“What –?”
Movement stole his voice. He looked down.
There were several bodies on the road. Several people who had been peeled apart and half-devoured, like appetizers when the main course suddenly rolls out earlier than expected.
He had barely noticed them – they were just part of the landscape, as normal now as a gray Toyota might have been a week ago.
Ken could smell death on the corpses, the stink of putrefaction seeping out of pores and oozing out of shattered stumps; leaking out of open mouths that allowed gas to escape from methane-bloated stomach cavities. A few of the bodies looked as though they had actually burst, ripped apart from neck to crotch.
All were dead.
All were well into decomposition.
And all were moving.
33
THIS HAD HAPPENED BEFORE. Stuck in a plane with nothing but the dead, and the dead had risen up to attack Ken and his friends. That was when they lost one more of their number. That was when Dorcas stayed behind to give them a few critical seconds to escape.
Christopher had done the same; an action that now seemed less insane generosity and more insane penitence. Whether he had a hand in his baby’s death or not, Christopher believed himself guilty. And while evil men confronted by true guilt will spend the rest of their days proclaiming their innocence to the tops of the mountains, so good men faced with guilt they did nothing to earn will accept a sin in solemn silence and seek out every opportunity to make it right.
And when they couldn’t fix the underlying cause of the guilt, as Christopher could not, they would all-too-often seek penitence and absolution in insane offerings of self-sacrifice. They did not offer riches or indulgences, but rather sold their own safety, gave their own futures as ransom for the blame they had never earned but carried nonetheless.
Ken hadn’t been there for the things Christopher had – or hadn’t – done to save his child. But looking at him now he had no doubt that if anyone was wronged, it was the young man. He had been lied to, betrayed by his own family when he most needed them. His daughter stolen away. Dead – he thought – in the collapse that followed the Change.
So Christopher had stayed behind, had been willing to pay the ultimate price. Torn apart at the hands of the things that had once been dead and now moved again.
Movies that Ken had seen featured two kinds of zombies: the ones that were alive, if only on a technical level, and the ones who were the reanimated flesh of the dead. The former were humans infected by virus or voodoo, made into killers by nature or as an effect of human meddling. The latter were things that were brought to life by forces outside of human understanding.
The movies had gotten it wrong. And right.
Zombies were living humans infected with some strange disease. They came after you, to bite you and make of you the very thing that you most feared: a part of the protean organism that flowed across the face of the earth, a thing with billions of cells that had each once been autonomous creatures.
Zombies were also the dead brought to life. As the things nearby demonstrated all too clearly.
A man who ended below the knees was sitting up, ruined face looking back and forth as he maneuvered into a mockery of normal mobility.
A woman who had been torn in two via a gash that ran from her right clavicle down to her left hip bone was rolling ineffectively, trying to use her head and her right arm as anchors to get into place. To stand, to move.
A man who had his throat torn away, pulled out so completely that the gray-white of his spine could be seen in the back of the mangled mess, was slowly getting to his feet.
They were all breathing – or at least all pushing air in and out of their mouths – in time.
“We’ve gotta get outta here,” said The Redhead. She pointed at Liz and Hope, who were also breathing in time with the zombies. “Before they call ‘em down on us.”
Here was where the movies had gotten it wrong: it wasn’t a choice between live and undead. Zombies were real, and there were both.
Live infected...
... and undead cursed to live again.
Ken wondered for a moment how it was that the stories had come to life, how it was that something so blatantly impossible had taken a firm grip on reality and thrust itself into that once-closed system.
He wondered how the stories had started in the first place. He remembered a line from the animated version of Pinocchio: “All this has happened before, and it will all happen again.”
Was this not the first time the zombies had taken form in their world?
He also wondered how his daughters had a part in it. How they apparently controlled a piece of it.
As if irritated to be the subject of his thoughts, Liz and Hope stopped breathing.
So did the undead. The ones that could move enough to do so turned to orient on Ken and the other survivors.
“Run,” whispered The Redhead.
Then she said it again. Frighteningly loud in the sudden stillness.
“RUN!”
34
THE ZOMBIES THAT HAD their genesis in death were slower than those born of bite wounds. Not much, but some.
Still, they were fast. Faster than a group of exhausted, crippled survivors.
Ken looked at Hope. She bounced in Buck’s arms. Limp, loose... and somehow connected to the maimed things that pulled themselves closer, closer.
Is she doing this?
Does she know?
Is she one of them?
It was this last that was most frightening. What if his daughter was no longer his daughter? What if she was one of the zombies, albeit one that was wearing a better mask of flesh, a more lifelike camouflage than the others?
What would he do then?
What should he do?
What could he do?
Buck was whispering something, wheezing the words through gritted teeth as he ran, holding onto Hope with one arm, pulling Ken with the other. “No Hope no Hope no Hope no Hope no....”
Ken supposed he could have been declaring his lack of hope, lowercase “h,” but he thought the big man was asking the little girl to stop what she was doing. To let the mangled cadavers rising around them lay down and resume their long sleep.
Aaron was pulling Christopher along. A moment later The Redhead joined them, grabbing Christopher’s other arm and throwing it over her shoulder. She had one of her machetes in her free hand, and swung it at a zombie as she helped Christopher lean on her.
A hand fell to the ground. Pussing over with the yellow ooze. It lay twitching like an upended turtle. Not dead – or not any deader than the rest of the zombie. The creature whose hand she had lopped off barely paused before grabbing at The Redhead with his remaining hand.
She didn’t pause either. Reversed grip on her machete. Plunged it into his open mouth. The dead zombie made no sound – the dead ones looked like they were screaming, but they never vocalized, not ever – but the viscous pink sludge that apparently kept shelter in their skulls erupted from the wound. The zombie went crazy. It held up its hands to the sky as though praying to a god only it could see. Its feet danced a quick rat-ta-tap on the pavement, then it fell to earth and started beating its face against the blacktop.
More of the pink goo splashed. Even more. The crunch-crack-thock of meat and bone shearing away made Ken’s stomach twist. Maggie gagged, a hrrrrk sound that didn’t help his own intestinal distress much. He tasted acid at the back of his throat.
Another zombie shuffled on two legs that ended unevenly above the ankles. It moved past the one that was beating its own head to a nub on the blacktop. The headless one reached out and attacked its fellow. The two fell into a melee as violent as any Ken had yet seen.
He looked away.
The other undead creatures were closing.
Five or so behind.
Another half dozen ahead.
Six more turning a corner nearby.
They were all too fast.
�
�What now?” said Aaron. Ken didn’t know why the cowboy – or anyone else – kept asking him that question.
He suddenly wanted to lay down and die. It wasn’t the sound of the zombies, either. He simply couldn’t stand the thought of going on like this forever.
He’d lost his son, and it looked like he was losing his daughters as well.
Just sit down and let it happen, man.
The ten-plus zombies ahead were not going to be easy to get by.
“What now?” Aaron repeated.
Sally growled, as though adding his own two cents to the moment. Adding encouragement, but also requiring answers.
Ken didn’t know what to say.
Just sit down.
Just let it happen.
The thoughts were not, sadly, the product of the psychic attack that had been coming faster and harder since the Change. They were his. He recognized his own inner voice, though the words were new. He had never thought of himself as a quitter, and was dismayed to find how comfortable the thoughts were now. They fit as tightly and comfortably as old shoes, friends long-buried in the detritus of his mind but made familiar and all-too-friendly by the present circumstances.
And the reason for his despair was obvious. It wasn’t the imminent doom of yet another horde. Nor was it the fact that even the dead were apparently a threat as long as his daughters were present.
No, it was his daughters themselves. It was the fact that he had lost Derek; had invested the rest of his hopes for the future in the little girls that hung limp beside him. And more and more he was realizing – was being forced to realize – that he might be hoping for something impossible.
What good to hope for your children if they have been taken, whether their bodies remain or not?
Then a flash of memory came. Not long memory, not a memory of before the Change, a time that was already receding into ghostly unreality. This was a time only a few short hours before.
He remembered Hope saying, “We’ve been here for seven poops!”
He remembered Liz curled up and asleep against the snow leopard. Her chubby fist bound up in the thick fur of the cat, like any baby with the world’s largest plush toy.
The moment saved him. The memories threw up a shield of truth that warded off the despair that had invaded his mind. Maybe only for a day or even a moment. But he picked up the pace again.
So maybe the girls were a part of this.
But this – whatever it was – wasn’t all they were.
They were still his daughters. His little girls. He had to believe that. To believe otherwise would be to give up give in die die die.
Ken refused.
He forced himself to stand a bit taller. To bear more of his own weight instead of leaning on others. The rest of the survivors looked to him. He didn’t know why – Aaron would have been a more logical choice to lead, and even Buck seemed to have become a strong person bent on saving the girls.
But the others looked to him.
He wouldn’t be the first to fall.
35
THE THING ABOUT RESOLVE is that it doesn’t matter until it is tested. Until it buts up against the challenge that defines it, it has no intrinsic worth and is merely false hope.
Ken felt that reality acutely as he limped forward with the rest of his friends and family – one and the same, really.
Doom was behind, death ahead. And it was literal death: embodied in the moving forms of people that had risen up from rot and walking on bones and flesh that had ceased metabolizing days ago.
Liz’s hand twitched. Sally was there, the big cat growling deep in his throat as he walked beside Maggie. It looked like Maggie would have to fall, have to trip over the cat. But Sally was always just out of the way, always just beyond tripping range.
Ken realized that, all abreast and synchronized as they were, the survivors were almost walking like the zombies. Moving as one, each aware of the other and coordinating their movements to mesh with the others’.
There was something to that. Something important.
Liz’s limp hand drifted across Sally’s back.
One of the things behind them stumbled. Coincidence? Ken didn’t know, and he didn’t have any way to find out. Not now.
Not with a tight knot of undead ahead, stretching out into an uneven line that seemed random until you looked and saw they were within arm’s reach of one another. Nothing could get through without being grabbed. Probably by two or more of the things.
The Redhead reached into her pocket and withdrew her walkie-talkie. She flicked a switch. Murmured, “Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast.”
The return voice was too low to hear. Ken hoped whoever was on the other end of the radio had good news, but The Redhead’s expression clouded.
Not good news.
No such thing as good news anymore.
36
KEN FELT HIMSELF DRAWN to one side. Aaron was pulling the group toward a storefront whose window had been broken out. A mannequin wearing a gray dress and a blood-spattered scarf leaned through the window like a drunk who had simply passed out after a particularly intense bender. Aaron’s intent was obvious: get inside, try to find a way through, to escape through the back.
Failing that, it was as good a place for a last stand as any.
The group stumbled with him for a few steps, then Ken felt a competing pull. Not toward the store, but forward again. Toward the zombies that stood before them.
“What are you doin’?” snapped Aaron.
The Redhead answered. “My best to save your ass, cowboy.”
Aaron growled, as though he didn’t like being called a cowboy. Or maybe he didn’t mind it, but didn’t think she had earned the privilege. “You gonna run us straight toward –“
The things hissed. It was the first sound that Ken had heard the undead zombies make. Not a vocalization in the strictest sense, but a sound that brought to mind the rattle of a cornered diamondback.
At the same time, he heard a louder noise. The sound of an engine. A diesel thrum that was louder than he would have expected to hear on Boise’s streets even before the Change. It wasn’t just the loudness of it, either, it was the choppiness of it. It had the rickety crick-crack of an engine that was used not for mileage but for hauling. Something built for more than its ability to get from point A to point B.
The rhythmic clock-tock-crick-crack of the diesel engine got louder. Closer.
The zombies remained silent. But also got closer.
Ken wondered which one would reach them first.
37
THE ENGINE ARRIVED. And with it, thirty-foot blades with edges keen enough to slice a ream of paper cleanly in two.
Another curiosity of Boise, but one that Ken had always loved: it was the urban extension of a strictly agrarian community. As such, the buildings and businesses were placed around and among acres of open farmland. It wasn’t unusual for a dentist to have fifty acres of corn as his only neighboring business, or for a Wal-Mart to back up to a working ranch, the smell of livestock drifting over to greet people as they exited with inexpensive items that were “Made in America” even if they were assembled somewhere in Thailand.
Boise was a city of contradictions. Hungering to be taken seriously as a urban center, but unwilling to give up its roots as a farming community. It had a hockey team, an amphitheater for concerts. It also had a large number of kids who took a week or two off school every year to help with the crops.
It had Best Buy for electronics beside Cabella’s where you could buy all your hunting gear.
It had new megaplex theaters alongside old-fashioned places that still showed black and white films.
It had streets where you could see people driving to work in a Lexus or a Honda tricked out to impress, or a Ford or a Jeep tricked out to work.
And, apparently, you could also see people driving John Deere tractor combine harvesters down the middle of the roads.
38
AT NEARLY TWENTY FEET
tall and thirty feet wide at its widest point, the great green beast was almost as much of a monster as the things in front of Ken and the other survivors.
Almost.
And, in some ways, more so.
It hove into view, managing to look both ponderous and slow and at the same time faster than Ken would have believed. Bright green, the only swatches of color the yellow John Deere symbol on sides and front and a red fire extinguisher clamped to the side of the huge cab.
John wasn’t a farmer any more than he was a hunter. But you couldn’t grow up in a place like Boise without at least knowing a few basics. So he knew that this was a combine harvester that could be used to harvest a variety of grains. He also knew that the long thing on the front that looked like a bingo cage lined with Ginsu knives was the thresher, and it epitomized “things you don’t want to walk in front of.”
The driver was barely visible through the glare that splashed sunlight across the front of the cab. Even at this distance Ken could tell he was huge, a body built like that of a pro wrestler crammed on the bench seat of the thresher. It looked likely that he had never actually gotten into the machine, but rather had been born on the seat and grown to giant manhood right there; that was the only way Ken could fathom him getting inside.
He was also dressed like The Redhead, with what looked like body armor and a gas mask swinging from his tree-trunk of a neck. His skin was black. Not the light brown of so many people that Ken and his friends referred to as “black” or even “African American” if they were still a few years behind the ever-shifting curve of PC designations, but so deep and dark it was almost the color of night.
He was smiling. It was not the carefree smile that Christopher so often wore – or had worn before he attacked his own child in this strangest of wars. No, it was the tight grin of a man about to kill. A smile that Ken had never really seen – not even on Aaron, who kept his emotions under tightest control – but which he recognized instantly. And which he feared.
The Complete Colony Saga [Books 1-7] Page 47