The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series)

by Mathis Kurtz, Robert

  As he made his way into the alley, Ron could see that the route was clear. Nothing was standing to block him and none of the shamblers was moving to corner him from that direction. Behind him, though, was a different matter. He paused to look back again and saw that the street now packed with moving corruption had become the price you sometimes paid for going out to scavenge. The pocked, bloodless faces snarled and ground out their hoarse rage, wanting Ron to slow down so that they could catch and kill him. Their desires were as simple as that. Sometimes, he thought that he could detect something in a few of them that could be called guile, but by and large, the most complicated thing he ever saw them do was pick up a stick or a brick to use as a crude weapon, mainly to smash windows and doorways.

  In a few seconds, he was moving again, driving himself forward. The Kid’s place was only two blocks away. He had to admit, it was a clever spot, and as far as he knew, no zombie had ever figured out how to get into it. Three days had passed since he had stopped to see about the boy, and he could only hope the youth’s refuge was still intact and that both the boy and his living space remained safe.

  Cutter came out of the alleyway into the next street. As he’d hoped, there were only a few of the dead staggering around, and when they noticed him, they slowly turned in his direction and began that slow, plodding gait that preceded what passed as rage for them. When the great stream of the dead emerged from the alley, they would also begin that stumbling trot that marked their top speed. Before that happened, he wanted to be around the next corner, leaving them in his dust.

  At the next corner, there was a partially toppled garbage dumpster, and because of a jumble of stalled automobiles in the street, Ron would have to pass between the wrecked cars and the huge green dumpster. He never liked to put himself into such a confining space, but he really needed to get something more in the way of a head start on the creatures pursuing him. So he bit the bullet and dashed forward.

  Just as he made his move, a pair of blood-black hands reached out, and fingers with no capacity for pain clamped onto his right shoulder and biceps. The sudden force of that grip, and the tug of what appeared to be at least 200 pounds of zombie, all but spun him around. Ron found himself suddenly looking into the lunging face of a dead man whose jaws were snapping open and shut, again and again, pulling itself close enough to try to bite him.

  Cutter’s first reaction was to punch the thing in the face. He had tried to wean himself from doing that. It rarely did any good and if the fabric of his gloves ever failed, he could find himself with a fist stuck in the chewing mouth of one of those monsters. Then he was as good as dead. This time the blow landed on the dead man’s cheekbone and the punch resulted in absolutely no effect whatsoever. Their ability to feel anything akin to pain was gone with their lives. Instead of being pushed back, the thing only increased the power of its grip and that slashing mouth was even closer to Ron’s face than before.

  In a flash, it had clamped its mouth shut on his left forearm, getting nothing but sturdy jacket material. Ron chose that instant to reach down to his thigh and pull the ball peen hammer free of its Velcro loop. There was the brief sound of the fabric tearing temporarily free and he had the hammer in his gloved hand. With anger and some satisfaction, he sent the metal head of that tool slamming into the dark, stinking, wet cranium. It only took that single blow, and the thing let go of him and crumpled to the pavement, dead for good and for real, this time.

  The sounds of pursuit coming toward him meant that he didn’t even really have time to look back. They were so close now that Ron could hear the scuff of grit beneath their shoes and their bare feet. With an oath, he twisted free of the truly lifeless thing and sped on. Another corner turned and Ron could see what he was hoping was still there.

  The Kid’s tree house!

  Indeed, someone had turned Oliver’s tree house into a place of refuge. Of course, it wasn’t just any tree house, but it had been constructed for some rich kid in the backyard of a brownstone that had been part of Charlotte’s downtown renewal some years before. In times past, the neighborhood had been public housing tracts, but in the years before the outbreak, it had given way to bulldozers and high-end real estate. Someone with a six-figure income had built their kid a 1,000 square-foot tree house on tubular metal stilts. Hell, if truth be told, it was better than the apartment Ron had been living in while he’d been paying his wife alimony and child support.

  The kid had spun razor wire all around the thing that he had found bound up in a nearby construction site. He had to give that boy credit for pure ingenuity and for willpower. Sometimes, he figured that the boy must have had some help—at least in stringing the razor wire, but Oliver would never cough that up. The two times that Ron had asked him, the boy acted as if he had heard nothing at all from Ron. So he’d stopped asking about that.

  If he ran fast enough, and if he was lucky enough, then it was possible that the chasing dead wouldn’t even see where he’d gone. If they did, then he would just have to hole up there with The Kid until they got tired of waiting for them to come down. One thing that all of the living had noticed about the Dead was that they could wait for hours, but eventually they would lose interest if they saw no sure signs of life. After a while, they would seem to forget why they were standing in a place. They forget that a victim waited just a short distance away. After that, they would begin, one by one, to lose interest and to wander off in search of whatever it was that they desired from killing and consuming warm flesh.

  When he was within fifty yards of the tree house, Ron was aware that the dead chasing him were still out of sight. He risked calling out.

  “Kid,” he almost yelled. “Hey, Kid! It’s me! It’s Ron! Lower a rope, dude! They’re after me.”

  Behind him, he could hear the tramp of hundreds of feet. In a couple of minutes, they would see him, and they would swarm to the place. If they did that, all Ron and Oliver could was hope that the razor wire kept them away from the base of the tree house, and if that wasn’t to be, that their sheer weight would not crumble those cast steel legs.

  Risking another call, Ron was almost ready to give up and pick his way through the maze of wire and shimmy up the poles when he saw the kid’s face appear over the edge of the catwalk that surrounded the spacious cab of the house. Without a word, the kid flung a rope ladder over the side and in less than thirty seconds, Ron was up the length of it and lying on the catwalk while the kid pulled the ladder up behind his guest. Just as they both hunkered down, out of sight, the dead appeared on the street, moving as a single mass that was like a stream of rotting, stinking, flowing meat.

  Their collective roar filled the air with their single desire.

  Sitting up, Ron looked across at the boy. He was leaning against the wall of his home. He blinked. The kid did not look good. The thanks that he knew he had to give were secondary, so he gave voice to something more important.

  “Hey, Kid. Are you all right? You look sick.”

  The boy looked back at Ron. His hair had been very blond the first time Ron had encountered him, but now it had faded to a darker shade, almost a light brown. Cutter never figured the kid’s parents had dyed his hair. It was just the situation peeling away anything that was bright and living from the face of the Earth. His eyes were still pale blue--the horrors hadn’t taken that. But his features were blank—almost nothing child-like remained in Oliver’s English features. He was just very tired in that respect, and of course, the things he had witnessed had been harder on him than on an adult.

  Cutter reached out with his left, clean hand and tapped the youth on his shoulder. “Oliver? Are you okay?”

  The boy nodded. “Yeah, I’m okay, Mr. Cutter.”

  Ron sighed, relieved.

  “I’m just tired, is all. I had to go scavenging for some stuff yesterday. I ended up doing more running than scavenging.” A cold smile crept across his pale, pink lips. “Heck. The city’s packed with them this week. More than I’ve ever seen before, I th
ink.”

  Ron looked down at the street, peeking over the edge of the tree house porch. The area around them was indeed filling up with the shamblers. Hundreds of them were milling around, searching for the man they had been chasing only moments before. Where could he have gone?

  “Danged if I don’t think you’re right, Kid.” He rolled away from the edge. “Can we go in your place?” Ron asked. “We can talk in there so they can’t hear us. I want to compare notes with you.”

  Oliver nodded and together they crawled to the door, pulling it slowly closed behind them as they went in.

  Once inside, Ron stood and looked around. No matter how many times he saw this place he never got used to it. Some banker had spent probably more than a hundred grand on this rich kid’s toy. It was, for all intents and purposes, a small house on stilts. It stood beside a hefty poplar tree and once upon a time, there had been a metal ladder on that tree leading up to the house. But the kid had disengaged it at the top and pulled it down. Thereafter, he had used a rope ladder for access, pulling it up behind him when he came back from his scavenging. The place was a big central room with a bathroom at the rear and a small bedroom. In its day, it had been wired for electricity and had running water. Somehow—as with so many remaining houses in town—the water still ran. Of course, there was no electricity unless you could rig a generator, and The Kid had no generator. Still and all, the place was a kind of palace.

  “I think they’re coming out of the countryside,” Ron told Oliver. “I’ve been noticing it for a couple of weeks. Last time I talked to Colonel Dale, he said the same thing.”

  “He told me that, too,” Oliver said, his voice so small and high that it hurt Ron’s heart to hear it. No matter how resourceful the kid was, he was still just a little boy. Standing over him, Ron figured Oliver for no more than four feet eight inches tall. He had tried to get the boy to stay with him, but there was always resistance to that. The boy just didn’t quite trust Ron.

  “You’ve talked to Colonel Dale?”

  The boy nodded again.

  Ron wasn’t really sure that Colonel Dale really was a Colonel. He claimed to be, but having never served in the military, Ron never knew what to ask or what to look for when the man spoke about his rank and what he’d done in the Service. It didn’t help that the military service that he claimed to have been a part was that of Great Britain. Also, there was something faintly feminine about Colonel Dale, so the fact that he’d been an officer made Ron wonder if the Brits had ever had a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy.

  “What did he say to you?” Ron looked for a place to sit and chose a recliner that was his favorite when he was there. He pointed to it and shrugged. Oliver shrugged back, agreeing.

  “Ah, he just told me to be really careful. He said that the deads were creeping into town and that they were all over the place. He said some people had been killed by them the past couple of days.”

  Ron jumped at that. “He did? Who got killed?” As far as Ron had been able to tell, there were about a thousand living people in this part of Charlotte. Of course, he didn’t know them all, but he’d sat and done his math based on people he saw and the movements of folk through the streets from time to time on a daily basis. He had come to a rough approximation of about a thousand still alive here. That was out of about a hundred thousand who had formerly called the city center their home.

  The kid threw up his hands. Ron noticed that his hands were dirty and he wanted to tell the boy to wash them. But he held his tongue. “He said something about a guy named Ryder getting cornered at the Target Store. And a woman named Maggie Pierce getting chased down on Tryon Street a couple of days back. Some others, but he didn’t give me any names.”

  “That’s all?” Ron didn’t know those names at all.

  “And he told me to be extra careful.” He paused, looking at the maple hardwood floors some rich fellow had had paid thousands of dollars to have installed in his boy’s tree house. “And he asked me for about the hundredth time if I wanted to come stay with him or someone else. He said there’s a guy two blocks away with a wife and three kids. Said they wouldn’t mind another kid.”

  “That would be the Lunds,” Ron said.

  “Yeah. That’s right. He mentioned their name. I think I saw them a time or two. Their mom called to me once.” He stopped. “But I just kept on goin’. I’m not a little kid. I don’t need a mother and father. And I especially don’t need any little kids hangin’ around me.” At that, Oliver stood and walked across the room to his kitchen. He turned on the water and filled a glass, drank it down. “You want some water?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Cutter answered. “I do, indeed.” As he crossed the big central room, he went to the sink. However, before taking the glass of water from Oliver he took the time to clean the blood from his hands. The kid hardly seemed to notice and said nothing as Cutter scrubbed the stains from his hands. He gulped down the water and put the glass back on the sink. “You know,” he mentioned, “eventually the system’s going to break down and the water will stop flowing. We should set you up something to catch rainwater. I’ve got them at some of my safe houses. It would be pretty simple to rig one here.”

  “Okay,” Oliver replied, as he edged over to one of the windows to peek out through the blinds. “They’re really out there,” he said. “You drew a big crowd.” It wasn’t quite an accusation, but nearly so.

  “Sorry about that,” he apologized. “But you were my best bet.”

  “That’s all right,” the kid replied.

  “Anyway,” Cutter said, plucking his pack from the floor and reaching inside. “I brought you something.” He labored to dig into the pack. “It’s at the bottom, because I was going to stop here on my way back, not on my way out,” he admitted. Finally, he got his hand on what he was after and withdrew with a box of cartridges. “I loaded these for you.” He handed the heavy box to the kid. “200 rounds. For your .22,” he said.

  “Gee, thanks!” Oliver was genuinely pleased. “I really need these!” For the first time, a smile cracked the sad façade of his features. Cutter smiled back, but then he considered the comment.

  “Well, heck, Oliver. I was just here a couple of days ago. You had a hundred rounds on you then. How many do you have left?”

  The smile went away as quickly as it had come. The boy shrugged. “Maybe…thirty.” He seemed to think for a moment, the ideas churning. “Fuck it,” he finally said. “I’ve got 19 rounds left from what I had last time you were here.” Looking up into Cutter’s face there were almost tears in the boy’s eyes. The kid was fighting to keep the emotions in check. “I got cornered. I had to use up most of my handgun ammo to get out of a…a really bad fix.” The boy sighed, letting out the tension. “But I got out of it.” He stared off into a scene that only he could recall. “Barely, though,” he whispered.

  “I’m sure you did what was necessary,” Cutter told him. He patted the boy on the shoulder, reassuring him. “I know you’re not one to waste anything. Anyway…now you have 200 more rounds. I’ll make you more when I can. If you have any empty shells, let me have them before I leave.”

  “Sure,” the kid told him. “I gathered up about fifty of the brass shells,” he said. “That was all I could grab up. It was—well, it was really bad.”

  Before Cutter could reply to that, the kid turned and peeked through the blinds. Outside the living dead packed the streets. Their moans and inhuman calls filled the air. Anyone holed up in that area would stay that way for the time being. Anyone headed in their direction would certainly turn and flee. Either the collective roar would warn them away, or the stench would let them know to veer off and head elsewhere. “I think you’re probably going to have to lay low here for a while. Until night, at least. They’ve got the scent of fresh meat and they’re going to hang around for a while. I can tell.”

  Of course, Oliver was right, and Cutter resigned himself to a wasted day. He would have to find the fuel for casting his bullets later on. W
ell, there were worse places to wait out the walking dead. “All right if I bed down here on the couch?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Oliver said, his face brightening again. “We can play cards!” There was still a boy there, but buried a little more every day.

  **

  Something woke Cutter in the night. He came awake with a start, and dealt quickly with that brief moment of confusion, not recalling immediately where he was. Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he peered around. Moonlight filtered in through the slightly opened blinds, and he remembered that he was in The Kid’s tree house and not likely to be in danger from the dead. The odds that any of them could climb up were pretty much zero.

  Still, something had awakened him. He sat up and looked around, his night vision coming on slowly as he adjusted to the dark. The room was empty of any other figure except Cutter. He could make out the angles and curves of the room’s furniture, the windows, and the closed doorways. He hadn’t been having a nightmare, which were common for him. Nevertheless, something had disturbed his sleep. He held his breath and just lay still, waiting.

  And there it was. A sound. A voice. Very small, and muffled, but definitely there.

  Cutter stood and padded across the big central room. It was coming from the kid’s bedroom. Quietly, he padded over on his bare feet and stood by the door, listening.

  It was The Kid. He was crying in his own tortured sleep. “I miss you,” the boy was saying. “I miss you Momma and Daddy. I miss you. I miss you…”