by Adair, Bobby
“The woods,” I told him.
We ran past the blue house without pause.
Despite the cold temperatures, I wished I was still naked and able to fit in with our pursuers. That one thing would give me a lethally stealthy advantage that, so far, the naked horde hadn’t been intelligent enough to counter.
Murphy crashed between bare branches growing over a narrow path. I tore in behind him.
Whites were in the yard we’d just crossed. Moments later, they burst through the bushes to get on the path behind us.
I listened for Whites in the trees, skipping the path altogether. I knew they would. They had to. It was an intelligence thing. If a regular White saw you on the other side of a fence, he’d try all day to go through the fence before it occurred to him to go over. It was a different story with Smart Ones. I knew at least some of the Whites had to see us among the trees and wouldn’t go to the path to chase us, but rather, would run a beeline from where they stood to the spot where they saw us, even if bushes and vines were in the way.
Advantage us. Those Whites would come more slowly and be dispersed.
The ones bright enough to follow the path would get strung out in a single-file line. Whites are easier to kill that way than when they all come at you at once.
I don’t know why, but that made me think of the attack by that mob of white-skinned motherfuckers when Steph and I were caught on the shore of Lake Travis a few months ago. And like every time that memory found its way into my mind, it hurt. A fresh dose of adrenaline pumping through my veins mixed with that pain, and blurred into a rage with a biting hunger for revenge.
My rationality switch flipped to fuck it.
I skidded to a stop on the trail. I turned to face the Whites coming up behind me and roared all of my hatred into a dead, gray sky.
I ran back up the trail, swinging my machete-shaped best friend.
Predators hate it when the prey turns and says, “Fuck you!”
The first White in line fell onto his ass as he tried to come to a stop. The two Whites behind him tripped and tumbled over.
Too bad for them.
I slashed and cut a chunk from two heads as I leapt over.
A fourth White, this one with a blade in hand, made a running Tarzan leap at me. I spun and ripped out his guts with a two-handed swing of my machete as I sidestepped his momentum.
The White who’d been leading the line on the trail struggled through the bodies of his three dying buddies to reach for my leg. He caught a big mouthful of steel-toed boot and went limp.
A quick little woman came around a curve in the trail before I had my blade up to hack her down. She made a quick move to get her face out of my fist’s way, but earned a throat full of elbow instead. Her larynx collapsed and the crunchy noise of it followed the gobs of spit on the last breath out of her wide-open mouth.
My blade found another White woman coming up the trail.
I ran further, seeing no Whites, only hearing them in the woods around me. I shouted, “C’mon, fuckers!”
I was full of victory and invincibility, thinking I could handle any number. I was loving the taste of revenge and the feel of warm Whites’ blood on my face and hands.
A big fellow tripped out of the trees and fell onto the trail a few paces away. Too bad for him, I was faster at covering the distance than he was at regaining his feet. I hacked him across the back of his neck and he collapsed face first onto the muddy path.
“There you go, motherfucker!” I shouted. “You want some more? Come on, I’ll kill every one of you shits!”
No more came.
Murphy said, “They’re dead, dude.”
I caught a big breath and found that the pace of my breathing was uncomfortably fast.
“You got most of ‘em,” he said, with his bloody hatchet in hand. “I finished off the ones who needed it.”
I nodded and pursed my lips. “Thanks.” Rational thought slowly returned as my anger settled to a simmer. “You have to shoot any of ‘em?”
“A few.” He turned back up the trail. “What do you say we get the hell away from Creepy Town and see if we can find us another barn to crash in tonight? Oh, and next time, let me know if you decide to run off in the other direction. I was a long way down the trail when I figured out that you weren’t behind me.”
I nodded and started to follow as Murphy moved up the trail.
Murphy said, “That was some shit.”
“Needed to be done.” It was the first excuse I came up with, though I wasn’t entirely sure I needed an excuse.
Murphy grunted noncommittally. A moment later, he asked, “You get hurt?”
“No.” I did a quick mental inventory of my parts—wiggled my toes, bent my elbows, swung my shoulders, and flexed my fingers. “I’m good.”
“None of that’s your blood, then?”
“You know how it goes sometimes,” I answered.
“Yeah.”
We’d gone a piece up the trail when I thought to ask, “You didn’t get hurt, did you? Bit or anything?”
“Nope,” said Murphy, as he held up his hand and flexed his fingers. “Something in the bushes got me.” He looked closely at his palm. “Maybe thorns or a scorpion, or something.” He shrugged and put the hand back on his rifle. “The ones coming through the woods weren’t hard. The ones on the trail were dazed, or too busy dying to pay me any mind after you tore through ‘em.”
“Yeah,” I said. “About that.”
Shaking his head, Murphy turned. “Don’t sweat it. You gotta do what you gotta do.” He reached up and tapped the side of my head with a big finger. “Before you can deal with some of the crazy that lives in here.”
I had no response. He was right.
Murphy turned and started forward again. “You forget, I’ve been there. There’s only one way past that shit for people like you and me.”
“To kill Mark.”
Murphy nodded.
Somewhere in the shadows far off to our left, a White screamed an alarm. Another added her voice. One by one, all through the woods, in the direction we were moving, White voices joined in.
“I knew we didn’t get them all,” whispered Murphy. “But—”
“But there’s always more than you think,” I finished.
The hunt was on again, and there were way too many Whites in the forest for me to kill, no matter how manic I let myself get.
We needed to evade them until dark. With Murphy’s night vision goggles, nighttime was the advantage that could save us.
We turned and ran back up the trail toward Creepy Town.
Chapter 36
We bolted out of the woods and ran past the blue house, fixing our bearing on the grain silos. Whites were crashing through the trees behind us, across a wide front, driving us with their frightful howls, but not gaining any ground.
But then, relatively few of them could have been on the narrow trail. The rest had to be moving slowly through the undergrowth.
Right?
Of course it was right, but damn. Something was fucked with that logic, but I was hauling ass too fast and my adrenaline was coursing too thickly with residual rage for me to put clear thoughts together.
Not good for me. Not one bit. I often kept a cool, analytical distance through a lot of this kind of shit, and it made me one lethal motherfucker. It was probably the only reason I was still alive and pounding the crumbly asphalt through the center of Creepy-ville.
Then it occurred to me.
We were being hunted.
An ambush was coming.
Holy shit.
The clarity of that thought slapped me so hard I nearly stumbled.
I had to act.
Right the fuck now.
I stopped and Murphy plowed into me from behind.
“What the fuck, dude!” He pointed at the grain silos, just three blocks ahead, on what passed for Creepy Town’s main street.
“Ambush,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone, though I ha
dn’t yet spotted one White, now that we were back in town. “Follow me.”
I bolted into a gap between two closely spaced houses and leapt over big, plastic kids’ toys hiding in the tall brown grass. I rounded the back of a house and turned right to see three Whites at the other end of the house’s backside, peeking around the corner, looking in the other direction, at the road Murphy and I had been running down moments before.
I ran full-speed at them with my machete out at knee level. “Hey, assholes,” I said, just as I passed. I couldn’t resist. The blade ripped across the tendons on the backs of their legs.
I missed one, but Murphy, taking up the rear, elbowed her in the skull and slammed her into the house.
I turned further away from the silos and ran across a dirt road into a quarter-acre collection of rusty cars, aging propane tanks, and pieces of metal so old they looked like giant, bent flecks of rust. We burst through a web of twisted branches, each displaying rows of small dead leaves, and found ourselves in a fallow field on the edge of Creepy Town.
We were still a good three blocks away from the silos, but hopefully, out of the scope of the hunting Whites. I made another hard turn and ran toward the silos.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Murphy said through labored breaths. “You’re gonna wear us out before we get there.”
“I know,” I said. Cool, quick thinking and an absence of hesitation had just earned us a life-saving advantage. The Whites didn’t know their prey had given them the slip.
We stopped behind a house two short blocks from the towering silos and scanned the area. More Whites had to be waiting in ambush. I needed to find out where.
Murphy pointed and whispered. “By that yellow house. Four of ‘em.”
“I see.” I looked left and right. “Over there, back the way we came,” I pointed. “A couple behind that tractor.”
“They’re all still looking the other way for us,” said Murphy. “Was that a lucky turn back there? Or did you know?”
“What do you think?” I took off at a run and crossed behind two more houses.
A block and a half to go.
Panting, I stopped behind a dense honeysuckle vine growing through a chain-link fence, looking for Whites ahead.
Murphy ran by, slapping me on the shoulder, “C’mon. I think they saw us.”
Shit.
It was a race.
Another race.
Murphy, being faster on his feet, put some space between us, but slowed as we crossed the last street. He stopped, swung his rifle around, and spent a half-dozen rounds at Whites he figured were too close. And if he figured they were, he was probably right.
I crossed the double railroad tracks first. My feet slipped and twisted through the big, loose rocks that made the tracks’ foundations. I thanked myself again for my decision to keep my boots. We passed a utilitarian cinder block building beside the tracks and ran beneath a pavilion with a twenty-foot roof overhead, pierced by a dozen wide pipes, the place where grain from the silos was filled into train cars.
With Whites screaming a hundred feet behind us, we rounded the last silo in the line, and spotted our salvation.
Murphy spun around and leveled his rifle at the closest infected. “Go!” he shouted, as he popped off several rounds.
I jumped onto the ladder and started to climb.
Before I was so high up that a jump back to the ground would injure me, I stopped and looked to make sure Murphy was coming.
He fired two more rounds and bounded over to the ladder.
I put myself in speedy monkey mode and started up as fast as I could climb, figuring before I was halfway up, Murphy would be right on my ass, because as with everything else, he was faster than me.
At about fifteen feet up, I entered the ladder cage, a round tube of mesh and braces, which I guessed were there to keep climbers from falling off. I laughed as I climbed. If a high wind blew me off, there was plenty of room inside the cage for me to do my falling without ever touching the ladder or cage.
The thing about climbing—as I came to understand pretty quickly—is that it’s not as easy as it looks in the movies. Yeah, I know, like anybody has to be told that. Climbing a ladder works the arm and leg muscles in a way they’re not used to, at least not in a repetitive, weight-bearing fashion.
My muscles were getting stiff and I stopped, thinking a good excuse for a pause would be to look down to see how Murphy was progressing.
I swung one foot and one arm away from the ladder and leaned my back against the cage. In another day, in an old, civilized world, I might not have done it. Too much risk for nearly nothing gained. But compared to the shit I did on a daily basis, it seemed a lot like no big deal. I looked down. Murphy was a good ways below and climbing a lot more slowly than I expected.
At least a half-dozen screaming Whites were crowded around the base of the ladder, with more of them close enough to spit on. A steady flow was piling into Creepy Town from the woods. All were heeding the call of their naked kin.
“You good?” I called.
Murphy looked up, worry on his face. “Yeah.”
He wasn’t good. He was having trouble with the rungs and he was coming up slowly.
I waited and watched, feeling the ladder vibrate with the weight of the Whites mounting it at the bottom.
“Dude?” I asked, concerned.
Murphy grimaced and raised his hand, palm up. His fingers were swollen as fat as sausages. “Whatever got me back in the woods—” He looked down at the Whites, then back up at me. “It keeps swelling.”
“Pass me,” I shouted. “Hurry.”
Murphy shook his head.
“Goddammit,” I yelled. “Just get the fuck up here.” I brandished my machete. “I can cut fingers off rungs all night long.”
Wrapping the arm with the swollen hand around the ladder, Murphy climbed with only his good hand to hold onto the rungs.
A clinking sound startled me into looking up instead of down. Way up at the top of the ladder, hanging right over the ladder cage, one of those wide-mouthed, metal grain chutes was pointing down. That didn’t make any sense to me, not one bit.
Why would the silo owners want to dump grain down through the ladder cage?
The pipe vibrated with a throaty, tinny noise.
Oh, shit.
I pressed my back against the ladder cage to get as far away from the center of the tube as possible. I yelled, “Murphy, off the ladder. Against the cage! Right fucking now!”
The pipe spat something black and round.
Before I could curse, a perfect black sphere swished past me, pushing a puff of air into my face. I looked down as it passed, hoping to God Murphy had heeded my order with the urgency that I’d shouted it.
His body was moving to the side, even as the bowling ball—it was a fucking bowling ball—brushed the front of his MOLLE vest. It hit the toe of his boot and deflected just enough to bounce off the ladder cage before it thudded with a wet crunch into the first White on the ladder.
Screams followed as I watched the weirdest piece of performance art I’d ever seen. Arms and legs flailed inside the ladder cage as they fell, spraying blood through grunts and howls.
However many Whites had been on the ladder, they were now crumbled into a squirming pile at the foot of it.
“Holy mother of shit.” Sometimes the words just come.
“What the hell was that?” Murphy shouted.
“Bowling ball. You okay?”
“I think.”
“Climb and be ready for more.” I started up the ladder again, shouting upward as I went, to whomever. “Hey! Hey! Give me a warning before you drop the next one. Please!”
Rusty metal hinges squealed from up at the top of the ladder. A head popped out directly above me, but way, way up. It disappeared again.
“There are people up there,” I called down to Murphy. I saw Whites below as I did, and felt the ladder take their weight as they took up the chase again. I loo
ked back up and shouted, “We’re coming. We’re cool. Just let us up.”
“Say please,” Murphy called, his smile clear through the sound of his voice.
I swore to myself if he didn’t spend a least a little more time in a shitty mood, I was going to kick him in the ‘nads.
Nothing happened above. No more bowling balls.
As I got closer, heads kept popping out from up there for a look. Voices discussed and some shouted. Things were tense upstairs, I guessed, as they were deciding what to do with an intruder and his friend in the process of dragging the attention of God knows how many naked Whites up to the top of their silo.
My biggest fear as I neared the top was that they’d see the color of my skin.
Chapter 37
“Bombs away.” The shout came from above.
I immediately pushed my back against the ladder cage and hollered down to Murphy, “Here comes another!”
Two seconds later, a bowling ball—not black, but glittery, with dark green swirls—whooshed past. It missed Murphy, thank God.
Another wet thud. A splatter of blood. Grunts. Screams. And falling bodies, adding to the pile of wiggling flesh and broken bones at the bottom.
“You gonna make it, Murphy?” He was still moving slowly, and the distance between us was growing, though I’d been climbing more slowly since becoming aware of his swollen hand.
A few hundred Whites were below, most crowding the foot of the ladder, trying to be next to climb. Some took advantage of the free meal of their dying comrades. It occurred to me that a significant minority in the naked horde had probably developed a preferential taste for the easy meat that cannibalism offered. Spending your days in a massive herd of edibles, eating the weak and injured, had to be so much easier than going balls-out into the bullets every time a normal was spotted. I wondered if the cannibalistic ones—that I now decided had to exist—were relatively smart compared to the mass. I wondered if they had the good sense to hang back during an attack and feed lazily on the leftovers in the aftermath.
Probably.
In a way, I thought none of that was my problem, but it was. Or at least, it was in terms of my understanding of the scope of the problem at the bottom of the ladder. How many of those Whites, Smart Ones included, would continue to climb, only to be slaughtered before they started trying to find a better way to get to the meat at the top of the silos? I wanted to believe that this ladder was the only way up, but I’d seen the brutal intelligence of the naked horde at work too many times. They had an uncanny ability to quickly solve the hardest problems, to see past the staunchest defense, to overwhelm, and kill.
