Turning on her heel, she ran back to the subdivision, though not in a straight line. In the few seconds she had spent in the field, zombies had closed in on her. There weren’t more than a dozen which, after the masses she had escaped from earlier, seemed like child’s play to escape from. She dodged to her right and made for the nearest house while behind, an engine’s roar sent a fresh wave of adrenaline through her.
Although she told herself not to look back, she did anyway, just in time to see the Jeep break from the tree line and make right for her. It covered the hundred yards of the little prairie belt in twenty seconds. By then Sarah was racing once again through the neighborhood. She kept off the streets and went yard to yard.
Zombies seemed to be going in every direction and by ill-luck Sarah ducked into a house that wasn’t a house any longer. It had scorched walls, part of a roof, a few feet of blackened flooring and the front door. She took one step in, saw the sky through a gaping, charred wound in the ceiling and stopped, inches from a drop into a pit that had once been a basement, but was now an ash-filled crag.
Just then, the Jeep turned down the street and came tooling along very slowly. In haste, Sarah shut the door. Even this little movement was too much for the weakened structure to bear; the floor beneath her gave way and she dropped. The Beretta went flying as she flung out her hands to catch hold of anything that would keep her from impaling herself on the debris below. Her hand caught what had once been part of a stud, but was now only a piece of wood unconnected to anything.
She and the stud dropped into the grey gloom. There were sharp pains in her back and legs as her fall was arrested by splintery boards and the blackened remains of furniture. She was cut and scraped up and down her body, yet somehow she managed to keep her lips pressed shut.
Holding in a whimper she peered through the gloom all about her with a feeling of surrender growing inside. Nearly ninety percent of the house had burned up in some months-old fire and had fallen into the basement. All she knew was that the gun was somewhere in the gloom to her right where there was wreckage of twisted metal and ash ten feet deep. She had no time to look for it. Outside, the Jeep had stopped, while inside, something was clawing its way toward her. There was a zombie in the pit with her.
Chapter 14
Sarah Rivers
Northern Maryland
The zombie advancing on Sarah was charbroiled. There was no other way to describe it. Its skin, which should have been a repulsive grey, had been blackened like a piece of chicken left too long over the coals. Its hair had been seared away leaving a cracking and blistered pate and, to make matters worse, it was frightfully naked, showing to the world the crispy curled flesh where its manhood had once been.
Sarah felt her lunch coming up. It went right to the back of her throat and threatened to come heaving out of her just as the first of the gun shots rang out. For just a moment she felt wild elation, thinking that it wasn’t the bounty hunter at all, but someone there to rescue her. The elation was short lived.
“Come on out, Sadie! I won’t hurt you. We’ll just talk.” It was the bounty hunter, who was obviously confused over who it was he had managed to corner. With her new haircut, Sarah clearly resembled Sadie more than she thought. “You might be able to hide from me, but there’s a thousand stiffs heading right for us. They’ll get you…”
He paused to shoot a few more times. As he did, Sarah glanced back toward the zombie. It had clawed its way closer. With its lips and tongue burned away, it was silent for a zombie, strangely making it even more menacing than normal. Sarah picked up the stud that had fallen in the pit with her and poked at it, hoping to fend it off. It didn’t work. The zombie grabbed the board and tried to pull it away. They fought in silence over the piece of wood as the shooting stopped.
“Don’t be like this, Sadie,” the bounty hunter yelled. “I get paid even if I bring you back as a zombie. Is that what you want?”
Something shifted beneath Sarah and the zombie and they both dropped deeper. Sarah’s head was practically covered by the ash and the wreckage. The wooden stud was gone. She tried to get the rifle off her back, but it was hopelessly caught on something unseen behind her.
“I hear you, Sadie,” the bounty hunter said.
Practically above her, the door opened and Sarah froze in place as the bounty hunter took a single step onto the rickety floor. The man wasn’t at all as Neil had described: dressed exactly like a bush. In the dark night, the ghillie suit the hunter wore rippled and flared in a light wind and from below he looked demonic; a living shadow without true form or substance beneath.
In one hand he held a flashlight which he beamed all over the pit before him. Though it was not yet full dark out, the pit was arrayed in shades of grey and black shadows. The hunter saw the zombie, which thankfully, turned its attention upwards. He also should have seen Sarah. As the beam came at her she closed her eyes and remained stalk still. For a second the light ran right over her, and then whisked away again to take in the edges of the pit.
“Shit,” the hunter griped after a moment. “Fine, get eaten by the zombies. That’s alright with me. I’ll be back in the morning to get your sorry, grey ass.”
Just like that he was gone, shooting a few zombies that got between him and his Jeep. When the engine faded away, Sarah and the zombie looked at each other. For half a moment it looked as though the beast would turn away. Was she so covered in soot as to be unrecognizable?
The answer was no. It took a bit of staring and more than a bit of pondering on its part, but the zombie finally concluded or perhaps remembered that she was a human. He began to claw at her again. For her part, she tried to push away from it, only to slide deeper. She was standing on something that gave no leverage; every time she tried to push off she’d slip further into the quagmire.
Somehow the zombie was able to find a sturdy footing and lurched at her. It got within three feet before it got snagged in the springs of what might have once been a couch. Up to that point Sarah had been basically stuck in place. With a huge effort she forced herself away from the beast only to sink again, but now her foot hit something solid and reaching down she felt the edge of a bathtub.
A question slipped through her mind: How the hell did that get by the front door? The question went unanswered. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it gave her purchase enough to push herself halfway out of the bog of cinder and waste. From halfway she was able to grab the edge of a joist above her. The next move required a real struggle: she had to pull herself, the rifle and the backpack up using only the muscles in her arms.
She lacked the upper body strength and succeeded only in exhausting herself before she sagged back down into the pit. Behind and below her, the creature was not stopped by exhaustion. Somehow it pulled itself off the springs of the couch. There was a sucking sound and when Sarah looked back she saw that the zombie had left behind the blackened husk of its own skin.
At the sight of the skinless creature, Sarah went dizzy and wondered, in a disconcertingly calm way, if she was about to faint. Her body felt disconnected from her brain, as though her head were floating. She sagged in what she could only describe as a “pre-faint” and as she sunk back into the buried bathtub her shifting weight caused part of the structure around her to crumble. This exposed a fire-warped hunk of plastic and metal which after a moment of confusion, she recognized as what had once been a vacuum cleaner.
Pick it up! Her mind screamed in a distant sort of way. It was like the command of some outside force and she did as she was told, hefting it above her head, holding it there with shaking arms until the fleshless zombie was almost in range. Grunting like a cave-woman she dashed it down with all her force and watched, still in a fainting mood, as the zombie’s head came apart.
“Ok…ok…that’s done,” she said in a breathy whisper, before leaning back into the dangerous remains of the fire to relax for a moment. It wasn’t comfortable, but she needed to collect herself before she turned her f
ull attention to getting out of the pit.
She saw that getting out was going to be simply a matter of dragging up the sturdier chunks of wood and heavy crap and building a ramp of sorts. It was a fantastically dirty and very dangerous undertaking, and the entire time she worked at it she just knew that if Jillybean had been there she would have said something like: Why don’t you just do this simple thing, or take that easy way?
Unfortunately for her, Sarah could not think of the easier way and when she finally made it to the little lip of foyer which was all that was left of the inside of the house, she whispered, “I did it all by myself,” and felt silly doing so.
She then dragged open the front door to the house and came, literally, face-to-face with a zombie. It had been a woman at one point and the two of them were of equal height. The zombie leaned in, staring, trying to fathom out the dreadful apparition that Sarah had become.
This time, Sarah didn’t wait for the zombie to come to any conclusion. She simply grabbed the zombie by the arm and yanked it across the threshold of the door, sending it face first into the pit.
There were more zombies in the street. Most gazed at her in their stupid manner before turning to go about their business, however a few were curious enough about her to start heading her way.
Now the first thought in Sarah’s mind was: What would Jillybean do? The answer came quick: act like a zombie. Jillybean had told the story of Ram; of how he had infiltrated the zombies by pretending to be one of them. The little girl had even demonstrated how to do it, complete with make-up and moans.
Sarah wasn’t going to need the make-up. She was head-to-toe, black as night and looked more like something that had just dragged its way from hell than an actual person. She sort of felt that way, too. The fall into the pit made it so that she didn’t have to fake either the limp Jillybean had suggested, or the groan. They were very real.
Sarah went into zombie-mode and passed inspection with flying colors. No one and no thing bothered her as she gimped back to her car. It turned out to be a waste of a trip through the deadly little town. Before she even got to the fence, she saw the Honda had its doors flung and its trunk sprung.
The bounty hunter had already been through it taking everything of actual value. Sarah still had her clothes and her sleeping bag, but she lost her food, her fuel and her common sense. For some reason she didn’t find it the least bit foolish to climb into the Honda, lock the doors and fall straight away to sleep.
She was fortunate that the bounty hunter had other traps to set and that he didn’t come back along that stretch of highway. It was for certain he would have noticed the Honda’s doors shut, and the person sleeping inside.
Fortune was on her side and she slept peacefully, especially when a light rain came to patter among her dream of Eve and Neil. It was a long, in-depth dream that she never wanted to end, but Jillybean woke her. In her dream the little girl came to her and shook her, saying: The early bird catches the worm.
It was not early when she woke, however with the clouds and the mist hanging low over the earth it seemed early. Sarah fell back to sleep, but immediately resumed the dream of Jillybean: Get up early bird, Neil is making pancakes.
“I’m up, Jilly,” Sarah mumbled. “Give it a rest.” She ran her hand over her face, but stopped in shock as she saw the color of her palm. Sitting up she gave herself a quick look in the mirror. “Whoa! Look at me.”
Somehow she had managed to cover the entire interior of the car in black ash without losing even a shade of it on her own skin. “No one will recognize me now,” she said, noting how brilliantly white her smile was compared to the black. The smile disappeared when a thought struck her: “But they’ll try to recognize me.”
The Believers wouldn’t let her into New Eden without a thorough scrubbing and then they’d be keen to see who it was under all that ash. There was a possibility that they would recognize her then. No, she couldn’t go in looking like a chimney sweep. She’d go in looking like her new self and no one would be the wiser.
Sarah poked around in the backpack she had taken from the swinging dead man in the tree and found a can of pineapple chunks that would do for breakfast. After she ate, she added some extra clothes to the pack and roped her sleeping bag on top. When she was done she stared at the pack until a little voice in her mind said: That doesn’t look like a monster’s backpack, that looks like a people pack.
“That’s because it is a people pack, Jillybean,” Sarah said. Sighing, she tore off the sleeping bag, and then dumped out everything. She looked at the array: clothes, food, utensils, can openers, candles, flashlight, and sleeping bag. She needed all of it, but what would Jillybean take?
The question just popped into her head. “What the hell is my deal? Who knows what Jilly would take?” Her I’m a Belieber backpack was always filled with so many oddities that it was enough to make a person’s head spin.
But this was different.
“I don’t need a sleeping bag,” Sarah said, pushing it aside. There were blankets in every house. “And I don’t need any more clothes than what I have on my back.” There were also clothes in every house. She packed the food, the can opener, a lighter, and a single fork. Everything else she left on the side of the road. This was a one way trip, she reminded herself. It wasn’t a scrounging expedition.
She took off the torn and tattered shawl, but did not cast it aside. With a grunt she slung the pack on her shoulders. The rifle went across the top of it, running through the straps to stay in place. It was a weak weapon against zombies, but there was still the bounty hunter to worry about. Finally, she took the tattered shawl and draped it across herself where it hung oddly.
Once she was decked out, she began her limping way back toward the ratty neighborhood. This she skirted to the south, making sure to keep to the woods. These weren’t the thick stands of the Appalachians where the greenery was sometimes a solid, impassable wall and the likelihood of getting lost increased with every step, these woods were thin, little more than surviving trees crowded on one side by the strip of I95 and on the other by suburbia.
Eventually, in another ten miles or so, the neighborhoods would give way to little self-sufficient towns, which in turn would lose their cohesion and become homesteads and farms. However that wouldn’t last either. Baltimore lay directly along her path, and no amount of ash or zombie make-up would get her to walk through that city. It had a bad reputation even when humans lived there.
At first, Sarah kept to the forest. This was in spite of the zombies, which stood about, unmoving, looking like stunted trees. For the most part they seemed asleep on their feet and did not bother her unless she came too close. If they noticed her, she went deeper into her acting which always fooled them.
She kept to the woods because they were safe. The forest concealed her from the bounty hunter. It was her hope that she was leaving him behind with every step; that he had gone back to the low rent neighborhood hoping to catch sight of a zombie that matched Sadie’s description. However, she didn’t believe the man would sit around there for too long. He wasn’t a “hanging around” type of guy. In her gut she knew he was searching…hunting really.
He had Sarah’s scent and was now after her. This was why, instead of looking for fuel and transportation, she walked through the mists and the trees for hours, slowly heading on a parallel path to the highway. She tromped under the green canopy where everything was damp and as she walked she thought about the family she had left behind.
Were they still in the ranch house she had abandoned them in? Or had they found gas and a car and were already at New Eden? It was possible. With enough gas it was only a fourteen hour trip and this was the third day she had been gone. But it wasn’t likely. Neil, who was very cautious, wouldn’t chance moving Sadie until her pneumonia was almost cured, which was today according to Sarah’s calculations.
“At least they didn’t have the bounty hunter to worry about,” Sarah said to herself. The thought was reassur
ing until she began speculating on the tenacity of the hunter. What if he had reset his tire-blowing, radio trap?
“Damn,” Sarah whispered, looking back the way she had come. She had put ten miles between her and the spot on the highway where she had been ambushed the day before. If Neil had figured out which way she was going it would mean he would come barreling into the trap any minute.
“Damn, damn, damn,” Sarah hissed, feeling real emotion inside her for the first time in weeks. Yes, she had felt fear when she’d been stuck in the ash pit with the zombie, however that had been her body’s reaction to outside stimulus. This was a reaction from the soul: her loved ones were in real, immediate danger.
“What do I do? How do I warn Neil?” Should she go back and see if the hunter had reset the trap? That would mean another three hour hike. Her only other option seemed to be to find a working car and drive back, which, though it sounded great, was something far easier said than done. She could be all day looking for a car.
Which way to go?
She decided to pin her hopes on finding a car. In a fever of worry, Sarah raced due west where she saw the top of a distant building. It wasn’t a long run, not upwards of two miles, yet her head was dizzy when she burst out of the woods and into the strewn remains of a proper America town. There was a main street where everything was brick or painted stark white. There was a grocery store, a school, a quaint little park, and all the rest that would make people nostalgic for summer days and apple pie.
Sarah ignored all that. She hurried to the nearest car—some little foreign thing that she didn’t make any attempt at recognizing. To her it was nothing more than a car and the only question was, did it have gas?
It didn’t. Neither did the next one or the next. She ran down the street, so focused on the cars that she didn’t see the first of the zombies come staggering at her. If it hadn’t accidentally kicked a rock it probably would have came right up and ate her.
The Apocalyse Outcasts Page 11