I was going to die and I knew it. This forest hid too many dangers, too many hidden catastrophes just waiting for me to stumble into. Even if I managed to avoid every one of them, it would be only a matter of time before I starved to death. No, scratch that. I would die of thirst first. After what had happened to Addison, I knew I could never drink water from any of the streams or creeks I came across.
When I got desperate enough, I knew I would anyway.
CHAPTER 57
I walked all night. I walked until the sun started to come up. It was funny how much better I felt to be able to see things again.
It wasn’t much, but it gave me a little strength. It kept me going a few more miles.
Long enough to come to the bridge. It wasn’t much to look at. Just a one-lane span over a ditch, held up by aluminum struts. In the eerie blue light of predawn it seemed to glow in the dark. Its surface rang under my feet as I stepped warily onto it, careful in case it collapsed.
It took my weight. And suddenly I couldn’t go any farther. I had to sit down, had to lie down on that metal span and feel how cool it was. The cold would be a balm to my battered skin.
“Come on, Finn,” I whispered. “Come on,” I whined. “Keep going. Okay, stop, but don’t—don’t sit down. Just don’t.”
My body wasn’t listening to me. It was going to sit down. I took another step, toward the center of the bridge, and it was like fighting off a pack of wolves. I went to the railing on the side of the bridge and put my hand on it, thinking it would help support me. Help me keep going a few more feet. If I could make it to the other side—
My hand made the railing shake and ring. The echoes rolled around the ditch below me, a narrow gap in the landscape through which a tiny trickle of brown water flowed. I forced myself, with my last ounce of strength, to take another step, and my footfall rang out.
It was echoed by a strange squelching sound. Like something crawling through muck. The sound came again before I could take another step.
I leaned over the railing and looked down. A face was down there in the ditch, staring back up at me. In the weird light it might have been the face of a ghost. Except it wasn’t. The face had red eyes, framed by long, stringy black hair.
Then a hand reached up and clawed at the face, as another zombie pulled itself out of the mud to look up and see what was making all the noise.
The two of them squirmed out of their muddy nest, pushing and pulling and fighting their way up the loose dirt that formed the wall of the ditch. They moved slowly as they climbed, grabbing a handful of tree roots here, falling back there as the mud slid out from under them. It seemed they would never get up to the top of the ditch.
But then I heard a ringing noise behind me. I turned my head—and saw a third zombie climbing over the railing, not ten feet away from me. Its red eyes burned as its jaws worked at the air.
CHAPTER 58
They were catching up. They were only a few steps behind me.
I had run, a little, when the zombies started chasing me. I’d had enough strength left, or rather, fear had lent me just enough adrenaline, to get a head start. But then the pain had come back to my side and my wind had left me and my legs absolutely refused to run a step farther, even if it meant being eaten alive.
The zombies didn’t get tired. They didn’t need to take breaks. There was food right there in front of them, just a little farther away than they could grab, always tantalizingly out of reach.
I would have wept if I wasn’t so dehydrated. I would have soiled myself in fear if there’d been anything in my stomach.
I forced myself to walk. To at least move, even if it was just a slow shuffle at this point, a gait as desperately sad and broken as that of the zombies. I kept walking because I couldn’t stop. I kept walking because if I stopped, they would grab me and pull me down and eat me alive. I kept walking because . . . because . . . because there wasn’t enough energy left in my body to think of a reason not to. I don’t know. I kept walking because I was too stupid to give up, like Adare said.
I had my knife. I figured that if I did have to stop, if they caught me, I could fight off one of them, or maybe two. If I had the strength to lift my arm. The third one would get me, though. Or one of them would bite me before I could finish it off. And then I wouldn’t just be a positive. I’d be an infected.
Kylie made it, I thought. Kylie must have made it to Ohio, to the medical camp, by that point. So I’d done something good with my life. I’d saved her—and Mary, and Heather, and hopefully Addison. I’d freed them from Adare and pointed them in the right direction.
That had to be enough, right?
I realized I was arguing with myself, trying to justify the moment when I finally did give up. When I let go and let the zombies have me. Because that would be less painful—or at least, it would be over quicker—than taking another step.
I kept walking.
Ahead of me, the trees parted. The road curved to meet up with another road. A bigger one. I staggered up the curve, onto the new road.
And suddenly it was just too much.
My legs turned to soft rubber. My knees bent the wrong way, and I went down hard, one kneecap hitting the asphalt and sending waves of shock all the way up my back. I put my hands down to catch myself, scratched my palms on the road surface.
The zombies were right behind me. I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t run. Couldn’t fight. I drew a long deep breath to have something to scream with.
I heard a horn blaring, but I was too distracted to pay attention. The horn kept sounding, and eventually I got annoyed with it enough to look up, to glance in the direction of the sound.
A big vehicle, a pickup truck, was coming right at me, at probably fifty miles an hour. Okay, I thought. That works. No way I would survive the collision. Better than having my skin torn off and my innards devoured by zombies.
Through the windshield of the truck I saw the driver make a sweeping gesture with one hand, clearly trying to tell me something. Move. Get out of the way. I was so far gone at that point, so mentally tired, I couldn’t resist the suggestion. I had an incredible compulsion to do what I was told.
I launched myself forward, throwing myself down on the road surface, and rolled.
Behind me the three zombies were standing, staring at the oncoming truck, looking confused. Not for very long.
They exploded in a cloud of white and red and pink and gray when the truck hit them, their bodies disintegrating in the air. Flecks and larger chunks splattered all over me. The truck kept going, fishtailing a little as it disappeared around a curve in the road.
CHAPTER 59
Damn, I thought. Damn. Now I have to get up. Now I have to stand up.
At least I could take my time about it.
I lay there just breathing for a while. Just staring up at the blue sky, framed by the green leaves of the trees over my head. Listening to the swell and sigh of the crickets in the tall grass at the side of the road. It seemed like a nice enough place to take a nap, there in the middle of the road.
I closed my eyes.
A little later—I couldn’t say how long, it was just black, black sleep inside my head—I heard a car door open and then thud shut again. I heard leather boots crunch and squeak on the asphalt. Sounds were okay, they didn’t take any energy to listen to. Plus, and this was definitely a bonus, I could ignore them. I could go back to sleep.
“You’re with those bikers, right? A road pirate?” a woman asked. I heard her walk away from me. I heard her boots moving around. I could ignore sounds. “I’ve been keeping an eye on your crew the last couple of days. Waiting for you to leave. Lucky for you, I guess, that I was close by. You headed out of my jurisdiction, or what?”
There were interesting words in there, words I felt like I might respond to when I got a chance. When I woke up.
&n
bsp; “Hey. Did I hit you by accident? Are you dead?”
A leather boot kicked my hand. It hurt.
I sighed, because now I was going to have to open my eyes.
I opened my left eye a crack. Then I opened both of them, because what I saw was the barrel of a gun pointed right at the tip of my nose.
Say something, I thought. That was the first lesson Adare taught me. When you meet people out in the wilderness, you have to say something so they know you’re not a zombie. Zombies don’t talk. People do.
“I’m not dead,” I said. My voice came out like the noise of a rusty hinge, but maybe the woman holding the gun understood me anyway.
The gun barrel looked huge. It filled up half the blue sky. I thought I could see the tip of the bullet inside, way up that cavernous tunnel, copper colored and cold.
“I want to make something clear, here. I didn’t just save your life,” she told me. “I did give you fair warning, sure. But the whole point of that exercise was to take out three zombies. That’s all.”
“Thanks anyway,” I squeaked.
“Yeah. Look, I’m not going to kill you, not unless you start something. So don’t look so terrified, all right? I don’t like it. I don’t like looking at you like that.”
I blinked my eyes rapidly. It felt like the insides of my eyelids were lined with sandpaper, but I had no choice. “Gun,” I sputtered.
“Sure,” she said, and the barrel of the gun moved away, moved out of my immediate vision. “Sorry. I guess. It’s just—your kind and mine, we don’t get along. Historically.”
“My kind?”
“Bikers. Bikers and lawmen, we always used to be going at it. You look about half dead, you know that?”
For the first time I got a good look at the woman who, despite avowed intentions, had saved my life. I was surprised first to see that she was old. Her hair was silver, tied back behind her head in a no-nonsense bun. Her face was lined with wrinkles. On her head she wore a hat with a very wide brim, a kind of hat I’d never seen before. She also wore tight-fitting black pants and black leather boots and a brown leather jacket. A patch on her shoulder read PENNSYLVANIA STATE POLICE TROOPER. On the front of her jacket was a nameplate that read CAXTON.
“Listen, I guess we don’t have to be enemies. You can even help me out, okay? And then I’ll give you a ride somewhere. Back to your pirate friends or whatever.”
“Help?”
“Yeah.” She dug in a pocket of her jacket and pulled out two floppy objects, whitish in color like the belly of a fish. They were both splattered with blood and matted hair. It took me a second to realize they were ears. “I know I killed three of those bastards. But I can only find two of these. I need you to help me look for the third.”
CHAPTER 60
I eventually made Caxton understand what bad shape I was in. She seemed distracted and barely aware of me at times. But when she saw I was dehydrated nearly to the point of collapse, she immediately fetched a canteen out of her truck. “Don’t worry, it’s been purified,” she said, holding it up to my lips. The water tasted of strange chemicals, but I didn’t care. I would have drunk creek water then and there if she’d offered it to me, even after I’d seen what it did to Addison.
Before I’d drunk my fill, Caxton was already back to scouring the road, looking for the missing ear.
Eventually I felt strong enough to stand up and help her, as she’d asked. She seemed almost surprised when I offered, as if she’d forgotten the deal we’d made. I spotted an ear after only a few minutes of looking—I think Caxton was nearsighted, or she would have seen it herself. I held it up proudly, but she took a close look at it, flipping it back and forth in her hands, and then tossed it over her shoulder. “Sorry. I need the left ears. Just the left ears.”
Eventually we did find it. Caxton went to the bed of her pickup with it, and I trailed after her. Sitting in the bed, along with several spare tires and a long row of extra fuel tanks, was a plastic trash bag. She opened it and a terrific stench billowed out of it, as well as a cloud of flies. Caxton didn’t even flinch. She put the three ears in the bag and then sealed it up again with a twist of wire.
“You—collect those?” I asked. I’d seen just enough to know what else was in that bag. More ears. Hundreds of them, I guessed.
“What? Yes. I mean, no! No, that would be morbid. I bring them in as evidence.”
“Evidence of what, exactly?”
“Of how many zombies I’ve killed. Once a month I take them to an army base near Johnstown and they give me what I need in exchange. Each ear’s worth a cup of gasoline or a little food. I don’t need much.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Some poor soldier has to count them?”
“No, they do it by weight. They’ve got a big scale.”
It struck me instantly—and this is a measure of how I’d changed since I’d entered the wilderness—how easily one could take advantage of such a system. Fill the bag with old newspapers, say. Or, if the army did occasional checks to make sure the bags were in fact full of ears, you could more easily take ears from slaves, or positives. At the very least, if they had some way of verifying they were real zombie ears, you could mix left and right ears, and get double value for your work. It would take a close inspection to tell the one from the other. I didn’t say it, but I thought how trusting the army must be to just take Caxton’s word that each ear represented one zombie kill.
That was because I didn’t understand her then. The army clearly did—they knew that she would never, regardless of hunger or want or any kind of human greed—cheat on her tally.
“Have you been doing this very long?” I asked.
“Just since the crisis,” she replied. “Before that I was in highway patrol. I used to run sobriety checkpoints and speed traps. Now I’m in charge of turnpike clearance.” She shrugged, as if the change in duties were nothing more dramatic than being transferred from one department of the state police to another. “Somebody’s got to do it. Hop in the truck and let’s get going—I need to fill up another bag like that if I’m going to make my quota this month.”
She had to help me into the passenger seat. My muscles had frozen up while I was lying in the road, and now every time I moved, a fresh jolt of pain went through me. “It’d be tough to ride a motorcycle in your condition,” she said, frowning.
“I’m not a biker. I’m a positive,” I said, and showed her my left hand. She glanced at it but didn’t seem put off by the tattoo. “I was trying to get to Ohio, to the medical camp at Akron, when those pirates kidnapped me.” Truth, all of it, if not the whole truth.
“That’s a relief. Just shove all that stuff on the floor,” she told me. The passenger seat was full of boxes of pistol ammunition, empty food cans, and a roll of toilet paper. It looked like it had been a long time since anyone else had sat in that seat. The floor in front of the seat was already full of pallets of canned food and bottles of water, but I was able to squeeze my legs in. Caxton explained that she pretty much lived in the truck. “Except in the winter. I have a place in Harrisburg for when it snows.”
Harrisburg. On Adare’s map, the city of Harrisburg was marked with a tiny badge symbol. I wondered if the two of them had ever met, but then I figured that if they had, I was better off not admitting my connection to him. She didn’t seem like the kind who would appreciate Adare’s rough charms.
She started up the truck and we headed east, not the direction I would have chosen, but I could hardly complain. After a few minutes she stopped again, but only to tell me to buckle my seat belt. “It’s the law,” she said.
I complied happily enough, though I said, “I figured that since the crisis nobody worried about things like that anymore.”
She stared at me as if I’d started speaking Chinese. “It’s the law,” she said again.
When I was buckled up, we head
ed out once more. Before we’d driven another mile I was fast asleep.
CHAPTER 61
When I awoke, the truck had stopped and Caxton wasn’t in the driver’s seat. I started to panic, but then I saw her walking back toward the truck, a pair of ears in her hand. She must have seen some zombies while I was asleep and figured she didn’t need my help to deal with them.
I saw then why we’d seen so few zombies in Pennsylvania.
When she’d put the ears in the bag and climbed back into the driver’s seat, she smiled and asked if I was hungry. I had trouble matching up the ruthless zombie hunter and the maternal old lady, but I put aside such concerns in exchange for a can of creamed corn and some beef jerky. As soon as we were done, she headed out again.
“You do this all day? Every day?” I asked.
“I make my patrols. There’s time for sleep, too, and I give myself two fifteen-minute breaks a day, plus meals.” The look on my face must have told her what I thought of her lifestyle, even if I was too polite to say it. “I got used to long shifts back before the crisis. You do not understand boredom, true boredom, until you’ve sat all day in a speed trap holding a radar gun out your window. You can’t even read or do crossword puzzles or anything, because at a second’s notice you’re going to have to spin out and flag down a leadfoot.”
“I thought the army was in charge of clearing out zombies,” I said. I remembered listening to the Emergency Broadcast Service on the radio and hearing the daily tallies of how many zombies they’d destroyed in far-off, undreamed-of places like Michigan or Bangor.
“They do what they can, but they’ve got other things to worry about. Guarding the Washington bunkers or putting down insurrections out west.”
“I heard something about that, about out west—”
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