by Joe McKinney
They watched me, alarmed because they didn’t know me but intrigued because I didn’t look like they did. My clothes were still fresh. My skin wasn’t sun-burnt. I wasn’t starving. For a long, uncomfortable moment, we stared at one another, nobody speaking, nobody moving.
Then a woman separated from the crowd and walked toward me. She almost looked like a zombie herself, emaciated, filthy, face sunken and haunted-looking.
Only her eyes were different. They were bright, full of life.
And, when she got closer, I could see they were curious, even friendly. The warmth there that reassured me.
“What in the world were you doing out in the rain?” she asked.
“I....” It was hard to speak, I was trembling so badly.
“Didn’t you see the clouds forming?”
I shook my head.
“You couldn’t smell the storm coming?”
“I’m cold,” I said. My tone demanded mercy, not questions.
“I wouldn’t doubt it. A storm like that, even the zombies have enough sense to get indoors.”
“Can I stay here?” I asked. “Just for the night?”
“That depends.” She looked me up and down. “Are you hurt? You bit anywhere?”
“No. Just cold.”
She paused for a long moment, studying me. Her face was honest, and I felt like I could actually see her in silent discussion with her conscience.
Then, abruptly: “I’m Jessica.”
“Samantha.”
“Samantha, or Sam?”
I tried to smile, but my lips were turning blue from the cold. “Sam,” I said.
“Sam it is. Come on, let’s try to get you warmed up.”
Jessica led me to a corner away from the door and showed me where I could sleep.
And that was how I spent my first night in the Zone.
§
When I woke the next morning, she was nudging my shoulder. I looked around, disoriented, and it took me a second to realize we were the only two people left in the depot. The others were outside on the road, set to leave.
“If you want to come with us, we have to leave now.”
“Where are you going?”
“East of here. We’re gonna cross the wall into Free America.”
I think my mouth must have fallen open. “Are you serious?”
“Of course, I’m serious. You want to come or not? We have to leave now.”
I couldn’t believe my luck. My publisher had commissioned me to sneak into the Quarantine Zone, make a circuit of South Texas, and get back out again. I was to report on the conditions of the people there and come up with something to challenge the government’s claims that the necrosis filovirus was so widespread as to make reclaiming the Zone a suicide mission. I knew going in that it’d be a dangerous assignment, but I figured it’d be no less dangerous than being an embedded reporter in Afghanistan or Iraq. It wasn’t a necessary risk by any means, but it was a risk I was willing to take, especially when the whispers of a Pulitzer started to reach my ears.
My publisher hired one of their other authors, an ex-Navy SEAL, to sneak me through the Coast Guard blockade of the Texas coast. He got me onto a weed-choked beach near Port Lavaca in the middle of the night. I still remember the sour look on his face when the wind carried the sounds of moaning in our direction.
“You sure you want to do this?” he said. “I can get you out right now.”
“No,” I said. “I want to do this. I’ll be okay.”
“Where’s your weapon?”
I hooked a thumb toward my backpack. I had a .40 Glock in my bag, plus three loaded magazines, for a total of forty-six rounds—forty-six more than I figured I’d need. “I have it in there where I can get it.”
The wind carried more moans our way.
“If I were you, I’d have it out and ready.”
“I’ll be okay. I know what I’m doing.”
I don’t think he believed that for a second. All he was supposed to do was drop me off on the beach, and yet he had our Zodiac boat loaded down with night-vision goggles and machine guns and a box of something that looked a lot like grenades to me. He kept asking me if I was sure I wanted to do this, and it was starting to get old.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. Our plan was for me to meet him on the same beach three weeks later. I had a cell phone to signal him. It was my first experience as an embedded reporter, but I had done my homework. I knew the lay of the land. I had studied up on the infected. I knew how to evade them and how to deal with them when I couldn’t evade them. In my mind, it was all going to be quite simple. “I’ll call you,” I said.
He shrugged and quietly slipped back out to sea.
But then came that night in the rain, and my unforeseen meeting with Jessica. When she asked me to join them, I jumped at the chance. Busting the wall—something the government assured us was impossible but that pretty much everybody believed was happening regularly—was just too much of a story to pass up.
In my eagerness, I got up too fast and upset my backpack, spilling the contents on the floor between us.
Jessica reached down to help me pick up my stuff, but paused when she saw what I was carrying. She moved my pens and notebooks out of the way, uncovering the iPhone and a battery-powered charger. I saw her mind racing.
Dark clouds of suspicion gathered in her face.
“Who are you?” she asked, her brow furrowed.
I’d been advised to keep my identity a secret for my own protection, but something told me I could trust Jessica. She had been the first to extend any sort of welcome, and she had come back for me while the others were ready to leave me sleeping in that bus depot.
“I’m a writer,” I admitted. “I’m down her to write a story on life inside the Zone.”
She stared at me for a long moment in frank, slack-jawed amazement. She must have thought I was out of my mind. And then she laughed.
“Hey, Jessica,” one of the men called from the road. “You coming or what?”
She waved to the man, then turned back to me. She studied me, my clothes, my shoes, shaking her head the whole time. “Well,” she finally said, “we’re leaving. You want to see life in the Zone, I guess now’s your chance.”
So I left with them.
We walked a long while, and the whole time I was thinking of the quarantine wall, and what it would mean for these people to get into Free America.
The idea of a wall to protect one society from another is an old one. Ancient China tried it. The Communists tried it. The U.S. tried it along the Mexican border. But none of those historical precedents were entirely effective. They all came with a great cost in human life and a lot of insane politics. Political borders, after all, rarely coincide with societal borders. To think otherwise is just plain stupid. Fences may make good neighbors, but walls do not keep countries safe.
That is, until the zombies rose from the flooded ruins of Houston. The military was able to contain the outbreak by constructing a wall from Gulfport, Mississippi to Brownsville, Texas. Imagine the scope of that project. That’s 1,100 miles of cement, chain-link fencing, and endless spools of concertina wire, constructed in a month and a half. Many have claimed it is one of the modern wonders of the world, while the critics maintain it’s a wonder it doesn’t have more holes in it than a fish net. But according to the government and several independent quality-control groups and news outlets, it doesn’t. The wall is sound. It’s the truth Free America entrusts its safety to, and its impermeability is, to most Americans anyway, a lock-step guarantee.
But Jessica and her group didn’t accept that. Lots of people break through every month, she assured me. And I could tell she honestly believed it.
Yet when I pressed her, she didn’t seem to have much of a plan.
“We want to get across somewhere between Flatonia and Weimar,” she said.
I waited for more. But after a moment, I realized there wasn’t more.
“That’s it? You don�
��t know where? I mean, exactly? That seems like an important detail to me.”
“How can I know something like that? That’s up to the coyotes, isn’t it?”
“I guess so,” I said doubtfully. It seemed like an awful lot to take on faith, though. After all, to trust your life like that to a total stranger seemed crazy. But I answered myself with the same mental breath: Wasn’t that exactly what I was doing here with Jessica?
“How much do they charge?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Nobody in the Zone has any money.”
“Well, how then?”
She glanced around to make sure no one was looking, then showed me a handful of jewelry. They were nice, but nothing special, a few necklaces and charm bracelets, probably worth a couple hundred dollars at most.
“Is that how most people pay, with jewelry?”
“Mostly, yeah. It’s the easiest way. But I’ve heard people paying with all kinds of stuff. Gas they’ve siphoned off old cars. Drugs they found in pharmacies. Liquor. Anything people want, you can usually trade with.”
This was insane, I thought. I guess it showed on my face.
“What?” she said. She was amused by my distress. She was almost laughing.
“I just don’t see how you can be so blasé about it. Where exactly you’re gonna cross, how much it’s gonna cost, those things seem like a big deal to me. I mean, right? You see that? They’re important. It scares me you’re not more worried about it.”
The bemused smile left her face, replaced by a bitter seriousness. “There’s always a way for a woman to pay her way,” she said.
“Jessica, I....”
She didn’t flinch. “I won’t go on living this way. Not in the Zone like this.” She gestured at the soiled rags that passed for her clothes, at her emaciated body that barely hinted at a woman’s natural curves. “Tell me, what would you do?”
“I don’t know.”
When I went on with my questions, I was more subdued. I’d been humbled.
“What do you plan to do when you get to Free America?”
“I taught Fourth and Fifth Grade before the wall went up. I thought maybe I could do that again.”
“What about friends, family? They could help you get back on your feet.”
“Maybe. I hope so. I had a boyfriend, you know. His name was Robert. He did IT stuff for an oil company. Made pretty good money. He was smart. We were living in an apartment together down in Corpus, but he left for a job in Oklahoma about a month before Mardell hit.” She ran her left hand down the length of her right arm, fingers touching the cuts and scars and fresh bruises there. “I guess there probably isn’t much chance of picking that up again.”
“You never know,” I said in what I hoped was an encouraging tone.
She gave me a weak smile. “I won’t kid myself. That old life is gone. It’d be like that Tom Hanks movie. Remember the one, he’s on that island....”
“Joe vs. the Volcano?”
She grinned. “The other one. The deserted island. Remember? His plane crashes?”
“Castaway.”
“That’s the one. I was thinking of the end, after he gets rescued. Remember that? He goes home and his wife... What’s her name?”
“Helen Hunt.”
“Helen Hunt, that’s it. Remember what happens when he tries to go home? Helen Hunt’s character has remarried, and they have that awkward moment on the doorstep. Life has passed him by, and there’s nothing he can do about it.”
I nodded. “You can’t go home again.”
“I remember hearing that. Was that from the movie?”
“No,” I said. “Thomas Wolfe.”
“Ah.”
We talked about the movies. We liked a lot of the same ones—French Kiss, Sleepless in Seattle, While You Were Sleeping, anything starring Molly Ringwald—and that was nice. But it didn’t last. It couldn’t last. Movies are movies, and real life is something else entirely. Jessica had changed too much. This world, this awful place, had changed her, and we both knew it. Soon she grew sullen and morose.
I couldn’t blame her.
§
When we left the shack, we left the bodies of Jessica’s friends where they lay. Nobody buries the dead in the Zone.
We walked the rest of the day, and around dusk we came upon a group of people headed toward a place off the main road. They said there was sort of a compound, an old ranch house, and that we could get some fresh water there and probably something to eat, too.
But it was dark by the time we arrived, and they were out of food. They didn’t have any room left inside the house, either, so we couldn’t even sleep where it was warm. It’s easy to forget, while you’re walking all day in the Texas sun, how cold the desert gets at night. The best we could do was to huddle beneath a vent that carried some of the hot air from inside. We spent the rest of the night in each other’s arms, trying to stay warm.
The next morning we woke to gunshots.
“What was that?” I asked.
We had both flinched awake. We stared around in panic. Jessica said nothing. Then we heard some men talking. Jessica and I traded a look. The men didn’t seem excited at all, just talking.
“What’s going on?” I whispered. Guns weren’t all that common in the Zone. There were still a few around, of course, but not many. That seemed odd to me, at first. This used to be Texas, after all. I had expected there to be guns everywhere. When I asked Jessica about this, she said most had been confiscated by homegrown militias in the early days of the Outbreak. Where those guns had gone to she didn’t know.
“Jessica, what do we do?”
“Let’s go see what they’re doing.”
“Let’s go...?” I didn’t get a chance to finish. She was already moving.
I followed her to the front of the house and got my first look at the place in daylight. It was dilapidated, of course, but still large and impressive, and I could see that it must have been something rather special before the wall went up. There were several fenced-off areas that looked like they had once been horse pastures but were now being used for crops. Enormous Spanish Oaks, rising like green skyscrapers over the flat, grassy landscape, dotted the countryside. Until the shooting started again, it was quite beautiful.
The men we’d heard talking were standing in the middle of a wide circular drive. Beyond that was a long, straight driveway that led to the county road. A large hurricane fence, topped with razor wire, surrounded the property, and a wrought-iron gate that I didn’t remember from the night before stood boldly at the entrance.
The shooting came from a pair of men in camouflage hunting outfits in a deer blind near the gate. Their target was a knot of zombies that had gathered outside the fence. The men didn’t seem to be in a hurry to do much killing though, taking a shot when it suited them, and one of the men standing nearby remarked on that.
“Don’t matter,” one of the other men said. “They got three good ones.”
“No fast ones, though.” The man sounded sullen, like a pouting kid.
“They’re good enough for the likes of Barry.”
The men turned away from the drive and walked to the east side of the house.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“No idea.”
A crowd had gathered to the east, so we went that way.
One of the horse pastures had been sectioned off with hurricane fencing. In the middle of the small enclosure was a man chained to a metal pole. He was sitting, his back against the pole, knees pulled up to his chest, refusing to look at the people gathered around the fence. A few people were chatting, but most seemed to be milling around, waiting.
We weren’t there long when the two men in camouflage who had been shooting from the deer blind trotted over to a horse trailer attached to the fence. One of them got up on top of the trailer and used a broom handle to pry open the door latch. Nothing happened. The door stayed close.
“Hit it,” somebody yelled.
&nb
sp; “Yeah, yeah,” the man on top of the trailer said. He slapped the door with the broom handle, and the door swung open. Three zombies piled out, lurching into the sunlight. They looked confused and lost. Then they saw the man chained to the pole, and as soon as that happened, they staggered toward him, hands raised and clutching at the air.
“They’re gonna kill him.”
Jessica gestured for me to be quiet.
I watched the man chained to the pole, and I thought for sure I was going to throw up.
The man climbed to his feet, backing away to the length the chain clasped to his neck would allow. He watched the zombies advancing on him, his eyes bulged in panic, lips trembling. He looked pathetic, tugging on the chain.
But he didn’t lose all self-control. When the lead zombie closed in, he made his move. Holding the chain in front of him, he sprinted to one side, catching the zombie under the knees and sweeping it off its feet. The zombie pitched over, landing face-first in the dirt, then slowly climbed to its feet.
I waited for a bunch of redneck hooting and hollering from the crowd, but hardly anybody spoke, much less yelled. One man, drunk though the day had hardly started, made a feeble attempt to stoke the crowd by yelling at the condemned man, but everybody ignored him and eventually he too fell into a sort of sullen, bored silence.
It was ennui, I realized then, that was the root cause of misery in the Zone. There were no prospects, no way to improve one’s life, save through savagery and the debasement of others. Whatever the man had done wasn’t enough to overcome the feelings of emptiness and bootless rage that afflicted these people. They watched him scramble around that enclosure, and even when he made a narrow escape, it wasn’t enough to change the exhausted listlessness in their expressions. It was like all the life had been bled from them.
Then he got lucky. One of the zombies was a man in the remnants of an orange T-shirt and jeans. The zombie slipped and went down to one knee. The chained man got behind him, looped the chain around its neck, pushed it face down in the dirt, and stood on its neck. I saw the zombie’s expression change as he struggled against the weight holding him down. I don’t know if it was muscle memory or some atavistic terror surfacing in its ruined mind, but I swear, for a moment, I thought I saw fear in its eyes.
