by Hugh Howey
Page 11
Dennis lay there, his legs burning, his body on fire, arms waving at the air. Sarah ran past, blubbering, to cradle Lisa. Matt yelled at her to stay away. To stay the fuck away. He cocked the shotgun, the hollow clunk of an empty shell bouncing on the tile, and went to pull her off.
The two of them were cussing and crying as they hurried from the scene of what Dennis had done. They left him there, arms gyrating at the darkened ceiling, the smell of Lisa fading, a wheel on a shopping cart crying out as it was pushed along under a heavy load, and then silence. And a thought. A sickening thought for Dennis that this was how his forever would remain.
23 • Chiang Xian
The throngs of sick tourists had wandered off, the streets outside full of the silent traffic of darting candy bar wrappers and the haze of smoke from unseen fires. There were pink smears on the glass, streaks of gore and abraded flesh where the undead had bumped and pressed and waved their stupid arms to get at the foul meat.
Chiang cared less and less for what went on out there. She had company, now. And while this boy—whose name would be Shen, she’d decided—stumbled and bumped in staggering circuits throughout the shop, she practiced chasing him, practiced controlling her feet, making a game of it, stopping now and then to eat from his parents before they lost their taste.
Shen, of course, hadn’t quite the hang of it. He knocked things over and stumbled on the cans scattered about. He crawled up in the window display and sampled some of the rancid meat, even gnawed on her parents’ shins. And since neither of them could talk, not yet at least, it was up to Chiang to supply the dialogue. She would crouch by Shen’s father while the boy ate what was left of the man’s thigh, and do both their voices over his loud smacking. Mostly, she would coach him, urging him to exert more will, to maybe one day help her move the heavy shelf blocking the door so they could both get out.
Practice, she would tell him, kicking a can, just an extra jerk of her knee as she was stepping along. See? See? she would shout. I can do it, and so can you!
The words would tumble out different, of course, like screams in a nightmare, but she thought it was getting better, that her tongue was learning just as her fingers and hands once had. Everyone has different abilities, she reminded herself. It was important to be patient with him. Some people had a hard time getting out of bed, forcing themselves to go to school. Some could just do it, always could. Different abilities. She would be patient.
In the meantime, she had a playmate to bump after in the meat shop. And so the two of them played chase during the day and a game she called There-You-Are at night. They played while the smell of their dead parents mingled in the air, and it was easy to pretend, if you knew how, that their grunts were giggles, their labored hisses the noise of happy laughter, just two kids wasting time while they wasted away, the both of them eying that heavy shelf by the door that kept them trapped inside.
Part III • Jeffery Biggers
24 • Jeffery Biggers
Where were the people? It was hard to figure at first, why with the outbreak there weren’t more people. Ten million in New York, and most of them were just . . . gone. Jeffery had assumed it would spread, that the avenues and streets would be crowded from one side to the other with the chompers. But then, most people didn’t get away, did they? They got more than a bite. They got consumed.
And so the streets were full of cars, but no people. Just remains. That was the sickest thing, seeing the bones, all the cleaned carcasses. Getting bit and surviving was rarer than getting eaten whole. Rarer and worse. Being infected was hella worse. But so few got infected, right? How many got a scratch or a bite like Jeffery did and still managed to get clear, find a place to hole up until it weren’t their choice how to move or what to do? Not many, he didn’t figure. Most got eaten. That’s where the ten million went. Gone. Eaten up and shat out by those who remained.
Jeffery remembered the one that got him. Goddamn that woman. Goddamn that crazy bitch.
He couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t stop playing that day over and over in his head as he rode among the pack, weaving around the jammed cars with blinking hazards and open doors, a picked-clean skeleton sitting there in one of ‘em with its seatbelt still on like it might crank the engine and go for a drive, some ad for a damn MADD commercial.
Jeffery remembered spotting the bitch from that upstairs apartment he’d staked out for his own. He hadn’t planned on leaving that place until the cupboards were bare. Earlier that morning, he had escaped a few mobs, had used that combination of boot camp army know-how and the black spirit that had helped generations of his color make it through the deep shit time and time again. He’d seen some brutal stuff in his weeks of running, more gruesome even than the crap he’d seen in the war. Roadside bombs and flesh eaters had some things in common, except these monsters didn’t leave limbs behind. They took them with them, munching on them like turkey legs while they tracked down another scent.
Jeffery had been surviving okay for a week or two, getting clear, avoiding one nick after another. Some of his friends weren’t so lucky. Jeffery was used to that, the inequitable luck of two people sitting side-by-side in the same Hummer. One man gets a scratch, the other is holding his guts in his lap and screaming for his momma. All luck. Where you’re sitting’, where you’re born. Dumb fucking luck.
Well, there’s dumb luck, and then there’s just plain stupid. Jeffery had been stupid, trying to save that baby, thinking shit could be saved anymore. Stupid.
He’d seen the woman from the apartment window, down in the alley, three stories below. One of the flesh-eaters was walking in circles, waving her arms over her head. Hadn’t seen one do that. Most walked with their arms out like goddamn Frankenstein, like the soul trapped inside can see but the shit in charge can’t. Like they gotta feel their way through the breeze.
So this one, arms wiggling like thick snakes over her head and around her shoulders, spinning and spinning all alone. He figured what the fuck? What’s her disorder? Jeffery had watched from the window, curious, eating someone else’s potato chips, whoever the fuck used to live there. And then he saw what the damn flesh-eating bitch was doing. Naw, he heard it. It was the wail of the living—a baby awake, screaming from one of those goddamn yuppie backpacks. The mother must’ve just turned in the last day or two for that thing to still be alive. Jeffery leaned out the window to see better. Damn woman was waving her arms, trying to get at the morsel of noisy flesh strapped to her back, trying to eat her own goddamn baby.
Up till then, Jeffery had done well by looking out for himself—no point risking two lives where one was in jeopardy. Hell, he’d seen so many dead by that point, so many go down that could’ve been him if he were a little slower, if he’d hesitated or panicked, if he’d stuck his neck out for someone else.
But something about the baby’s cries got to him. That sound dove into his bones and clawed at something deep, something primal. Maybe it was this last chance at life. All the death and dying, and here was something that’d just been born, a memory of how shit used to work. The thought of leaving that baby to starve to death on its mother’s back—or worse, for those writhing arms to finally get it free, for those clacking teeth to set to work—he couldn’t sit there and wait.
He remembered leaning out the window and scanning the alley. There was a van crashed into the corner of the building, the hood buckled up around the old brick. The body of the van blocked the alley off from the street. It looked safe enough. Boxed in. One woman spinning in circles, grunting and groaning. Jeffery set the bag of chips aside, wiped the grease off on his blue jeans, and threw his leg out the window. After a moment’s hesitation, he scrambled onto the fire escape.
A gas grill blocked access to the ladder—a ghetto balcony. Pots of dirt with wilted brown stalks lay over on their sides, a luckier kind of dead. Jeffery wrestled the grill out of the way, metal squealing on metal. He flashed a glance
across the alley at a spot of movement, saw a young man watching him from a window in the building over, late teens or early twenties. Surviving age, as Jeffery had come to think of it. The boy leaned out the window and looked down at the woman in the alley. Jeffery squeezed around the grill and descended the metal stairs.
At the end of the stairs, he knelt and started to free the telescoping ladder at the bottom, but wondered if the chompers could manage to scramble up. He was pretty sure they couldn’t, but why risk it, now that he’d found someplace safe? He gauged the distance below and figured he could jump up and grab the lowest rung, used to go around the neighborhood leaping up and doing pull-ups on ‘em to impress his friends when he was younger. Better safe than sorry, so he left the ladder the way it was.
He scrambled down the rungs, the cries from the baby louder now and somehow soothing. The noise it made was a sign that it was still alive, that the woman hadn’t gotten it free. Jeffery didn’t know what he’d do to take care of the thing. Maybe it’d be his ticket onto one of the rescue helicopters he’d heard about but had never seen. If they were real, the baby would be his way on board. Jeffery could be that soldier helping a friend cradle his guts for a change. He remembered. They always took that other soldier out of the shit-storm. They saw him helping like that, squeezing a friend’s grave wound, and they treated him like some necessary bandage, some emotional tourniquet. Jeffery would save the baby and be saved himself. That became the plan.
Working down to the last rung, he dangled there for a moment, feet swinging high over the windswept garbage in the alley, the grunts from the woman changing as she spotted him there, as she caught his scent.
Jeffery let go and dropped through the air to the pavement. He landed in a crouch, moving from a safe world to one of danger, a slender bridge having been crazily crossed.
The woman staggered toward him, hands opening and closing like a crab’s pinchers. Jeffery hadn’t thought this through. He scrambled backwards, feet kicking through loose newspaper and swollen bags of trash chewed open by rats.
The lady moved like a drunk. Jeffery’s heart pounded through his sweatshirt. He thought he heard the whistle of mortars whizzing down toward his base in the middle of the night, that feeling that death was everywhere and it could suddenly choose you. But this weren’t mortars. He could see her coming. Could outrun her. He told himself there weren’t nothin’ to be afraid of.
Hurrying backwards, Jeffery made some space between him and her. One thing about the chompers was that they never stopped. Always coming forward, lips flapping, eyes unblinking, arms out. They were fuckin’ tireless. He grabbed a lid off one of the metal trashcans. The baby had fallen quiet. The damn thing had better make it, risking his neck like this. An aluminum painter’s pole rested against the pipes that ran up the side of the building, a crusted roller still on the end. He grabbed it as well and glanced up at the boy watching from the window, wondering how crazy he looked down in that alley with a lid and a stick, a shield and a sword.
The woman in the dress kept coming. Jeffery waited, a tight grip on the lid’s handle, the dented metal resting against his forearm, the pole in his other hand. She was nearly within reach when he finally spotted the wound that’d turned her. It was at the base of her neck, a nasty bite, the gurgles and moans leaking from there rather than her lips. The dried blood running down her neck and chest was like a red scarf tucked into her dress. Her crab-claws pinched for him. Jeffery swung his shield and knocked her arms aside. The woman did a pirouette, bending at the waist as she flailed for balance. He lunged forward and shoved her in the back, tried to get his feet tangled in hers, but in a drunken stagger she shuffled out of the way. He tried again, the baby watching him with wide, white eyes, and this time the bitch flopped forward into the garbage.
Jeffery was on her before she could push her way to her feet. He kept a knee at the base of her spine, easy as pie, dropped the pole and the lid and fumbled with the clasps on the pack. He should have brought a knife from the kitchen to cut the damn thing free. The woman’s arms slid back and forth through the trash, the rotten fruit rinds, the empty tin cans, like it was trying to make a snow angel. An alley angel, Jeffery thought to himself. He was giddy. Laughing. The adrenaline was melting away, the fear fading to a tingling sense of relief now that she was pinned on her belly, jaws well away from him. It reminded Jeffery of the sound of a distant mortar blast, knowing a tent down the row had caught the whistling reaper and not you. He worked one buckle loose and moved to the other. The baby’s little arms twirled in mimicry of its mother’s, little pink lips kissing the air, mother and son both hungry and grunting and crying from being so close to each other, so close to the sustenance they needed, neither of them able to reach it.
The other buckle finally came free. Jeffery yanked the straps out from under the pinned and writhing woman. He slid his knee up her spine to where the baby had been, listened to her teeth clack shut over and over, head turned to the side, eyes straining for a sight of him, eager to eat them both.
The baby cried. Jeffery took his time strapping the kid to his back, made sure the buckles were tight. He eyed the jump down the alley, thinking how heavy the kid was, if he could still make the leap. Hadn’t thought this shit through. Not at all.
The boy in the window above whistled at him. Jeffery glanced up and frowned at the kid for all his waving and shouting. Stupid fool, making all that noise, gonna summon more of ‘em.
And then Jeffery saw where the kid was pointing. He looked toward the van, cold fear clawing at his guts, as Jeffery Biggers saw that the boxed-in alley weren’t so empty anymore.
25 • Jeffery Biggers
Jeffery could still hear that baby’s wails. He could feel the little guy writhing against his back, legs kicking, lungs screaming, missing his mother. But the baby and his mother were long gone. And as he stumbled along the Hudson through cleaned bones and past skeletons jumbled and missing pieces, he flashed back to that mother pinned beneath his knee, face down in alley filth, swimming through that accumulation of garbage like she was trying to get somewhere.