“Hey.” Tony’s voice sharpened. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Getting her out of here. What’s that kid doing over there? Give him a poke.”
Dax moaned.
“Think he’s dead,” the other voice said.
I was carried somewhere. At least, I think I was carried; I felt air rushing past my head.
“She’s ours,” Tony said.
“Looks like she’s ours now.”
I was vaguely aware of being stashed into the backseat of a car. Someone pressed a plastic bottle into my hand. “Gatorade,” he said. “Drink up.”
The Gatorade didn’t taste entirely the way I remembered, but I figured the shelf life had to be at least a half-year. Once I’d downed half the bottle, I shoved it at the nearest figure.
“Good girl.”
The last thing I remembered was the engine turning on.
TWELVE
I don’t know how much time passed between passing out in the truck and regaining full lucidity. I was vaguely aware of drinking more Gatorade, of swallowing pills, of hunching over the toilet retching. Did some fuckhead roofie me?
Someone held my hair back when I barfed into the toilet for the umpteenth time, and I think I screeched when I was doused with cold water.
Roofies. The small part of my brain that still functioned tried to regain control of the situation. Did they roofie me? They aren’t doing anything. Am I being hosed off?
“You gave her too fucking much,” someone snarled.
“She’s sick, dude.”
“You can’t just shove a bottle of antibiotics down her throat! That’s strong shit!”
Antibiotics? They’re giving me antibiotics?
I threw up again.
When I finally came to, I was in bed.
I actually let myself relax for a precious few seconds, tucked underneath blankets, safe from the world and all it had become. Maybe none of this had happened. Maybe I hadn’t even gotten up for work—it was all a terrible fever dream, and I’d open my eyes and find my roommate in the kitchen and a recorded Daily Show episode playing in the background.
I opened my eyes, and the whole shit situation came crashing back down. Meteors. Revenants. The rush to camp, the escape, a bunch of angry biker gangs, me feeding a bunch of bikers to the undead, the drinking…
Where the hell am I?
I’m sure there’s some folks out there who are celebrating the grave new world and the creatures in it. I’m not one of them. Reliving it every damned morning is worse than waking up to a smoke detector with the battery running low.
I sat up and looked around wildly, kicking the blankets aside. I was in a pale blue bedroom, and my king-sized bed faced a TV stand with a silent, dusty set.
I reached up to rub my eyes, and jumped when soft gauze touched my skin. Someone had changed the bandage on my hand. Well, that was nice of them. I hadn’t been too good about remembering that.
Something didn’t feel quite right, though. I peered under the blankets.
Oh. I was naked.
Well, this is different.
I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered, then spotted my clothing in a pile beside the bed.
My clothing, incidentally, sat right next to a gigantic pile of firearms.
Interesting...
I did my best to ignore the guns for the moment, and picked up my clothes. They had been cleaned as much as they could be; the jeans were probably beyond saving, but I decided to appreciate the thought. I dressed hurriedly, then peered out the window.
I was stashed away in some kind of house. I had no clue what time it was, but the rural setup suggested we were somewhere on the outskirts of Muldoon, where the city hadn’t quite encroached on the surrounding farmland. There were some detached buildings, a couple of RVs, and vehicles scattered amidst dead plant life.
I didn’t see any dead people wandering around. That upgraded my opinion of the place.
“You’re awake!”
I whirled around, hands scrabbling for a gun I no longer possessed. My rifle. I want my rifle. Hell, even my pistol. Anything to help me face the grinning teenager who had manifested in my room, holding a bottle of blue liquid.
His yellow grin widened. “Hey, I don’t mean you no harm. I just came to give you more Gatorade.”
I pressed my back to the wall. “What happened?”
“You were real sick. We gave you some of them pills, you know, the ones for syphilis…”
Syphilis. They used to treat syphilis with mercury. They gave me mercury pills? No, even a bunch of backwater Midlands hicks wouldn’t be that stupid. Not to mention you couldn’t really get mercury pills anymore. Must’ve been antibiotics. Maybe they threw a sedative in there, too. That was a much happier assumption.
That left the unfortunate conclusion they’d jumped to. “I don’t have syphilis.”
He cocked his head to the side. I figured he was about eighteen or nineteen, and he’d either lost a lot of weight recently or he’d dressed in the jeans and button-down shirt of a much huskier man. “But you got the…the doo-dads.” He gestured vaguely at my face, and I gathered I still had spots on my skin. “You know. The doohickeys.”
“You know a lot of the standing water’s gone bad, right?” I reached up and felt the welts; they seemed smaller, at least, so I figured they were healing. Within another day or so, I might look relatively normal. Well, as normal as I could look after a very poor diet and weeks without sunshine. “I fell into an acid puddle or something. I don’t have syphilis.”
“Oh.” He smiled, flashing those awful yellow teeth again. What, had he just stopped brushing and flossing entirely? “Well, that’s good.”
I managed not to cringe away. “That’s not what syphilis looks like, anyway.”
“So you’re a smartie-pants, eh? Arthur will be happy.” He set the Gatorade down on the bedside table and strolled over to me, and I fought not to lean away from his stench. He gestured out the window. “Like what you see? We’ll get a whole farm going here, soon as the skies open back up. Blair wanted to build a greenhouse before that, but now…”
“Blair?”
“Yeah, you made him really mad, you know. He’s not doing so hot. He wanted to find some women, but you ain’t worth the price. That’s what he says, anyway.”
Oh, I didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Where are my friends?”
He shrugged. “We left ’em. One was real sick already, the other wasn’t worth the bullet. We even let them keep their guns. It’s been two days, they’re probably dead.”
Two days? I’d been out of it for two days?
“I’m Ronald, by the way.” He stuck out his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, I shook it. There was no point being rude to the guy, at least not yet.
I shuffled my feet, wondering if I dared make a break for the door. “So can I go find them?”
Ronald squinted at me. “Now why would you want to go back out there? It’s all kinds of fucked up. We had twelve guys here to start, and now we’re down by half. ’Sides, y’all went and got shitfaced with all this crap going on. You guys are really stupid.”
“I know.” There was no point in denying it. “But they’re still my friends.”
He smiled thinly. “Blair said we don’t need more men.”
I smiled back and turned my attention to the outside, studying the bleak, dried landscape. Blair didn’t need more men…that meant they were looking specifically for women. And hell, what were a bunch of guys going to do with women?
Oh…oh.
My stomach twisted.
Well, at least now I knew the situation and could handle it appropriately.
I killed those boys...maybe this is karma...
“We got armed men patrolling the grounds,” Ronald said cheerfully, as if he was trying to sell the place to me. “We cleared out the groundhogs when we first set up camp, and we don’t see more’n two a day now.”
“Groundhogs?” I pictured the
rednecks taking potshots at Bill Murray.
“You know, the dead fucks. The zombies. They were thick as groundhogs when we got here, but the place is strategically important or some shit, so we cleared them out.”
Groundhogs. I’d have to remember that. I made a show of looking at the guns in the corner, trying to appear impressed. “So is this your armory?”
“You don’t need to worry about those,” he said hurriedly. “We’ll be taking them out just as soon as the boys get back from the food run. You know how to shoot?”
Is he serious? Granted, I hadn’t been carrying a firearm when they picked me up, but I thought guns were the first thing a person looked for when the goddamn living dead starting walking around. But I wanted him to relax, so I shook my head and tried to look fearful. “No. They thought I’d just hurt myself.”
“Idiots,” Ronald muttered. “You’re better off. Once we clear the city, we’ll live like kings. All those ruffians who don’t think Blair had good ideas…all those stayers.”
I’d heard that word before. Hammond had called us stayers when he realized we hadn’t left, and it had been bandied about a few times since then, usually to deride those who decided to stick it out in their homes. “And what are you doing with the stayers?” I asked carefully.
“Arthur handles the ones we can’t negotiate with. We dump them in Old Town.”
Handles probably meant kills. “You just leave them there?”
“Yes.”
And they called us stupid. Old Town Muldoon was probably completely infested. I kept my mouth shut, thinking information might be power at some point. “I see. Who’s Arthur?”
“He leads ’nother group, but he and Blair have made an alliance. Keeps us all safer from Mal.”
“Mal,” I repeated. “Who’s Mal?”
“Crazy sonofabitch. Thinks he rules the place. You don’t need to worry, though, we’ll protect you.”
Oh, great. More crazy sons of bitches. They reproduced faster than gerbils.
“Yeah, we’ll take care of you. Although I tell ya, some of the boys are mighty pissed over what you did to Blair.”
His zig-zagging around topics made me dizzy. “Who’s Blair, and what did I do to him?”
“You know, when you tried to feed him and Rory and Patrick and the boys to the groundhogs. Only Blair got away, though we’re not sure he’s gonna make it.” Ronald looked at me, his brow furrowing into an expression of true confusion. “Why the hell would you do that, lady? That’s just fucked up.”
Oh, shit. Oh shit. This had to be karma, or maybe I’d died and this was purgatory, or…
Something thumped outside the bedroom door.
Ronald got pale. “Shoot, I thought he was in bed.”
The door banged open, and a hulking dude with bandages swathing his upper right arm and half his face came storming in. The bandages were saturated with pus and blood, and when he waved a hand at me, the stench of dying flesh almost knocked me off my feet.
Oh, this is not good. I recognized the feverish stare and the beady eyes—he hadn’t had his bites treated properly.
“Hey, Blair,” Ronald said.
Of course. Of course it was Blair.
He had the same reddened, festering sores on his skin as the boys at the massage parlor. Yellow-green pus oozed from the ruined bandage, ran down the side of his arm, and dripped onto the carpet. Holy shit, what are those lesions? The sores looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place them. What the hell causes that…
“Blair,” Ronald said, a hint of nervousness in his voice. “I was just talking to the gal here, and…”
Blair crossed the room in three steps. “How about you give me a few minutes alone with the little bitch, Ronnie?”
No, Ronnie, stay here. I didn’t think leaving me alone with the leader of the biker gang I’d fed to the undead would end well for me.
“Uh…I’m supposed to help her acclimate n’stuff…”
I nodded at Blair’s upper arm. “You need medicine for that. Stitches. Revenants clamp down hard, so they get through the outer layers of tissue pretty eas—”
THWACK. The back of his hand collided with my face, and I landed in a heap amidst the guns. Stars swirled around in front of my eyes, and everything in my head screeched to a horrible, crashing stop. Blair’s big hand closed around my wrist and jerked me up off the floor.
“Hey!” Ronald’s head blurred in front of me, but whatever attempt he made to rescue me was swiftly rebuffed. “Don’t touch her!”
My vision cleared slightly, although I was pretty sure I had tears streaming down my face. Oh, hell, that hurts.
Blair snarled at me, revealing bloody gums surrounding otherwise excellent teeth. Well, at least one of them flosses. But the virus has really set in. He succumbed fast. Maybe he had a preexisting condition. Heart palpitations. Blood clots. The doctors hadn’t worked out why the virus worked fast or slow, beyond hesitant connections to age, general health, and lifestyle. It’s kind of like acne that way.
“You killed my boys,” Blair said. Sweat beaded on his brow, clumping up beneath strands of thinning blond hair. “I saw you on that fucking roof.”
I wiped at my nose, and almost jumped when I saw the red smear across my hand. I wasn’t crying, I was bleeding. “I was trying to warn them!”
“Blair,” Ronald said, “you leave her alone. Arthur said we need women!”
“Arthur won’t mind if she’s got a few more bruises. What’s your name?”
“Vibeke,” I muttered, because I wasn’t clever enough by half to give him a fake name. My ears were starting to ring again.
“Well, Vi-beck, if I had my way, your head would be on a fucking stick to warn off intruders.” He gave me a sickeningly dark, bloody smile. “But I guess we can think of other ways for you to make up for your sins, can’t we?”
That didn’t sound ominous or anything.
Ronald edged closer to us, his voice coming out in a squeak. “You hit her again and—”
“And you’ll what, you little shit?” Blair grasped Ronald’s neck with one meaty hand, squeezed just enough to make the kid squeak, and shoved him several feet away. “Last I checked, I was still in charge, at least until Arthur got here, and he ain’t due until evening.”
Ronald evidently knew a threat when he saw one and scrambled backward, his fingers catching the doorknob. “I’m gonna get help, Vib…whatever the hell your name is.”
He fled, slamming the door behind him.
Blair didn’t seem to notice. “The guys’ll like having a woman around. Makes things a lot more pleasant.” He eyed me critically, the way Clive did when I tried to weasel my way out of the Blood Nuts concert. Go do your job, Vibeke. “Well, once you’re fixed up, anyway.”
“You should talk,” I muttered. Big, ugly splotches of purple and red stood out along his lower arms, further signs of the virus setting in, or the pathogen hosting a party, or whatever it was that turned normal people into zombies if their bites weren’t treated. I was so busy staring at the splotches and the burns that I didn’t really register the muscles in his right hand bunching, nor the fist as it blew toward my face and cracked against my cheekbone.
“What are you staring at?” he snarled.
I landed next to the pile of firearms, gasping for air. Blair might be dying on his feet, but he still hit hard, and didn’t seem to care that I was half his size. Tony had been warning me right along about assholes like this running wild after the end of the world, but I’d been spared any actual encounters with them.
Blair coughed and hacked behind me, sounding like he was bringing up something wet. I reached out to the right, and my hand closed around cold metal. I explored it briefly: a smallish pistol. I’d gotten used to using a rifle, but Tony had given me a decent primer in smaller firearms. I switched off the safety.
Blair must have heard it. “What the fuck?”
I rolled over, pointing the pistol at him. “Oh, shit, look what I found.”
/> I squeezed the trigger over and over again, aiming in the general vicinity of his head. The shots roared out, and the pistol jerked in my hand four times...five...six...
Click. Empty.
I stumbled woozily to my feet, my ears ringing. Blair was on the floor, clutching his right knee, emitting a high-pitched shriek any death metal vocalist would take pride in. Blood spurted out around his fingers, drenching the carpet.
Holy shit, I’d shot his knee out. And his shoulder, by the looks of it.
I let the revolver slip out of my quivering hands. “Sorry,” I croaked. “I’m used to bigger guns. I thought I’d just get you in the head…sorry.”
Why the hell am I apologizing?
Blair flopped toward me, reaching out with a bloodied hand.
I fumbled around for a more familiar-looking firearm. I settled for the biggest, meanest-looking shotgun in the bunch and pointed it at him, not sure it was even loaded. “Now,” I said, pumping it to show I meant business, “you’re going to tell me how the fuck to get out of this house.”
The door hinges creaked loudly, and I jerked around, expecting to find Ronald gawking at me from the doorway.
Tony leaned against the doorframe, holding a silenced pistol in one hand and my elderly assault rifle in the other. “Take the stairs straight down and head out the front door,” he said, as if directing me to the bus stop. “Pretty easy.”
I stared at him, not entirely sure he wasn’t a hallucination of some sort. People hallucinated under stress, right? Maybe I’d dreamed up Tony right when I needed help most.
He leaned slightly away from my stare. “You okay, Vibby?”
Am I okay? I ran a quick check of my facilities and decided I was indeed okay, at least physically. I cleared my throat. “What are you doing here?”
“Rescuing you?” His gaze drifted down to Blair, who had a puddle of blood forming around his leg. “Should I let you get back to what you were doing?”
The gun shook slightly in my hands. Rescued? He’s rescuing me? Tony McKnight was trying to save my ass?
He didn’t forget about me.
He stepped inside, fixing me with a stare. “Vibeke?”
I wanted to hug him. No, I wanted to throw myself into his arms and be held for a good long while—but now wasn’t the time. “I’m really glad to see you,” I whispered, forcing the words out one by one. “How did you get in?”
Death and Biker Gangs Page 13