh?” she said.
The man’s dead eyes stared at nothing. His mouth hung open uselessly, gathering flies. She let his head drop and his face thunked against the gunwale. Niki grabbed him by the back of his belt and pulled him into the water. The alligators or the zombies could have him, she didn’t care which.
She climbed aboard and took a quick inventory of the weapons the dead men had left behind. She saw one pistol and one AR-15. There were two men with hip holsters, but she didn’t see the other pistol. It must have gone over the side, she thought ruefully. Too bad. There was no time to look for it, either. The first few zombies were almost to the waterline now. Niki turned the black shirt with the rifle over and was surprised at how young he was. Avery’s age, maybe even younger. Such a shame. So young and already things were bad enough he felt the need to join up with this lot. She thought of the men impaled on spikes on the opposite riverbank, and what the black shirt there had said. Those were all the ones who wouldn’t serve the Red Man. She wondered if this boy here had been presented with the same choice, and she found it hard to hate him.
She searched his corpse and came up with two fully loaded, thirty-round magazines for the AR-15. A good haul.
She put her boot to his chest and shoved him overboard.
“Okay,” she said, turning to the third black shirt. “Your turn.”
She flipped him over, wincing from the pain in her side, and froze. As soon as she saw his eyes open and his pistol coming up, she cursed herself for her stupidity. A rookie mistake if there ever was one.
He motioned for her to put up her hands. “Real slow,” he said.
She raised them halfway, at the same time gauging the distance to the AR-15 leaning up against the captain’s chair.
“I wouldn’t,” he said. He slowly climbed to his feet, careful to keep the pistol trained on her chest.
She stared into his eyes, taking the measure of the man. He had a round face with a thick black beard. There was blood in his beard and in his hair, but that didn’t bother Niki. She had seen blood before.
Instead, she kept coming back to his eyes.
Niki had never seen the man before, she knew that, for she would have remembered eyes like his. They were cold and brutal. He didn’t serve the Red Man out of fear. He was too emotionally dead for that. Too hollow inside even for something as instinctive as fear. No, he served the Red Man because he liked the killing. She had been wondering about the bodies on spikes on the opposite riverbank since she first saw them, not only at the courage and pain of the dead and dying there, but also at the men who put them there. How fucked up and depraved did you have to be to impale another man through his ass on an eight-foot spike?
Well, here was her answer, staring her right in the eye.
Niki’s lip curled in disgust, but not because he offended her sensibilities. He disgusted her because she had had dreams of looking in the mirror and seeing eyes very much like his staring back at her.
That recognition scared her the most.
“You ought to shoot me if you’re gonna do it,” she said. “I’ll kill you if you don’t.”
“Not the way you’re favoring your ribs there. You’d never make it.”
She forced a smile. “No,” she said, “I guess not.”
CHAPTER 30
Shivering all over, Sylvia touched the searing wound where her ear had been. It was hot to the touch and sticky. Her hand came away bloody. She didn’t believe that she was going to die like this. She didn’t want to believe it. Not after all these years, and all that she’d been through. But here it was, her life dripping from her fingertips, turning pink in the rain and fading away to nothing as it splashed to the floor.
She looked over at Avery. Sylvia had hoped to find some strength there, some hope, some desperate child need for her mother, but the girl looked beaten and resigned, dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes. And somehow, that look of defeat on Avery’s face was harder to bear than the wound itself.
To the Red Man she said, “You had no right to do this. I don’t want this. I don’t want it.”
She expected to be ignored; or, if he paid her any mind at all, to be backhanded across the cheek for her insolence. Either of those actions she was prepared for. But she wasn’t prepared for him to kneel next to her and speak so kindly, so gently.
“But it will happen. Whether you want it or not, the course is set. There is no free will, no decisions, no choices.”
She sniffled.
His face was next to hers, his breath on her cheek. She wouldn’t look at him, though. She couldn’t.
“You’ve been through this before,” she said. “You know how bad I hurt. Why would you do this to me, knowing that?”
“It does hurt. I remember. You feel like your lungs are filling up with blood. It’s hard to focus. Your mind is racing with all the things you wished you’d done. The regrets are piling up in your mind like unpaid bills.”
“Yes.”
“All of that goes away,” he s
aid. “You hate me right now because you don’t understand. But I’ve set you free. Here in just a moment there will be no guilt, no shame, no regrets. Nothing bad lives here. You are about to be reborn, and when you come out on the other side, I’ll be waiting for you. And I won’t be a monster then. I’ll be your god. I’ll be the voice that tells you where to walk, when to eat. For the first time in your life, you will rest easy. I guarantee it. You haven’t felt this way since you were a baby.”
“But my mind will be gone. All that I am will go away.”
“Evolution is painful, and it doesn’t always take us in the direction we want to go. Don’t you see? That’s what’s happening here. This is evolution. What you’re feeling, this is the future of humanity. This is more than what you’re feeling. This is more than you changing. The world is changing. And those who don’t change with it will become casualties of it.”
Her eyes kept wanting to roll back into her head. She was sweating, but the rain was cold on her skin. Her mind was drifting, unable to lock onto a clear sense of where she was or what she was feeling or what she should do. There was a lump in her throat but she couldn’t swallow it. Her heart was pounding furiously, but no matter how hard she tried to fight it she couldn’t stop her mind from floating away. Thinking used to be so easy, she told herself, such a necessary part of who she was. But now it seemed unimportant, like a daydream.
“This is a good thing,” he said.
No, her mind screamed. Fight, damn it!
She reached down to his crotch and squeezed his balls as hard as she could. Zombies felt no pain because they lacked a sense of self, but she figured he’d be different. His howling in pain was enough to convince her she was right as she tried to roll over onto her hands and knees.
Why was it so difficult? she thought, willing herself to do it. Something so easy.
She heard him raging behind her. Her body rebelled against the sudden exertion and she began to cough and hack, but she no longer felt like she was drifting. She felt solid, like she had purpose.
His hands were pawing at her back, but that was okay. Lead him away from Avery, she thought. Give her the opportunity to escape.