by Joe McKinney
An image of the Red Man rose up in his mind and his guts rolled over queasily. It didn’t seem possible, the things Sylvia had told him. But after seeing the Red Man control the zombies around him, he found it difficult to deny. And not for the first time he found himself wondering how such a thing was possible. Was it really a sign, as Sylvia Carnes believed, that the disease was curable? Was the person that a zombie had once been still inside that damaged husk, waiting to be freed of the infection?
That really seemed to be the big question. He supposed it was possible. After all, people sometimes got sick and got delirious with fever. Then they got better. Might this be a far more serious version of the same thing? And, if so, if it was possible to restore the person within the zombie to their former selves, would they remember what happened to them during their infection? Would they remember the cannibalistic horrors they committed?
He wasn’t sure. And he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know.
Ahead of him, Sylvia was still wrestling with her ponytail. The heat and the humidity were working on her, he could tell. A wide sweat stain spread from her shoulders down her spine.
“Sylvia,” he said, “you wanna stop for some water?”
She turned back to him and nodded. “Over there,” she said, “in the shade.”
She was pointing to a ruined gas station up ahead and to their right. Most of it was still white, though the paint was curling off the walls and the metal poles holding up the awning over its pumps were brown with rust. Its driveway and the sides of the service bays were thick with brown weeds. With a glance behind him, Richardson realized it was about as good as any point they could have chosen. From the building, it afforded a pretty good view of the road in both directions.
“Yeah,” he said, “that looks good.”
They walked up the driveway and were nearly under the awning when Avery pointed into the shadows and said, “What’s that?”
“A hammock,” Richardson said. It was strung between the gas pumps. He followed the ties at either end and saw where they had rubbed some of the rust off the pumps. Someone had strung it up recently.
“Hello?” he called out.
“Ben!” Sylvia hissed. “What are you doing?”
A glass bottle skittered across the pavement from somewhere behind them. The three of them turned as one, their expressions full of surprise and panic.
A child was standing in the road. A girl, maybe ten years old. She stood perfectly still, watching them. Her greasy hair lifted in the breeze. Richardson immediately thought, zombie: but something was wrong. The girl’s clothes were hardly new, but they were clean. There were no bloodstains, no abscesses on her skin. And he didn’t see any signs of injury. Still, his internal alarms were ringing at top volume.
“Ben,” Sylvia said, “what do you think? Oh God! Avery, no!”
But it was too late. Avery was trotting down the driveway, toward the girl.
Richardson ran after her, and he was nearly close enough to grab Avery and pull her back when two women stumbled out of the woods to his left.
Both were obviously infected. No doubt there. Their bodies were stiff, their movements clumsy. One woman’s mouth and cheeks and hair were black with dried blood. Her clothes had been reduced to rags. The other woman raised her hands and began the familiar clutching that Richardson had seen so many times. Both began to moan at the same time.
Richardson grabbed Avery by the back of her collar and pulled her behind him. Then he pulled his pistol and fired at the female zombie closest to him. The bullet caught her in the left eye and blasted off black, ropey bits of her face onto the ground behind her. She dropped to the ground without a sound.
He pivoted to his right and fired at the second female zombie. The bullet smacked into her shoulder and spun her around in a weirdly graceful pirouette as she staggered down the slope of the driveway. Then she turned back around, raised one arm, and slowly staggered back up the driveway toward Richardson.
Behind him, he could see Sylvia pulling Avery out of the way. “Get back, both of you,” he shouted.
He raised his pistol again and was about to fire at the female zombie when the little girl ran at him. She moved with incredible speed. He tried to point the pistol at her, but she was moving too quickly. She was on him before he knew it. She knocked the pistol from his hand, then lunged for his throat.
He staggered backward, but didn’t fall. Now he could smell the rot coming from her breath. He could see two rows of small, busted teeth behind her slowly spreading grin. She was snapping her teeth at him like a dog, a wet, stuttering growl rising from her chest.
He turned and ran toward the building. There was an old sedan there with the passenger door hanging partially open. Richardson ran around the back side of the car and dove into the front seat. Then he sat up and pulled the door closed just as the little girl reached it, her hands beating against the window, yanking on the door handle.
For a horrible instant her face was framed by the passenger window, her diseased mouth pressed up against the glass. Her teeth scratched against the window, her tongue darting out and touching it, testing it like a finger. He saw a smear of dark blood forming across the glass. And a terrible thought occurred to him: They used this one as a decoy. Someone had actually cleaned her up enough that she could pass for one of the uninfected, and was using her as a decoy.
But there was no time to follow the thought through to its implications, for at that moment the little girl jumped onto the hood of the car and started kicking the windshield with her heel.
Richardson heard a pop, and then the soft, almost liquid splash of glass breaking. Bright white spiderweb cracks formed along its surface. The windshield separated from the top of the roof and sagged inward, held together now only by the protective plastic film on the inside of the glass.
Through the shattered windshield he saw the little girl’s ruined face. The glass gave way with a series of loud pops and the next instant it was draped over him like a sheet with the girl on top of it, shredding her hands to bloody ribbons as she tried to claw her way through to Richardson.
“Help! Goddamn it, get me out of here!”
His arms were pinned between the seat and the steering wheel and he couldn’t get the leverage he needed to push the girl off him.
“Sylvia. Help me!”
The little girl’s snarls got louder. Bits of broken glass were flying all around her face. Her blood was spattering across the dashboard, running down into the puddles of water that had collected on the floorboards. Richardson was kicking madly at the passenger door, trying to get leverage against the girl’s weight, when suddenly there was a shot. Her face seemed to swell above him, actually growing larger, until it slopped down on the remnants of the windshield and oozed off onto the floorboards. Her headless corpse sagged down on top of him.
“Ben?” It was Sylvia’s voice. “Ben, are you okay?”
He looked to his left and saw part of the little girl’s face on the floorboard, empty, bloody eye sockets staring up at him.
“Ben?”
“Get her off me, Sylvia. Jesus, hurry.”
The passenger door opened and they pulled the little girl’s body off him. “Careful of all the glass,” Sylvia said, as she helped him sit up and then climb out of the wrecked car.
He stood and checked himself for wounds, any possible sign of infection.
“You okay?” Sylvia asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Come here,” she said. “There’s something you need to see.”
She turned and walked down the driveway. The two adult female zombies were there. Both, he realized, had an ear missing.
“Look at that,” Sylvia said, pointing to one of the zombies.
The woman had been wearing jeans and an Ohio Buckeyes sweatshirt. She looked like a scarecrow inside the baggy clothes. Not sure what he was supposed to be seeing he let his gaze wander down to her ankles. One of her pant legs had been pulled up to her knee,
revealing a small, black box about the size of a pack of cigarettes strapped to her ankle. It was beeping quietly.
“What is that?” he asked.
“It’s an ankle monitor,” Sylvia said. “The kind they used to put on people who were on house arrest.”
He was still feeling a little sick from all the adrenaline going through his system, and it was hard to focus. A lot of half-formed questions rose up in his mind, but he wasn’t able to articulate them.
“Why?” was all he managed.
“They were tracking her. They were tracking her while she was tracking us.”
“Who?”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
He looked at her, still confused.
“The Red Man,” she said. “Remember last night, when we told you his father used to be chief of police in Gatling. Where else do you think they would have gotten this kind of equipment?”
“I don’t . . .” he said, and then trailed off with a shrug. “Why not just capture us?”
“I think that’s obvious. The Red Man is hoping we’ll lead him to Don Fisher.”
“Why us? Doesn’t he have Niki?”
“That’s exactly my point,” Sylvia said. She looked almost triumphant. “If he’s tracking us, that means he hasn’t gotten anything from Niki. Best case scenario, that means she’s still alive, still holding out.”
He almost said, “But the worst case . . .” Fortunately, he stopped himself. Avery was hanging on their every word. He looked at her and nodded. Then he turned back to Sylvia. His head was beginning to clear now. He examined the car where he had nearly died. There was blood all over it, running down the hood and the fenders. Richardson let out a long breath, and then turned his attention back to the blinking ankle monitor.
“Do you think they have any way of knowing we killed their trackers?”
Sylvia shrugged, but before she could answer, they heard the sound of trucks in the distance.
“It’s him,” Avery said. “What do we do? We got to hide.”
“Not in the building,” Richardson said. “That’s the first place they’ll look.”
“Where?” Sylvia said.
Richardson reached into his pack and removed the tarp he’d made from the old Gilley suit. “Under here,” he said. He looked around and his gaze fell on a section of an overgrown ditch thick with tall brown weeds. “Over there. That ditch across the street. Come on.”
CHAPTER 8
Nate Royal woke with a fire burning in his head. He blinked his eyes open and the daylight stabbing in on his eyes only made the pain worse. Groaning, he fell back into the hammock he’d suspended between the service station’s rusting gas pumps and closed his eyes.
He was not doing well.
He skin was filmed over with a cold sweat. Sometimes he felt like he was burning up; other times there didn’t seem to be enough blankets in the world to keep him warm. The clouds in his head never seemed to clear, and even when he tried to work through it, really concentrate, his heart would start to race and he’d grow short of breath. Not for the first time that week he wondered if he was going to die.
He suspected that what he had right now was the flu. A really bad case of it. There’d been that old man he’d shared a campfire with the week before, the one who kept him up all night with his hacking cough and sneezing and his moaning in his sleep. Maybe he got it from him.
But did it really matter? Hadn’t he been going downhill for a while now anyway? Even if he hadn’t gotten sick from that miserable old man, he would still be in a bad way. He was hungry all the time. His face was so badly sunburned that he could barely touch it. He kept losing his supplies. They were stolen, or misplaced, or forgotten, whatever. They just disappeared on him. A lot like the rest of the world.
He’d seen a farmhouse a few miles down the road, but had decided to pass it by because there might have been people sleeping inside and he didn’t want to be around them while he was sick. He felt weak and defenseless, and all he wanted to do was curl up like a dog behind some bushes somewhere and hide, to be by himself. Now he realized how stupid that had been. What he needed was someplace warm to rest. Some clean water to drink. What he needed—
The thought broke off cleanly.
He heard the muffled cracking sound of glass breaking underfoot, and suddenly he knew he was being watched.
Very slowly, he opened his eyes and turned his aching head toward the sound.
There were three of them, standing there, watching him. A little girl of about ten, just a few feet from him, and two older women behind her. They stood absolutely still, draped in the shadows of the gas station’s awning like something materializing out of a nightmare. They didn’t make a sound.
Even through the fever clouds in his head he knew they were infected. He could see it in their yellowed, bloodshot eyes, and the way the flesh slacked off the bones of their face, and the deep black hollows under their eyes. The two women had dried blood all over them. It was matted in their hair and crusted around their mouths and down the front of their clothes.
But not the little girl. She was a zombie, too. He knew that. But she was wearing clean clothes, and her hair, though oily and dirty, was free of blood.
He was hallucinating, he decided. A trick of the shadows. Nate raised a hand, his index finger outstretched as though he was about to lecture them, and then he let it fall. He didn’t have the energy.
Not even to defend himself.
“Go ahead and kill me,” he muttered. “You got me netted in this thing like a country ham. You ain’t gonna get a better chance.”
A country ham.
He’d seen a bunch of them hanging in fishnet bags from a ceiling in a ruined deli in Atlanta a few years earlier. In the dark, he’d seen spiders moving all over them.
Now he was the country ham, and the zombies were the spiders.
But the thought didn’t frighten him. Nate wasn’t afraid of the infection that the zombies carried. For reasons that had been explained to him many times, and yet he still didn’t understand, he was immune to the necrosis filovirus. He had been bitten at least fourteen times in the last eight years, with the attendant scars to prove it, but the disease was unable to gain purchase in his body.
When the quarantine wall fell, Nate had been living in Martindale, Pennsylvania, with his dad and his dad’s girlfriend Mindy. Up through his mid-twenties, he’d led a thoroughly disappointing life, one spent drinking beer and smoking dope and watching lots of porn and pretty much avoiding anything remotely close to responsibility. But that all changed when the outbreak spread through the East Coast like a wildfire. Bitten by a zombie during the evacuation, he’d retreated, scared and all alone, into a neighbor’s lawn mower shed. Shortly afterwards, a roving military squad discovered him and put him in a holding cell with hundreds of other infected victims. But while the others became zombies, he did not, and for several hours he clung to the top of a chain-link fence, with hundreds of the infected snarling below him, reaching for him, while soldiers in biohazard suits watched him from the other side of the fence. Finally, he was taken down by a team of military doctors and turned into a lab rat.
But they did derive a cure from his blood. And if only the doctors who worked on him had lived, he thought, maybe that would have counted for something.
He blinked at the zombies. They were still standing there, watching him. “Come on. Do it.”
But they didn’t move.
Their eyes shone in the dark. The weight of their stares was oppressive. He could smell the faint charnel-house odor of them in the still morning air, but he couldn’t hear them breathing. They were enveloped by stillness so perfect, so absolute, that they seemed to have been transmuted into granite, like statues in a graveyard. A chill crept over Nate’s skin, and he shivered involuntarily.
Run, he thought. He was immune to their sickness, but that didn’t matter. Their stillness was something completely new. It terrified him, and that little voice inside his head beg
an to scream: Run! Get away as fast as you can.
Then, without warning, all three zombies turned their heads as one and stared down the road. And that simple gesture, like their heads were all mounted on the same pivot, turned by the same dial, scared him more even than their stillness had.
He leaned his head forward and tried to see what they were looking at, but there was nothing there.
Nate turned back to the zombies. “What are you . . .” But he trailed off, the question left unasked. The zombies were leaving. They turned and walked into the daylight, staggering along a crooked path to the woods at the edge of the pavement.
One by one, they slipped into the woods.
“What the . . . ?”
With effort, he climbed out of the hammock and stumbled to the edge of the awning’s shadow line, one hand on a rusted pole to support his weight. He watched the zombies disappear into the thicket, and he realized with a sense of horror and shame that he had been ready to die. Had they attacked him, he would have welcomed the death that followed. He rubbed the computer flash drive that hung from a lanyard around his neck and coughed. Had it really come to this? Was he really giving up?
There used to be writing on the flash drive, but it was worn down and faded now from all the long nights he spent rubbing it with his thumb, thinking about Dr. Mark Kellogg, the man who had encoded the cure onto the drive and then slipped it into Nate’s hand as he lay dying.
He tucked the flash drive back inside his shirt.
“We are put into this hostile, alien world as isolated individuals,” Kellogg had told him, shortly before he died of suicide by pistol to keep from turning into a zombie. “We can learn to like other people, even love them, but we can’t ever truly know them, and so we remain isolated. We’re not allowed to know why life has meaning, not for sure anyway, and yet we feel compelled to create some sort of answer. It’s an absurd downward spiral of impossible things, and yet it is our lives.”
Nate leaned on the support pole and stared miserably into the thicket where the zombies had disappeared. He’d never felt so lonely as he did now. More than fast cars, more even than pretty girls, he missed Kellogg. In the short time he’d known him, Kellogg had become like the father Nate never had. His own father—his real father—was a small, stupid man, who saw in Nate a reflection of his own limitations and failure. They had hated one another, and as far as Nate was concerned, the outbreak was about the best thing that had ever happened to them.
