“No,” said Stacey. “I hear what you’re saying, an’ I agree it’s nice not to have to worry about some of that shit. But I’d take it all back, hell I’d even go back to prison if it meant the only things walkin’ around on two legs were human fuckin’ bein’s. An’ I don’t know about you, but I had a wife an’ two kids who are dead, probably, an’ I sure as shit miss ’em.”
“Yeah,” said Tim, wondering again why he didn’t miss his wife and kids. He kept forgetting their names, only vaguely remembering their faces. It’d been something Linda and Mark had hounded him about: They figured it was key to his recovery to give a shit about his family, remember them. But he couldn’t find it anywhere inside him. And if they were dead — which was almost certainly the case — wouldn’t it be better not to remember them at all? Anger and grief drove Stacey to spend his days killing the creatures that had destroyed his family, but what sort of life was this? Living in a cave, eating squirrel meat, looking like a goddamned orangutan.
They were quiet for the rest of the trip. When they started coming into some buildings, Stacey announced they were on the edge of Stringtown.
“Time to look sharp. You see anything looks familiar, sing out.”
Nothing looked familiar. When he was last here, if this was even the place, it’d been dark, and Tim had been distraught over his split with Marilyn. He remembered the inside of the home with the “Knitter’s Prayer” that he’d read, but he recalled nothing about the exterior of the house or the neighborhood.
“Pull up one of these streets and I guess just start driving up and down,” Tim said. “Hopefully I’ll see something looks familiar.”
Dead lawns, rusted cars and lonely swing sets passed by slowly as Tim strained his eyes at every shitty little house, trying to remember. The place looked abandoned, not a Zee or a human in sight. But then on the third street they drove down, a child Zee came shrieking out of some bushes and rushed for the truck. Stacey stopped, shoved it into “Park” and quickly opened the door in the Zee kid’s face as she lunged at the truck. He stepped out and, using a silenced pistol, put it out of its misery.
“Nine-hunnert an’ eighty-six,” he said, almost under his breath.
“Nice,” said Tim.
“Sometimes silence is golden,” Stacey said as he got back in. “Situation like this, sound of a gunshot’s like ringin’ the dinner bell. Who knows how many of them are around here, waitin’ for any freshies dumb enough to come around.”
Tim was about to make a crack about being the dumb freshies when something stopped him cold.
“Holy shit, that’s it!”
“What’s it?”
“That house, the yellow one. It’s got a weathervane on top. That’s fucking it.”
Stacey pulled up slowly and stopped, killing the engine.
“How you wanna handle this?” Stacey asked. “If she’s even in there, of course. I don’t think she’s gonna throw herself in your arms or any shit like that. She most definitely will be interested in usin’ your dick like a hot dog, an’ she won’t need no bun or relish.”
Tim knew Stacey was right. Whatever had existed before between him and Marilyn was gone, replaced by simple Zee-squealer dynamics: She would want to kill and eat him, and he’d be compelled to defend himself. How, then, to capture her without killing her?
“Get the rope ready to tie her up and wait just outside the front door,” Tim said, opening the truck door and stepping down. “Let me just see if she’s even here first.”
Stacey nodded.
“OK chief, just watch yer package.”
He handed Tim the pistol with the silencer on it. “Just in case.”
The dead Zee was still in the doorway, and Tim stepped over it into the hall. He knew that, if for some reason Marilyn had stuck around, she’d be using the bedroom they’d slept in together. Somehow, he had to get up those stairs without alerting her — or anyone or anything else — to his presence. Slowly, with each step producing a creak that sounded like a gunshot to Tim, he made his way up the stairs and down the hall. Pushing open the door to the old lady’s room with the barrel of the gun, he peered inside — half expecting Marilyn to come at him like she’d been launched out of a cannon.
But there she was still, lying in the bed staring up at the ceiling. Was she already gone, her eyes still open?
He coughed, ready to slam the door shut if she came flying at him. But she only turned her head slightly and looked at him through eyes that could, he knew, see very little anymore.
Tim came within a few feet of the bed and regarded what was left of Marilyn. Her cheeks sunken in, her tongue dry and her eyes mostly dead, he guessed she hadn’t left the room since their last encounter.
“Oh, Marilyn,” he said in a near-whisper, “Look at you. You’re a mess.”
He called down to Stacey, who joined him in the room. He looked at Marilyn and poked her in the ribs with his shotgun. She didn’t move.
“She’s all fucked up,” he said.
“No shit,” said Tim. “How the hell are we going to get her out of here?”
The decided to just roll her up in the bedding and carry her down that way, and when they got through the door with her, they had company.
It was Craig and about a dozen guards. Three Meridian patrol trucks were pulled up around Stacey’s Ford, and Tim figured they’d just been following him the whole time. And doing a good job of it; he’d never seen or suspected anything. Craig was holding a shotgun, and while he didn’t point it at Tim, he knew the man would be happy to use it on him given the slightest provocation.
“That her?” Craig said, gesturing at the package he and Stacey were carrying.
“Yes, but she hasn’t got long,” Tim said. “We’ve got to get her to Meridian as soon as possible.”
“Well that’s what we’re here for,” Craig said. “Just get in and drive. We’ll lead and follow.”
Craig’s eyes told Tim he hated his guts, but his words made it clear his instructions from Mark were to focus on the task at hand. They loaded Marilyn in the back of the pickup, shoved a spare tire and a piece of wood against her to keep her from rolling around, and set off.
“What the fuck?” said Stacey, jamming the truck into gear and pulling away from the curb. “Did you know they were following us? Man, those guys are good.”
“No, I didn’t know, but I guess I should’ve figured since we hadn’t seen them. They probably put a tracker beacon on your truck last night while we were sleeping or something.”
Tim sighed.
“It’s probably just as well.”
Stacey gave him a curious look but said nothing. Tim contemplated telling him about Dr. Linda, but why complicate matters? He’d know soon enough. As it was, the time it would take to get back to Meridian was, Tim figured, the last he’d ever spend as a free man. If the blood synthesizing did work, neither he nor Marilyn would be needed anymore, and they could get rid of both of them. He could assume Mark would give Marilyn a humanitarian dose of something like Seconal. For Tim, would he just be turned over to the guards? Maybe put out in the field for target practice.
Once they got to the fence outside Meridian, they stopped the convoy and transferred Marilyn to a gurney in one of the patrol trucks. Tim was handcuffed and thrown in the back of another while they told Stacey to get lost.
Confused and facing overwhelming firepower, Stacey slowly pulled away while yelling out his window, “Let me know if it works!”
Inside, Mark took command. He didn’t look Tim in the eye, but had him securely strapped onto the bed. They did the same with Marilyn, despite the fact she needed no restraints.
Taking no chances. Who can blame them?
Mark drew so much blood that Tim passed out. And when he came to, his wife, Janet, was sitting in a chair beside him.
Chapter 22. The Cure
“Hi Janet,” he said, a wave of recognition and memory flowing in now that he could finally see her face.
Janet did
not smile, did not jump up and joyfully cover him in kisses. She sat there, prim in a checked shirt and jeans, and eyed him evenly.
“Mark tells me … you’ve been a very naughty boy,” she said.
He looked at her closely a moment, remembering those eyes, the mouth, the dark hair she spent an hour on every morning.
“Well, Janet, I’ve been a zombie, more or less, and we’re an unpredictable bunch as you may have noticed.”
She looked down.
“You fucked that doctor, and then you killed her, and then you ate her?”
Now, she looked back up.
“How the hell am I supposed to, supposed to assimilate that information into, you know, our marriage?”
Tim considered a possible response. Correcting the sequence of events with Dr. Linda would likely get him nowhere. Really honey, I only had like a small bit of breast and some blood. And she was fucking me. Practically raped me. Should he tell her he was as good as dead anyway, that their marriage was over? Or go with something safer?
“How are the kids?”
“Dead, Tim. They’re dead.”
And she told him the story of her life since they’d been separated all those months ago. Their two little girls, Madison and Monroe (Janet was a history teacher before the plague) didn’t last a day once they were on the outside. Janet tried her best to keep them moving, but they fell behind and were taken at the same time Janet was being hustled away from her girls by the National Guard members trying to preserve as many lives as possible. She was in a herd of several hundred people being moved to what was supposed to be another secure facility, but the Zees descended on them in a terrible swarm, picking off people from the flanks while Janet did her best to stay in the center. Finally, they made it to the safe house — another jail nearby, in fact, where she’d been since yesterday. It was through the ham radio network that she’d learned of some scientist who’d returned to Meridian and that a cure was in the works. She figured it was Tim.
“I had no wish to live anymore, Tim. The girls gone, you gone, I figured what was the point? But there were some other little kids there, kids whose parents had been killed, and they needed someone. That’s the only thing that kept me just a little bit sane — taking care of those kids. There were about a dozen of them, all devastated, terrified, confused. Just like me.”
She paused and the room grew quiet. Again, Tim could think of nothing to say to all this. The loss of their children was awful, the worst news imaginable, but his Zee heart couldn’t contain it; nor could he remember much of the girls save the barest recollection of their being: dark hair, giggles … not much else.
Janet’s sad voice turned back into the sound of a chainsaw.
“And here you were, fucking bimbos and chewing their tits off. Jesus, Tim, how …?”
More possible responses rose to his lips, more explanations, maybe even an apology. None of it mattered, though, and in the end he chose silence, which she took badly. Janet stood, fetched him a good, hard slap on the cheek and stormed out of the room.
And this was exactly what he was talking to Stacey about the day before: Life is just less complicated when you’re out in the field, out in the Wasteland. He did wonder, though, if Janet’s previous love for him, their bond, was strong enough to help him out of the current pickle. It would take something of a charm offensive — something he was pretty sure he was incapable of mounting.
But he had to try, didn’t he? And he had to start by trying to get his head around one simple fact: What bothered Janet wasn’t so much the murder of Dr. Linda, it was the adultery that preceded it.
As they’d planned together, Mark was growing a few hundred different cultures in the lab to see which one might prove to be a true cure. Rats were easy to come by, and he tested each one on individual specimens and recorded their daily behavior and vital signs. A week went by before he came to see Tim, which Tim regarded as inevitable. His own expertise was in the synthesizing of viruses into agents that would work as anti-virals, and he knew Mark would need his help.
He came in quietly and stood in the corner, slowly outlining his needs and taking notes as Tim talked. When he had what he needed, he started to leave but Tim stopped him.
“Mark, look …”
“Forget about it, Tim. Whatever apology you may want to issue is … irrelevant.”
“I wasn’t going to apologize. Just explain.”
“I don’t need it. I understand. You couldn’t help yourself. But I still hate your fucking guts, and as soon as I’m sure I don’t need any more samples or information from you, I’m going to tell Craig we’re done with you. What happens then is up to him, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be pleasant. Linda couldn’t stand him and he knew it, but he was in love with her all the same. I adored Linda, like a sister. To see her lying there, violated in a way beyond comprehension …”
He left, and Tim felt a shiver run up his spine. He’d known what was coming, but hearing it spelled out by Mark was a whole different thing. It was also the first time he’d ever heard him use such strong language, and it frightened him. The notion of being utterly and completely alone and facing a painful death caused him to think endlessly on the simple question of whether he wanted to live at all and, if so, what his options might be to do so. It kept coming back to Janet, who’d also been avoiding him like, well, the plague. But, the fact remained that she was here. She’d come here, left the kids she was mothering, presumably to see him. Of course, she hadn’t known until she got to Meridian that her husband was an evil zombie sex fiend kinda dude, but still …
Tim had a lot of time to think, lying there strapped to the bed. Mark told him Marilyn was still alive, responding well to a goat blood diet and to the treatment of her many wounds. There was no doctor, but they had a good nurse who’d trained with Linda who was doing what she could.
He imagined her lying there, eyes staring at the ceiling, her mind blank as an IV full of goat blood kept her from starving. What would she be like, he wondered, as a person — a human female? As he lay there, day after day with his absurd and useless hard-on straining against the sheets, he fantasized about a future where they both went off together into some ridiculous sunset. They’d find an empty house, go upstairs and find another one of those nice, neat bedrooms. He’d lie down, she’d climb on top of him, she wouldn’t try to eat him …
The next time Mark came in for more advice, Tim asked him about distribution of the cure, assuming it was discovered. That was someone else’s job, Mark told him. The CDC was working with the remains of the military — something like that.
“Come on Mark, throw me a bone. You must know more than that.”
Mark looked at him with a mixture of disgust and familiarity. They’d worked together for so long, and now they found themselves on either side of some weird, emotional gulf. He sighed and sat down.
“They have several things in the works, Tim. Normal injections for restrained Zees, tranquillizer gun cartridges, some kind of aerosol that will be distributed via aircraft into the clouds, a model for introducing it into lakes and streams. It’s not one thing, it’s a bunch, and the estimate to treat all of the U.S. is … it’s not an overnight kind of deal.”
“How long do they think,” Tim asked, genuinely curious. Who knows, maybe he’d be around to try to live through it.
“Eighteen months at least, and probably up to five years to really stamp it out the way, say, polio was eradicated. And then of course the vaccine would need to be introduced as a requirement for every newborn from now ‘til eternity.”
“Wow,” Tim said. “Five more years of this shit. That sucks.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Tim,” Mark said, leaving.
You never know, Tim thought, looking up at the ceiling at the tiles he’d grown to know so well. Zees — maybe even ex-Zees — have a funny way of skewing expectations and making the seemingly inevitable morph into chaos.
He remembered this the next morning when Janet came to
visit him again, very early. She was in a bathrobe, and she carried a roll of duct tape in one hand. She sat down and looked at him, saying nothing. So Tim spoke:
“If you’re here to tell me what an awful person I am, I just want to issue a blanket statement first: I don’t care what you think, I have no sense of remorse for fucking, killing and eating Dr. Linda, although I will add that I only had a little of her, and she was yummy — wish I’d had time for more. I don’t really remember you very well and I don’t give a shit about our marriage. I’m sorry I don’t really remember our kids, but I won’t lose any sleep over it. I’ll be dead soon anyway, but I do have this hard-on all the time, so if you want to make yourself useful, you can …”
Janet stood abruptly, pulled off a section of the duct tape and covered his mouth with it. The robe fell to the floor and she whipped off his sheets to reveal his diamond-hard prick. With his restraints on and his mouth taped shut, Tim could only communicate his surprise with his eyes as his wife slid her very wet and ready self onto him and started moving slowly up and down, talking to him throughout in a quiet, rather sinister voice.
Zombie Road Trip Page 14
