by Joe McKinney
The crowd grew interested, too. They murmured. One man chuckled. Most just leaned forward, hoping for something to break the boredom.
Meanwhile, the chained man was pivoting around, making sure to keep the other two in sight. They were closing on him, but he didn’t seem willing to quit with the zombie in the orange shirt until it was dead.
One of the zombies reached for him, but the chained man was faster and kicked the zombie’s legs out from under it. More people were getting interested now. The man who chuckled just a few moments before was nodding. He shucked his shoulders from side to side, the way my dad used to when he watched the fights on TV.
The zombie in the orange shirt and jeans stopped fighting. It looked dead to me. It wasn’t even twitching. The chained man tugged on the chain, pulling the zombie away from the other two, and then started unraveling the chain from the dead man’s neck.
He’d almost freed himself when the zombie reached out and grabbed the hem of his pants. The chained flinched. He kicked the zombie in the face, but he wouldn’t let go. Unable to pull himself free, the man lost his footing, and the other two fell on him. The man screamed horribly, but those were choked off soon enough, and just like that it was over.
The zombies began to feed, and people wandered off in groups of two or three, nobody speaking, their expressions inscrutable.
As we walked away, one of the men in charge asked us if we were hungry, and we told him we were. He said we could have a can of pork and beans to split if we were willing to clean some clothes first. We said that’d be all right. He showed us where we’d be working, and we got busy on three big piles of laundry, chatting about nothing in particular as we cleaned.
We were finished by midday and collected our food, then went out back to cook it over a fire pit there.
I took a few bites of my pork and beans and gave the rest to Jessica.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
“I know.”
She pushed it back at me. “No, I mean you really don’t have to do that. I’ve been hungry before. I don’t need charity.”
I felt a flush of embarrassment rise in my cheeks. “It’s not charity,” I said. “I can’t eat. Not after what we just saw. Please take it.”
She nodded and took it.
“Why would they do that to that man?”
“Who knows?” she said through a mouthful of beans. “He probably stole something. That’s about the only thing that gets people upset enough to put a man to death that way.”
Most of the work had stopped for the midday meal, and people milled about in the grass with paper plates topped with whatever they could scrounge. If it weren’t for the rags they wore and their unkempt hair and the sour smell of unwashed bodies, you could almost make yourself believe it was a good old-fashioned backyard barbeque. Almost.
I found it hard to marry the sight of so many people enjoying such a commonplace thing with the realization that we’d all just watched a man die.
“I guess a lot of people stay in places like these,” I said, nodding toward a group of men lounging in the grass.
“They won’t be staying here,” she said. “This is just a quick meal. Most of them will probably be trying to get to Free America sometime tomorrow.”
“Are we that close to the wall? I didn’t realize.”
She nodded. “Twenty or thirty miles.”
“And these men”—for they were almost entirely men—“they all want to cross.”
She nodded again. “See the way they’re dressed? The extra shirts, multiple pairs of pants? They don’t dress that way because it’s cold. That’s everything they own.”
She was right, of course. These men were hard-looking fellows, weathered faces, starvation in their eyes. A few had improvised sacks with them, but most had nothing but the clothes on their backs and heavy sticks to use against any zombies they happened to encounter.
“This worries me, Jessica. With all these men trying to cross, aren’t we drawing a lot of unwanted attention to ourselves?”
“I doubt it. There’s a lot of land out here. There are many places to—”
She broke off mid-sentence as a large man in a red Coca-Cola T-shirt sat next to us. He leered at us, exposing a mouth full of black teeth and a tongue that wouldn’t stop moving, like he was chewing on it.
“Where are you ladies headed?” he asked, and when he spoke, I could smell booze on his breath.
“Nowhere,” Jessica said.
He turned my way and looked me up and down, eye-fucking me like I was some whore he’d already bought and paid for.
“Well,” he said, “if you’re gonna be hanging around here for a couple of days, let me know if you meet anyone interested in getting across to Free America. Me and my buddies know how to get them there. It’s what we do.”
My pulse quickened. Jessica had told me that it would probably happen like this, a quick, unexpected encounter, and while I wanted to catch every nuance of this exchange, I still found it hard to believe that this man was a coyote. In my mind I had formed a picture of what such a man was supposed to look like. He’d be shifty, mean-looking, the kind of man men fear. But above all, the man I pictured in my imagination would actually look like he could do the job. This man, this boozy, greasy, black-toothed redneck, looked like a caricature of himself.
Jessica didn’t shrink away like I did, but I did see her gaze sink to the grass. I didn’t know it at the time, but Jessica was trying to save us both from looking too eager. This man was a coyote, true, and he seemed sure enough of himself that he could get us into Free America, but there was a certain etiquette to these things of which I was wholly unaware. Men like our thoroughly stewed companion in the red Coca-Cola shirt were, above all else, dangerous. They were opportunists. No doubt they provided the service they claimed, but appearing too eager, jumping right into the conversation, meant that you had something valuable to barter, and for that you were practically begging to get robbed. Or worse.
“I know a good place to cross. Quiet. The patrols pass through there, but they don’t hardly ever stop.”
“Why not?” I asked. Despite my better instincts, this guy had me curious. He was so sure of himself, like he knew the Quarantine Authority’s business better than they did.
“Nothing around there. No towns, no nothing. Just open countryside.”
“Well, they have helicopters, right? Robot drones and stuff, too?”
His smile faded then, and I got the feeling that he was reevaluating his first opinion of me. He looked suspicious now, the wheels turning behind his eyes as he took in my clothes, which were dirty, but still holding together, my sturdy shoes, my skin, sun-burnt, but still healthy looking. I was different, and that was making him uncomfortable.
I happened to catch a sharp, warning look from Jessica just then. Careful, it said.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
I lowered my gaze. I’d just done a very dumb thing and put us in a bad spot by doing so.
“All over,” I said.
I could feel him staring at me, but I kept looking at my hands in my lap. When I didn’t offer anything more, he went on.
“The Quarantine Authority is no trouble. How much money do you have?”
“I don’t have anything,” Jessica said.
“Gold? Any diamonds? A wedding ring, maybe?”
Jessica shook her head.
He looked at me. “How about you? I know you’ve got something.”
I shook my head.
The man went silent again. After a long moment, he got up to leave. “My friends and I are gonna be here till tomorrow. Let me know if you find something you can pay me with.” Then he walked away without waiting for us to say good-bye.
“I hope we never see that man again,” I said.
Jessica watched him go, frowning, but said nothing. I should have wondered then if she knew something I didn’t.
§
After lunch, we walked away from th
e main house so we could talk.
“We should get moving,” she said. “It’s not smart to stay in places like this longer than you have to.”
“Okay,” I said. “Where?”
“We should keep going east, toward Weimar.”
“We can find somebody there to help us cross?”
She nodded.
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure, yeah.”
“Jessica, look. I gotta say, this is scaring the hell out of me.”
“Me too.”
“No,” I said. I was fumbling for my words. I swept my hand in a vague arc, trying to make a point about everything we’d been through together. “I don’t mean all this other stuff we’ve been dealing with.”
“What then?”
I was frustrated with her, angry in fact, and it crept into my tone. “We don’t have a plan,” I said. “Doesn’t that bother you? Even a little bit?”
“If you want to change your mind,” she said, “I won’t be offended. I can make it from here on my own.”
“Jesus, Jessica.” I threw up my hands.
“Why are you so upset?”
“Why am I so...?” I stopped there and huffed at her. “Jessica, don’t you see? We could die doing this. This isn’t some kind of game. The Quarantine Authority, those guys are for real.”
“I’m very much aware of what’s real,” she said. She sounded injured, not haughty. “And for people like me, this was never a game. I hope you remember that when you write your story.”
He words floored me.
“Jessica, no. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. That was cruel of me.”
“No, really,” she said. “It’s okay. You’re sweet. I know you mean well, but we’re living in different worlds, you and I.”
I felt ashamed. I didn’t want to look at her.
But the shame made it easy to make up my mind, and when she got up to go, I did too.
“You’re sure?”
I nodded. No words.
We set out on a county road, with a little water but no food. Luckily there was no wind, and though it was cold, the sky was a bright cobalt blue and the sunlight felt good.
After a few hours we came to one of those little towns that used to dot the Texas landscape, a mill or a cotton-processing plant surrounded by a couple of rundown buildings. This town was little more than a stop sign and a handful of moldering doublewides, but it was enough to put us on guard.
“I lost a friend in a place like this,” Jessica said.
I hadn’t heard her talk about people she’d lost before, and so this caught my attention. “Someone you knew before the wall was built?”
She shook her head. “Just a girl I traveled with. We stopped in a little place like this to try to find water. We were standing behind a counter, and a crawler came up behind her and bit her on the leg before either of us knew it was there.”
“I guess you have to be prepared all the time, don’t you?”
“Yep.” She scanned the town, taking it in with one slow stare. “See! Look right there!” she said, pointing toward a dilapidated gas station. “See it?”
I did. Stumbling through the waist-high weeds that had grown up around the gas pumps was a female zombie. Its hands hung limply by its sides, its hair a stringy, blood-encrusted curtain hanging over its face.
“The place looks deserted, but there are probably more,” Jessica said. “Usually they can’t survive if it’s just one of them.”
I watched the zombie for a moment, and was about to look away, when a shot suddenly rang out.
The female zombie collapsed.
Startled, Jessica and I spun around. We hadn’t heard the truck coming up behind us, and for a moment, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I knew there were a few vehicles still working in the zone, like the truck that had pulled that horse trailer full of zombies back at the ranch, but I hadn’t seen any actually driving around.
And then it hit me. Oh shit, the truck from the ranch!
“Run!” Jessica said, grabbing my shoulder and pulling me toward one of the trailers.
As I ran I pulled off my backpack and struggled to get the zipper open. I started to fall behind. Jessica turned and yelled at me to hurry up, but I was too busy trying to get my Glock out of the special compartment I’d stitched into the interior.
I slowed down even more. It wasn’t there.
Jessica looked back over her shoulder. “What are doing? Come on.”
I was frantic now. With the flaps open, my stuff was spilling out of the backpack, going everywhere. I lost my iPhone, my charger, my notebooks, a change of clothes.
But no pistol. Where was it?
“Hurry!” Jessica yelled.
But it was too late. The truck overtook us, swung around wide, and skidded to a stop, kicking up a wave of dust that covered us. I dropped down to one knee and groped for the knife I’d stashed there.
Again, I was too slow.
Two men in camouflage jumped out, and I recognized them immediately as the two men who had been shooting zombies from the deer blind at the ranch.
A third man got out of the truck’s back seat.
Our friend, the booze-soaked coyote with the black teeth and the dancing tongue.
His eyes narrowed. It was a sinister gesture, full of menace. “That one right there,” he said. “In the black top.” He motioned to one of the other two men, who promptly searched me, confiscated my knife, and then pulled my shirt up to my chin.
“Holy shit!” he yelled. “Hey, Jake, you were right. This one ain’t no Zoner. Look at this; she’s got a brand-new bra on.”
§
They put us in the backseat and drove east. The two guys in the camouflage hunting outfits looked enough alike that they could have been brothers. They sure acted like it, both of them stinking of beer and sweat and singing along with an Iron Maiden CD they’d plugged into the truck’s stereo. The older man, they called him Jake, sat in back with us, a pistol across his lap. Jessica seemed to have slipped into a morose silence. She didn’t react to anything the men said, just stared silently out the window at the empty countryside. Riding between them, listening to the two idiots in the front seat, all I wanted to do was be invisible.
Eventually I saw a sign for a town called Harmony Springs, population 1,405. Harmony Springs was bigger than the little town where we’d been abducted, and it had obviously been hit hard since the Outbreak. Most of the buildings were burned or so thoroughly looted that they looked like little more than empty shells. But there were zombies here. A crowd of them heard our truck coming and stopped, turning their heads to follow our progress.
We pulled into a small motel. From the parking lot, I could see zombies on the road, shambling toward us.
“Why did we stop?” I asked.
The man in the driver’s seat found me in the rearview mirror. “Girl, if you gotta ask, this is gonna be more fun than I thought.”
His brother guffawed and slapped him on the arm. “Hey, that was a good one.”
Jake kicked the back of the passenger seat. “Shut up, Tommy. Go get the collars out of the back.”
The laugh died in Tommy’s throat. “Sure thing, Jake,” he said, and climbed out.
I heard him rummaging around in the bed of the pickup. He came back to Jessica’s side and pulled her door open.
“Get out,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder at the zombies. They were still a few hundred feet away, but close enough to worry about. “Come on. Hurry up, girl.”
Jessica climbed out.
“You too,” Jake said and nudged me in the back with his pistol.
I climbed out and stood next to Jessica, my eyes squinting against the sudden brightness of the sun. The man named Tommy had two blood-stained leather collars in one hand and two dog leashes in the other. My heart sank. These men were clearly no strangers to this kind of thing. Whatever sick abuse they had pla
nned for us, they knew how to go about it.
Jake and the other man climbed out of the truck.
“Do it,” Jake said. “Hurry up, so we can get inside.”
“Yeah,” the third man said. “Oh, yeah.” Only then, when I saw the way his hands were shaking and the wild look in his eyes, did I realize he was amped up on something, probably meth.
I was crying when Tommy put the collar around my neck. His breath smelled foul, and when he ran his dirty fingertips across the outside of my bra, pausing long enough to give me a hard squeeze, I began to shake. Tommy handed the leash to his brother and a terrible sort of acceptance washed over me. I was going to die, and worse, I was powerless to stop it.
Then he went for Jessica.
I was only half watching what happened. He put his hands on her. She flinched, backed away, swatted at his hands. He closed his arms around her, laughing, despite the zombies who were getting closer every second.
“Hey,” he said, “what you got there?”
I saw him take a step back. He looked amused as he reached for her belt buckle. She pushed his hands away. Her clothes were so loose, she had no trouble sticking her hand down the front of her pants, from which she produced a small pistol.
My pistol! The one missing from my pack!
Jessica’s face looked utterly blank.
Tommy stood less than an arm’s length away, and he took the bullet in the left side of his chest, just under his arm. He didn’t fall, though. He staggered away, his hands hanging limply at his side, and bounced off the side of the pickup, leaving a smear of blood. His face was deathly white. He stared, confused by pain and the sudden crazy turn of events, and eventually found his way to one of the concrete curbs at the edge of the parking lot, where he collapsed.
Jessica didn’t stop shooting. As soon as Tommy stepped out of her way, she turned her pistol on his brother and shot him once in the chest. The man fell back onto the pavement, rolled onto his side with a sickening groan, and died.
