Crunch, swoosh, crunch, swoosh. The sound carried across the night air as her eyes scouted for its source under the shards of moonlight filtering down through the treetops.
There. Up ahead to the right of the path. The bramble bushes trembled as a slumped figure emerged, ignoring the sharp thorns that tore at its skin and ragged clothing.
Gesturing to her friends to follow, she scanned for any more orcs before leaping to her feet and charging toward the lone figure. It turned toward the sound of her footsteps and moaned; an unearthly death rattle that echoed through the trees, sending a shiver down Rachael’s spine despite the countless times she’d heard it.
She could see in dim light that this particular orc was in lousy shape—it looked like it had spent some time submerged in water. Mottled skin peeling away from its bloated face. Moss growing in an otherwise empty eye socket. Fingers swollen and splitting open at the tips.
It reached for her and she ducked easily under one decaying hand, spinning around the orc to position herself behind it, driving her dagger directly into the base of the skull with an awful crunch. It crumpled to the ground, the stench washing over Rachael and her group.
“Ugh! That one was ripe.” Alice grimaced, dark hair falling around her face as she covered her mouth and nose with one arm.
The dagger made a squelching sound as she pulled it out of the orc’s skull. Rachael wiped the viscous black blood on a handful of leaves and tucked it back into her scabbard. “At least it was only one,” she said, trying to sound reassuring.
She felt less than reassured, however. It had been three days since they’d seen a living human other than the small scouting group that had splintered off from their original group of travelers, and three weeks since they’d seen anyone outside of that. No survivors, no towns hidden away from the dead. Nothing, except for orcs.
It felt like they were alone in the world.
The five took to the path again, moving quietly and cautiously through the trees, ready for attack, ready for any trap that might spring shut on them.
Rachael was still worried they weren’t ready, but she knew that if they waited much longer they ran the risk of being unprepared for winter, so she’d set a date and pushed for preparations. Some of their group were afraid to leave the safety of the hospital, and others were unable to make the long trip, so the number that set out from their temporary home was lower than Rachael had wanted. But she would never force someone to make the journey. She knew it was a risk, even if she was optimistic of the endeavor.
Of her small team, the two fittest and most promising were Claudia and Jason. He was in his early thirties, with skin the color of milk chocolate and brown eyes flecked with bits of gold. Claudia, ten years younger, had lighter skin and green eyes. She looked like a fashion model, and he looked like an accountant, but they moved well and could fight.
***
After two weeks of slow and strenuous travel, they’d found a school with fences and walls intact, and very few orcs in the immediate vicinity. Everyone was exhausted, so Brett had suggested they take up camp for a few days, give people a chance to rest. Despite her own desire to keep moving, Rachael had agreed, dealing with her own restlessness by deciding to scout the surrounding area for supplies and survivors. Alice and three others had volunteered to go with her.
After two days of cautious exploration, they’d found only meager supplies and there were no signs of survivors anywhere. It was disconcerting, and Rachael decided to give them one more night of searching before heading back to their group and declaring this area an orc zone.
Sunrise breached the horizon as the five broke through the edge of the forest. They paused for a moment to appreciate the pure light reflecting off a stream that wound its way between scattered suburban-style homes and spacious farmland. At first glance it was if nothing bad had ever happened here. But, as they took a closer look, certain details became obvious: shattered windows, doors hanging on broken hinges, garbage scattered along the ground, and the slow movement of a half dozen or so orcs shambling through the streets, looking for prey.
“Let’s go around,” suggested Claudia.
Rachael nodded. There were not likely survivors here and the odds of supplies still remaining in the gutted buildings were too low to risk drawing out more orcs.
As they turned away from the dead town below, a sudden movement out of the corner of her eye caught Rachael’s attention even as Alice called her name in a low, urgent voice. Rachael spun, dagger already in hand as something pushed its way through the bushes on either side of a deer path ahead in the tree line. The others took out their weapons swiftly and silently, ready for anything.
Well, almost anything.
None of them were prepared for the little boy that emerged. He looked seven or eight, tops. Hair combed and slicked nicely to the side, dressed in country club best, looking as if he had wandered away from a family luncheon in the World Before. His light green button-down shirt was well kept, no holes or patches other than a small rip in one sleeve that could have come from wandering in the woods. Even his shoes were in good shape.
For a brief moment Rachael thought she might be dreaming. His cheeks were rosy and clean and round, not gaunt like the children back at the hospital. This child didn’t know hardship. Didn’t have to fight for survival. This was not a child from the end of the world.
“Hold,” Rachael said softly to her team, dropping her dagger to her side and quickly slipping it back into the sheath. She stepped forward with a non-threatening posture, hands out front and low, the way you’d approach a strange dog. The boy saw them and nearly bolted, but froze when Rachael spoke.
“Hey there.”
He looked at her warily, eyes red and swollen from crying.
“I’m Rachael.” She spoke in a calm and soothing voice. “What’s your name?” She walked a few steps closer, keeping her eyes and ears open for a possible ambush. The boy blinked through his tears.
“T-T-Tommy,” he stammered.
She smiled at him, trying to put him at ease, taking a few more steps forward until she was directly in front of him. Crouching down on one knee so she and the boy were face to face, Rachael put on her best friendly this-is-not-the-apocalypse smile. “Where’s your family, Tommy?”
Sniffling, he glanced back at Alice and the other three before finally settling his gaze on Rachael. It suddenly occurred to her what a sight they must be—her in jeans, T-shirt, and Wonder Woman armor mixed and matched with Sif and Valkyrie and Asgardian armor pieces, and her fellow travelers wearing a mix of costumes, armor, and well-worn everyday clothes.
“Do you know the Apple Man?”
Not the answer she’d expected. Rachael glanced back over her shoulder at her friends. They looked at one another, confusion registering on their faces. Alice shrugged and Rachael turned back to the boy.
“I’m sorry, Tommy. My friends and I don’t know him. But maybe we can help you find him. Who is the Apple Man?”
“The Apple Man is my friend,” Tommy answered, “but he went out where the Bad Things are and hasn’t come back. The Apple Man used to work for my daddy but then he left. I wanted to go find him, but no one would let me. They said it was bad out there, and that the B-B-Bad Things would get me, but I was worried about him so I climbed the wall and went looking for him. But then there were s-s-scary sounds and I ran and now I can’t find my way home.” His sniffling, which had started to subside, threatened to turn into tears again. Hoping to forestall it, Rachael quickly pulled a bandana out of the side pouch of her backpack, offering it to the boy. He stared at it, lower lip quivering.
Alice stepped forward, setting her sword down as she knelt next to Rachael. Taking the bandana, she gently wiped Tommy’s face, mopping the tears away before pressing the cloth into his hand. “Where’s home, Tommy?” she prompted. “We can help you get home to your family and look for the Apple Man on our way there. Would you like that?”
Tommy looked from Rachael’s Wonder
Woman armor, to Alice’s Superman shirt, then up at their faces.
“Happytown,” he replied, wiping his nose on the bandana and rubbing his eyes on his shirt sleeve. “They’re in Happytown.”
— 3 —
DAHLIA AND THE PACK
“If he’s just some old guy,” said Trash, the second oldest of their pack, “why are you afraid of him?”
Neeko, the pack’s scout, looked up from the careful work he was doing wrapping bandages around the head of one of the other scouts. Neeko wore bandages, too. Both of them were covered with small bruises that were as intense as blueberries growing ripe on their skin.
Trash, who was one of the best fighters in the pack, recognized the bruises as the marks from single-knuckle punches. Full fists, edge-hands, Y-hands and palms left different kinds of marks. Trash had fought in semi-pro mixed martial arts for years before the outbreak. He’d taken and given enough injuries to be able to read them. Both Neeko and the other scout looked like they’d been worked over by club bouncers.
“You saying he did that?” he demanded.
Neeko tied the bandage, patted his friend’s shoulder and blew out his cheeks, nodding as he did so. “He kicked our asses and didn’t work up much of a sweat doing it, man.”
“One old guy?”
“Yeah.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know. Pretty old. Had white hair and a white beard and all.”
“You’re telling me you got your asses handed to you by Santa Claus?”
Neeko rose from the cinderblock he’d been using as a seat and came over to the card table where Trash was cleaning and loading pistols. He didn’t sit.
“He didn’t have elves, didn’t say ‘ho-fucking-ho,’ and the only thing he gave us was a beating,” he said. “Old fucker could have killed us, but he didn’t.”
“He chased you off?”
“He let us go.”
“Let you go? Meaning, what? He couldn’t beat you and chased you with his walker, so you ran off?”
“He could have killed us if he wanted,” said Neeko. “We snuck up on him, and you know how quiet I am. He was sitting in a beach chair, hat down over his face. Looked like he was sleeping. And even if he was awake I was ghosting my way past him and keeping like a hundred feet between us. Bushes and some stacked boxes and all. He had this pimped out motor home. Really sweet, and in great condition. Reinforced, too. And there was one of those storage pod trailers hooked up in back. It was open, though, and he had his stuff all around his campsite. I think he was doing some kind of inventory on his shit.”
Trash leaned his forearms on the table, interested now. “What kind of shit?”
“Boxes of food. Bottles of water. Medical stuff. All kinds of shit.”
“How much?”
“More than we could use in, like, six months. A fuck lot more than we have,” said Neeko. “That’s why we followed him. Smelled cooking and there he is with a campfire and like six rabbits on a gas grill. Some potatoes and corn, too. God, the smells were driving me crazy.”
“Yeah? So what did you do?”
Neeko’s eyes slid away for a moment. “Two of us, and we had the edge. We both had our hatchets and all.”
Trash gave him a skeptical look. “Why didn’t you just kill the old fucker and take all that shit, man? What the actual fuck?”
“I, um,” began Neeko, licking his lips. “I wanted to scare him. Maybe rough him up some and take most of his stuff. Take the mobile home, too. Wanted to roll up here behind the wheel of that sweet ride. Guess I wanted to see the look on everyone’s faces.”
Trash laughed. “But you came limping your ass in here like a pussy. Both of you.”
“You weren’t there, man. You didn’t see what happened.”
“So . . . stop dicking around. What did happen?”
Neeko cleared his throat. “We were coming up on him from behind, each of us with our choppers out, ready for anything, and then without moving his hat or moving a muscle, he said, ‘You’re doing this wrong.’”
“What?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Fucker told you you’re doing it wrong?” Trash laughed a big donkey bray, his blond dreads dancing as his big shoulders shook. “What else he say?”
“He pointed to a stack of cans and bottles over by a tree and said we could take that and go. His gift. That’s what he called it. He said to take it and go. But if we tried anything we wouldn’t be allowed to take anything.”
“What . . . ?”
“Hand to god.”
“What’d you do?”
Neeko looked down at his bandaged hands. “Andy rushed him,” he said, referring to the other scout. “I guess I did, too, because Andy did.”
“And . . . ?”
“And I don’t know. It was all so fast. The old guy was out of the chair and was hitting us and then he took our hatchets and . . . and . . . ” He stopped and shook his head. “It was too fast, man. Before I knew what was going on we were in the woods, in a little creek. Both of us pretty banged up. The old guy was standing on the edge of the bank with our hatchets and I thought that was it, I thought we were dead as shit, but then he knelt down and chunked the blades into the mud and walked away.”
“He just up and left? Didn’t say shit?”
“Well . . . ” said Neeko, “he said something weird. He said something about we got one pass because we’re kids. Then he said that if we come back, we need to do it with manners. We need to ask nicely and shit. He said that we had to act like people and not animals or we’re not worth saving. Something like that. I don’t remember the actual words.”
Trash stood up. At seventeen he was the third oldest, but easily the biggest, with massive shoulders and arms packed with ropey muscles. His skin had a permanent peeling sunburn that never seemed able to become a tan even after all these months running through the woods and farmlands to escape the biters. Like all the fighters in the pack, he wore jeans with a flexible weave, a camo tank top and a vest with lots of pockets, as well as a belt from which hung a holstered Glock and a big hunting knife. When the pack had raided a Wal-Mart, their leader, Dahlia, had decided that everyone needed a uniform. That rig for the fighters, full camo for the scouts, all black for the security, and jeans and T-shirts for everyone else. Dahlia liked order, and Trash was cool with that.
He towered over Neeko, who was fourteen, scrawny. “Listen, fuckface,” he said, “you’re going to tell all this shit to Dahlia and then you’re going to take us all to this old asshole’s camp. I’m going to personally shove your hatchet up his ass and break off the handle.”
Neeko nodded quickly, forcing a smile, but Trash saw a look in his eyes. Equal parts fear and doubt. That bothered Trash, but it also made him really fucking mad.
— 4 —
THE SOLDIER AND THE DOG
Baskerville and I hunted the woods and streets and fields of a dying world. He was bigger now, more muscular, because I’d spent some days making armor for him. Dogs couldn’t become zombies, as far as I knew, but they could be killed. So I made him a suit of leather armor fitted out with studs and spikes and blades. He didn’t have the full rig on all the time, but enough of it so that he added extra mass to support it. He even had a helmet.
At first I thought I was going to have to muzzle him so that he didn’t bite any of the dead. If he did that then his mouth would be a danger for me to be anywhere near. But Baskerville had some kind of instinctual abhorrence to dead flesh. He wouldn’t bite any of it, and I later found out that if we came upon someone who’d been bitten but wasn’t presenting with symptoms, the dog knew it. He’d growl and stay at a distance. That saved my ass a lot of times.
We hadn’t yet gone west to Nevada. I knew I’d get around to it, but I was stalling. We’d been back to my uncle’s farm a dozen times, trying to pick up the scent of Junie or the baby. Or anything. But Baskerville only sat and howled. I did that sometimes, too.
There were travelers,
refugees, wanderers out in the storm. We met a bunch of those. Most were deep inside a bubble of their own PTSD. Gone mad or gone feral, or just . . . gone. Some were cool, though. I met a guy named Billy Trout, a reporter from Stebbins, the little town where the plague started. He was stuck with a bunch of school buses that had been killed by the EMPS. The buses were filled with kids, and Trout was taking care of them while waiting for his girlfriend, a local cop named Dez Fox, to find him. Her bus had gotten separated from a convoy before the power was blown out. The plan had been to take the kids to the post-apocalyptic version of the Promised Land, Asheville. Rumors were that people had made a successful stand there and were trying to build something. A community.
I helped Trout fortify his place and then moved on.
Then I ran into Dez Fox, who was in real trouble. She was something. A fiery redneck blonde badass who took no prisoners and cut no one any slack. I liked her in about the same way you can like a pit bull. We fell in together because she was protecting her bus of kids against a bunch of assholes who—and I’m not joking here—called themselves the NKK, the Nu Klux Klan. No, it doesn’t make any sense no matter hard you stare at it.
They were exactly what you’d expect them to be, and there were a whole lot of the bastards. They were ranging through the woods and farms, gathering up women and children. Rape and every other kind of vile abuse you can imagine. Women and kids.
Naturally Dez and I took some umbrage at this and sternly disabused them of the notion that they had permission to act like total parasites. We had some help from a young woman, early twenties, who was dressed like some kind of Viking or Asgardian or something. A cosplayer who used to do the comic convention circuit and after the dead rose decided to embrace the characters she played. A little crazy, sure, but tough as fuck. The three of us, and my armored mutt, stood up to the whole NKK army.
We walked away. They did not.
Still of Night Page 11
