I am about to follow them back into the Little Five when I spot another figure moving on the far side of the tunnel.
“Is anyone else with you?” I hiss at the man. He says no, and I draw my weapon. I aim in the direction of the newest visitor, knowing that my officers will understand the gesture. It doesn’t take long before Pritchard grabs binoculars and identifies what I’m seeing.
“Looks like a hollow-head, Chief,” he says in his usual raspy, homespun tone.
My skin crawls under my coat. If handled calmly, a lone hollow-head is not a real threat. But we don’t handle them calmly, even after all this time. They look like human beings, but they behave like animals, and on some unfortunate occasions one or more of us will recognize a friend or loved one who was lost to us long ago.
We try to think of them as being already dead. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a complex combination of relief and remorse every time I have to shoot one. They may be empty shells, but they were once like us, and they are most certainly still alive. In the depths of our gallows humor, we sometimes wish they were truly “the living dead.” Then, at least, we could put them down without feeling like monsters.
Instead, they are hollow-heads. The pandemic that ended the world made its mark by consuming chunks of its victims’ brains. The parts that control the higher functions are little more than slop sloshing around inside the cranium. Personality is gone. Memory is gone. Gone, too, are all the cares of the world and all vestiges of civilization.
There is no cure. There was never going to be any cure. When the hollow-heads first appeared, the good oil was all but gone, and we were already out of time.
Braithwaite and one or two of the other mathematically inclined eggheads in the Little Five once did what they called a “back of the envelope” calculation and figured that ninety percent of the world’s population succumbed to the disease. The entire world’s survivors, then, were less than twice the population of pre-collapse America. Less than the population of India. Of the ten million people who lived in Georgia before, fewer than a million survived. How many are still alive today is impossible to know.
The hollow-heads are survivors, too. But they survive in a different world from ours, and they don’t do back of the envelope calculations, or remember that there once was an India, or an America, or a Georgia.
They travel in packs, most of the time, but have just enough brainpower to send off scouts in pairs and threes to search for food—wild dogs, cats, deer, the occasional goat, and people. They also seem to be able to tell the difference between the run-of-the-mill hollow-head and the shriekers, and use shriekers as scouts when they can. Most hollow-heads don’t make noise: they remain uncannily silent, even when they’re agitated. A few, though—maybe one in twenty—still know how to scream. And because they don’t care about their voices, and don’t have the usual social anxieties about looking foolish in public, when they scream, they scream. Louder than anyone I’ve ever heard.
We make sure to put shriekers down quickly, remorse and self-doubt be damned.
The hollow-head at the far end of the tunnel looks to be alone. It’s female, wearing rags that were once proper clothes, with blood-caked bare feet. For whatever reason, the infection is a jealous god, and hollow-heads don’t get sick like the rest of us. They don’t get tetanus, they don’t die of gangrene, they don’t suffer from any of the ailments that come from being bruised, scratched, stabbed, or cut. They can bleed out like anyone, and if they get gut-shot they will eventually die of starvation or blood loss, but I’ve been assured by people who claim to know that hollow-heads don’t even die from having their own shit seep into the blood stream. Frostbite still affects them, even if their limbs won’t rot, and some of our scouts have seen them chewing off their own dead arms. But even that is only helpful to people living in the north. Here in old Georgia, where the coldest day is like a Pennsylvania spring morning, it’s not enough.
This hollow-head is intact, all of its parts in the right places, which makes it more dangerous than the average. Still, I’m the one with the pistol. I wait and watch to see if it realizes I’m here, but all it does is shamble from one side of the tunnel to the other, munching on something hanging from its mouth. A rat, maybe. Because hollow-heads operate entirely on instinct, I can’t rely on this one feeling full and deciding not to bother with me. If it sees prey, it will attack, full stomach or no, and if it’s a shrieker, it will alert its pack.
Shooting a gun attracts hollow-heads only about half the time. Maybe the sound isn’t natural enough, or it reminds their hollowed-out brains of thunder. No one knows. They certainly chase after voices, loud footsteps, biodiesel engines, and just about anything else. Even so, I don’t want to waste a bullet at this distance, with this light. I inch forward, keeping as quiet as I can, trying to stay out of its field of vision. It reaches the northbound side of the tunnel and stops to rub against the concrete like a dog scratching an itch.
A few steps closer and I will be confident I can get a good shot to the chest. But that’s not enough: I need to shoot the head. If she’s a shrieker and I leave her with one good lung, she can still cry out in the few moments she has before she dies.
A perverse part of me wants to holster the pistol and use my knife, but I’m not that stupid. Being bitten by a hollow-head is almost always a death sentence. Sepsis sets in, the fever comes, and then you get six hours of feeling better than you ever have before, as every bad bug in your system is eradicated by the resurgent infection. But from there the descent is quick as your brain melts away in your skull. I’ve seen it happen more than a few times, and the worst part, without question, is being aware of your own devolution. It’s like suffering from an aggressive dementia that destroys you between breaths.
The hollow-head stops pressing against the wall and turns, its glassy eyes finding me at last. Its shambling motions give way to the instincts of a predator in sight of large prey, and it propels itself toward me, arms reaching, blood-caked hands grasping for me. It shows blackened teeth and opens its mouth to scream, but I lodge a bullet in its throat. The body collapses immediately, a gurgling sound pouring out of its neck along with the blood.
My gun arm feels heavy, as if the moral ambiguities had weight. One would think that after ten years this would get easier. And maybe it has. Just not enough. I don’t recognize the one I’ve killed, but it—she—used to belong somewhere. Her face once made her mother smile. I take a deep breath and remind myself not to think about such things.
I holster my weapon and return to the wall, fetching the stranger’s shotgun along the way. Luther chains and locks the door behind me, and my other officers come down from the upper deck. Before I turn my attention back to the visitors, I tell the guards on duty to watch for more hollow-head scouts and to clear the body from the road.
The pregnant girl is seated on the curb. The man hovers nearby while the mayor tries to coax some words out of his companion. But she says nothing. When I approach, the man steps in front of her and reaches out a hand. I don’t offer mine in return, but he is undeterred. “Thank you,” he says with apparent sincerity. “I promise, we won’t be any trouble to you.”
“I’ll have to judge that for myself,” I say, trying not to sound too skeptical. “I’ll have some questions for you, to figure out what your story is and to make sure you’re not running a con of some kind.”
Mayor Weeks turns to the man. “We will make sure you have clean clothes, food, and a bed for the night,” he says. “But,” he adds with a nod toward me, “Chief Edison will need to be satisfied. We can take your friend to our doctor now, if you’ll go with the chief to the station and answer those questions.”
Before I take the stranger to the police station, I crouch in front of the girl and look her over with as little intrusion as possible. She didn’t speak to the mayor, but maybe she’ll speak to me. “My name is Sam,” I say. “How do you feel?”
Her eyes flicker toward me, bu
t beyond that she betrays no response. She looks healthy, but that is meaningless. Preeclampsia doesn’t show its signs externally. Her demeanor is from some other trauma or the exhaustion of walking in disintegrated shoes—or both.
“Okay,” I say after a moment. “We’re going to take care of you. You’re going to be fine.”
I tell Luther to take the girl to our makeshift hospital, then gesture for her companion to follow me.
The police station was formerly a mini-precinct of the Atlanta Police Department, conveniently located near the five-point intersection. Regina Weeks’s daughter, Phoebe, is at the station when we arrive, unloading our daily delivery of bread onto a table in the lobby. Although she is four years older than my own daughter would be, I am reminded of what I’ve lost whenever I see her. She seems to have Jeannie’s eyes and chin and a laugh that pulls on my memories like marionette strings. Sometimes the good memories are worse than the bad ones. I remember the last time my daughter laughed and all the minutes between that moment and her last.
“Good morning,” Phoebe says with a bright smile. Her red-haired ponytail bounces. “I wasn’t sure when you’d be back. Do you want me to take everything to the dry cupboard?”
“Yes, thanks,” I say, unlocking the inner door to let her through. I bring our guest to my office and motion for him to take a seat across from my desk. The man’s eyes roam back toward the door. I call out to Phoebe, asking her to bring in some of the bread for our guest. “You must be hungry,” I tell him, and he confirms it with a nod.
“You’ll find that most of the people here are friendly,” I begin. “And part of my job is to make sure they can be that way and still be safe. If I don’t like the answers you give me, or you give me any reason to think you’ll be a danger to us, I won’t hesitate to send you back out beyond the wall.”
He nods again. “I understand. I know what it means to protect your boundaries. I know what’s at stake. You won’t regret helping us.”
“Let’s start with your names.”
Phoebe enters with a small sack of her mother’s bread. Phoebe is a smart young woman, but trusting, and always looking to please people. Asking her to bring the food here gives me a chance to see how the stranger will react to her.
“My name is Owen,” he answers, and when Phoebe approaches him with the food he takes it with a quick “thank you.” His eyes follow her for only a moment as she moves toward me; he focuses most of his attention on tearing pieces out of the bread and chewing rapidly. “The girl’s name is Abigail.”
“What about you, Chief Edison?” Phoebe asks me just above a whisper. She holds out the sack, and I take a piece of the warm bread, inhaling the aroma. The smell reminds me that I’m a small part of something important, something that keeps our world turning. We get most of our wheat flour from semiannual trade with one of the rural collectives south of Atlanta; they get biodiesel in exchange.
I thank Phoebe for the food, and she leaves, closing the door behind her. Her face showed eager interest in the stranger, but she has always been good about staying out of the way of important business. She must have learned that from her stepfather.
The way this man Owen referred to the young woman tells me a lot about their relationship. “So you aren’t related to her,” I say. “And it’s not your child she’s carrying. But you do know her. She’s not just someone you picked up on the way.”
Owen’s lack of surprise at my conclusion is also telling. “We’ve been coming south on 400 and 85 for—oh, God, it must be a week now, at least. You know, I used to be—well, it doesn’t matter. We came from Dahlonega.”
Dahlonega is seventy miles away, a two day walk from the Little Five under good conditions. Getting through Alpharetta, Roswell, and then most of the metro Atlanta area couldn’t have been easy. They would only have come this far south, into this more treacherous environment, if they had no other option.
When Owen doesn’t continue, I prod him a little more. “Why did you leave? Was it overrun?”
“No, nothing like that,” he says, finishing off his meal. “I had this idea that we could get down to Macon, where my folks lived. They were still there last I heard, some seven years ago. Abigail could have her baby there and stay a while, and then go where she needed to go after that. But it was bad enough getting here. We almost got caught a few times, and we’ve been having trouble finding food.”
“Most of the shops were stripped bare years ago,” I say, filling in the blanks. Owen and Abigail weren’t well prepared for the journey. “It was just the two of you?”
“Just us.”
“Why?” I ask.
“I—” he starts, looking to the windows. “We had to leave. It’s not a good place up there, anymore. Maybe it never was.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question. From all you’re telling me, you could be just two people who ran away from home. But you’re not a kid, and if she’s not your girlfriend and that’s not your baby, why are you with her?”
Owen doesn’t answer, so I press on. “Unless it affects us here, I don’t really care why you left. But I need to know if there are people who are going to come looking for you. And I need to know if you’re the sort of man who creates trouble and then leaves before he gets caught.”
“No,” he says before I can take a breath. “I swear, it wasn’t anything like that. And no one is going to come after us.” Owen pauses to look directly at me. “Abigail is a friend. I promised her that she would be safe. Her baby would be safe. If you need me to go, I will. I can go on to Macon like I planned. But please don’t kick her out. She needs—she just needs one good thing.”
It’s hard to reject a plea like that in this world. Even so, I wish I had old world police resources at my fingertips. I might not have been able to check Owen’s story, such as it is, but I would have had access to warrants and BOLOs. In the old world I’d have a telephone; I could call the girl’s parents and be reasonably sure they were still alive. But even lacking all that, I still have my instincts. They tell me that Owen is not a pedophile, unless he is very good at hiding it or has a very specific type: he didn’t take a second look at Phoebe when she delivered the food. And he isn’t trying to justify taking the girl away from her home by giving me some long, convoluted story intended to obfuscate the truth. I’d expect that from someone with secrets to hide.
“What about her family? They won’t come looking for her?”
“I don’t know where they are. She hasn’t told me anything about her parents. For all I know—”
I interrupt him with a raised hand. “They’re not back in Dahlonega?”
“What? There? No. Of course not. For all I know, they’re dead. She hasn’t seen them in years.” I let Owen stew in the silence that follows, until he explains, “Abigail came to us about five years ago. A caravan of refugees, I was told at the time.”
But he doesn’t go any further. “Look,” he says at last, “it’s not my place to tell you most of this. You should ask her. She’s not a bad kid. It’s just hard for her to trust anyone else. She’ll talk to you when she feels safe.”
Owen’s expression clouds, and I don’t think I’ll get much more information out of him now. Perhaps in a day or two he will be less reticent, or I will learn the whole of the truth from his friend. Pushing too hard right now will only agitate him and give him reason to do something stupid that we might regret, like trying to get back out through the tunnel wall. “We have a few empty apartments that we’re using for storage,” I say. “I’ll see if we can’t get some of that moved out, some furniture put in, to give you and Abigail a place to stay. But for now, the best I can offer is the cell here at the station. Which isn’t as bad as it sounds, really. I’ll try to make it comfortable.”
“I understand.” Owen rises when I do and shakes my hand. “I promise we won’t be any trouble. Thank you. Is it all right if I see Abigail?”
There has not been a real, board certified doctor
in the Little Five for almost eight years—not since Ronnie Colbart was bitten on the leg by a hollow-head and succumbed two days later. We have two former nursing students and a vet technician, as well as a woman who was two years into a premed degree at Emory before the collapse. There isn’t much that a doctor could do for us that this staff of four cannot, anyway. Antibiotics and antivirals are no longer effective to control the diseases that matter, and they’ve never done anything against the barbarian at the gate.
A few years ago, Marilyn Trainor, the former premed student, figured out that everyone—whole and hollow-head alike—has already been infected. At the start the disease was passed by simple touch or through the air. Most of the original victims died; a few became hollow-heads. This overpowered what little remained of the world’s infrastructure. Those of us who didn’t get sick assumed we’d never contracted the disease. It turns out, though, that we’re just as infected as the dead were.
Marilyn speculated that the hollow-head disease is a virus that encapsulates in resistant hosts, remaining dormant until it is reawakened by high fevers from some other source. This is why hollow-head bites are so dangerous, even though they don’t transmit the virus itself. And it is why we must be obsessively wary of pneumonia and influenza. Sepsis from hollow-head bites almost always leads to full-blown infection. Pneumonia has a “mortality” rate of around seventy percent, and we lost almost thirty people in the first three years from standard cases of winter flu. One of them was my daughter.
Our hospital, if it can be called that, is a converted restaurant on the northbound side of Moreland, across from the old BP gas station where Vargas and Braithwaite store their biodiesel. The staff of four live in apartments above and around the hospital, making house calls and coming up with whatever rudimentary medical concoctions they can put together with their limited resources.
Marilyn and one of the nurses, William Echevarria, are with Abigail when I arrive with Owen. Adelaide Luther is seated by the door, watching them. The girl is lying on her side on a long table, drinking watered-down tomato juice through a straw. Her clothes have been changed, the old ones left in a pile by the door. The shoes have all but fallen apart. The girl’s bare feet are dirty and blistered from the road. The effort it must have taken for her to keep one foot in front of the other all the way from Dahlonega is astounding.
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