“Give those two groups an hour to meet and join up, and there’ll be nothing left for them to do except head up here,” Big Red continued.
“How long do you think we have?” said Nolan.
“That’s the only good news,” Big Red allowed. “Damn things are slow, especially in groups. We’ve got hours until they get here. Until morning, at least.”
For Nolan it was only a small consolation. He could see how it would happen, clear as day. The zombies would come up from the south, entering the city quietly and slowly. Nobody would hear them approaching. The refugees would be asleep. Then the zombies would suddenly be there. Blocking every road out of the city. Many of the refugees camping near the capitol would be pinned between the zombies and the barricades. All the agitators with weapons had pressed toward the Green Zone, so the ones in back would be unarmed families, elderly folks, and children. They would be the first to see the zombies, and the first to be eaten.
“Okay,” Nolan said, turning away from the southern edge of the building.
“Okay, what?” said Big Red.
“I’ll do it,” Nolan said.
27
For most of the night, Kesha, Steven, and Madison made a long, slow circuit of the Green Zone. At every checkpoint, the story was the same. The National Guard troops seemed not to recognize Madison, or they simply didn’t care.
Some checkpoints were quieter. Most of the guards at these were drowsing, but the one or two still awake would tell Madison to “move along” or “get back from the barricade” before she’d had time to explain herself. Other checkpoints were teeming with drama. People trying to charge the barricade. People throwing rocks and bricks and shitty diapers from screaming babies. People crying bloody murder at the tops of their lungs. These rowdy entrances were even more challenging; Steven found it difficult to carry Madison forward safely. (He was concerned that if he were knocked over, she might be unable to stand and get trampled.) Often, Madison found herself pleading her case to a National Guard soldier at an extreme end of a barricade. The soldier was invariably distracted by flying debris, and usually unable to hear her above the din of the angry crowd.
After several exhausting hours, Kesha realized to her dismay that they had made a complete tour of the Green Zone exterior. They were standing back in front of the southernmost barricade where they had started. The troopers manning it were still wide-awake, and still formidable-looking.
“I . . . I think I need to take a little rest,” Madison said softly.
“That’s a good idea,” Steven said. “My dogs are seriously barking.”
They picked their way back through the crowd, away from the Green Zone.
“Maybe a new shift of guards will take over in a few hours,” Kesha said. “Maybe the new ones will recognize you, Madison.”
Madison managed a barely audible, “I hope so.”
They wandered a few blocks south and settled to the ground in an empty green space beside an office building. The building had a coffee shop on the first floor. The door had been forced open by looters. All the coffee and baked goods were long gone, but people still went inside to use the restrooms.
Steven gingerly lowered himself to his knees, and Kesha helped Madison to the ground. They reclined on the green lawn and looked up at the sky. Kesha had never seen so many stars at night above the city. It was like an astronomer’s map of the Milky Way.
Then a voice said, “Would you like some water?”
Kesha sat up on her elbows and looked around.
Next to them on the green space was a woman with two young children. They had pitched a little pup tent, under which the two boys slept. The woman—athletic with long red hair, perhaps forty—was offering Kesha a metal canteen.
“It’s okay,” the woman assured her. “Distilled.”
Kesha looked over at Madison and Steven, who appeared to have already fallen asleep.
Kesha nodded, crawled over to the neighbor, and accepted the canteen.
“Thank you,” Kesha said, drinking deeply. “We’ve been walking for a long time.”
“You look like it,” the woman said. “Where y’all coming from?”
“We . . . uh . . . southern Indiana, I guess you’d say.”
“Us too,” the woman said. “We’re from Santa Claus.”
It took Kesha a moment to remember that this was a city in the southwestern part of the state.
“That’s a long way,” Kesha observed.
The red-haired woman agreed.
“We took the Oldsmobile as far as it would go. Ran out of gas up near Bloomington. They weren’t selling any, and I was out of money. We walked most of the rest of the way. Some folks gave us rides here and there.”
“I know how that goes,” Kesha said.
“You’re all so young,” the woman observed. “Why, you can’t be out of school yet.”
“I’m a sophomore,” Kesha allowed. “Go to school here in town.”
“My lands!” the woman said. “Where are your parents?”
Kesha looked over at her sleeping compatriots for a moment.
“I’m trying to find my dad,” Kesha said. “He’s somewhere in Indy, I think. My mom, I don’t know. She hasn’t got along with us for a while. That girl there, Madison, she’s trying to get to her dad, too. He’s past the barricade. I don’t know if Steven has a father. His mom was in the wrong place at the wrong time this morning . . .”
Kesha felt silent. The woman took her hand.
“This sort of thing, it makes you feel blessed just to be alive,” the red-haired woman said. “For the last two months I’ve been trying to find a new job. I’m sick of waitressing, but there’s no good jobs left in Spencer County that I know of. I did factory work for a while. Didn’t like it. Plastic bits from the presses would burn my arms. Then I worked at a hotel, but it closed down. We been behind in bills. Maxed my credit card and then some. Bank fees ate the rest. Shawn and Daniel have been such troopers. Don’t complain every time we have to move when I can’t pay the rent, even though it breaks my heart a little bit.”
The woman took the canteen back from Kesha and had a sip. Then she offered it once more. Kesha politely waved it off.
“I’ve been praying on things in the last twenty-four hours,” the woman said. “More than usual, I guess . . . And I wondered if all the shit—pardon my language—that we’ve gone through since their daddy left us . . . Maybe it was all to get us ready for this moment. All the others were just small moves to get us ready for a big one. For this. You know?”
Kesha did not know what to say. She was not used to adults sharing their problems with her. It made her feel more adult herself, in a way. It also felt a little weird and dirty, like the forces that separated adults from children and teenagers had broken down. (These were strange times indeed. You could see the stars right above the buildings downtown, and adults almost three times your age wanted to talk about their problems with you.)
Kesha wondered if she should ask the nice woman follow-up questions, or simply remain silent. (How did adults do this? What was the protocol?) Kesha could not imagine what it would be like to try to support two kids on her own, much less to deal with them in a zombie outbreak.
“I . . .” Kesha faltered. “I’m really impressed you did all that with two kids.”
The words felt stupid coming out of her mouth, but she could not help her candor. She was exhausted, hungry, scared, and unsure what the coming hours had in store. It didn’t feel like a time to beat around the bush.
“Shucks,” the woman told her. “It wasn’t that hard to get here. You did it, too.”
“I don’t mean that,” Kesha said. “I mean . . . two kids and no partner. Wow.”
The red-haired woman smiled gently.
“Aww, honey,” she said, adopting an almost avuncular tone. “That ain’t nothin’. That’s life.”
Kesha smiled.
“Do you want a granola bar?” the woman asked. “I think we have one left.
”
“No, thank you,” Kesha said. “I think I should go rest my eyes for a while.”
“Good thinking,” said the red-haired woman. “Night-night.”
The greeting struck Kesha like a blow to the chest. Was it not what her own father said to her at the end of each evening?
“Night-night,” Kesha managed, feeling for all the world like she might suddenly start crying.
Kesha crawled back to her position next to Madison and Steven. She turned onto her back, supported by her elbows, and listened to the din of the crowds at the barricade. She decided the responsible thing to do would be to sleep in shifts. There might be people in this crowd who weren’t as nice as the red-haired lady. Maybe she would keep a lookout until Steven woke up.
With this conviction firmly in place, Kesha laid back on the grass and looked up at the stars. Her eyes became itchy, and she allowed herself longer and longer blinks to clear them. Before she realized what was happening, she had fallen asleep.
28
As the first rays of morning sunshine found their way into his office, Hank Burleson remained sprawled across his leather couch, dreaming deeply.
It was the old dream. The Always-Dream. The Dream of Dreams.
The governor stood on the steps of the United States Capitol Building, and with both houses of congress, his mother, and his high school wrestling coach looking on, he was sworn in as President of the United States. He looked out at the cheering crowds and waved. He breathed in the frosty morning breeze blowing off the Potomac.
Yet this morning, the dream was burnished by exciting new details. Burleson had won the presidency in a special recall election. The voters had demanded it after seeing the way he had helmed the State of Indiana during the great zombie outbreak. His simple, efficient, and—above all—self-reliant Hoosier leadership had been a model for the nation. The populace had screamed: “That man must lead us!” And so he had. And so he did.
It was as Burleson entered the apex of his dream—the final flourish of the inauguration speech, followed by a quick romp in the Lincoln Bedroom with his favorite mistress before an evening of grand balls held in his honor—that the crowd at the barricade outside his window began to cheer.
For a moment, this mixed with the cheers of the audience in his dream, and the governor did not awaken. Then came the undeniable clomp-clomp-clomp of Doug Huggins running down the hallway toward his office. Now the dream died entirely as Huggins burst through his doors and cried, “Mister Governor!”
Burleson irritably scratched himself and sat up on the couch. Huggins stood at the entrance to the office, out of breath and alarmed-looking. It was already light outside. Burleson wondered how long he’d been asleep.
“Governor, there’s something happening at the south barricade,” Huggins cried. “Listen! You can hear it from here . . .”
Burleson put a hand to his ear. By gum, the acting mayor was right. Cheers, whoops, and hollers were coming from the Green Zone barricade just south of the capitol. Burleson’s mind went to the darkest possibility he could imagine.
“It’s not the Feds, is it?” he asked, throwing his feet onto the floor. Burleson pictured a parade of headline-stealing Army troops—perhaps brought up from Kentucky or Tennessee—cruising up the ass-end of Indianapolis to the capitol.
“I think you better come see,” Huggins said.
“Fuck you,” Burleson shot back, still only half-awake. “I’m the goddamn governor. You tell me what it is, and I’ll tell you if I need to ‘come see.’”
“It’s James Nolan,” Huggins said. “He’s . . .”
The governor leapt to his feet.
“James Nolan!?” he cried. “Does he have my daughter? Is she safe?”
“He . . . I . . .” Huggins stammered. “I don’t know if Madison is with him. He appears to be . . . well . . . giving a speech.”
A beat passed. Then two. The governor looked around the room, trying to make sense of what he was hearing.
“Why in the Sam Hill is he doing that?” Burleson boomed.
Burleson got moving. He built up steam and brushed past Huggins like a charging bull. (The acting mayor jumped aside to avoid being gored.) Burleson rocketed out of his office and down to the steps leading out of the capitol. A few moments later, he was standing in the street.
It was true!
As the governor jogged south, he saw that both the troops and protesters had turned their attention to a giant man standing atop an armored personnel carrier smack in the middle of the barricade. Without a doubt, that man was James Nolan. He gestured dramatically with his giant arms. He seemed to be addressing the crowd on both sides of the barrier. He was not using a microphone or any form of amplification, so the crowd had grown hushed in order to hear. Yet occasionally he said something they liked, and the silence gave way to cheers of encouragement.
Burleson found himself next to a group of uniformed police officers to the side of the barrier. Burleson quickly located the one with the most stripes on his sleeve, and grabbed him hard by the shoulder.
“Hey!” cried the officer. Then he saw who was gripping him and saluted.
“Oh,” said the policeman. “Mister Governor.”
“What’s happening here?” Burleson cried. “What is this?”
“Um . . .” the police officer hesitated. “A few minutes ago, a group of bikers pulled up to the barricade. We thought they were here to start trouble. They’re called the Inlaws, run meth and stolen goods on the southeast side.”
“I don’t care about a bike gang,” Burleson barked. “What is James Nolan doing?”
“They brought him with ’em,” the police officer explained. “When people saw Nolan, they started to cheer. I mean . . . it’s James Nolan! People still love him. Pretty soon, it was like a little parade was happening.”
“Nolan works for me!” the governor snarled. “He’s mine! Everyone in the department knows that! Why didn’t you send him through?”
“He didn’t want to go through,” the policeman said. “He told us he wanted to say something. Then he got up on the barricade.”
“What?” Burleson said.
The policeman shrugged, and pointed up toward Nolan’s perch atop the personnel carrier.
Burleson began to pick his way closer to Nolan. As he did so, he listened.
“I’ve seen what these things can do, and I’m betting so have most of you,” Nolan was saying. “One-on-one, they’re not so dangerous. You can usually run away. But as a group, they can surround you, and you’ve got no chance. With a big group, you probably need machine guns and bombs. The kind of things these soldiers have here.”
Was Nolan giving some kind of Zombie 101 lecture? Who had told him to do that?
“This group I’ve seen heading north, it’s got to be in the thousands—maybe the tens of thousands,” Nolan continued. “A few hours ago, they were close enough to see from the top of a tall building. By now, they’re probably inside the city limits.”
A worried murmur ran through the crowd.
“You’re a big group out here,” Nolan said, addressing the people standing outside the barrier. “But I’m confident we’ll be able to fit everyone inside the Green Zone. Especially people who are unarmed, handicapped, or not equipped to fight.”
What was this bullshit? The governor growled like an angry dog and pushed his way forward through the crowd. When someone stood in his way, he elbowed them hard in the side.
“Now . . . you know me,” Nolan continued. “You know who I am.”
“We sure do!” someone from the crowd called. A couple of other folks hooted in approval.
“I’m not perfect by any means,” Nolan said. “But I like to think you can trust me. I’m asking you to trust me now. I also know many of you on the inside of this barricade. We’ve worked alongside each other for ten years. I follow orders, too. I’ve followed orders as a police officer, and as a basketball player. I understand that orders are important. But sometimes you g
et the opportunity for a fast break that can win the game. When that happens, nobody wants you to stop and set up the play. They want you to take it to the hoop.”
Several cheers rang out. Nolan put a hand up to stay the applause. Those shouting were soon quieted by others in the crowd, as it became clear that Nolan still had more to say.
“I think we just got the ball at half court, and the other team is underneath the wrong basket,” Nolan said. “But I can’t do this fast break myself. I need your help. We can save all the people here. We can save everyone. But I need your help to do it.”
The governor was now close enough to see across the barricade to the street beyond, swelled far as the eye could see with refugees. To his horror, Burleson found that people on both sides of the barricade wore the same expression. They were entranced. They were beaming. They were lapping it up.
And why not? In a time of strife and confusion, this handsome, familiar face—that they had cheered for years—had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. And instead of telling them to shut up, disperse, and go away, he was rallying them to a common purpose.
It was disgusting.
Evidently, Nolan—his best man—had gone rogue. Perhaps even gone insane. (These had been trying times indeed. The governor reflected that he might have asked too much of his favorite policeman.) Yet whatever the cause of Nolan’s insanity, the upshot of its effects remained.
The governor’s most stalwart servant was now standing on top of a government vehicle like a common, scruffy-faced protester, encouraging troops to abandon their posts, and telling them to flood the Green Zone with the unwashed gamin gathered just beyond.
The governor knew what he had to do . . . .
29
Nolan was terrified.
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