Kesha began tugging Steven by the back of his shirt. After a few seconds he relented and rose. By that time, two motorbikes and one silver RAV4 were headed toward them. Kesha heard the report of a rifle as someone below took a potshot.
“These people . . . they’re just killing anyone they can,” Steven intoned sorrowfully.
“Come on,” Kesha urged.
They scurried back inside the H2.
Steven started up the engine, turned the hulking thing around, and began driving like hell in the opposite direction. The hillside was not made for automobiles, and the jarring bumps came thick and fast. Kesha looked nervously at the side-view mirror.
“We’re not going fast enough,” she cried. “Those motorbikes were going so much faster than this.”
“What do you want me to do?!” Steven yelled at her. The Hummer hit a shallow ditch and bucked violently, as if to put an exclamation mark on his point.
“Omigod, they’re going to catch us and shoot us!” Kesha cried.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” Steven said. It appeared that he was. The steering wheel seemed just barely within his control. It rolled right and left in his hands like the tiller of a foundering ship.
Kesha took another look back and saw the first motorbike cresting the top of the hill. The driver paused near the spot where she and Steven had been hiding in the grass. Then he spotted the Hummer, narrowed his eyes, and sent his bike shooting down the hillside after them.
“This isn’t going to work,” Kesha said. “We can’t outrun them in this! Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!”
The Hummer suddenly swerved ten degrees to the left. It was no longer headed for the floor of the valley, but instead the woods where they had found the gym bag. For an instant, Kesha’s imagination showed her suicide by car crash—Steven would take both of their lives rather than let the looters catch them.
“What’re you doing?” Kesha cried.
“The woods,” Steven called. “It’s the only thing that will work. Those trees are thick. Old growth. You probably couldn’t ride a motorbike in there. If we want to lose them, we have to go into the woods . . . on foot.”
In a trice, Kesha understood that Steven was right. It was their only hope. She risked another glance back. The first motorbike was gaining, and the second was just coming over the hill.
Moments later, Steven brought the Hummer to a bruisingly abrupt stop at the edge of the forest. He and Kesha sprang from their seats and headed for the tree line as fast as their legs would carry them. Kesha heard one of the bikers open up with a handgun behind them. One of the rounds went into the Hummer with a noisy KLANG! Another knocked loose a bird’s nest from a tree, just as Steven and Kesha sprinted past below it.
Inside the trees, branches and nettles began to scratch and sting. Pointy obstructions—easy to avoid when you had a moment to notice them—came too thick and fast to circumvent. Kesha and Steven plowed straight through, their adrenaline such that they hardly felt the scrapes and scratches. Behind them, the motorbike engines roared closer and closer still.
Kesha and Steven nearly became separated when they circumvented different sides of the same enormous maple and Kesha fell into a ditch. After a few steps, Steven became aware that Kesha had disappeared. He stumbled backwards, found her, and helped her to her feet with a powerful yank on her hand.
From that moment on, he did not let go.
13
It had been a fool’s errand, the whole thing. Ellard van Zanten knew this, and that made it all the worse.
Editing down the video of Burleson’s heroic defense of the mayor had taken only a few minutes. Then it had been uploaded and emailed to every news outlet in the state, and all the national media. But the Internet did not seem to be working normally, and van Zanten was unsure if the emails were going through. Even so, van Zanten had been absolutely giddy to report the video’s successful dispersal to his superiors.
It was, however, not enough for Doug Huggins. The chief of staff had expressed skepticism that any of the news outlets would be opening emails from PR distribution lists at this moment.
“So what do we do then?” the governor had wanted to know. Though expressing a concern, he was still obviously in a fine mood. The good feeling from his incident with the mayor had not faded. Instead, it was like a time-release drug. He was going to be cheerful for hours to come.
“Van Zanten could hand-deliver the footage to TV stations around the city,” Huggins suggested. “Put it on a zip drive and physically hand it off.”
Governor Burleson raised his eyebrows to indicate that it might be a good idea.
“Are you serious?” asked van Zanten.
“WTHR is just up on Tenth Street,” Huggins said. “You could do it on foot. Take you twenty minutes, tops. Everybody’s power—and their TVs—could click back on at any second. When that happens, we want them seeing our footage.”
“You know, the more I think about it . . .” Governor Burleson interjected, his good humor making him increasingly ebullient. “The more I think about it . . . the more I think that we should have some kind of event as well. A follow-up to the tape. It could be a rally. Somewhere downtown. I could still give a speech or something.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” Huggins said. “I’ll get started on crafting something right away.”
The chief of staff turned back to the assistant director of communications.
“As for you, van Zanten,” Huggins said, “make some copies and take them to the television stations personally.”
“But the zombies!” van Zanten managed.
The governor bristled uncomfortably, as if the junior staffer had used a racial slur.
“If you’re concerned about the . . . dangers of the situation, by all means take a police escort,” Huggins said in scolding tones. “Now, Mister Governor . . . let’s talk a little more about your next move.”
Van Zanten backed out of the room and sulked down the corridor to his cubicle. There, he dutifully copied the governor’s zombie encounter onto four different thumb drives. One for each local affiliate.
He next walked to the rotunda of the statehouse, because it seemed to have the most police presence. Though now perhaps the third highest-ranking member of Indiana’s functioning state government, van Zanten hesitated to interact with the officers who stood milling about or resting beneath the marble columns. He normally never talked to police. He had certainly never ordered one to give him a ride. Eventually, van Zanten summoned the courage to approach a tired-looking veteran with a salt-and-pepper mustache who did not look very threatening.
“Excuse me,” van Zanten said to the exhausted officer. “I’m the governor’s acting press secretary. He told me to deliver some footage to the local TV stations. It’s outside the Green Zone. He said I could get a police escort. Do you know who I should talk to about this?”
The police officer let out what was possibly the longest sigh van Zanten had ever heard. The man had bellows for lungs. Then he stood up from the marble bench where he had been seated and began to walk to the front of the capitol. He turned and motioned for the dumbfounded Dutchman to follow.
Minutes later, van Zanten sat in the passenger seat of a squad car as the very sleepy IMPD officer drove through the improvised checkpoint and out of the Green Zone.
“Let’s hit WTHR first,” van Zanten said. “On Tenth Street.”
The policeman gave a lazy bob of his head that might have been a nod.
The first thing van Zanten noticed outside the Green Zone were the plumes of smoke rising into the air.
There were wrecked and abandoned cars everywhere. There were also bodies. The alarming thing was not their number, but that they had been left where they were, usually on sidewalks or in gutters. (Death happened. People didn’t like to think about it, but it was a day-to-day occurrence. People died in automobile accidents all the time. But bodies were something that got attended to almost instantly. Frowning, head-shaking crowds formed aro
und them. Emergency vehicles came and took them away with great speed. Firemen used hoses to wash blood off of the pavement. In a matter of minutes, you never would have known that one had been there at all. But now that was not happening. There were bodies here that nobody had bothered to deal with, just lying in the streets. Or walking around.)
As they passed the public library at Meridian and Ninth, the police officer finally said two words to van Zanten.
“Look there.”
The Dutchman looked.
A mail carrier—tall, middle aged, and still in his uniform—was shuffling down the sidewalk with an unnatural gait. His eyes had a milky-white sheen. His mouth was caked in red and slashed apart as though he’d French-kissed a running fan. A couple of errant letters were mottled in blood and stuck to the front of his shirt.
“Jesus!” van Zanten said. “You can’t let that thing walk down the street!”
“Whaddaya want me to do, arrest it?” the policeman quipped.
“No . . . but . . .” van Zanten tried. “You could pull over and shoot it, right?”
The exhausted officer looked over at van Zanten, then wordlessly tendered his sidearm to the Dutchman.
“What?” van Zanten said, physically squirming away from the gun. “No! I don’t want to do it!”
The Dutchman had never in his life touched a gun.
The police officer replaced his sidearm and continued driving toward the NBC affiliate.
The squad car stopped in front of the television studio and van Zanten got out. The parking lot was mostly empty, but van Zanten thought he saw movement inside the building. Thus emboldened, he made his way to the front door and tried it.
Locked.
Van Zanten looked back at the squad car. The police officer had already pulled his hat down over his eyes and assumed a sleeping position. Van Zanten sighed. He began knocking as hard as he could on the door.
After what seemed like a full five minutes, there was movement inside. The door was answered by a sweaty, exhausted-looking man in a pit-stained dress shirt. He had short grey hair and a bulbous, W. C. Fields nose. After a good night’s sleep and a shower, the man might have passed for fifty. In the unforgiving light of the noonday sun, he looked well past-due for retirement. Van Zanten guessed he was the station director.
“What?” the man snapped.
“I’m from the governor’s office,” van Zanten explained. “I have some footage for you.”
The station director man looked left and right—as if checking for any sign that this might be a ruse—then relented and pulled the Dutchman inside.
“You’re from Governor Burleson’s office?” the station director asked.
Van Zanten followed him down the darkened corridors leading to the production booth.
“Yes,” van Zanten said.
“What is the governor up to?”
“That’s, um, what the video is about,” van Zanten explained. “He’s, you know, liaising with the mayor. Putting up a Green Zone around the capitol. Handling stuff. He’s definitely handling stuff.”
“Do you have power?” the station director asked. “Do you have phones? We have a generator, but it’s not giving enough power to broadcast. The best we can do is update our website, but it’s acting futzy too.”
They passed an employee lounge with vending machines and a fridge. At one of the tables sat a TV anchor van Zanten recognized from nightly newscasts. With apparently nothing to do, he sat alone playing solitaire. The nearest vending machine had been jimmied open, and a row of empty Diet Cokes sat next to his cards on the table.
“Does the governor know how bad things are?” the station director continued, conducting van Zanten deeper into the station. “Because things are bad. Really bad. And it’s not just the zombies, or whatever we’re supposed to call them. CNN was saying ‘moving cadavers’ before they went off the air. Sounds like a PC euphemism to me. Are we trying not to hurt their feelings?”
“Heh,” van Zanten laughed.
The station director turned back to him and showed a frown saying no part of this was funny.
“We’ve been getting reports from all across the state,” the station director continued. “People have been coming here all night. On bikes. On foot. They think we can do something. I don’t know why. It’s you people who are supposed to do something.”
“What do they tell you?” van Zanten asked nervously.
They stopped in front of the station director’s office. Van Zanten handed him the zip drive.
“There’s widespread crime all over the city,” the station director explained. “People think there aren’t police anymore. People believe it, and it becomes true. Criminals think they can do what they want. People are scared. Nobody knows when the power’s going to come back on. The generators at the hospitals weren’t built for this. What are all the people on life support supposed to do? And the phones are completely down now, even the landlines. Have you tried to make a call recently? It’s like the Middle Ages out there. You want to talk to somebody, you’ve got to go physically find them. And try not to get shot by a criminal or eaten by zombies in the process.”
“Well . . . the movie on this drive should give folks some inspiration,” van Zanten said brightly.
“What is the U.S. government saying?” the station director asked. “When did Burleson last talk to the president? When can we expect help?”
“Yeah . . .” van Zanten said as he looked away and scratched the back of his neck. “The governor’s examining all appropriate options at this time. If a call from D.C. comes, the governor will make some decisions, I’m sure.”
The station director paused. He studied van Zanten’s face suspiciously, as if the tall Dutchman’s sympathetic eyebrows might conceal a horrible secret.
“Make some decisions?” he said. “What decision is there to make? It’s chaos outside. Half my staff is missing or dead. Nobody can tell us if the police force still exists, much less the fire department or the EMTs. A city can’t live like this for long, son. We need all the help we can get, and we need it now.”
“The governor is doing . . .” Van Zanten stopped short of saying everything. What was the governor doing? Everything that was prudent?
“The governor is doing what he can,” van Zanten tried again.
The video downloaded, the station director handed the zip drive back to the tall Dutchman.
“Can you find your way out again?” he asked.
“Uh, sure,” van Zanten said, accepting the drive.
The station director looked at van Zanten one last time and shook his head. Then he closed the door to his office and left him standing outside in the hall.
On his way out of the station, van Zanten ran into the idle news anchor again, this time almost physically as he walked down the hall.
“Hey,” he said, stopping to shake the anchor’s hand. “Ellard van Zanten, with the mayor’s communications office? You might know my boss?”
“They’re all dead,” the anchor sputtered, his eyes wide and insane.
“What?” Van Zanten had time to wonder.
“Every reporter we had wanted to do a live remote from the field,” the anchor stammered. “Every cameraman wanted to be the first to get B-roll of a walking dead man. I wanted to go, too, but they kept me here. Said they needed at least one talking head sitting in front of the camera. I wanted to go like hell . . . but then I was glad I didn’t. None of them came back.”
The reporter grabbed the collar of van Zanten’s shirt for emphasis.
“None of them came back!”
Van Zanten writhed uncomfortably, eventually freeing himself from the anchor’s grip. It was deeply disconcerting to hear the familiar, sonorous voice—one that usually shared even, measured words written by another person—reduced to mania and fear.
Van Zanten brushed past him down the hallway. The handsome anchor leaned against a cubicle wall for a moment, and then collapsed to his knees.
“None of
them came back . . .”
Van Zanten exited the WTHR offices to find that his ride had disappeared. The police car and driver were simply not there. Van Zanten surveyed the sparsely populated parking lot, hoping the policeman had simply moved his car to the shade. Yet he was nowhere to be found. Just gone. And there was no clue left as to what had happened.
Exhausted and confused, van Zanten rubbed his forehead and tried to figure out what to do. He didn’t want to go back inside the station and deal with the creepy anchor or the angry director. At the same time, he wasn’t going to walk across Indianapolis to each of the other TV stations. The Fox affiliate was way out in Pike Township, for chrissake . . . No, he couldn’t do that.
He would return to the Green Zone on foot, van Zanten determined, and requisition a new driver. That was the only option that made sense. Maybe, on the way back, he would see a police car or National Guard Hummer and be able to flag it down. After all, he was the governor’s emissary on important state business. That had to be good for a lift a mile south.
Van Zanten stood on the curb and looked down the length of Meridian Street with great trepidation. It was now his gauntlet to run. In the distance, he could see the Soldiers and Sailors Monument eclipsed on either side by the jutting skyscrapers of the downtown skyline. Beneath it was the Green Zone and relative safety. This normally bustling thoroughfare was quiet, but not completely empty. Every few moments, van Zanten would notice movement in the landscaping. Maybe a person. Maybe an automobile. Maybe . . . something else.
He began heading south along the sidewalk. Despite waves of exhaustion and lightheadedness, he managed a brisk pace. It was positively eerie to see the city’s downtown so dark and barren. This was quieter than during holidays, and emptier than during tornado warnings. Still, squint your eyes, and it was easy to imagine that nothing was wrong. The zombies had only come in the last few hours. The trash was still collected. The lawns and bushes were neat and trimmed. Were it not for the plumes of smoke in the sky and intermittent gunshots in the distance, van Zanten might have been able to convince himself that it was a nearly normal day.
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