Someone took a step upstairs. A step toward us.
Macky fired a bullet straight up, not even trying to hit anyone. I heard a scream, but a scream of fear, not pain.
It sounded like the scream of a child.
“We did what you said!” someone else, an adult, shouted. “We were faithful! You said you would leave us alone!”
My bloodlust drained away as fast as it had come on. “I don’t know who you think we are,” I called back, “but you’re wrong.”
“You’re not—you’re not stalkers? Then why are you killing us?”
“We didn’t start this,” I said. “One of my people walked up to a car outside, and it blew up in her face.”
“That was one of our traps. We got ’em all over the place, for takin’ care of zombies. That wasn’t meant for you.”
“Yeah, well then you shot two more of us.”
“What choice did we have? Stalkers or not, nobody comes out this way to be nice.”
I glanced over at Macky. He gave me a nod—he was still ready to fight if anyone poked their head down those stairs.
“You worship the skeleton,” I said. “You want to explain that?”
“You want to explain how come you don’t?”
This wasn’t getting us anywhere. “Come down from there, one at a time, with your hands showing. If we see a weapon, we’ll shoot.”
“How do we know you won’t shoot anyway?”
I growled with frustration. I didn’t want to do this, but I couldn’t see any choice. “You killed one of us and wounded one more. I’ve got plenty of reason to just burn this place to the ground with you in it. Instead, I’m talking to you. Now. One at a time, hands showing. Starting now.”
CHAPTER 111
Kylie’s wound was shallow. It bled a lot, but as long as it didn’t get infected she would be fine.
Archer wasn’t as lucky. Most of her head was gone. The bomb in the car—just a can of gunpowder mixed with nails, triggered when she tried to open the car’s door—had torn her up enough she probably would have died even if the sniper hadn’t finished the job.
As for the people from the farmhouse, they’d taken their own losses. The sniper was dead, killed by Macky’s bullet. The man I’d peppered with my shotgun blast was still alive, though it looked like he might not last the night. The woman Macky had hit with his rifle butt might have a concussion, assuming she woke up.
The rest of them were unharmed. None of the children were hurt.
There were six kids, all of them kneeling in front of the house with their hands on their heads, in a row from oldest to youngest. The youngest couldn’t be more than five. A little apart from them, his hands tied together behind his back, was their father, a man of about forty with a shock of white hair that had never thinned. He said his name was Deptford and he’d been living on this farm since before the crisis. Him and his wife, his two brothers, and their kids. I got the impression that some of the kids were fathered by each of the three men, and nobody had bothered to keep too careful track who was whose.
I had no problem with their domestic arrangements. The world was too big and too empty for those kind of judgments. Their religion was another matter. But it turned out that wasn’t their fault. The way they told it, anyway.
I dragged the skeleton idol out of the house and confronted the father with it. He just looked away. In the last light of sunset I could see I’d been right—there were bloodstains on it. “What the hell are you doing with this? And whose blood is this?”
“I got nothing to say to positive trash,” the man told me. He looked like he expected me to smack the truth out of him.
“We didn’t come here looking for trouble. We just wanted a place to spend the night. You asked if we were stalkers. What the hell is a stalker?”
That made him look at me. He seemed legitimately surprised. “Them outriders. You know. From Michigan Mike’s set.”
I glanced over at Macky, but he just shrugged. Whoever this Michigan Mike was, neither of us had ever heard of him.
“Stalkers, they call themselves. They come on motorcycles. Twenty of ’em at a time,” the father told me. “They find where people are and they tell ’em they’ve got a choice. Sacrifice or be sacrificed. They come by again a couple weeks later to see if you done it. You’re not supposed to see ’em a third time. That’s who we thought you were. But we done what they asked, so we didn’t know why they’d come for us, and so we got a little jumpy. That’s all.”
I looked over at the dead body lain out next to the bombed-out car. That’s all, I thought. A woman dead, another wounded.
“This Michigan Mike, he’s the head of the skeleton cult?”
The father grimaced in annoyance. “You don’t know shit, huh? Michigan Mike’s just one of the lieutenants. The head of that cult, he’s called Anubis. Sometimes the Jackal. He’s out west somewhere, s’posed to be. Maybe Colorado, maybe Montana, someplace big and empty. Got an army ten thousand strong. Even the government is afraid of Anubis. He’s got religion on his side. He’s got a god working for him, the Death god. Everybody either worships his god or they end up on his altars. Where the hell you comin’ from, you never heard about this? It’s been goin’ on for years.”
I thought of Indianapolis. I thought of thousands of bodies dumped in a fountain and set on fire. Maybe I’d made a terrible mistake, leading my people west. Maybe we would have been better off going back to Pennsylvania, where Caxton worked tirelessly to clean up her state. I ground the ball of my thumb into my eye socket, suddenly very tired and scared.
I started to turn away, but then I thought of something. “You made a sacrifice, right? That’s where the bloodstains on your idol came from.”
The father stared at me.
“Who did you kill?” When he didn’t answer, I leaned close and shouted in his face. “Who did you murder for them?”
Finally he looked scared. Like he should have all along. “Listen, I just did what I had to, to keep my people safe—”
“Who was it?”
“My . . . my daughter, the lazy one . . . she wasn’t pullin’ her weight anyhow, and—and daughters—daughters is easy to come by, you can always make more—”
That time I did hit him, smacking him so hard he fell sideways and buried his face in the dirt. Then I turned and strode away, anger and bitterness filling every nook and cranny in me. I had to close my eyes and wait for it to subside.
When I opened my eyes again, Macky and Kylie were standing in front of me, watching me carefully. I glanced over and saw Strong still watching the prisoners. She looked pissed. I’d known that she and Archer were lovers, and these people had taken that away from her. I remembered how I felt when they shot Kylie. If I gave the word, Strong would have killed the entire Deptford clan, then and there.
“What do we do next?” Macky asked carefully. He must have seen the rage on my face.
“He’s right,” I said.
“What?” Macky asked.
Kylie gave me a guarded look. She was very, very interested in what I was going to say next. In how this was going to play out.
“He did what he did to protect his family. We might have done the same thing, if his people came snooping around our camp.”
“Oh, come on, Finnegan, this is—” Macky’s eyes went wide with disbelief. “This is completely different!”
“How?”
“Because this is them, and that would be us!” I could see in his face he knew that what he was saying didn’t make perfect logical sense. He didn’t care.
“I’m not about to forgive him and forget all this,” I assured him. “The kids can choose for themselves,” I said. “They can come with us or stay here. Obviously we can’t carry their wounded, so they have to stay. The father stays here. We take all their guns—”
/> “You’re just going to let him be?” Macky asked. “They don’t get punished?”
“No,” I said.
“No?” he demanded. “No? Why the fuck not?”
“Because this is us,” I said. “That’s not how we live. Not now, not in the future. This is us. We don’t kill unless we have to. And we show compassion when we can. That’s our law now. That’s my law.”
Macky stormed off in disbelief. He’d been one of the good bosses back in the camp, one who didn’t beat his workers just for fun. But apparently there are levels of compassion, and not everyone agrees on where the lines should be drawn. He’d beaten his workers when they “needed it.” I could hardly expect him to see this my way.
On the other hand—Kylie was nodding slowly. As if I’d said something profound and she was working it through.
In the end, all but one of the kids joined us. They would have a hard time fitting in with our tribe—they lacked the plus sign tattoos on the backs of their hands that gave us cohesion—but they would have a better life all the same, I thought.
The one who stayed was the youngest girl. Kylie tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t hear it. She would stay with her father, because he needed her.
That was her choice. That was another of my laws. People can choose for themselves. If they make bad choices, that’s not for me to second-guess.
CHAPTER 112
We came away from that farmhouse with a couple new people and a bunch of guns—the family there had stockpiled a significant arsenal during the crisis. That was a good thing. We barely had enough guns for our scouting parties as it was.
But the encounter with the family gave us something far more important in the long run. Losing Archer was hard, but her death would not be in vain.
It gave us Hearth.
The children we picked up at the farmhouse knew the local area pretty well—they’d gone out looting often enough, and they knew where clean water could be found, where the wild pigs tended to gather, and, most important to me, where all the little towns were. It turned out that my scouting party had walked right past an abandoned town and never seen it.
There was a good reason for that. The land around us was as flat as a tabletop. You could see for miles in any direction, except where the occasional tree blocked the view. We’d assumed we would find any town just by keeping our eyes open.
It hadn’t occurred to us that one might be hiding behind the trees.
One of the children, a boy named Matthew, led us right there once he figured out what we were looking for. He took us into a little forest that had looked, from the road, like just a single copse of trees. As we got closer it became apparent that the forest went on for hundreds of acres, an oblong-shaped thicket. We’d seen its leading edge and assumed that was all there was to the forest—it was like an optical illusion.
It was first thing in the morning when we entered the forest, but the trees were so thick it was still like night under there. I worried we would stumble upon a nest of zombies, but we didn’t see any. Matthew took us to a trail through the woods—a nature trail, he called it, a path laid down before the crisis by people who wanted to get away from their cities and see a bit of the wild world.
“Hard to imagine wanting to leave a city now,” Macky said. He seemed distinctly unnerved by the forest, by its darkness and by the constant song of the insects up in the branches, by the crunch of dead leaves underfoot, the fact that for the first time in months he couldn’t see farther than a few dozen yards in any direction. I smiled to see him so put off. This was a man who’d taken the horrors of the medical camp in stride, who had faced down zombies and snipers, and a few trees made him feel ready to jump out of his skin.
“It’s just about a mile in,” Matthew said. “Don’t worry—it ain’t covered in trees; there’s a clearing.”
And so there was. In the heart of that forest was a cleared space maybe a half mile around. The trees gave way to overgrown brush. Up ahead I saw what looked like a scaffold made of metal pipes leaning at crazy angles, strangled by vines and slowly rusting away. “What is that?” I asked.
Kylie stomped through the brush to reach it. She dug into the vines and pulled up a piece of rubber, about a foot and a half long, that had rotted and cracked. Chains were attached to either side of it.
“It’s a swing set,” she said. “A kid’s swing set.”
We were standing in a backyard, and we didn’t even know it. Once I knew what to look for I glanced up and saw that the vines ahead were clinging to the side of a house. A few dozen yards away was the corner of another house—and another.
I pushed through the overgrowth, nearly tripping on a fallen bit of fence. Beyond lay asphalt, cracked and colonized by weeds. And beyond that was a street. On either side of the street were the vine-covered faces of more houses, more and more. At the end of the road I saw a big concrete building with a massive parking lot. I headed toward it—the others came along behind me, keeping an eye out for zombies—until I could make out more details. In big silver letters on the front of the building were the words:
HEARTH TOWNSHIP HIGH SCHOOL
Beyond the school lay a street lined with shops, and another with small factories and warehouses. The vegetation had clambered over everything, vines and creepers reclaiming this place for the world that had existed before humans ever came here. But the buildings underneath seemed largely intact.
We spent all day poking through them, pushing open doors that had warped and swollen into their frames, climbing stairs thick with an inch of dust. The houses were empty, cleared out of furniture and appliances. The schoolrooms were bare to the walls, though hundreds of child-sized desks had been piled up in the gymnasium. The factory floors were littered with debris, but the walls stood high and wide and the cool air inside seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for something.
There were no skeletons anywhere—in either sense of the word. No dead bodies, but also no sign the cult had ever been here.
Matthew seemed unwilling to enter the buildings. That was fine—we left him outside with Strong and the other children, to keep an eye out for zombies. I was a little surprised when none appeared.
“Why are all the houses empty?” Kylie asked at some point, and I realized there was something truly strange about the little town of Hearth, nestled in its clearing in the forest. I started to wonder if anyone had lived there at all, or if this town had just spontaneously appeared with no people to build it.
“I never been this far before,” Matthew said when we asked him. “My daddy always said this was a ghost place, and so I was scared to come.”
“Ghosts?” Kylie asked me, a little fear on her face.
Something occurred to me. “Did he say it was a ghost town?” I asked.
Matthew nodded. “That’s right, that’s what he called it. I always figured there must be whole families of ’em here, families of all the people that died in the crisis.”
I laughed. “A ghost town.”
Kylie looked at me funny.
“I’ve heard those words before,” I told her. “I don’t know—a story my dad told me? About towns out west, built around gold mines or whatever. When there was no more gold, the people just up and left, leaving the buildings empty behind them. I’d guess this place was abandoned even before the crisis. It must have been empty even then. Which would explain why we haven’t seen any zombies all day. If no people were here when the virus came, there won’t be any zombies here now.”
Kylie seemed skeptical, but some signs suggested that I was right. In the tiny bus station near the center of town, there was a newspaper dispenser, full now of wet wood pulp and insects, but I found enough of an intact paper to see the date on it—1998, many years before the crisis. Then there were the empty lots on the far side of the town—what looked like f
ields of overgrown grass, but here and there amid the vegetation, pipes stuck up from the ground, and broad, paved roads wove back and forth through the wildflowers. “Plumbing, electricity, who knows what, all set up for houses that never got built,” I said.
Macky didn’t seem to care about the people who had or who had not lived in Hearth. He was more concerned about the people who might still come to visit. “I like all those trees—they’ll keep us from being seen,” he pointed out. “And there’s good water here, a stream out behind those houses. But if we’re too close to a highway, somebody’s going to come sniffing around, eventually.”
“There’s just the one road,” Matthew said, “and it runs southwest about twenty miles before it hits the highway.”
I looked at Macky.
He shrugged. “That’s a start. But even if there are no zombies here now—there will be. They’ll hear us or smell us, who knows what. And they’ll come. We would need to build a wall. A fence, at least.”
I put that thought aside until well on in the afternoon, when I found a hardware store that was still full of tools and gear. The power tools meant nothing to us, and the bucket after bucket of paint we found had long since dried solid. But in a back room we found giant rolls of chain link, ten feet wide and hundreds of feet long when we laid it out. Enough, at least, to fence off a big chunk of the little town.
“This is exactly what we’ve been looking for,” I said. “This is going to be our new place. Our new home.”
Kylie put an arm around my waist. “You really think so?”
“It has everything we need. What it doesn’t have we can build. We can clear out some of those overgrown lawns and plant crops. We can hunt for pigs when we need meat. We’ll have water all year, as long as we boil it—and there’s plenty of firewood for that. This place is perfect.”
They still weren’t sure. We’d seen so many little towns that couldn’t be defended, towns that lacked water or were too close to the highway or that were tainted by having skeletons painted on their walls, towns full of zombies, towns that were the wrong size, too big to defend, too small for comfort. We’d been searching so long they’d pretty much given up.
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