by Oliver Atlas
The voices come clearly now, piping down the stairs as though I’m already in their midst.
“ . . . better than chum.”
“Shit, man. Please. What is better than chum?”
“I’m telling you, man. I don’t know. That’s what he said. Better than chum.”
“You two shut up and load this thing,” orders a voice lacking the accent of his friends. “It’s ready.”
“Ah, shit. There won’t be anything left, man. Why not try that flare gun?”
“It doesn’t have the range or the accuracy,” says the leader. “But this can’t fail. If you hurry the hell up. So hurry the hell up! If they get by us the Duchess will have our balls, got me?”
That wins silence and the sound of diligent tinkling. Bullets tinkling on stone, bullets tinkling on metal. A string of bullets. A gatling gun.
“Ninety seconds, boys. Our window is closing.”
My window is closing too. Either I dash up the stairs and shoot them dead or—
I don’t hesitate. I leap down the stairs into the main hall. Its big double doors stand solid and barred by a single thick beam. Outside, through the cracks, I can see faint shuffling shadows. Zombies. A whole street-full of them. With a groan I lift off the beam, let it drop to an end, and push it aside. I throw the doors open and whistle. The responding chorus of moans is immediate. Running back to the stairs, I strike up my own horrific moan, throwing in a few insatiable snarls.
“Shit, man! They’re in. They’re in.”
“It’s ready,” says the leader. “We’re finishing this.”
“Shit, man! We’re out! We ain’t getting eaten.”
A scuffle sounds and two shots fire.
“Bastards,” spits the leader.
I hear a brisk tinkling of bullets. Whoever is left isn’t leaving.
The zombies are already pouring into the building, heading straight for the stairwell. I’m next to the window I came in by, with no time to think. It’s out or up. Has it been sixty seconds? Maybe the balloon is already out of sight. I should get out of here. No. The last man would have started running already if Milly had escaped. I have to hurry.
One floor, two floors, three floors—as I start up the last switchback of stairs, a door above slams. I hear something drag across the floor. By the time I reach the top of the tower, the only entrance is closed and blockaded. Giving my best zombie moan, I start shoving on the door, hoping the last gunman will panic and run. Three shots fire. I blink at three holes in the door, a few inches from my face. Right. No more moaning.
Through one of the holes I see a figure settling in behind what I take to be the gatling gun. Beside him stands a nearly waist-high pile of shadow that runs up into the gun’s side. Bullets. An unbelievable amount of bullets. Beyond him, drifting smoothly across the dark sky, I see the darker silhouette of the balloon. The man throws off his hair—a wig—and swings the gun’s head up, getting a bead on his placid target.
Behind me, the stairwell is a trumpet of grisly throats and plodding feet. And these are not pretenders. Half the town must be on the stairs by now. I wonder if the old wooden structure can hold. It doesn’t matter. There’s no going back. There’s also no sense pretending to be a zombie any more. I take another peek through one of the three bullet holes and give Clementine a squeeze, just as the man begins spinning the gatling’s hand crank and spitting fire into the night sky.
The door throws off my aim and the shot grazes the man’s cranking elbow, spinning him round to face me. His face is shrouded. All I can see is the glint on his teeth, a clamped frown of agony. Agonized or not, the man has enough fight to open fire with his good hand. Thankfully, I’ve ducked down before his six slugs zing over my back. As he reloads, I ram my shoulder into the door and it cracks open a half foot. I ram it again and it cracks open more. I risk another look inside the room only to see a reloaded pistol raising toward my head. The man is smarter this time, firing only twice. Again, I duck in time, but just barely. One of the shots nicks my shoulder, only a flesh wound.
Screeching stairs cry out behind me. I spin to find a train of zombies turning the last flight, fifteen feet away. They’re four abreast and fighting one another to be the first up the next step. That gives me a few extra seconds. Staying crouched, I peak back through the open tower door. It seems empty. Good enough for me. I plunge through the crack, my careful pacifism completely suspended, Clementine firing blindly.
But the room really is empty—except for the gatling gun and the two bodies on the floor.
Motion catches my eye, heading north, just below the now-vanishing balloon. The last man is gliding through the air, down from the tower to the corner of the town wall. Flying? No. A zip line. From the beam right next to my head, I spot a razor thin shadow running out into the night. I feel at its base. Sure enough: a wire cable runs from a bolt on the wall, down into the town.
I turn and slam the door shut again behind me, sliding the tower’s broken metal bell back in front of it. It won’t do much though. The door’s hinges appear to be broken now, probably thanks to my shoulder. They won’t hold back the zombie train for more than a half a minute. I need to make prompt use of that wire.
The man lands at the wall and turns to go. But he pauses. My heart pauses too. Just as I’m taking off my belt and preparing to loop it around the wire, I hear an ominous twang. An instant later the line goes slack. He’s cut it. He’s cut it. I’m sure he’s laughing. The Duchess may have his balls thanks to my interference, but now at least the zombies will have mine in turn.
The door thuds and creaks behind me. Hungry hisses lick through its cracks. Fingernails scrabble at its wood.
Yep. I have about fifteen seconds to find a way out of Durkadee’s clock tower before my time is up.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Escaping Violent Squalor
The cable.
That’s the only hope I see. But it’s too thin, too sharp, it would slice into my hands and I’d be in a practical free-fall. I’d be better off jumping. Unless I had gloves. Socks maybe? The two bodies at my feet must at least be wearing socks, right? It would take too long to get their boots off anyway. The tower door is rocking side to side, its hinges nearly severed completely, the metal bell ready to slide aside. Festering arms grope around the door. I have about five seconds to jump and pray for the best or maybe—
The gatling gun.
I jump to it and spin it around. Thankfully, the ammo belt swivels without much resistance and—all the more thankfully—the belt doesn’t break. All right. Now it’s me, a giant machine gun, and a town of dead-heads knocking down my door. Wouldn’t Einstein and Mophead be proud? I’ve come so far in just a few hours, from agonizing over basic self-defense to the threshold of violent squalor.
I imagine the door smashing open, ghouls pouring through, my one hand on the crank, my other on the trigger, bullets spitting forth at a thousand rounds per minute, bodies piling high until I’ve constructed a new doorway out of soggy bones—
And then the door really breaks open. The last hinge gives way and it sweeps aside, the big bell with it. Time stops. I can see about a dozen grotesque faces, leering but without passion, mouths gaping like hideous baby birds, arms outstretched, ready to rip mine from their sockets.
To fire or not to fire?
That’s not really the question.
The real question is whether I shoot to kill or try another round of kneecapping—ridiculously macabre kneecapping. The zombies would live, I figure, and if Milly ever found a Cure, the population of Durkadee would all need wheelchairs to get around, but at least they’d be alive. And if I ever came to visit, I wonder if they’d treat me as a liberating hero or a maliciously sentimental bungler.
There’s only one way to find out.
The zombies reel in the doorway for just a fraction of a moment, getting their bearings. And in that span I open fire. Not at their heads. Not at their knees. But beneath their feet.
A deafening whir fi
lls the room and I can feel compressing air and heat flying from the weapon. Sawn by bullets, pushed by zombie-weight, the boards at the door’s threshold give way almost immediately. The first eight dead-heads vanish downward through disintegrating wood. Another dozen stumble forward and drop as well, grrrring and garrrring all the way. For good measure I mow back another five feet of staircase, hoping to miss anything too load-bearing.
When I finally cease fire, my ears won’t stop ringing. My head pounds. My shoulder aches. But the tower remains standing, and zombies keep piling up the stairs and plopping down—grrrrrrrrrrrr—into darkness. Wonderful. I’ve managed to create my own phantasmagoric M.C. Escher.
A bit of poetry comes to me. I can’t remember where it’s from, but it demands to be spoken—“I woke to find myself in a vernal wood, where the rightful road was more and less than should”—and soon I’m singing that same line over and over. I sing it softly, in a wandering melody set to the blaring key of the ringing in my head.
A silent burst of thanksgiving hits my lips when I inspect the Duchess’s henchmen. They’re wearing gloves after all—thick leather ones. I guess it makes sense, given that they’d planned to escape the way I hope to: by cable. And as gloves beat wearing sweaty socks as mittens, I double them up and grab the cable.
As I’m about to rappel down the tower, I spot the roadkill lump of the third man’s wig. That makes me wonder. I stop to check the other men’s heads. Real hair, genuine dreadlocks. Perhaps real Haitians.
Strange.
It’s strange that their leader would wear a wig. He didn’t try faking an accent, and even though I didn’t get a real look at him, it was clear his skin was lily white. And then there’s the dreadlocked wig I found in Dirt-face’s bag . . . . None of it makes any sense.
I rappel to the roof above the veranda and swing down, retracing my steps from there to the wall. As I leap from roof to roof, a terrible fear hits me. What if the third man found Enemy? What if he stole my horse and supplies? The spotting scope still hangs around my neck. Clementine is still at my side. Otherwise, I have nothing. No food. No GPS. No way to catch up with Milly. And if zombies pick up scents, the town of Durkadee has definitely picked up mine.
I reach the wall, leap over atop it, and my heart stops. My fears are confirmed. The apple tree stands alone, a spidery shadow. No Enemy to be seen. I risk a whistle and wait.
Nothing. I strain my ears.
Not far to the north, a twig snaps. It’s not the sound of a horse coming back for her master. It’s the sound of someone or something trying to be stealthy. Taking up stealth in reply, I creep toward the sound, mindful of the wall’s crumbly state. From inside the town, the zombies have started moaning loudly. I can’t tell if it’s the whole clock tower fiasco that has them upset, or if they know I’m here and are tracking me in their cumbersome way. As long as they stay inside the walls, it doesn’t matter. What matters, at the moment, is the source of that snapped twig.
A whisper sounds: ahead and to my left, outside the wall. I freeze, dropping to my stomach and hugging the wall, glad I wore so much black.
“He’s trapped in the tower,” I hear a familiar voice say. “He fired up the machine gun for long enough that I’m sure he’s alive. He must have clogged the door with bodies.”
“And you’re sure about the badge?” It’s a woman’s voice, thick and smoky, with a strange, sharp-edged accent.
“Those things aren’t something you can miss. What else glows black in the middle of the night?”
“Hmm . . . you don’t want to know.”
As if on cue with the woman’s ominous words, my heart stops. A shiny black tendril stretches into the corner of my vision. It writhes through the air until it spears into an apple on the tree and plucks it, before reeling back out of sight.
When the man speaks, he sounds afraid. “How do you want to deal with this?”
The woman snorts in sinister amusement. “How do you want to deal with this? It’s your mess. Now that we’ve lost the balloon, what I care about is taking this man alive. I want to—” The airs snaps with bitten fruit—“question him.”
For a minute, the two don’t speak. There is only the unpredictable crunch of the apple. I begin to think maybe they’ve spotted me, but then the man asks, “The Bokor?”
“If you think that’s really necessary. I doubt they will be pleased to leave their work in order to finish yours.”
“Then blowguns,” says the man, decisively. “Tico, get your people on the wall and have them fan out around the tower. Get close and look for a shot. And don’t force anything. We want him alive.”
A dozen feet scatter, along with their collective attempt at quiet. One set comes straight for the wall, to a tree near me. I scoot backwards, scrabbling as quickly and silently as I can, thankful that between the zombie moans and the crunch of footsteps in the woods, I have plenty of noise for cover. A minute later, when I see a someone in the tree, climbing high enough to reach the wall, I ease myself over the outside of the wall and drop into a pile of bushes. The rustle is louder than I hoped for and the figure in the tree pauses. After a few seconds, it leaps onto the wall and hurries on.
Now what?
I still can’t account for everyone. The woman with the razor accent could be waiting in the woods not far away, watching. Maybe it’s the memory of the creepy black tendril that lanced the apple, but something tells me that bumping into her would not be good.
Fifty feet away in the woods, movement catches my attention.
Lights. Reflected lights.
Eyes.
The woman? No. These are animal eyes.
A wolf?
No, not unless it’s a wolf the size of a . . . a horse.
Enemy! Could it be?
Quiet as I can manage, I creep across the gravel road, away from Durkadee. The woods are a prison of black and blacker shadows. Other than the blinking eyes, I can’t see a thing. Every step seems to take an hour, both for fear of making noise and for fear of gouging myself or falling into a pit. When I finally arrive at the eyes, I sigh with relief. My hands find a soft mane and I know I’ve found Enemy.
Or, more likely, she’s found me.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Road to Union Powder
The rest of the night is a blur. After relying on Enemy’s quiet hooves and sharp eyes to skirt around Durkadee through the forest, we head north by the road under moonlight. We pass another two dead towns. We bypass an ambush by bandits—I kiss the GPS for that one. And, of course, we’re in the Alley now, north of the John Day’s source, so we have to weave through a never-ending maze of dead-heads. Enemy is quick and wily and none of them give us much trouble. The few that do get a crack on the head with a smooth four-foot cudgel I picked up in the forest.
I spend most of the ride obsessing over the GPS screen, hoping the little device doesn’t run on fickle batteries, watching for Screamers, and praying that Milly’s still alive. She was when the balloon passed over Durkadee and I’m hoping that means something. I’m hoping that means if anyone really wants her dead, they don’t want her dead quite yet. I also hope for Kaite and Casey, for Yarely and Lancaster. Moon said he’d get Yarely and the medicine to Portland and I believe him. There was something about the man that made it hard not to. Something about his eyes, that unnerving blue. Intense, fearless . . . and menacing, if in a strangely benevolent way.
At dawn, we pass down out of the hills onto a wide, fertile plain. The Little Alps to the west rear up beside us in morning glory, their brown-gray sides lit with new day’s gold. A few miles ahead I spot Baker’s Flat, a huge plot of land gated for farming with a small town at its center. Field workers are out by the hundreds, moving irrigation pipes and mending post-and-wire rows, dark spots moving over the frost-covered land. Twenty miles beyond Baker’s Flat, just at the edge of vision at the base of a mountain, I spot what must be Union Powder. The town sparkles with reflected sun, a radiance that hardly matches its hard-as-nails, see
dy reputation. Union Powder is infamous for its lunatics, its gunfights, its hunting contests, its prostitutes, and its cavalier disregard of the zombie hordes surrounding it.
As for the flatlands between Baker’s Flat and Union Powder, well, there are two things I notice. First, the balloons. Red, black, white, gold, striped, checkered—at least fifty hot air balloons hover over the valley. They’re all at about three thousand feet and each one spits randomly with gunfire. And the gunfire leads to the second, slightly more obvious thing I notice: zombie hordes. They range across the valley by the thousands—maybe the tens of thousands. From my vantage on the foothills, they look like an infestation of ants, milling swarms that blacken the greens, golds, and whites of an otherwise beautiful morning.
Enemy rolls her head back at me, big eyes a little too wide. She wants to know when we’re going to stop and turn back.
I can smell pine, sage, wild grass, petrichor—the aroma of heat reentering the world. And I can smell the dead—the dung, blood, and rot—an acrid, cloying stench that eats away at the edges of everything good. Gunfire from the balloons crackles like a morning Fourth of July show, sprinkling over the valley’s dull din of moaning. The night’s chill is quickly vanishing. I can tell it will be another unseasonably hot day.
Enemy and I pass down into the valley, weaving through an increasing number of the living dead. Some are dawdling. Their heads snap up and swing around at us. Some are languishing in the grass. They sit up and straggle to their feet. Others are feeding. They peer over a deer corpse or quail’s nest and hiss. One, the chalky remains of an old bald woman with her throat torn out, sees us and manages a plangent whistling gargle. The noise fills my stomach with ice.