Z 2135

by Wright, David W.

  “What kind of supplies?” Daemon peered toward the back, as if his squint could cut metal.

  “Flour, medicine, rations. No weapons.”

  “We’ll see,” Daemon said. “Open it up.”

  He waved his gun from the driver’s face to the truck in a universal hurry up before taking a step back.

  Ana and Liam took a step forward, as did Manolo and Jor, who had circled from the front to stand beside them. The driver turned from Daemon, trembling slightly, and walked to the back of the truck, his measured steps making it look like he was trying to keep himself from tripping. With no hesitation, the driver swung the latch and yanked the door up by its weathered strap, then slipped his fingers under the metal bottom and shoved the paneled door high.

  As the door started to open, Ana noticed that the driver had something dark tucked away in his palm—some sort of small device. Something in his eyes seemed wrong. Like he was afraid, but not of the men with their guns aimed behind him.

  No, there’s something else.

  Then the door rolled all the way open and hell spilled from its gaping mouth.

  Zombies exploded from the back, swallowing the driver in a sea of arms, legs, and gnashing mouths.

  Ana fell back, staring in horror as they chewed through the driver like ants devouring a speck of bread. She thought of the thing in his hands, then noticed that all the zombies wore black bands around their necks—necklaces that must have kept them docile until the driver pressed the button. He had known what was coming. Ana wondered how many rations and credits The State had given the driver’s family to make a suicide run like this.

  While the first group of zombies was feasting on the driver, the rest raced forward, searching for their own meals.

  Liam pulled his trigger a beat before Ana, but both his zombie and hers dropped at the same time with matching head shots. They had been lucky, being farthest back of the raiders, with time to draw a bead on the zombies. Manolo and Jor were closer—overwhelmed before they had a chance to aim. They fell while emptying their guns, but they did little damage, and were torn apart in seconds.

  There were at least 20 zombies left, maybe more; it was hard to tell. They were moving faster than any zombies Ana had ever seen.

  She pushed herself against Liam, feeling his side against hers as they fired into the crowd, missing more often than not, but still somehow keeping the horde away.

  They could hear the other members of their party firing, but were too busy to see how the fight was going.

  “I’m out,” Liam said, stripping a magazine from his rifle. Ana covered him, taking shots at a zombie racing toward them. She missed the first three times, the thing was moving so fast, but her fourth and fifth shots dropped the creature.

  Once Liam swapped his ammo, Ana did the same.

  She was startled to see that the zombies were now ignoring them. Instead they were chasing the remaining raiders in front of the truck.

  “Come on,” Liam said, “Let’s hit them from behind and take out as many as we can.”

  They spotted Daemon climbing to the top of the truck for a better vantage. As far as Liam knew, zombies couldn’t climb for shit, so it was a terrific position if Ana and he could make it up there too.

  A zombie noticed Daemon before he reached the top, however, and grabbed at his ankle, snarling as Daemon kicked at its face. The zombie tried to bite him. Daemon screamed, kicked again, and scrambled to the roof before the zombie could sink its teeth into him. On top of the truck, he started nailing zombies one at a time, felling each with a head shot, including the three descending on Ana and Liam.

  Zombies kept pouring out from the truck. Ana couldn’t imagine how tightly they must have been packed inside their rolling coffin. They were coming out too fast, and she couldn’t reload quickly enough. Neither could Liam. He fell back beside her until they were just far enough from the mass to get their bearings. Then—as they were taught and practiced each day—they spun their weapons, butt first in their fists, and rushed into the fray, swinging rifles like clubs at the zombies, aiming for heads when they could, or less lethal places when they couldn’t.

  Ana and Liam quickly dropped the zombies closest to them. With bodies sprawled across the ground, they held formation, waving their weapons in front of them, ready to either reload or keep swinging. But it wasn’t necessary. The back of the truck was finally empty, and Daemon, with nothing to slow his reloading, was a metronome atop the truck until his shots finally fell silent and the bloody mist cleared.

  Their team had been cut to a third: just Ana, Liam, Daemon, and Shaw, who was the only one to survive the massacre in front of the truck.

  Daemon reloaded his gun one last time before climbing down from the truck, looking pained as he dropped to the asphalt. His right ankle was fringed with bloody tassels of shredded denim.

  Oh, God, he WAS bitten.

  “You were bit.” Shaw pointed to his wounded ankle, stating the obvious.

  Eyes were mostly on the ground—all four of them were thinking of Drey. Ana had only known Drey for a month, but she doubted she’d ever forget a day with the kind man. He was older than her father, but younger than Duncan, and knew how to turn every situation better simply by seeing it differently. If it was raining Drey would say, “The world’s getting washed so we don’t have to scrub it!” If something was on fire he’d say, “Sometimes a seed has to burn before it can sprout!” When he had been bitten on mission two months back, Drey said, “Everything will turn out, it always does!” proving he was unflinching in his optimism, though not always right.

  Because things didn’t work out for Drey. Rules were rules, and he had to make his choice. There were zombies circling the grounds outside Paradise, more than usual, but Oli said no waiting—it was in or out. Getting killed by friends while still human was better than being banished and becoming a monster in The Barrens, so Drey fell to his knees and told Oli to go ahead and end it. Oli did, putting a bullet between Drey’s eyes without blinking.

  Ana wondered if Oli would be as strict with the rules when it came to Daemon being bitten. Would Daemon be given the same choice of banishment or execution? Or would the leader find some excuse, some way to spare his son?

  Daemon was ignoring his bite, perhaps pretending it hadn’t happened. He said, “Collect the weapons and any supplies we can salvage, and let’s get back.” Then he emptied the magazine of his reloaded gun into a pile of unmoving bodies before climbing inside the truck and rifling through the cabin.

  “What are we going to do?” Ana whispered to Shaw.

  “About what?”

  “You know what,” she looked at Shaw like he was stupid, both because of his question and because he was. “Daemon’s infected.”

  “You don’t know that,” Shaw said, as if their leader’s ankle hadn’t been raw hamburger. Shaw always followed Daemon like a puppy, was mostly indifferent to Ana, and slightly hostile to Liam. She got the feeling that Shaw would always see them as outsiders, even if they stayed in Paradise forever. “The zombies were bloody. They could’ve got some of it on his leg.”

  “You know the sentence for infection,” Ana said, ignoring Shaw’s idiocy.

  “Yeah, but that’s decided by Oli. He won’t kill his son.”

  Though Ana had only known Oli only for a few months, she figured she was about a million times more perceptive than Shaw, who’d known him for at least a decade. Liam was silent, too smart to argue with an oversized moron.

  Talking to Shaw was pointless. Ana gathered weapons in silence, pounding twitchers with her heel as she did. Liam and Shaw went to collect the truck they’d come in, parked just down the road and tucked away in the woods. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t be filling their ride with supplies.

  Daemon emerged with nothing from his fishing expedition in the truck. He and Ana stood together in awkward silence while waiting for Liam and Shaw. She tried not to notice his ankle. He made no attempts to hide it, as if daring Ana to look.


  She wanted to say it was his own fault. He should’ve listened to Liam and stood down. Liam had known it was a trap, but Daemon had been so damned eager to put them all at risk, and for what?

  But she didn’t say any of that. There was no point in stating the obvious and rubbing salt in Daemon’s grievous wound.

  The truck was only a half mile away, and the boys were back in no time. Shaw and Liam got out to help Ana with the extra weapons, and they quickly loaded what remained of the supplies.

  Shaw rode shotgun beside Daemon, while Ana and Liam rode in the back—an empty cargo box, which only made their losses seem more painful. Rather than delivering a truckload of supplies, they were going home with eight fewer campers and Oli’s bitten son.

  Their raid was a bust.

  They had fallen into a trap.

  Liam was right.

  The back of the truck had a light, but neither Ana nor Liam wanted it on. The dark somehow seemed safer. Ana whispered, “Do you think Oli will banish Daemon?”

  “We’ll know soon enough.”

  CHAPTER 2—JONAH LOVECRAFT

  The Barrens

  Jonah stared through the scope of his crossbow, hungry to pull the trigger, desperate to hit anything. Ever since he had seen the faked footage of Ana’s and Liam’s deaths last winter, Jonah had wandered The Barrens alone in search of Ana. He was exhausted from the endless miles and near starvation he faced every day. The Network had gone to great lengths to fake their deaths, which Jonah had seen on the orb Egan had given him. The orb showed the direct network feeds of The Games, the footage that people back in the cities didn’t see. Judging from what he’d seen, The Network was attempting to hide the fact that Ana and Liam had managed the impossible—to escape The Games.

  Jonah hadn’t seen his reflection in anything other than muddy water for months, but his cheeks were hollow—thin skin caving in from both sides—so that he assumed gaunt was an accurate description of his physical condition as well as his mental. The winter had been too long, and nearly had killed him too many times, yet it seemed like only yesterday that his life ended along with Molly’s. Only yesterday since everything Jonah had ever cared for was warped, ruined, or taken from him.

  No, not taken. I did it. I killed Molly. Even if Keller or someone somehow made me do it, I still did it. I was the one who butchered her, right in front of our daughter.

  Ana, if she were alive, probably hated him. Adam too. Jonah deserved it. He was a monster. He couldn’t explain why he had done what he had, other than that The State had somehow forced him to via the implanted chip that Father Truth removed, but Jonah could no longer lie to himself and call it an artificial memory. He suspected that Keller was behind it, of course, but not why he’d put such a plot into motion. Jonah would find out, and have his revenge, but not before he found Ana— if she were still alive. And even if she was, he had little faith she was the same girl he had left last winter.

  Jonah wasn’t the same either. He had done many awful things in the last few months, worse than the petty crimes for which he’d arrested people when he was still a Watcher.

  Two weeks back—he only knew the passing of time by tallying tiny nicks on his machete’s black handle; he wasn’t sure of the actual day and date anymore, though—Jonah stole food from a sleeping family.

  There were more families scattered throughout The Barrens than Jonah had ever imagined, at least in those areas clustered closest to City 6. He wondered if populations thinned or thickened further into The Barrens. Jonah didn’t know, since nearly all of his time had been spent wandering the same loops, searching for Ana.

  The State said The Barrens were empty except for savages and scavengers. Jonah knew that was a lie, of course. He had been helping The Underground move people to West Village. And while the Village was burned to the ground, which he discovered after leaving Egan’s camp, Jonah saw signs of life everywhere. Groups like Egan’s weren’t all that uncommon: small clusters shoved into tiny pockets of The Barrens, too mistrusting of others to fall in with a larger family.

  Seeing small groups of survivors (rebels, outsiders, aliens—Jonah didn’t know what to call them) was common; seeing them starving, shaking and near death only slightly less so.

  Which once again brought his thoughts to two weeks ago. He had buried himself behind a thicket of trees, watching as a family’s matriarch killed a deer. The father was weak, maybe something wrong with his leg. The father stayed in camp with the two young girls and the one toddler boy. The mother dragged the deer back to camp on a homemade wooden cart, which Jonah helped himself to as soon as they were sleeping. He crept up, and stole what he could, quiet and fast like the thief he was, caring little since the slumbering family wasn’t also starving. He snuck into the night, only part of him sorry. The rest wished he could have stayed longer and taken more, telling himself that they had plenty and he had none. And his darkest part—the part The Barrens taught Jonah to never look in the eye—wondered what he would have done if the family had woken, and the father or mother had come out to face him. That was the reason to avoid the darkest part’s eye: even if Jonah knew he would bloody hands and soul to survive, he didn’t want to see it. Not if he didn’t have to.

  Jonah justified all this by telling himself he was preserving his life because he wanted to protect Ana’s. Ensuring her safety was worth everything, including his soul. He had to know she was fine—or at least know she was dead—and make peace with the truth. Jonah had been searching for her since leaving Egan, Calla, and Father Truth.

  Every day he walked as far as his energy took him, then set up camp in the safest place he could find or craft. Ana was nowhere, but still Jonah swore he felt her in the wind. The instincts that had made him such a highly decorated major at such a young age—and the best in City Watch according to Keller—told Jonah that Ana was still out there in The Barrens, alive, waiting to be found. He had to stay strong, even if that meant sticking to shadows, stealing food, and contemplating murder.

  The only person Jonah had seen that reminded him of Ana was a teenage girl, malnourished enough to resemble a zombie. Somewhere behind her thin and haunted face quivered something still human, but nothing that looked like it would—or even could—smile again.

  At spring’s earliest notes, Jonah had come across a small village with the most people he had seen in one place outside The Walls. He found the village by accident, after following a quad of travelers—one man, two teenage boys, and a woman who looked like she was in her late 20s—into a giant field of forsythia. The sea of bright-yellow bell-shaped blossoms had been a promise that warmer weather was finally on its way. He had maneuvered around the village’s perimeter, making sweeps for four full days, his eyes on the village, waiting for any sign of Ana. He had seen none, and his gut told him she wasn’t there, especially after bearing witness to their handling of a stray visitor—a brusque response that quickly escalated to the visitor being murdered by guards.

  Jonah thought it best not to introduce himself.

  But the village had haunted Jonah since. Though it was the largest gathering of people he’d seen, he left it further behind him each day. As his machete’s handle gathered tallies, he couldn’t stop wondering if Ana were there now, just past the fields of forsythia, even if she wasn’t before. Or maybe she had been in the village, but left a day before he started watching and had gone off in the other direction.

  These thoughts—and many others like them—plagued him with indecision. Finally, Jonah had surrendered, figuring he’d return to City 6 to get more information. He knew it was dangerous, but he also knew enough people to help him stay hidden for a while—just long enough to get strong, lean on his contacts, and see if maybe word of Ana’s whereabouts had reached back behind The Walls.

  Resolved, he had trekked back to City 6, only to find on arrival that it was surrounded by more orbs than he had ever seen. They swallowed the skyline outside City 6, and buzzed like bees through the hives of the hidden tunnels he knew. Som
ething big was happening behind The Walls.

  Having to turn away once there had been even harder than deciding to return to City 6 in the first place—as hard as it was to leave that village beyond the forsythia. He had only seen The City on lockdown once, when a zombie had somehow been smuggled behind The Walls and threatened The City with infection. It had made him wonder if that’s what had happened again.

  Jonah had wondered about the other cities too, and whether they were also on lockdown. Even though he had never thought of it before, Jonah wondered if he could reach City 5 without dying. It would be difficult to cross The Barrens, but if the other cities weren’t on lockdown, he could maybe sneak into City 5. Jonah didn’t have a network in 5 like he did in 6, but you only needed one connection to stay alive, and Jonah had at least that in four of the cities. He had decided it was worth a shot, and it might have been the only option still open to him.

  But first, he needed to round up some supplies to take the trip. The provisions Egan had supplied him with were long ago depleted. The sphere he’d used to watch The Network’s direct feeds had given out a month ago. He also needed basic survival gear, including some first-aid supplies, some material for fire starters, tape, and some rope.

  More important, he had to find a gun and either some energy packs to go with the blaster or bullets if it turned out to be an old lead shooter. Finally, he could use a new sack, as the one he’d been carrying on his back had torn through.

  However, in the two days since he’d decided to make the journey to City 5, he had yet to find anything to eat, let alone other supplies to make his trip less dangerous.

  Movement jolted him into the present: Jonah finally sighted a deer. It was a far off dot, but definitely in range. He swung his crossbow toward it. The deer looked up and over as he pulled the trigger. Something (hunger, fatigue, or mounting fear that his mind would soon leave him) tightened Jonah’s reflexes. It was a slight movement, but enough to send the bolt flying too high over the deer’s head, sailing between two trees before thunking into the thick trunk of a third. The startled deer raced off deeper into the woods.