The conditions closest to Newgreen were harder to make out. He moved the binoculars to the moat, the raised bridge and buildings. Somewhere in that gray, rectangular haze, Frank Toll was reading an article, and doors were opening in the Big Bags. Tokens were exchanging hands. Bread was being baked and bins were being carried to winter storage. Newgreen didn’t get snow, and the pleasant climate allowed for a winter garden of broccoli and cabbage and salad greens, other cold-tolerant plants.
Some of that had already gone in, and more of it was going in right this instant as he stood here. The population couldn’t live off salad greens for months, though, so a portion of the harvest and what came from the convoy had to be stored for lean times. The area didn’t get much frost, but Newgreen didn’t take chances. If Xan got back, he would soon be laying down row covers. They had always looked like burial shrouds to him.
He could do this. He could see it, for God’s sake.
He canvassed another two properties on Wicker Place. Neither had a car, nor was anything broken. The owners had been gone at the time. One was on vacation. The mailbox by the gate had been so overfilled with letters and magazines and supermarket flyers that the lid was jutting open. Nothing had fallen out in all of this time. The key to the house was under the welcome mat. A large gun safe was in a closet, but he couldn’t get it open. For a while he tried to guess the combination for the lock, but luck didn’t smile on him.
He missed the weight of Selena on his back. It wouldn’t give off, this urge of his to double back and check on her. His logic won out: it was a waste of time, and dangerous, and he would only see the same thing of her quietly decaying in the bed. But the urge remained because maybe, just maybe . . .
Dead. Gone. She didn’t need him in that house; Katie didn’t need him in this world. Colette and Lucca needed him in Newgreen, or maybe it was just Colette now.
Heaving himself up a wall, he dropped into another property. There couldn’t be too many more of them going this way. Sooner or later, he was going to run into the outlet that ran down to Rockwin. And he’d have to decide if he was going to walk.
Decide. Like he had a choice. Even without Selena, he had no chance of hauling that kayak several miles to the river. And the cars up here weren’t even functional. He’d be walking, or running, and shooting until he was out of ammunition. Then he’d just be running.
When he came around the side of the house, a beautiful white house with balconies all along the second floor, and ugly black curtains on the first, he almost walked directly into a zombie. The long grass had muted its footsteps. The creature was swaddled in clothes and hair and filth, tangled and stinking and its tongue the only bright color as it opened its mouth. It was so close that its body inadvertently knocked the barrel of the rifle to the side.
Xan had his semi-automatic handgun out of its holder in an instant, and was pulling the trigger in another instant. He got it through the chest and jumped away. Falling to the grass, it threw out an arm to his leg. He kept some distance between them, took aim, and shot it in the head.
The blasts of the gun were rippling the curtains of the window nearest to him. But the window was closed. As the creature went still, he took a closer look at the rippling fabric.
They weren’t curtains. They were flies, so thickly layered on the inside of the glass that they obscured the room. He took an involuntary step away. Then a hand appeared atop the wall at the back of the property.
In the time it took him to raise the gun, a flurry of hands had appeared. So did the graying top of a head. Slipping the handgun into the holster, he shouldered the rifle and blasted at the first torso to come into view. The zombie toppled down. He shot a second and backed away. More hands were taking hold, fingers straining as they fought to pull themselves up from a slope that went down steeply on the far side. One didn’t have the upper body strength, a head appearing and disappearing, appearing and disappearing like a whack-a-mole game.
The others weren’t having that difficulty. When he turned to go back around the house, he saw another flurry of hands coming over the wall by the driveway. If he ran the way he had come, he would have to cross part of that steep slope that was discharging the zombies upwards. It had been hard to get over coming this way. He couldn’t do it fast.
He couldn’t do it at all. The fence to the last property was high, and he’d had to stand on a bench to get over it. There wasn’t a bench on this side.
They were spilling over the walls as he ran to the deck and climbed up on the railing. Pushing the rifle between the lowest rung and the floor of a balcony on the second floor, he leaped for the bars. They were horizontally placed, each one groaning as he scrabbled up them to the bar along the top. Then he was on the balcony, and one of them was scuttling onto the railing of the deck.
Blue eyes, brown eyes, black eyes, green eyes, pair after pair of them settled on him hungrily just like they had in his nightmare. It was an infestation, and the sounds of gunfire would be attracting more. He couldn’t shoot them all.
Brown fingers curled over the edge of the balcony. Until now, he hadn’t known they could climb anything more complicated than stairs. But that didn’t mean they weren’t capable of it. There was no reason for them to scale random trees, which was why he hadn’t ever seen any in the canopies.
He was a reason to climb.
Some of them still couldn’t figure it out. They were looking straight ahead like their field of vision only extended to what was on the same level as they were. Xan had just vanished to their perspective. On the zombie IQ scale, which didn’t sport a very wide range, they were on the developmentally delayed end.
The rest were not. Xan tried the glass door behind him. It was locked. There weren’t as many flies on the second floor. The door was sprinkled with them instead of slathered. He didn’t beat or pull at the handle after meeting the lock’s resistance. The house wasn’t safe anyway. Someone had died in there, presumably recently and a zombie, so a window was open or a door busted through. He didn’t have time to find a room to lock himself in.
Higher.
The brown fingers curled over the lowest bar. He stamped on them until they let go and the zombie fell heavily to the deck. Xan tossed the rifle up to the roof, followed by the backpack. Stepping onto a metal chair on the balcony, he heaved himself up after his belongings. Backpack on, rifle in hand, he entered a sea of sharp black angles above the mansion.
He made his way to a chimney and slipped behind it. The roofs and trees of Delanto lay beneath him. Nothing showed except that, and no one from the ground around this house could see him. There were noises from the deck, squeaks of wood and trotting feet, a crash and metal rolling. They knew their meat was here somewhere.
He leaned against the chimney with the rifle in his lap. He had food. He had water. He just had to wait for them to go away.
After some time had passed, he heard small sounds coming from beneath him. They had entered the house, and an open or broken window was letting Xan hear their passage through the rooms. Glass crunched and furniture scraped. Something shattered, a mirror or a vase. One zombie was thumping on the walls. A blind one feeling his way along, or just obsessive, or believing that the sound would scare Xan out of hiding.
Some of the scraping grew louder, too loud for sounds coming from within the house. He looked around the chimney. The man whose fingers he had stepped upon had made it to the roof, and brought along several companions. The one nearest to the chimney saw Xan peeking. Xan shot him without delay. The body rolled down the pitch and fell off the side. It made a loud thump when it hit the ground far below.
Four other zombies had figured out how to get to the roof. He used the chimney for cover and waited for them to roam his way. But he’d only gotten two of them before there was a worrying scratch. Fingers were curling around the roof behind him, fingers belonging to more than one zombie, and he was being boxed in.
He couldn’t maintain this position. Abandoning the chimney, he climbed up
a slope and down the other side. They saw him and gave chase.
Having to swing close to the edge, he threw a glance down. The ones who could only see straight ahead were roaming there, trampling flowers and tripping on rocks. His snap estimation was ten.
The two on the roof had become five. He staggered and leaped and ran-crawled with one hand on the roof for balance. The huge house had a second chimney on the far side and if there was no balcony on the second floor just below it, he had another place to use as a shield as he shot. Over the edge that way, sunlight was striking down on the lusterless surface of a big pool.
Wriggling worms of fingers appeared in a new place. The man heaved himself up as Xan was going by. Xan kicked him, a foot straight to the face, and knocked him off the roof. He just had to make this chimney . . .
No. One was coming up there, too. Levitating up. The zombies in his wake were panting, and someone was growling like this was his kill, his meat, and everything else from the zombies to the breeze had better leave him and his meal the hell alone.
The roof had been a bad idea. He had to get off it. But they were up here and down there and in the house and swarming just about everywhere he could go . . .
There was only one thing left to do. As Xan scrabbled closer and closer to the chimney at the end of the house, he threw the backpack far over the side. He threw the rifle. They wouldn’t shoot his guns or go through his backpack to steal the edibles. His things were safe. The worst that could happen was that they would be stepped on down there.
He took out the handgun and fired a quick succession of shots. The zombie who had levitated onto the roof absorbed them as he scooted up the pitch to Xan, and then he crumpled. Xan jumped over the body and picked up speed, as much speed as he could on a sloping roof.
There was a generous walkway between the house and the pool. He had to clear it. As he neared the edge, he saw just how very generous the walkway was.
He leaped off the edge without fear. Fear he left behind in the shapes coming up fast on his heels, in the growls of possession.
The jump reminded him of Katie.
He plummeted down, the handgun dropping from his fingers as he curled into a ball. Then he landed in the pool with a tremendous crash, water and darkness and bubbles flying up past his face as he sank beneath the surface. His ass bumped on the bottom, jarring yet not immobilizing, and he thrust his feet hard. Shooting up through the murky water, he broke the surface and gasped for air.
The water had gone down, but there had been a lot of rain over the last two winters and the pool was still near capacity. It was foul, however, soupy and green and full of leaves. He swam to the centermost point of the muck, his toes barely gracing the bottom, and waited.
They came. Crawling and walking, running and shuffling and lurching, they gathered at the four sides of the pool to look at him. He counted. A dozen. Two dozen. Three dozen. Numbers thirty-seven and thirty-eight could be seen on the roof. One fell over the side, unaware that it was deadly to step off the roof of a two-story building. It landed on the pavement and didn’t move again. The other fell onto a balcony, climbed onto the railing, and fell off into shrubbery. The fall didn’t kill him, but it did hurt his leg. He emerged at the pool as a crawler.
The smell of unwashed bodies pulsed out to Xan. For two years, the only bathing they had received was from rainfalls. All that some of them wore were wedding rings. Ears had healed raggedly from torn-out earrings. There were infected cuts, bruises on their arms and legs, facial abscesses, bug bites and fleshless ribcages. If he hadn’t been in such danger of dying, he would have pitied them.
Some had fresher stains on their faces and chests. Xan had forgotten all about the two murderers who had leaped from the back of the bait truck. They couldn’t have made it very far like that. Their residue could be here around this pool, in the saturated shirts and flecks of tissue caught in beards.
They stared at him. He stared at them, treading in circles to see them all. A man moved to the water, dropping a leg over the side of the pool, but that was as far as he got. He lifted his leg and backed off.
They didn’t know not to step off a roof, the danger was beyond their mental abilities, and they didn’t know that guns could kill them. But a body of water was a deterrent like no other. It spoke to some visceral fear within them. If not fear, then aversion. The few scientific experiments since the contagion had shed no light on it. It wasn’t that they had forgotten how to swim, those that had known how to do it in their former lives. In fact, the knowledge or lack of knowledge was irrelevant. If thrown into water, one and all, they paddled like dogs to get out. They wouldn’t even try to take a bite out of a human on the way, should one be in the water with them. The only thing on the mind of a zombie to find itself in a body of water was getting out of it. Whether day or night, clear or murky water, they would not willingly enter.
A woman turned away from the pool. She hesitated for a long moment after making the turn, and then she walked off. Wind whistled past the mansion and shook leaves from the trees. As they swirled down to the pool, another woman turned.
They trickled away, a man on the deep end skirting the pool to return to the house, an older woman by the shallow end going to the back wall. Curious, Xan filled his lungs with air and sank beneath the surface. The water was cold, but it was saving his life and he didn’t care.
He held his breath for thirty or forty seconds. When he resurfaced, more of the zombies were turning away. He sucked in another lungful of air and sank. Going down to the bottom, he waved his arms to keep himself there and waited until his lungs were crying out. A leaf stuck to his face when he came up.
Three dozen zombies had turned to less than two dozen. He could still see many of the ones going away. They were staggering into bushes and walls, thoughtlessly bumping into each other on the driveway. Xan pulled in air and went down. It had been a game as a boy, to sink with a friend and see who had to push up first. The water had been clear then, and full of stinging chlorine. Colorful pool rings on the floor of the deep end, mushroom clouds of bubbles exploding around divers, the surface full of splashing from kids swimming overhead . . . he concentrated on those soothing memories and counted out the seconds. He pushed up at forty-five and spun around in place to count the zombies.
Eighteen.
Forty-two seconds.
Fifteen.
Forty seconds.
Twelve.
One swung his leg at the water. Xan lost his memories of the pools in his childhood for those of his days as a zombie. He had been so insanely hungry, so frantic to fill himself. His mouth was always watering, his stomach permanently in a clench, his guts churning and twisting to wring out the last calories of food that wasn’t there . . . even when it was, even when it packed him to bursting. Hunger. It was a raging beast within him, one he could not feed enough, one that controlled his every move.
Except for water. The parasites had controlled him, but water controlled the parasites. He only made it to twenty before having to breach the surface.
Eleven.
Bump. Thump. Clatter. Clang. Splash. A girl of eighteen or nineteen had knocked a plastic play shovel into the pool as she wandered away. Xan went down, but kept his eyes closed. The untreated water no doubt contained other parasites that he didn’t want in his eyes. Bubbles pushed between his lips. The cartoon solution of swimming after that play shovel and digging his way to Newgreen played out in his head. Dirt flying as he tunneled under the earth and popped up in Tomato to surprise everyone working there.
Nine.
After all this time, one still had an ID clipped to his button-down blue shirt. No pants, no underwear, no shoes, but that shirt was still buttoned to the top with the ID hanging from his breast pocket. The name was in print too small to make out from the middle of the pool, but Xan could see the smiling face in the picture. That man was the next one to turn away.
He did pity them. They hadn’t chosen to become this. The people they had been w
ould be horrified to see themselves reduced into ravenous, mindless, slaughtering beasts. And now they were going to gradually starve to death, surrounded by homes containing food, running after the smell of blood when nine times out of ten or more, it belonged to a wounded, dying, or dead zombie that they wouldn’t eat.
Eight.
He went under, and came up to six. Then it was four.
Three.
Two.
And then it was only one: a crawler who kept his fingers extended out weirdly rather than curl them over the rim of the pool. He leered at Xan, drool dropping from the corner of his lip and then both sides of his lips. He looked like a dog.
In time, and three more dunkings, he went away, too. Xan was alone, only in the immediate area, but alone. The property was still seething with them. He would have to stay in the water until everyone was gone, or the stragglers were so far away that he could get to his guns before they could get to him. Go to the edge of the pool too soon and they would flock back, drag him out of the water by his hair, and carve him up on the tile as the screaming turkey of their Thanksgiving feast.
He could see the garage from the water. There wouldn’t be a hybrid inside. He could feel it in his bones. This was going to be done on foot, these last few miserable miles. He would run so fast he flew, or creep so stealthily around trees and fields that no one ever saw him.
Hours passed with him in the pool. The sun did its paces across the sky, neatly dodging the clouds. Some of the zombies had formed a wave, ten of them washing back and forth in the driveway. Others disappeared over the walls in the front and back of the property, or went into the house and shuffled around. The black curtains on one window suddenly rippled at unseen stimuli. Then they lifted for a hand to slam against the glass. It stayed there for a full minute, giving Xan a view into a kitchen. Then the flies coalesced around the hand, and the zombie withdrew.
It grew quieter and quieter as the afternoon dripped on. The wave shored up on his side of the driveway near the pool every fifteen minutes. After it washed away yet again, he did the breaststroke closer to the edge. There he marked the positions of his belongings and squinted at the garage door. It was a few inches off the ground. The space was too small for a zombie to have crawled in, just like it hadn’t been closed all the way by the person who had lived here. Weight should have brought it down, yet there was that gap.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 41
