Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  Outside she put her hand in her pocket and touched the heart scarab. “Ptolemy,” she whispered. “Have they mobilized?” Time for business.

  perhaps vehicles one hundred perhaps vehicles, he told her. west heading west

  She bit her lip. There was still time to catch the Tsarevich—and sanitize Ayaan—but she needed to get moving herself. “I only wish we knew where they were headed. We could just get there first and ambush him. If we follow in his footsteps there’s no telling what will be lying in wait for us. But the only person who might know where he’s headed isn’t talking to me.”

  perhaps, the mummy told her, i help can be i of help there

  7

  There was no roof on top of the ventilation tower, just a lattice of metal bars designed to keep birds out. Greasy lint matted the lattice, black with soot spewed from generations of cars going by in the tunnel beneath. Sarah kept slipping but Ptolemy was right there to grab her, his hands dry and very, very strong.

  His painted face betrayed no emotion whatsoever.

  In the sunlight, standing upright in the breeze and the blue sky, she studied him as she never really had before. She saw how his bandages gathered in his armpits and how they had been woven across his back. There must have been dozens of layers of cloth wrapped around him. She saw flashes of gold from the small of his back, from his kneecaps, and knew he must have amulets buried in all that swaddling. She smelled her hands where he had grasped her and smelled the spice, the cinnamon and ground nutmeg smell of the resins that preserved his body. She smelled the millennia he had outlived and the strange worlds he had inhabited. He had died at the height of the Roman empire, only to be reborn at the end of history. She wondered what that could do to you, what it might do to your mind, your sanity.

  “What did you want to show me?” she asked. He grabbed her hand.

  Hard. He grabbed her hand very hard. It started to hurt.

  She started to protest but suddenly his energy flooded through her body, dark and thick and her arcane vision flared up, overwhelming all of her senses. She saw him, the darkness inside of him burning intensely. She saw herself, full of golden fire. She saw through his eyes, though. Her own vision had never been so sharp. He saw what she did but with far greater detail.

  Amazing. She wanted to study herself in the mirror of his eyes, she wanted to look at everything the way he did. There was no time for that, though. He turned her to look to the west. Her vision sped across the world until she saw what he wanted her to see.

  Pure energy. It radiated from a single point well to the west, high in mountains in the middle of the continent. It should have been impossible for her to see it—it lay around the curve of the earth—but with Ptolemy’s help all was revealed to her. A broken chain of enormous rocks like an exposed spinal column cradling a fallen star. The light that flooded outward in long flickering beams from that place was colorless and perfect. Colorless, neither yellow nor purple, though she knew it had to be the energy that created both. Colorless because it wasn’t light at all, but life, the very energy that made her cells divide and her hair grow.

  It was awesome in its beauty. Jaw-droppingly, hypnotically beautiful. Sarah felt a powerful urge to get closer to it, to that Source. “That’s where he’s headed?” she asked.

  it is go where we all go want to go, he told her. it source is the source

  The Source. She understood immediately. If the Tsarevich was headed west—well, there was nothing else out there, nothing else he would want. “We’ll leave today, if we can,” she told him. The Tsarevich had a long road ahead of him still but she couldn’t afford to lose a step. “Your friends are ready?”

  He nodded again. This time just a simple nod, his painted face bowing up and down. She followed him back down a ladder to the ground and then across the narrow causeway to the Island. Osman was waiting for her, a stack of cheaply printed technical manuals in his hands. He gave Ptolemy a nasty but brief look and then turned away, gesturing for Sarah to follow him.

  “Marisol didn’t want to give up any of them, and I must say I understand her logic,” the pilot told her as he lead them deep into the Island’s interior, to where the big aircraft hangars loomed over the slack-haunted gardens. “If something should happen to this place they’ll need all the vehicles they have to get away. I had to really sweet-talk her for just the one.”

  “Do you want a medal?” Sarah asked. “I’ll make sure you get a medal when this is over.”

  He laughed and nodded appreciatively. “Alright. What we have here,” he said, and grunted as he shoved open an enormous hangar door. It was counterweighted so it could be opened easily even without power but it was still huge. “What we have here is American airpower at its finest. The HH-60 Jayhawk, which is just a United States Coast Guard version of the UH-60, I do not lie.”

  The aircraft in the hangar had the stubby nose and long tail that just said “helicopter”. There was little to distinguish its lines except its white and safety orange paint job.

  “This is the workhorse of the US Army. Medium-range, medium-lift, twin engine, single prop, it stands up to any kind of duty you’d care to mention: medical evac, air cavalry, troop transport, point-to-point and my least favorite, direct air assault. It’s the best helicopter ever built by human hands.”

  Sarah peered into the darkness of the hangar. “Medium-range? We’re going quite a ways.” She tried to remember what she had learned of American geography. “The Rocky Mountains, I think.”

  Osman shuffled through the tech manuals in his hands and pulled out a heavily annotated military aviator’s map of the country. Sarah recognized the mountains she’d seen and pointed out the Source at once. With a ruler Osman measured the distance, his thick fingers smoothing out the paper map as he went. “A little under two thousand miles,” he told her. He scratched his beard. “Fine, just fine. We’ll need to stop once and refuel. There’s a major air base here,” he said, pointing at a star on the map labeled Omaha. “They’ll have what we need.”

  “We can just do that? The fuel won’t have evaporated or gone stale in all this time?” Sarah asked.

  “No problem, boss. Gasoline goes bad over time, that is true. Jet fuel, on the other hand, is just very pure kerosene. It lasts forever if it’s stored properly.”

  Sarah nodded and looked up at the helicopter. “Okay, I’ll take it.”

  “Wonderful,” Osman said, and gestured broadly with his arms. “Once again I get to fly into my certain death. It had better be a very large medal, with many ribbons.”

  Sarah smiled and took some of the tech manuals from him. There was no time to waste. She was about to start looking for the fuel hoses when a shadow passed across the mouth of the hangar.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said. Dekalb didn’t look happy.

  “Sarah. I thought we discussed this.” On his shoulder Gary looked like he’d gone to sleep, though Sarah knew better. “I don’t want you in harm’s way. So please, just. Just step away from that helicopter.”

  “I won’t let Ayaan down,” she told him. Maybe if she could just talk him into going back to the house. Maybe if she just lied to him then he wouldn’t notice when she left. “Not when I’ve come this far already.”

  “Fine,” he said, and stepped inside the hangar. “Then I’ll do it.”

  It took her a second to realize he was serious. “Dad, this isn’t the time,” she insisted, but he was already climbing inside the helicopter.

  Osman dropped what he was doing and came over to stand next to her. Slowly the pilot folded his arms across his chest. “I know you from old times, dead man,” he said to Dekalb. “I respect you for what I’ve seen you do. So I’ll ask you nicely to get out of my vehicle.”

  “Osman.” Dekalb looked at the pilot as if trying to place him. “It’s been so long. Please, take me to where Ayaan is. I have to dispatch her.”

  Heat filled Sarah’s throat. Was she about to cry? Somebody had to teach her fath
er a lesson about reality. Somebody needed to point out his folly.

  Why did it have to be her?

  “Dad,” she said, very, very carefully. “It’s not up to you. This isn’t your responsibility. It’s mine.”

  “I’m your only surviving parent, Sarah.” He wasn’t even looking at her. “You are my responsibility. Your safety.”

  Sarah glanced back at Osman but the pilot had nothing for her. He had taught her before to finish off her own liches.

  He wasn’t going to give in without a fight. Clearly he’d decided that this was when he would make his big stand. “I’ve lost too much already,” he told her. He glanced at Gary on his shoulder. The skullbug didn’t so much as twitch. “I forbid this. I mean it.”

  “Stop this, Dad,” she tried.

  “I died for you. I died so you could have some kind of life in Africa. Do you understand what that means? Do you understand what I gave up for you?”

  “Please stop,” she whispered.

  “I died and then I locked myself away with this freak of nature,” he told her, gesturing at Gary, “to make the world safer for you. Don’t you dare make me throw all that away by getting yourself killed now. Not for some pointless idea of camaraderie with a dead woman. Not after all I’ve suffered to protect you.”

  “Stop,” Sarah said. And surprisingly enough he did. He’d said his piece.

  Her turn.

  She closed her eyes and tried to remember how she’d felt earlier when she’d looked at him and seen nothing but decay. It gave her a little strength. “To protect me?” she asked. “You came here to protect me? How did you protect me, when did you protect me when I was eleven years old and hungry and the Somali government collapsed and we had to run and the ghouls were after us and some didn’t make it, huh? How were you protecting me when we finally ran out of food, when for three weeks we had nothing whatsoever to eat? We made little cakes out of clay, Dad. We ate clay because it expanded in your stomach and made you feel full. Clay, Dad, I ate dirt I was so hungry.”

  He winced visibly but she refused to stop there.

  “Where were you, where was your protection, when the women came for me and said it was time I got circumcised? They wanted to infibulate me, do you know what that means? No, probably not, because you weren’t there. You were too busy over here, trying to protect me. If Ayaan hadn’t been there I would have been sewn up, they would have sewn up my vagina with yarn, leaving me just a little hole to pee and bleed out of. So I would be pure for my future fucking husband. You weren’t there!”

  “Sarah,” he said, his voice completely altered.

  She refused to let him speak. Instead she screamed at him. “Listen, you maggoty old wound, I guess you can come along for the ride if you want to protect me now. It’ll be handy to have somebody who can heal bullet wounds. But I’m in charge. I’m in fucking charge! If you can’t accept that I’ll pick you up and carry you out of here myself.”

  “You have no idea what my existence is like. Don’t you dare say that to me!” he howled.

  “I already did.” She turned around and started walking away.

  “Wait a moment,” Osman said. “I did not say dead things could come!”

  “Yeah, well, you’re not in charge either,” she told the pilot. She wondered how he was going to feel about the soldiers she’d recruited. She walked back out into the sunlight to wait for Ptolemy.

  8

  “You’ve been here before,” Ayaan said. It wasn’t a question.

  Nilla turned around to look at her but the pale face under all that blonde hair gave away nothing. “I’ve been to lots of places,” she replied.

  Ayaan nodded and smiled to herself. Her radio crackled and spat white noise at her but she ignored it for the time being. The two of them stood at the front of the flatbed. Ahead of them Erasmus guided the giant hot rod over a road surface that had been washed away by a dozen winters. Little but a scoured-out track in the side of the mountain remained.

  They were getting close. Even Ayaan could feel it, a deep thrumming in her bones. An almost musical feeling that something big and powerful and wonderful was right over the next rise. Of course she’d been feeling that for days, since long before they’d reached the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

  It had been a long and arduous journey. The Tsarevich had given them little encouragement but the zealots had never so much as murmured a complaint. Dozens of them had died along the road: dehydration and the meager traveling rations had taken some while others were accidentally crushed by the drivers of the transport vehicles. A few had succumbed to violent fevers or terrible infections. It didn’t matter. Moments after their eyes fluttered shut their bodies rose and they simply entered their next phase of service to their master. It was something they looked forward to.

  Almost all of the vehicles had broken down eventually. The dead and the living together took to walking along after the flatbed, taking turns at the ropes when they hauled it over rises, heaving with all their strength to pull it out of muddy ditches.

  After the first week they came across larger and larger breaks in the tree cover and then the world seemed to open up wide. The sky seemed to grow bigger as the forest ended and the prairie began but little changed. On the plains they weathered brutal sun and punishing rain. The column had never stopped. The rain gave way to days so dry and dusty Ayaan had to wear a cloth around her face and sunglasses to protect her eyes. The ghouls were oblivious to the dust that scrubbed their skin right off and burned their faces an angry red. The living made do as best they could.

  In all of that empty land Ayaan had seen not a single survivor. Of course the living were hardly likely to make themselves known to the column, but she had seen no signs of them at all: no villages, not even a thread of smoke from a distant campfire. If they existed at all they were like the fallen creatures she’d seen in Pennsylvania. Hidden away in places no one ever wanted to go.

  Of the dead they saw many, and all of them were headed west. Whatever it was that pulled at Ayaan’s bones pulled them even more strongly. They could be spotted far to the north and south of the column sometimes, plodding along at the speed of death. Their faces didn’t turn to look at the strange caravan that passed them by. Their feet didn’t falter. They were being drawn onward inexplicably and inexorably. Ayaan wondered if something had happened recently to inspire them to come or whether this had been going on for years.

  Prairie gave way to desert. The hills they climbed over turned silver or purple with sage, or a brilliant yellow where they were covered in millions of black-eyed susans, asters and fleabane. In the troughs between the rises broad swaths of grama or fescue or big bluestem grass flourished, anywhere there was a little water. They started to climb, the roads got steeper as the hills turned into mountains cloaked in loblolly pine and fir trees. They began to find pockets of snow hidden anywhere a hollow in the earth might give a little shade from the sun.

  “This was all different,” Nilla said. She sat down on the edge of the flatbed, dangling her legs over the track. She gestured around at the mountains green with stunted pine trees and juniper bushes. “There was less green, more brown. All of this looked like... I don’t know. Like another planet, a dead one. I guess the ghouls ate it all, the vegetation, but then it grew back. It’s funny, isn’t it. The Source is for all of us, living and dead. It makes everything grow and it doesn’t play favorites.”

  Ayaan didn’t pretend to follow Nilla’s train of thought. As for herself she wasn’t thinking much of anything, really, just watching the road go by beneath their wheels like the most tranquil movie in history. Here a sprig of bitterbrush would squeeze up between the broken rocks of the track. Next she would see the broad chevrons of the hot rod’s wheel tread where it had spun out a little in loose dirt. She had learned over the space of weeks to fall into a trance state whenever she wanted to. She remembered Erasmus standing at the portholes of the nuclear waste ship Pinega, watching the wav
es for days on end, just watching them rise and fall. She supposed this was the one great consolation of being dead. She was removed from time—her body did not recognize the passage of hours or days or months the way it had before she was murdered. Her period or at least the time when she should have menstruated had come and gone without so much as an episode of spotting. She was glad enough for that.

  “Oh, shit,” Nilla said. It was shocking enough to make Ayaan look up. She saw nothing, really, except for a scar on the side of the mountain. A place where the trees weren’t as dense. She looked closer and saw a twisted piece of metal glinting dully between two trees.

  “Something has come back to you,” Ayaan suggested. “A memory.”

  Nilla grasped her wrist. Not in an aggressive manner. Like a little girl wanting some reassurance. “Come with me,” she begged and then she leapt down to the road. Ayaan followed, of course, though not altogether happily. She understood what was happening. Nilla had come this way on her journey to the east. Now she was going to have to recreate that passage but in reverse.

  There had to be things in the past that had driven her across the country. Things no one would ever want to revisit.

  Together they wove through the trees, climbing over deadfalls, picking their way through whip-thin branches that showered them in dust and organic debris and crackling snow as they pushed through. The snow underfoot had formed a thin crust and it crunched like styrofoam under their footsteps.

  Ayaan looked back at the column, which hadn’t stopped moving. She hadn’t been so far away from it in weeks and she felt strangely vulnerable, even with the trees arching over her. She turned again and saw Nilla getting ahead of her.

  “What is it?” Ayaan called out. “What was it?” she asked, more softly. She found the piece of metal she’d seen from the track, rusted and scorched. A line of rivets, some of them burst by metal fatigue and time, bisected the shard. She moved deeper into the woods and found more pieces, some of them embedded in tree trunks. The pines had grown around the wreckage in soft, flowing contours.