Chapter 8
Washington, East of Puget Sound
For a long moment, foolish courage on the part of Knights Sergeant Troy Holt, and an unnatural lack of anything resembling either fear or self-preservation on Neil Martin’s kept the two men standing amidst their tracks in the dew. They had known that there were Corsairs following them, but neither had any clue they were this close.
They were also clueless as to how many of them there were.
The fog hid their numbers, but not the noise they made: low curses, a snuffling nose, a foot catching on a log, the light click of an M16 stock knocking on the top of a canteen. Troy guessed there were possibly as many as a dozen, which was too many to fight. Next to him, Neil had no guess as to how many there were. He wasn’t so good at numbers anymore and had he been asked to count to ten, he was sure he would have lost interest in the process somewhere between five and the number that came after eight, whatever that was.
He was suddenly more interested in a new and growing hunger than in fighting or counting. Eating humans was something that had been on his mind a lot lately. The thoughts and desires properly disgusted him, and it helped that the Corsairs were hairy, unkempt, beastly creatures. The idea of picking lice out of his teeth was repulsive, even to someone who was more than half zombie.
Just then; however, the Corsairs were hidden in the fog and as such, they existed in something of the abstract. Neil’s mind filled in the blanks left by the mists and he pictured them as soft, clean, hairless and smelling of oregano. Like a Corsair lasagna, there’d be layers, each delicious if taken alone, but so much better when one got it all in a single bite. Saliva suddenly filled his mouth and his stomach let out an embarrassingly loud growl.
Troy shot him a look.
“Sorry. It’s just…”
“Shush, please.” Troy needed time to think, time to figure out what to do. Running seemed like the best option; however he was responsible for shoeless Zophie Williams, who had foolishly taken off on her own. Her tracks through the dew were glaringly obvious, and he had no doubt that he could follow them right to her. So could the Corsairs, which would put them in exactly the same position. What he needed was to be in two places at once; someone had to find Zophie and someone had to slow down the Corsairs. Unfortunately, he couldn’t trust Neil with either task. His straight-forward fighting style would get him killed by the Corsairs in seconds, and if he was sent to find Zophie there was a good chance that he would either forget what his mission was after a minute and wander away into the fog, or that when he did find her he would eat her.
“We’ll just have to work together,” Troy decided. He pulled Neil behind the downed tree Zophie had been sitting on. “We have to slow them down, okay? Neil, listen. Are you listening? We’ll give them a few shots and then move. Neil, look at me; focus. Stick and move. This is not the time for a prolonged battle. Got it?”
Neil stared at him for a long moment as the words sank in. When they finally penetrated, and he was able to recall the definition of the word prolonged, he grinned wolfishly. “Just kill a few of them, right?”
Troy didn’t understand the grin and he definitely wouldn’t have understood the warped thoughts going through Neil’s head: A dead person was no longer really a person, and if someone wasn’t really a person then certainly no one would mind if I took a bite or two, while the flesh was still warm, that is.
“Yes,” Troy conceded. “We’ll take a few well-placed shots and then move.” Neil licked his scarred and bruised lips, curing Troy of the last of his own hunger pains.
By then the Corsairs were very close. Their sounds multiplied and magnified, and their presence loomed. While Neil pictured them soft and yummy, Troy’s mind inflated their numbers until he figured they were facing a battalion of men. In reality, there were twenty-two of them and not one smelled of oregano, although a few smelled of garlic-infused sweat.
The first man appeared like some sort of apparition. He was ghostly and grey, and disappointingly scruffy. Neil frowned and shot at him, missing by a good foot and a half to the right. It wasn’t a wasted shot, since the platoon of Corsairs were foolishly walking clumped together. The bullet sizzled through the wet air, found a neck, and a gurgling scream erupted in the mists.
Troy fired as well, knocking down the man Neil had missed. The Guardian then walked his next four shots in a line to the left, holding his rifle at waist height, and spacing his shots about two feet apart. It was effective precision shooting, killing one man and wounding two others. Neil, on the other hand, sprayed bullets all over kingdom come. The echoes from his own gun confused him, and he shot trees and fog and a lot of dirt.
“Enough,” Troy hissed, seconds later, hauling Neil to the ground as the Corsairs returned fire. The two slithered away with hundreds of rounds whizzing overhead, stirring up the fog.
The Corsairs displayed a very high degree of inexcusable inaccuracy. More than half of them weren’t even pointing their guns in the right direction, and the ones who were, had the angle all wrong. Not far in front of them, the slight hill they’d been tramping up flattened out, but because of the fog they couldn’t tell.
Their bullets were flying harmlessly over head, hitting tree trunks and scaring squirrels. To Neil, who was no longer a good judge of distance, it seemed that the bullets were missing by half a mile and he was the first to stand, brushing off his ragged, stained clothes. “I think we got one.” The gurgling cries could still be heard beneath the thunder of the one-sided battle.
“Hopefully more than that,” Troy answered getting to his feet as well. His personal code would not allow him to cower while another man stood. “Come on. They won’t…” He paused as there was a bit of a lull in the shooting. “…be distracted forever.” He wasted a few bullets, firing without aiming. The return fire was a sustained barrage that allowed the two to jog off, following Zophie’s tracks.
She hadn’t gone far. The scurrying tracks showed a short, quick stride, then they crossed over a dry stream bed, which consisted solely of rocks and brambles. After that there was a stuttering quality to the prints which suggested she had stepped on something undesirable. They found her twenty yards further on, attempting to hide behind a tree trunk.
Zophie threatened them with a tree branch until she saw Troy’s clean-shaven jawline, at which point she launched herself into his arms as if they were lovers who’d been apart for days, instead of virtual strangers who had been separated by five minutes and two hundred yards. This was unheard of conduct among the Guardians, and he quickly disentangled himself from the woman.
“There’s no time for…” The blundering wanderings of a zombie stopped him and the three crouched—Neil doing so in imitation of the others; Troy, while hand-fighting Zophie, who still wanted to cling.
The beast went by unseen, stomping toward the Corsairs, who were still firing, although now sporadically as they began to wonder if they were actually shooting at anything at all. The zombie and the next two that followed after it changed that. Each came charging up one at a time, only to be riddled by enough bullets to turn their pumpkin-sized heads to pulp. This gave the three fugitives time to run up the dewy tracks made by the first zombie. Troy cautioned Neil and Zophie to try to step in the huge prints left by the beast. It proved to be too much for both Neil’s diminished eyesight and his total lack of dexterity. He strayed, fell frequently, and generally made a mess out of the tracks, but it didn’t really matter. Their own tracks had “disappeared” far too close to the zombie tracks to fool the Corsairs. Still, it gave them a few minutes head start, long enough for Zophie to get her shoes on.
Her being shoed helped, and they were able to stay out of reach of the Corsairs long enough to find a running stream of some fifteen feet in width. It went bubbling off to the east and Troy had no doubt that it would eventually empty out into the Sound, which meant it was the direction the Corsairs would expect him to take. The other direction meandered in a general northward direction.
&nb
sp; “This way,” he said, splashing into the stream and heading against the freezing current.
Neil went in without blinking, while Zophie practically screamed, “It’s fricking freezing!”
Troy felt “fricking” was too close to an actual curse word and sniffed, “It’s ice melt, what do you expect?”
“Aren’t you the snooty one?” she said through pursed lips. “You know, I’m starting to like the zombie-guy better’n you.”
Neil was slow to realize that she was talking about him. When he did, he gave her a smile that could have curdled milk. “That’s right, baby, I still got it.”
“Yeah, you’re quite the catch,” she said and pushed past him, stepping squarely on one of his Crocs. The rubber shoe popped up out of the water like a powder-blue cork.
He grabbed it and hobbled after her, saying, “That’s nice of you to say, but I don’t think it would work out so well between us. I don’t know if it’s noticeable, but I have a slight skin problem. I might be infected with the zombie virus.”
“Might be?” she choked out in an astonished laugh.
“Maybe. And it may not be permanent. And this head thing I’ll get fixed as soon as we can find a staple gun or something. Or once we get Jillybean back, she’ll take a look at it…”
Her eyes rolled far back in her head as she said, “Just stop. We had this entire conversation yesterday. You said you were some bigwig on Bainbridge and that the Captain tried to assassinate you. Blah, blah, blah. It wasn’t believable then and it’s even less so, now.”
“Believable? I don’t understand, what’s there not to believe? I am an advisor to the Governor of Bainbridge and once, a long time ago, I was the Governor in Estes Park. That was when the…”
“When you helped to defeat the Azael?” she spat over her shoulder. “You told that one, too. Look, Neil, I bet you were a great guy, but I was just joking before. There is no possible future between us, so why don’t you give it a rest? No one in their right mind would believe your wild stories, especially me. You’re just embarrassing yourself.”
Neil trudged through the water wondering if what she had said was true. His memory had been slipping ever since he’d been cut by the poisoned razor blade, and the idea that he really had broken into the River King’s prison did sound far-fetched. “What about the attack on New Eden?” he muttered under his breath. Had that been real? And what about Yuri and the zombie vaccine? Had that happened? He remembered Victor Ramirez being turned into a zombie and he remembered being chained to a ferry boat that Jillybean had set on fire.
Considering these things put him into one of his tunnel vision moments where he simply plodded along. Time swept over him and he was slow to realize that Troy had left the stream and that he had as well. He was walking along, his brain mostly turned off when he knocked into a tree branch and fell. When he got up, he found Zophie staring at him in horror.
“What?”
She pointed to her own head. “Your hair is all flopped over again.”
He slapped it back down. “We really could do with finding a house.” He glanced down at his outfit. From the Crocs on up, he was wearing what had once been women’s apparel and because of that he wasn’t exactly upset with the blood stains, the mud and the general rattiness of the outfit. “I could use a change of clothes.”
“I already asked twice, but his holy highness said no.” She pouted, a look that did not sit well on her drawn and sadly man-handled features. Her bruises from the day before were breaking out in ugly green and yellow splotches.
“We’ve seen two houses?” He looked back, thinking he’d see the stream or maybe one of the houses. There was no stream, only forest. The fog had lifted enough for him to see maybe thirty yards. “When was that?”
She gave him a queer look. “A while ago. Where have you been, zombie-boy? Off in la-la land, daydreaming?”
He didn’t like being called a zombie, but adding “boy” to it sort of offset the insult. It made him feel young. As he was considering a comeback, something that might have taken an hour or more, Troy came back.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Are we good? Okay then, let’s tighten up. We’re almost there.”
“You’ve been saying that for two hours,” Zophie groused.
He had been, and was as disappointed as she was. According to all the maps he had ever seen, they should have been at the Sound by then. Even the air had that familiar sea smell to it. “Trust me,” he told her. Her look told him that she didn’t. A few minutes later they climbed an old sagging chain link fence and dropped into a bit of a dell.
For some unknown meteorological reason, the fog did not sink with the land. It formed a perfect blanket ten feet above their heads, and for the first time since they had escaped from Hoquiam, they had an actual “view.” It wasn’t exactly scenic, however. Before them were the remains of a four-lane highway. The surface ran with long weed-choked cracks that snaked from one muddy pothole to the next. There was a car canted off the shoulder. It had once been red, but now it was a sun-bleached pink. Its doors were thrown open and its hood was up, showing a mass of rusting metal and slowly disintegrating rubber belts and hoses.
Just in front of it was a faded road sign declaring that Little Skookum Inlet was one mile ahead. “Finally,” Troy said. He turned to Neil, who had missed the sign and was gazing absently at a squirrel sitting in a nearby tree. The squirrel was staring at him with a murderous look to his tiny black eyes. “Neil?” Troy tapped him with his spear. “Where’s Little Skookum Inlet? Is that close to Olympia?”
“Little Snookum’s what?”
“Little Skookum Inlet.”
Neil scratched his flap, making it wiggle. “Uh, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it, but they have all sorts of inlets and bays around here. Hey, you know what we need? A map!” He made it sound as if maps were a new invention. “There’s got to be more houses around here. We should look in one of them.”
“A map?” Zophie snorted. “What a brilliant idea. We shoulda thought of that a long time ago.”
Neil missed the sarcasm. He was back to squinting at the squirrel, very certain that it was on the verge of attacking. He answered without taking his eyes off of it, “Maps are smart. Does that squirrel look rabid to you guys? Troy? Zophie?” Only just then he noticed that the other two were forty yards away, marching diagonally across the highway in the direction of the inlet. “Oh, jeeze!” He hurried to catch up, tripping as he came up the shoulder of the road. When he looked up, they had disappeared into the high marsh grass that ran straight and true down the middle of the highway.
He could hear them wading through what sounded like a bog, their feet making squishing noises that had him concerned for the safety of his Crocs. He was quite attached to them. Certainly more so than anything else he carried. His and Zophie’s rifles were strung across his shoulders and were all but forgotten. And he was oblivious to the pack he had been toting since Hoquiam. It had been torn nearly in half by the zombie he had fought and looked like just another of the rags that covered him.
To preserve the Crocs he sat on the edge of the marsh, and was about to pull them off when someone started shooting a gun. “Do you guys hear that?” he asked, getting to his feet. Troy and Zophie had been thirty yards away on the other side of the marsh and slightly to the south. Now he had no idea where they were. Turning, he saw the shooter firing from the edge of the pink car.
“Hey! There’s a Corsair!” He pointed at the man, just as the air started hissing and whispering around him.
“Get down, Neil!” Troy cried.
That certainly seemed like a good idea. He looked for a dry spot and crouched down, perfectly amazed as the velvety brown heads were being shot from the duckweed. They were strangely fluffy inside. The fluff was coming down like a light snow. “I wonder if I’m allergic to…”
“Cover fire!” Troy cried.
“Oh right! Sorry. I just have to get this gun off my…oh, crap. It’s tangled. The s
trap is caught. Here we go. Are you ready?” Troy called out in a carrying whisper that he was. “Okay, Go!” Neil yelled, as he stood and fired his M4. Of course, it was still on Safe and nothing happened. Once more the air hissed and crackled, and something hard smacked into the stock of the rifle, flinging black plastic into the air. “Ah, here we go,” he said, and fired. He missed everything, including the car.
“Sorry, I forgot to aim.” When he looked down the length of his rifle, everything blurred into a mix of brown and grey with just a touch of pink close to the center. He fired at the pink and was happy to hear bullets skipping off the cement and then smacking into metal, which was probably the car.
When the gun was empty, he crouched again. Although his head rang, his ears were just fine and he was able to appreciate the few seconds of silence in that fog-less zone.
It didn’t last.
“This is Nick!” the Corsair practically screamed. At first, Neil thought he was talking to him, and only slowly did it dawn on him that the man was shouting into a radio. “I found them! They’re right here on the 101, and the girl is with them.” There was a pause before the Corsair said, “Did I shoot? Uhhhh, no.”
Neil wanted to shout: You’re a liar! Only just then he heard a weeping sound from across the marsh. Even as slow as he was, he knew it wasn’t Troy. “Zophie? You okay?” Forgetting his Crocs, he plunged through waist-deep brackish water and found her not far away. She had been shot in the midsection and was leaking blood.
“He-he-he left me alone. He-he left me, N-Neil.”
Troy was nowhere in sight. “I’m sure he’s off fighting that guy. Here, let me take a look.”
She cringed back. “Don’t touch me!” she hissed, her face going from a cringe of pain to desperate fear. It eased slightly once he sat back. “Sorry. I-I just don’t want your germs anywhere near me.”
“I understand. I’d feel the same way. Wait. I think that might have been Troy.” A single gunshot had sounded. It had a finality to it that made Neil a little sad and hungry at the same time. He sucked in a deep breath, his nostrils flaring wide, discovering that blood held so much more than a coppery scent. There was also a rain smell that the copper rode upon. And a scent like old bone, and…
Generation Z (Book 6): The Queen Unchained Page 9
