“They spared you because you were a girl?” That didn’t sound like the looters I’d heard about on the radio.
“Yes,” she said. “They spared me because I could be raped. Eventually they got bored with me, and they sold me to Adare.”
“Sold you? Like a slave?” I asked. I’d had no idea that went on in the wilderness. The idea was almost as horrifying as cannibalism.
“Adare doesn’t call it that. The looters don’t ever use that word,” she said. “Come on. We need to check the bathroom upstairs. That’s where the drugs will be.”
CHAPTER 21
Kylie and I worked half of the street before the zombies came. We had two bags full by then, mostly with clanking liquor bottles that were all but empty. Every time they rattled together I thought they made a sound like a dinner bell.
We had just come out of a house and Kylie had just marked its door when I saw the first pair of red eyes at the end of the road. The zombie was just standing there, leaning against a fence railing. Its head was lowered as if it were winded and needed to catch its breath. It lifted its face toward me.
It had been a woman, I think, though it can be hard to tell. Its hair fell like crooked veins past its shoulders, and its hands were gray and dark with old cuts and bruises. The stink of it hit me next and I nearly gagged. Strange that one zombie could give off such a reek.
That was probably because it wasn’t just one of them. Ten more were coming around the corner behind it. “Kylie,” I said, trying not to panic. Trying not to scream. “They’re coming.”
“Don’t run until you have to,” she said. There was no fear—no emotion at all—in her voice. “Once you start running, you stop looking where you’re going, and then you’ll run right into one of them. Can you hear Adare’s car?”
I couldn’t focus enough to listen for it. The zombies were starting to shuffle toward us. Their mouths were open and their eyes gleamed. One lifted a hand as if it could reach out and grab us.
“This way,” Kylie said, grabbing my hand. She led me up the street, away from the zombies. We moved at a fast walking pace, and still we nearly stumbled on another group of zombies shambling down a side street. They saw us at the same moment we saw them. Now we had zombies coming from two directions. We could only go in one other direction. I had no doubt zombies would be down there, too. “What do we do?” I asked.
Kylie didn’t stop to think. She ran up to the nearest house—one we had already broken open and ransacked. I thought she meant for us to barricade ourselves inside and hold out until Adare rescued us—a prospect I found less than encouraging. Instead she headed for the back of the kitchen, where a door opened into the tiny backyard. It was surrounded on all sides by a high wooden fence.
A glass-topped table and a pair of wrought-iron chairs stood next to the fence on the far side. Over the fence I could see the back of another house. Kylie jumped up on the table and then over the fence so nimbly she made it look easy. It wasn’t. When I tried to follow, I nearly impaled myself on the top of the fence.
I managed to roll over the top and land awkwardly on a patch of overgrown grass in the next yard over. Kylie was already tearing open the back door of the house beyond.
Behind me, the zombies had made their way through the first house and were gathering in the yard I’d just left. They didn’t try to go over the fence—instead they battered at it with their bare hands, shoving at it with their weight. It didn’t look sturdy enough to hold them for long.
“Help me,” Kylie said, and I rushed over to where she was struggling to break a board off the back door. Together we pried it free. She had already kicked in several other boards, creating a gap just big enough for us to wriggle through. Inside the second house we saw dust and streaming sunlight and covered furniture, just like we’d seen in every other house that day. There was a weird smell in the air, but I was so scared I didn’t think to comment on it.
Kylie ran through the kitchen and into the front room. I followed, just in time to see a zombie come down the stairs and grab at her. It was missing one eye and all the teeth from one side of its mouth, but its fingers sank into her arm as she tried to fend it off.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t even shout for help. She kicked at its legs and struggled to get away, but it had her, and in a second it would knock her down and start tearing at her flesh with the teeth it had left. I could see it all in my mind’s eye, I could see how it would happen.
I drew my knife. I reached forward and grabbed a thick mat of the zombie’s hair and pulled its head back, away from Kylie. Then I put my knife against its neck and dragged the blade across its windpipe. Blood splattered down its shirt and splashed all down Kylie’s front. For a second I thought the zombie would ignore the wound and kill her anyway. Instead its fingers slackened on her arms, and it dropped to the floor.
It was the first time I’d killed anything bigger than a rat, the first time I’d killed something that looked human. There was too much going on just then for me to stop and think about what I’d done.
Kylie kicked the body away and turned to the front door of the house, bashing through it with her shoulder. In a second we were out in the street, out in the sunlight.
Outside was another street. There were zombies up the block, but we could also see Adare’s SUV, rolling toward us. Kylie looked down at herself and saw the bloodstains on her shirt. Without a pause she tore the shirt off. Next she opened one of the bottles of liquor we’d found and poured the contents all over her face and chest. “This’ll kill any germs in its blood and wash away the virus,” she explained, when I stood staring at her with wide eyes. She poured more liquor over my knife until the blood ran away.
The SUV pulled up beside us. “Get in,” Adare shouted, leaning out his window.
Kylie and I piled into the SUV. Adare turned it around, away from the gathering crowd of zombies, and headed back toward the turnpike. The inside of the car quickly stank of gin, so he rolled down all the windows and air rushed through the car, loud enough to help me not hear myself think.
“Is it always like this?” I finally asked Kylie when I could speak again.
“Just another day in the wilderness,” she told me. This, too, sounded like something she’d memorized. A famous quote or something.
One of the other girls had a spare shirt. She handed to Kylie, who casually pulled it on. Then she looked out the window and watched suburban New Jersey roll by and didn’t say another word.
CHAPTER 22
The car was full of looted goods, and it was time to turn them in, Adare announced. “Time to get paid,” he crowed. “We’ll head down to Linden, see what we can score.”
The idea of being off the road, of being someplace that wasn’t mounted on wheels, appealed to me. For some reason the girls didn’t seem as enthused. They looked almost apprehensive, and I got the idea Linden must be a rough place. I was going to get to see it for myself, so I didn’t ask any questions.
It took us all day to drive to Linden. The turnpike took us through the Meadowlands, a vast swamp full of the ruins of old factories and chemical plants. In places, the road had flooded, and we had to creep along slower than we could have walked. Adare was worried there might be a bad pothole just under the water and he would never see it. In another place a big chemical tank had collapsed into the road. Big chunks of rotten metal sat on the asphalt, ready to tear our tires to shreds. There we all had to get out and move the debris off the road, piece by piece. The bits of metal stank, but not with any smell I recognized. I worried it was toxic, but there was nothing for it—Adare made the rules, and I had to follow them. My safety, my continued existence depended on it. Without him I would be lost out here, all alone, with nothing but my knife to protect me.
Southward we continued, and we saw more and more storage tanks looming over the road. Giant round structures, some of them bigger than the bu
ildings I’d grown up around in Manhattan. It seemed I had entered an entire new world of industrial decay, of rust and stinking winds and weeds chewing up the concrete that was the only soil. Sometimes we could see water on our left—the Arthur Kill, Adare told us, a name that made some of the girls look at each other in fear. Sometimes we would see great stands of golden plants at the edge of the water, lifting their plumed heads toward the sun, but always they were surrounded by more ancient, crumbling machinery, by towering girders attached to nothing and broken pipes wide enough for one of us to crawl through.
Adare told us, at one point, that we were driving past the Newark airport, or the town of Elizabeth, or the entrance of the Goethals Bridge. I remember seeing none of those things. Only that weird alien landscape of steel and peeling paint.
Linden turned out to be more of the same—and then it became much worse. Our destination was not the old town of Linden, Adare cheerfully announced, but an industrial sector east of that place. “A refinery, from before the crisis. A refinery and a sewage treatment plant. Don’t worry. All that’s long gone. But it sat on some nice defensible ground, so when the looters needed a place to set up shop, they couldn’t have asked for a better place.” By this point we had left the turnpike and were following a long pipeline, a cluster of pipes reinforced with barbed wire above and below. The road bent and turned until I knew I would never be able to find my way back to the turnpike alone, and then, before us, we saw the gates of Linden.
They stood twenty feet tall, made of corrugated steel that had been painted white to prevent rust. Along their top ran a catwalk of iron girders where men with sniper rifles stood guard. In front of the gates, filling a wide empty lot, was nothing but bones: skeletons, human skeletons, hundreds of them, no, thousands—definitely thousands. It seemed to go on forever. They lay heaped in piles, skulls and pelvises and femurs and phalanges all mixed together, bleached yellowish white by the sun. Dark birds picked them over, though it looked like nothing was left for them. Only a narrow strip of asphalt had been swept clear to allow vehicular traffic—otherwise that great killing ground was nothing but bones.
“Zombies,” Adare said, in what he must have considered a reassuring tone. Then he shrugged with one shoulder. “Mostly. I guess they don’t give you much chance to prove you’re not a zombie, if you come walking up here. No self-respecting looter comes to Linden without wheels under him.”
He honked the SUV’s horn and the gates were opened, rolling back just far enough to let us inside. They were closed again as soon as we had passed through. “This is the only way in. The camp’s got water on three sides, and this whole stretch of land other than the gate is one continuous fence. Don’t worry, Stones. You’re as safe here as you were in New York.”
I found that hard to believe. For one thing, there were a lot of people in the camp, and every single one of them was carrying some form of firearm, a pistol or a rifle or a submachine gun. Most of them had knives as well, worn at their hips where they were clearly meant to be seen. They turned to watch us pass with appraising eyes, sizing us up as if deciding whether it was worth it or not to shoot us and take what we had.
We were not stopped or molested, however, as we made our way into the middle of the camp. We passed rows of shanties built of old car tires, corrugated tin, car parts heaped up and welded together. Wispy smoke leaked from some and went wandering among the narrow streets in white tendrils. Other huts were lit up with one or two flickering fluorescent tubes. None of them was big enough that Adare could have stood up straight inside. “Permanent residents,” Adare said with a sneer. “Mechanics. Car washers. Middlemen. Retailers.” He made the last word sound like a curse. “People too scared or crippled to go out and find their own fortune, so they park themselves here and live off our scraps.” The structures looked especially pathetic with the giant round tanks looming over them, the tanks that made up the horizon like a geometric mountain range. “Don’t worry—our people don’t live like this,” he assured me.
I turned to stare at him with sudden anger, but I couldn’t find the words to articulate what I was thinking. “Our people,” he’d said. Including me. It was no slip of the tongue, I’m sure of that now. He was sending me a deliberate message. I was a looter now, whatever I’d thought I was before.
I couldn’t deny what I’d done that day. Consciously I believed it was just a temporary thing, an arrangement as makeshift as the tin shacks and tire igloos we were driving by. Just a way to stay alive until I could find my way to Ohio. Subconsciously I felt a great undertow pulling at me, a current of fate that was drawing me into ever darker water, and I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to resist.
CHAPTER 23
Just a little farther on was a massive parking lot, a broad expanse of asphalt that had rippled and buckled under the constant onslaught of weeds but that was still flat enough to host a whole fleet of cars. A couple dozen of them were gathered there, and these were clearly the vehicles of other looters.
Some were SUVs, pickup trucks, or military vehicles repainted black or red, with flames on their hoods and laughing skulls on their doors. A few were more outlandish contraptions, wildly curved and tail-finned cruisers, jalopies with exposed engines and bright upholstery. A whole row of the lot was taken up with motorcycles, which Adare told me only the insane would ride through the wilderness.
“There’s a lot of them, though,” I pointed out.
“I didn’t say insanity was rare among looters,” he replied, with a hearty laugh.
Most of the vehicles were what Adare called “uparmored,” though the modifications were meant to be equally offensive as defensive. Like Adare’s SUV, many of them had barbed wire strung around their windows or doors, to keep zombies from trying to crawl inside. Some sported hubcaps with welded-on spikes to slash an enemy’s tires, or thick steel snowplow blades bolted to their front bumpers so they could ram their way through obstacles. Some of the pickups had machine guns mounted in their beds. I saw one SUV with a full turret mounted on its roof, with a little seat where a child-sized gunner could sit and fire in any direction.
“Most of that shit’s for show,” Adare told me. “In a real fight, look at that—you see those wheel spikes? Who’d be stupid enough to let that guy get close enough to slash your tires? And all the time they waste on those paint jobs, just to look scary.” He spat in the gravel. “Like zombies get scared.”
The owners of these vehicles were milling about the cars, some repairing damage or tuning engines that roared and belched exhaust, some just standing close to oil drum fires and sharing bottles. They were as varied and as bizarre in appearance as their cars. The men wore either tactical vests and black baseball caps over mirrored sunglasses or expensive suits with immaculate ties and pocket squares. The women were decked out in furs and evening gowns or military uniforms with the insignia ripped off. Both sexes wore piles of flashy if broken jewelry—wristwatches that had stopped working years before, rings that had lost half their stones, diamond earrings, cloisonné brooches, ruby tie studs. It occurred to me that I knew exactly where they’d gotten all these flashy things. The same places I’d found half-empty liquor bottles and expired pills. The wealth of an entire continent, all its most gaudy and lavish treasures, lay open to these people who were willing to risk the zombies to take what they desired. And apparently what they desired was to wear ridiculous clothes.
“No dress code in the looter camps,” was Adare’s opinion on that.
I was to learn he was rare in his relatively mundane appearance. He favored comfortable clothes, because, he said, he had nothing to prove. The other looters preferred to dress up in these outfits as a way of displaying how daring they were, what risks they were willing to take just to look good. “You know what a peacock is?” he asked me.
“No.”
He grunted in frustration. I knew that grunt—it was a first-generation grun
t, meant to imply that second-generation kids didn’t know a damned thing. Which really just meant we didn’t know anything about how they used to live their lives before the crisis. “They were these birds. Used to see them in zoos. You know what a zoo is? Fuck, don’t answer that. These birds grew huge long tails, bright blue and purple and green, gorgeous things, but it made it impossible for them to fly. They gave that up for the fancy colors.”
“Why would a bird choose not to fly?” I asked, not understanding where he was going with this.
“For the same reason anybody does anything. To get laid.” A wide smile split his face, but then he relented with a shrug. “Or to, you know. Get attention. Get noticed. The problem is, one guy, maybe one day he shows up in a bright purple shirt and everybody oohs and ahs and think he’s hot shit. But he comes back the next day and everybody’s wearing a purple shirt. So he doesn’t stand out anymore. He needs a fancy hat to bring to the party. It never ends.”
I shook my head. Someone like me, someone from New York City, would never understand the way fashion works, I decided.
“Ignore ’em, anyway. I don’t want you getting mixed up in that crowd. One of them’s likely to try to steal you away from me, Stones.”
It sounded fine to me. I wanted nothing to do with these people. He drove the car past the crowd, barely acknowledging all the waves and shouts he elicited. His next destination was a big concrete building on the edge of the lot.
About halfway there, my eyes went wide and I had to drop down in my seat, suddenly very anxious not to be noticed by the crowd. Adare looked at me funny, but I didn’t dare show myself.
I’d seen, among the crowd, one face I’ll never forget. I’d seen the woman who ambushed me at the end of the George Washington Bridge. The woman I’d cut with her own knife, the knife I still had in my belt.
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