A hatch on the side of the helicopter opened, revealing two soldiers standing inside. I’d never seen a soldier before in my life. They looked like aliens from another world, their eyes made enormous and dark by their goggles, their heads misshapen by all the equipment strapped to their helmets. They wore full body armor, and each of them carried a massive assault rifle.
They waved the looters over, and the trading started. There was no order to it, just a frenzy of people shouting and holding up fingers, shoving packages forward and catching the trade goods that were thrown to them in return. The soldiers had what seemed like a never-ending supply of things to trade. Bundles of food, and medical supplies, and plenty of fuel—big drums of it, the stuff that made this economy possible.
Adare towered over the others, and his voice boomed out over even the noise of the rotors. I was pushed and nudged in every direction, barely able to stand up in the crowd, and it was all I could do to keep standing and keep handing loot to Adare as he asked for more and more.
As the trades were completed, the looters drifted away one by one, easing things up a little. When only a handful of them were left pressed up near the helicopter, I knew it was time to enact the plan I’d been thinking of all night.
It wasn’t easy but I shouldered my way through, right up to the side of the helicopter. Adare said something but I ignored him. “I’m a positive,” I shouted, and held up my left hand, turned around so the soldiers could see it. “I’m from New York City. I was supposed to go to the medical camp in Ohio.” I screamed it over the rotor noise. “There are others here, some girls who—”
It should have worked. The government was supposed to want me in that camp. The law was supposed to be on my side.
I had put my right hand on the bottom of the helicopter hatch, assuming that the soldiers would nod and help me jump up among them. I had thought I knew exactly how this would go.
It didn’t go as planned. I had to cut off my speech in midsentence because the butt of an assault rifle slammed into my stomach, making me choke on my own air, making every nerve and bone in my body jangle with sudden pain and shock. My eyes went wide, and I nearly swallowed my tongue. A boot lashed out and clipped the side of my head, sending me spinning around, and there was no way to keep from falling facefirst onto the concrete. A knee pressed hard into my spine, and someone grabbed my wrist and pulled my arm so hard my shoulder squeaked in its socket.
“Don’t you ever touch government property, you looter asshole,” the soldier on top of me said. “You’re nothing, do you understand? You’re nothing to us, and if I shoot you in the head right now, you know what the fallout’d be?”
I couldn’t speak, but clearly he wanted an answer. I shook my head in the negative.
“Nothing,” he said.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t protest. I could barely breathe.
“I wouldn’t even have to fill out a form,” the soldier told me. “I’m not gonna kill you, though. No. I’m gonna let you live.” He was bent low over me, his mouth nearly touching my ear. “But I am gonna break your arm. I know how to do it so it never heals right. You’re gonna spend the rest of your life as a living example of why you filthy looters do not touch government property.”
He started to twist my arm in a direction it wasn’t meant to go. The pain was excruciating. I couldn’t struggle, couldn’t think. I started to vomit, though whether from pain or fear I didn’t know.
“Please!”
I looked up in surprise. Adare was holding his hands up, his fingers spread out in an imploring gesture.
“Please! Officer! He’s my son! Please don’t do this!”
The pressure on my arm eased, just a hair. It was a blessed relief. “This piece of trash? Come on,” the soldier said. “You’ve taken bigger shits, Adare.”
“Please—he’s my only help and hope in this world. Please, I’m begging you. At least leave him able to work. Please!”
Adare was down on his knees with his hands clasped in front of him. He was still taller than most of the people around him.
“Please.”
“Fuck off, Adare,” the soldier said, and twisted my arm again. The bones in my elbow started to scrape across each other in a way I’d never felt before and I hope to never feel again.
“Here,” Adare said, and he took something out of his pocket. A little orange pill bottle. He shook it to show it was nearly full.
“You gonna buy this piece of trash back for a couple Tylenol? Huh?”
“Percocet. Yellow ovals, man, the real stuff. Guaranteed. They’re still good—I’ve been hoarding them for a rainy day,” Adare said. “I figured, if I got bit by a zombie or something worse happened, I could just down all these and go out nice and peaceful. But they’re yours. All yours, for free. Just let the boy go.”
Instantly the pressure on my arm was gone. There was plenty of pain left over, but it couldn’t match what had come before. I lay with my cheek against the cool asphalt and just breathed, because that was all I could do.
The soldier took the bottle from Adare and shook it a few times. Then he stuffed it in one of his uniform pockets and nodded. He started to turn away, started to go, but then he stopped and looked back down at me.
I expected a final warning, or that he would go ahead and shoot me anyway. Instead he worked up a good mouthful of saliva and spat in my hair.
A minute later the soldiers were back in their helicopter and it lifted away from the pad, floating up into the air as if it weighed nothing at all. I watched it go. My delight in its seeming magic was gone now—I just wanted to be sure it wasn’t going to turn around and come back.
Eventually even the sound of its rotors faded. The other looters were gone by then—it was just Adare and me on the asphalt, under an empty sky.
“You’d better be worth it, Stones,” Adare said. And then he kicked me in the ribs. Hard enough that my vision went black.
I didn’t wake up again until we were already outside the gates of Linden, headed south. I woke up in the front passenger seat of the SUV, my seat belt holding me up. Drool had run down the front of my shirt. Every part of me felt sore.
“Hey,” Adare said, “look who’s finally returned to the land of the living! Good morning, Stones. It’s going to be a beautiful day.”
I looked at him in pure surprise. Only a moment ago—from my perspective—Adare had looked like he was of half a mind to kill me, just for the trouble I’d caused him. Now he was smiling at me. Beaming.
He never was a man to hold a grudge.
CHAPTER 27
I was with Adare and his gang—he preferred the term “crew,” but he was the only one who ever used it—for a little over a month, I think.
My first month in the wilderness. It was quite the education. We spent every day looting old houses, but most nights we didn’t return to Linden or any of the other looter camps. Instead we slept rough, in the SUV, parked under an overpass or in a culvert somewhere, out of sight, no lights showing, making as little noise as possible. Doing everything we could to keep the zombies from noticing us.
They were everywhere. Even my experience in Fort Lee, when I brought an entire town of them after me, couldn’t prepare me for just how many of them there were. No matter how deserted a subdivision looked, or how desolate a stretch of industrial wasteland seemed, they were always waiting for us. Always hungry. More than one night I woke up to find a red-eyed face peering in my window at me, to hear fingers squeaking on glass as a zombie tried to grab me. When it happened, I would wake Adare and he would get the SUV moving, and we would spend a bleary hour just driving, trying to lose the zombies, who would follow us even if they had no chance of ever catching us.
We returned to the looter camps only when the SUV was full of pills and liquor to be traded in, about once a week. Adare seemed to find the camps distasteful; he
never associated with the other looters there, never joined their parties around burning oil drums or even looked to share rumors and news with them. If he’d had some other way of contacting the army and making his trades, I think he would have shunned them altogether.
He had everything he needed out on the road, he often said. He had a car to keep him mobile, a crew to help him forage, and of course he had his girls. How I fit into the equation was still being worked out.
Those weeks spent out in the wilderness tend to blur together in my memory, long hazy dreams—not to say pleasant dreams—broken by only occasional moments of clarity, when everything snapped back into focus. Typically those are not good memories.
Like the time we met our first band of road pirates.
We were headed to a place called Metuchen, another looter camp. The car was so full of loot that some of the girls had to sit on boxes full of liquor bottles and stacks of moldering porn. They didn’t complain, of course. Adare said this was the most dangerous time of all, because anyone passing us on the road could see how flush we were, but it had been days since we’d seen another car and I wasn’t exactly paying attention. I was sunk down into a sort of trance, just watching the road roll out ahead of me through the windshield. I was beginning to see how Kylie could switch herself off and become part of the landscape, as unthinking and unfeeling as the giant concrete ruins that crouched on the sides of the road.
When I saw the first motorcycle up ahead, it didn’t even really register. It was just one more detail of the view. As we got closer I could feel Adare growing tense, his massive bulk next to me growing taut with concern, but my lazy brain figured he could handle whatever was coming, and it wasn’t my problem.
The bike slowed down and moved to the side of the road to let us pass. Adare kept our speed steady, so we blew past the biker at a good twenty-five miles an hour. We came so close to clipping him that for a moment I could see his face through my window, near enough that I made out every detail of his bizarre clothing. Metal horns stuck up from either side of his helmet, their tips burnished to a dazzling shine. He wore a sharp-cut business suit with a perfect red-checked tie, held down by a ruby pin. The cuffs of his jacket sleeves were tattered and the suit was smeared with dust, but the shirt underneath was an immaculate white. He turned to look in at me, and I saw he was missing the tip of his nose and several of his teeth. But he was smiling. Beaming at me.
I gave him a friendly wave, figuring it couldn’t hurt to be nice.
“Shit,” Adare said under his breath.
“What’s the problem?” I asked. “One guy on a motorcycle can’t do us any harm. He didn’t even have any weapons.”
“You’re not gonna live very long, Stones, unless you develop a healthy misanthropy,” he told me. He didn’t look at me—all his attention was focused on the road ahead and the wheel in his hands. “Kylie. Dig out the guns.”
Kylie bent down into the leg well of the second row of seats and started dragging out long parcels wrapped in oilcloth. Addison and Mary helped her pass these around. Adare reached back over his shoulder without looking away from the road and took the massive black carbine I’d seen him use back in Fort Lee. The girls all got pistols. Kylie tapped me on the shoulder and handed me something big and heavy. It didn’t look so much like a gun as a complicated machine part, though there was a short barrel on the front and a part in back that folded out into a skeletal stock.
“Be careful with that. It’s set for full auto, but don’t just spray it around like a hose,” Adare told me. “Tap the trigger, don’t hold it down.”
The guns stank of oil and metal, and the one I’d been handed was heavy and dug into my thigh when I laid it across my lap. I still didn’t see why this was necessary, or what Adare thought was going to happen. The road ahead was flat to the horizon, and I saw no sign of anyone else, no more motorcycles, no roadblocks where we could be ambushed.
“Not everybody can be as lucky as us, Stones,” Adare said, as if he’d guessed at my confusion. “Not everybody has the social skills necessary to be a successful looter. If you can’t get an in with the military, if you get a bad reputation in the looter camps, you can get stuck out here on the road. You can live a long time like that on canned food, sure, but you need some way to get fuel and anything else you might want. And you know nobody’s ever gonna shed a tear for a car full of skeletons on the side of the road. So maybe you start thinking you’ll cut out the middleman, by which I mean honest business folk like me. And by cutting out, I mean, kill and take all their stuff. There aren’t a lot of pirates this far north and east, but the ones who do operate here are crafty. They’ve gotta be, to avoid government patrols. There’s a ramp up ahead. It’ll take us onto surface streets where maybe we can hide. But it’s also the most likely place for them to be waiting. You see it, up there?”
I looked ahead and saw the off-ramp he meant. It was just a curve of road lined by crash barriers on either side. There were no buildings or even trees around it, nowhere for a gang of road pirates to hide. “It looks safe,” I said. “Doesn’t it?”
“Safe is a relative term. Hold on.” Adare sped up, and the SUV jumped and bounced over road debris and potholes. Clearly he intended to take the curve of the off-ramp at high speed, which seemed more dangerous to me than any pirates who might be hiding out there. I couldn’t see any threats at all, and the one cyclist we’d passed had seemed harmless enough. But I could tell from Adare’s body language that he expected death to come barreling down on us at any second.
Our tires squealed as we hit the off-ramp, the surface of which was even rougher than the turnpike behind us. Adare braced himself against his door as the SUV tilted over to one side, and behind me the girls strapped themselves in with their seat belts and grabbed onto anything they could hold. I clutched the dashboard and the armrest built into the passenger door and tried to see in every direction at once, desperate not to miss the attack when it came.
I barely saw the trap—and Adare missed it altogether. “What’s that?” I had time to ask before it sprang. Lying in the middle of our lane was a piece of a telephone pole, chopped down until it was only about six feet long. One end was bolted to a piece of sheet metal, and two thick steel cables were tied around the other end. Before I had time to register all the details, the cables went taut and the pole swiveled up into the air, until it was standing straight up and down.
Right in front of us.
Adare managed to swerve at the last second, nearly rolling the top-heavy SUV as he spun the wheel to the side. It wasn’t enough to avoid a collision, though, and the front driver’s-side corner of the SUV slammed into the wooden pole. Brown splinters splashed across the windshield as we all went flying forward, as the SUV spun out to the side, as metal screamed and bent and the girls shrieked and Adare used every obscenity in his inventory. I could only stare in panic through the windshield, at the world spinning around me, at nothing at all.
The SUV came to a stop, rolling on its suspension like a ship at sea. The engine chugged and coughed as broken glass spun and danced on the concrete. Adare wasted no time. He threw the SUV into reverse and stamped on the accelerator, trying to get us lined up again with the off-ramp so we could get out of there. The SUV whined and then screamed, and I could hear metal crumpling. It was clear we were stuck, and going nowhere in a hurry.
And then, over the noise of the engine, I heard the mosquito drone of motorcycle engines, coming closer. A lot of them.
CHAPTER 28
Who’s hurt? Who’s hurt?” Adare shouted. Mary moaned in the backseat in response. He grabbed her shoulder and pulled her forward so he could look in her face. “That’s just a bruise,” he said, though one of her eyes was bloodshot and her forehead was bright red and starting to turn purple. Her head must have slammed forward against the back of the front seat in the collision. Everyone else seemed to be okay, or at least they
weren’t complaining.
Adare tried to get the SUV moving again, spinning the wheel and alternately standing on the accelerator and the brake. Nothing worked. “That pole must be jammed up into the axle,” he said, sounding more annoyed than anything else.
Through my windows I could see motorcycles approaching, churning up dust as they roared over the open ground toward the off-ramp. I couldn’t see where they’d come from—they must have been close, though, because it took no time at all for them to reach us. The men on them were definitely armed. Some were carrying shotguns, others just pistols. They were dressed just like the one we’d seen behind us on the road, in dusty suits and horned helmets.
“They must have been hoping we all died in that crash,” Adare said. “Clever fuckers. Well, they’re not going to stop now.” He looked over at me, and I realized the gun had fallen out of my lap and landed by my feet. He grabbed it and shoved it back into my hands. “Tap the trigger. Don’t spray,” he told me again.
I could barely feel my hands holding that obscene piece of metal. I could barely breathe.
The motorcyclists lined up as they approached us, and soon I saw why. One by one they hit a makeshift ramp and jumped over the crash barriers and onto the off-ramp. They were incredibly well organized, almost choreographed, as if they’d rehearsed this scenario a hundred times. Or maybe this was the hundredth time they’d attacked a car and killed all its occupants for their fuel. One of them leveled a shotgun at my window and I ducked down, just as a shower of tiny projectiles hit my window and door. It sounded like a hundred hammers had smashed into the side of the SUV, but the window didn’t break.
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