Twice he saw zombies.
One was an armless man in blue jeans and a blaze-orange vest. He staggered in a pigpen just visible at the edge of a farm. The pigs were nowhere to be seen, but they had eaten away the flesh on his arms, and some of the flesh on his face. He now walked dumbly into a fence, unable to undo the latch that would allow him to escape.
The other sighting was a pair of the things, way out in the center of a cornfield. Both were caked in mud from head to toe. They moved like ancient arthritics, so frail it seemed the taller cornstalks might prove too much for them.
Yet the most awful encounter of his journey had involved two living men walking along the side of the road. They had worn overalls and baseball caps, and neither could have been over twenty. One carried a burlap sack over his back. The other held plastic grocery bags filled with God-knew-what. Both of them shouldered rifles. They were smiling. Chatting as they strolled. And before Nolan had so much as waved hello, one of the men had leveled his rife and taken a shot at the Jeep.
The bullet had gone wide, and Nolan stepped on the gas and shot past without incident. But Nolan had been able to see the expression on the shooter’s face. Nolan was already haunted by it. The man’s face said that this—shooting at the Jeep—had been something perfunctory, like swatting a fly or casting a fishing line. It meant nothing. These two men could have been walking to a bar or a football game, or just going home for the night. But instead they were shooting at people in cars. And maybe worse. And it was no big deal.
Why?
With increasing uneasiness, Nolan had decided that the correct question might be: “Why not?”
Now, sitting in front of the governor’s $150,000 “cabin,” Nolan felt relieved to see something even vaguely normal and familiar. Something that, at least from first appearances, had not been corrupted by the wave of violence and chaos that had settled over the countryside.
Yet.
The cabin’s recently washed windows were unbroken and dark. Nothing stirred inside. There were no cars in the drive, but—if Nolan’s hunch was right—the governor’s daughter would have come on foot. (And even if she had walked all night, she would not have arrived much before him. She would be terrified and—moreover—exhausted. If she was in this cabin, she was locked in a back bedroom somewhere, fast asleep.)
Nolan was no longer hungry. The carnival hot dogs were not sitting well in his stomach, but they had done the trick. Still belching a little, he got out of the Jeep and crept up the stone walkway to the door of the cabin. An ADT security sticker was boldly affixed to the front window, and there was a keypad next to the door. Nolan doubted the system would be operational during an extended power failure. (And if it was, he was willing to bet the PIN code would be the same as for the governor’s mansion, which he knew by heart.) Nolan prepared to punch the numbers into the beige keypad, just for the hell of it. Then he looked more closely and saw that the door was ajar.
Nolan frowned. He looked around for any other clues. There were no signs of illegal entry. No broken glass. No trauma to the lock. No nothing. Perhaps Madison had gained access to the cabin and simply failed to close the door behind her.
“Hello!” Nolan called, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Madison, are you in there? This is Sergeant Nolan; I work for your father . . . Hello?!”
He waited for a response. Nothing came.
Nolan kicked the door open—not hard—and peered inside.
The cabin looked as it always did—which was to say, immaculate and ready for a photo shoot with Indianapolis Monthly. There was the beautiful, unused fireplace and hearth. To one side a deluxe kitchen, its granite countertops and Sub-Zero appliances freshly dusted. Even the floor looked recently swept. Nolan stepped inside and smelled potpourri-scented air freshener.
Then the butt of a shotgun hit him hard on the side of the head, and he went careening to the floor.
Nolan’s head swam. There was pain. It took Nolan a moment to understand where he was and what had just happened. It was like suddenly waking from a dream into a horrible reality where your cheek feels like it’s on fire and you’re seeing stars.
Nolan knew it would be a few seconds at least before he could right himself and go for his gun. He just had time to think, “Well . . . if they want me dead, I’m dead.”
Nolan waited, wondering if these would be his final thoughts.
The barrel of a shotgun pressed against his forehead. Hard.
“Where is he?” a voice asked urgently.
Nolan hesitated and tried to think: “Where is who?”
It was surreal. Nolan felt as though none of this was actually happening.
“Where is the governor?” the voice said again.
“I . . . I . . .” Nolan began to push himself up off of the floor. “I assume back in Indianapolis, where he lives.”
“Why are you here?” the voice said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for Madison,” Nolan said. “His kid.”
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Nolan could feel himself hoping that bringing up children might awaken some empathy in the assailant.
Nolan rose to his knees.
“Whoa there,” said the voice. The shotgun barrel pressed harder against the side of Nolan’s forehead.
Nolan stuck his arms out to the side and raised his hands to indicate surrender. Then he risked a glance at his assailant.
The man holding the gun couldn’t have been more than five-foot-ten with shoes on. Wasn’t too broad in the shoulders, either. He was wearing gloves and a ski mask, and clearly had a pair of Coke-bottle glasses on underneath. His upper lip was covered by a thick mustache.
Were it not for the shotgun, Nolan would have already had this guy down and cuffed. But a shotgun was a shotgun was a shotgun. In his ten years on the force, Nolan had known men who’d failed to appreciate the immutable nature of facts like these. Those men usually didn’t last very long.
“I’m a police officer,” Nolan said, trying to speak calmly and clearly. “My name is James Nolan. I work for the IMPD. I came downstate last night because some kids in a school group got trapped in a cave.”
The masked man reacted, leaning in close.
“What?” he barked intensely. “What do you know about that?”
Nolan looked back and forth quickly. Why did his assailant care?
“Some kids from a private school up in Indy came down to tour the caverns. Then they didn’t come out. Nobody knew what was happening. The governor’s daughter was in the group, so his people called me. I drove down and tried to find out what was going on. It was zombies, of course. We just hadn’t seen them yet. I went into the cave and found zombies and a lot of dead kids . . . but a few had escaped. I found one girl in the cave who was still alive. She and I went to try to find other survivors. The governor’s daughter survived, but I don’t know where she went. I thought she might have come here.”
“There are kids still alive?” the man asked. The hostility was draining from his voice. It was replaced by a vulnerability Nolan had heard before, usually in persons confronting family tragedy.
“Yeah,” Nolan said. “We think a small group of them. Madison, and maybe a few of her friends. And then the girl I found down in the caves, Kesha Washington is her name.”
The man’s eyes went wide, an effect greatly magnified by the thick lenses in front of them. He stepped back from Nolan, lowered the shotgun, and removed the ski mask.
“My name is Drextel Washington,” said the bookish, unassuming, accountant-like African American man underneath. “Kesha is my daughter.”
***
The two men sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee with lots of cream and sugar. Nolan held a kitchen towel to the rapidly swelling side of his face. Drextel talked, and Nolan listened.
“When I realized what was happening, I drove down to try to find her. It was a nightmare, as you might imagine. The highways were clogged. People running everywhere, hoping there would be anoth
er place—anyplace—without zombies. I think people from the country ran to the city, and people from the city ran to the country. Then they realized both were just as bad. Anyhow, I knew some back roads. I got down there pretty fast. It turned out I wasn’t the only parent from Kesha’s class with that idea. There ended up being a group of us. What we found wasn’t encouraging. An abandoned school bus. A handful of dead bodies, some of them park rangers. Lots of blood. A couple of parents got brave and went down into the cave with flashlights. A few minutes later, we heard screams, and they didn’t come out again.
“As far as I know, some of the parents might still be there, sitting at the mouth of that cave. Sleeping in their BMWs and Mercedes. I don’t know. It was a bad scene. People weeping and screaming. Nobody could reach anybody on the phone back in Indy. Everybody was really beside themselves.”
Nolan nodded. He could imagine it. A lot of entitled parents used to getting exactly what they wanted all the time. They sure weren’t going to get it last night. There were precious few favors you could call in during a zombie outbreak, especially when the phones you did the calling with were dead.
Drextel continued his tale.
“With those things walking around, I didn’t give high school students down in a cave much of a chance. God help me, I assumed my daughter was dead—that they all were. Once that idea began to take hold in my brain, the only thing I could think about was the man who had ruined my life. I knew that he was probably back up in Indy, surrounded by police. But then I got to thinking . . . What if he had run away, like most people did? What if he just put his assistants in charge and high-tailed it? I might do that, if I was a cowardly governor. I might want to get the hell out of Dodge. And where would a fleeing governor go? I thought it might be to his cabin. I decided that if I was going to get eaten by zombies anyway, I had some unfinished business with Hank Burleson first.”
Nolan nodded and took a sip of coffee. His face hurt like the dickens. The cabin’s medicine cabinet had nothing stronger than aspirin, and his kitchen towel soaked in cool water wasn’t doing much.
“How did you even know about this place?” Nolan asked. “It’s supposed to be a secret. And what have you got against the governor? What did he do to you?”
“The answer is one and the same,” Drextel said soberly. A sad grimace came across his face. He struggled to push it away.
Nolan reckoned that nobody was exactly suited to a zombie outbreak, but this man seemed especially ill-suited. He seemed gentle. Naturally timid. Bookish. The kind of person who, when he was feeling particularly extroverted, might look at your shoes when he talked to you.
“Do you know Angelica Burnett?” Drextel asked. “If you work for the city, you might’ve heard of her. She’s on the city council? Represents the eleventh district? She was in the news a few years back over that parking meter schedule controversy. Good-lookin’ lady.”
Nolan shook his head and said, “No, I don’t. Sorry.”
“She’s Kesha’s mother and my ex-wife,” Drextel said. “We divorced a couple of years ago. I found out she’d been ‘carrying on,’ as they say, with the governor. He would meet her right here, in this cabin. I tailed her down to Bedford a couple of times after some friends tipped me off. I wanted to see it with my own eyes. And I did. Sometimes, the governor would spend the whole damn weekend with my wife. They were brazen about it, both of them. When I confronted her, she basically told me I was being uptight. That it wasn’t a big deal. That I didn’t know how the world really worked. I said that she was married . . . and she said so was the governor.
“I wouldn’t have cared so much if she’d fallen in love with him. At least I don’t think I would have cared. But it wasn’t that. It was just like, ‘Oh, you want a career in politics in this town? We should hang out more.’ It was banal. Like they were just playing golf together. She wanted me to accept it, and I didn’t. So we got divorced. She left. I haven’t spoken with her for a while. She’s supposed to get Kesha on the weekends, but she’s always too busy.”
Nolan took another sip of his coffee and thought.
“If you were mad, it seems to me that you could have ruined her . . . and the governor,” Nolan said evenly. “Kesha said you run a newspaper, right?”
“Yeah . . .” Drextel said hesitantly. “Let’s just say my paper isn’t exactly the Indianapolis Star. It would have been my word against theirs. Maybe if I’d taken pictures of them together in the cabin, which I didn’t . . . maybe that would have done it. I loved Angelica. I still sort of love her. I get this feeling that one day she’ll wise up and apologize, and it will be like it was before. Her and me and Kesha. We had some good times together, you know? Back in the day? I didn’t want to ruin her. I still don’t.”
“But you came down here to see if you could blow the governor’s brains out?” Nolan asked.
“I don’t know,” Drextel managed. “I only grabbed the shotgun because of the zombies. I don’t know if it even works. I haven’t fired it in years. But . . . but . . . I felt like this man had taken everything from me. I was furious . . . I wasn’t thinking straight . . . Well, maybe I was going to kill him . . . just a little bit.”
Nolan shrugged as if to say that these things happened. Especially to priapic narcissists like Hank Burleson.
“I’m sorry about your head—really, I am—but can we get to where Kesha is?” Drextel asked. “I won’t be able to think straight until I see her again.”
Nolan agreed that they should move out. They did a quick sweep of the cabin, but found no sign of Madison or anyone else. Nolan still felt like she would try to come here—like his hunch wasn’t wrong. But at the same time, he knew how badly Kesha wanted to see her father—and vice versa. He couldn’t in good conscience delay that.
He considered leaving a note for Madison, but what would it say? With the lines of communication down, what could he reasonably tell her to do? Stay here and wait? For what? Nolan could not guarantee when or if he would ever be back. There was also a chance that a bad person could see the note and then lie in wait for her, just as Drextel Washington had lain in wait for him.
In the end, Nolan simply turned off the battery-powered coffeemaker and locked the door behind them. Drextel pulled an aging Honda Accord from its hiding spot behind the cabin and followed Nolan’s Jeep. It would be at least an hour before they made it back to the fairground. With all the busted and abandoned cars on the road, Nolan knew it would probably take much longer. . . .
12
Kesha sat in a collapsible lawn chair outside of the Hipwells’ trailer. Furbus the cat, who had taken a liking to Kesha, rested in her lap and allowed itself to be petted. Now and then, the expansive feline offered fitful purrs.
“Looks like you got a friend,” Steven said from next to her. He was helping his mother pick up the area around the carnival workers’ housing. Trash was scattered all across the grass. How much was the usual result of a fair—and how much a consequence of the zombie attack—Kesha didn’t know, but there were food wrappers and paper scraps everywhere. Steven had a dowel with a nail on the end of it that he used to expertly spear the scraps. He had evidently done this before.
“I can’t believe she doesn’t run off,” Kesha said. “Furbus, I mean.”
“She knows to stick around,” Steven said. “Now and then she’ll slink off and come back with a baby bird or some setch, but mostly she stays put.”
“Are you ever afraid you’re going to leave her behind, like when you move on to the next town?” Kesha asked.
“Oh, it’s happened,” Steven said. “She always finds her way to wherever we are. You’d be surprised what cats can do.”
Kesha could not quite believe this.
“What?” she said. “Furbus just shows up in another town?”
“Yep,” said Steven. “It’s amazing.”
Then he winked at her.
Kesha looked back and forth, unsure what to think.
Steven disappeared to spear more
trash around the side of the trailer. His mother approached from the other direction.
“Don’t you go believin’ my son for one moment,” Sheree said. “He’d lose his damn mind if we forgot that fat cat even once. Loves the thing.”
Kesha smiled and continued to stroke the feline’s dark fur, warm in the mid-morning sunlight.
A few moments later, Steven came around the other side of the trailer with several new scraps impaled on his dowel.
“Think that’s about got it, Mom,” he said, flicking the paper into a round metal trash bin. “I was thinking that next maybe somebody ought to go collect all those cars.”
“And I suppose that somebody is you, huh?” Sheree asked, a skeptical hand on her hip.
“What if people come back and they want their cars?” Steven said. “We could organize them. Put them back in the parking lot in an orderly way. In nice rows.”
He gestured to the fields and hills beyond the carnival midway where dozens of vehicles had been wrecked, abandoned, or—more frequently—wrecked and then abandoned.
“Hmmm,” Sheree said, surveying the scene with a hand raised to shade her eyes from the sun. “It would be good to clear up the road. But it looks dangerous. Some of those cars are not safe. And what if some of those things come back?”
“Mom, they’re slow,” Steven assured her. “And anyhow, it’s daytime. We could see them coming. All those cars out there are in the middle of empty fields. No way those things could sneak up on us.”
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