Outside the lawn was a vast placid surface of grass, silvered by the moonlight. Beyond lay concrete and asphalt, all painted the same color. Overhead a thousand stars watched like spectators. I looked left. I looked right. I looked straight ahead.
Everywhere I saw shadows moving, lurching upward from where they’d been sitting or lying on the ground. Shadows with long strawlike hair and red eyes. I could see the red of their eyes even in the darkness.
I dashed out toward the street, thinking I should keep out in the open as much as possible. The buildings around me offered the promise of shelter but also of shadows, and while the zombies couldn’t seem to see in the dark any better than I could—the one on the basement stairs had barely been aware of me until I flicked my lighter—I knew I could stumble into one of them before I knew it was there. Out in the street the red-eyed shadows starting looming closer, but I dodged around them, running as fast as my legs would carry me. I had no idea where I was going, no idea what I would do next. No place was safe. There was nowhere to run to where this would be over—the zombies owned this town. They owned all the world outside the cities and the government zones.
I just ran.
CHAPTER 15
The looter whose knife I’d taken had said the zombies got “playful” at night. I would later learn what that really meant. It had nothing to do with how the zombies thought or felt. They don’t do those things—their virus eats holes in their brains until they can feel nothing at all. They didn’t care about night or day. Zombies don’t care about anything but how hungry they are.
They do have some primitive kinds of instincts, though. They are hunters, and they know or they learn that it’s easier to catch prey when the prey can’t see you coming. Maybe they even have some rudimentary sense of self-preservation, and they know that humans are dangerous in the daylight.
At night they have the advantage, and they don’t hesitate to take it.
I was surrounded by them on all sides. I’d never imagined there were so many of them, that there could be so many—on the radio, the government always claimed that they were dying off, that every year the zombie population was dropping at a precipitous rate. Winter killed far more of them than government patrols, but it was estimated that within fifty more years they would be all but extinct.
I think maybe the radio lied.
Or maybe there were just so many of them, back during the crisis, that nobody could even imagine the vast numbers, the untold millions of them out there in the wilderness. There must have been a thousand of them in Fort Lee, New Jersey, alone. There could have been many more.
As I ran they lurched and grabbed at me, stumbled toward me, drawn by the sound of my feet pounding on the pavement, drawn by my simple vitality, my speed they couldn’t match. Somehow they knew I wasn’t one of them. They reached for me with outstretched hands, gnashed their teeth at the air in my direction. Their red eyes didn’t blink as they stared at me with naked hunger. They made no sound.
They don’t make any sound at all.
Up ahead of me the street opened into an intersection, a broad square of moonlight that looked mostly clear. I careened to a stop there, trying to catch my breath, trying to think of something—anything—to do next. I couldn’t see any good options except to keep running.
Even in the few seconds that I stopped to think, they came closer, a noose tightening around me on every side. They stumbled into one another and pushed others away, competing for the chance to be the one that got me first. One of them walked into the side of an abandoned car and got spun around by the wing mirror on its door. For a moment it could do nothing but swing its arms, trying to keep its balance. It failed and fell down with a crack on the pavement, the first sound I’d heard from them. I started to take a little comfort from that—I was grasping at straws—but a second later it started to rise again, its nose tilted over at a new angle but its eyes just as red, its teeth just as bare.
I picked a direction at random and ran on. My body protested at the strain. I’d had nothing to eat for a full day, nothing but those damned sugar-free mints. I’d caught maybe an hour of sleep. My muscles were flagging, and I knew if I didn’t stop soon, I would just collapse, fall down in the street like that zombie. Except I wouldn’t be getting back up again.
I found the strength to keep going, but I was barely trotting along, only a little faster than the zombies chasing me. And always I saw new ones ahead of me, waiting for me, hobbling straight at me. When any of them got too close, I ducked to the side or I slashed out with my knife or did whatever I could to get past.
Eventually, I came back to where I’d started. The turnpike lay before me, crossed overhead by an on-ramp. It was a huge shadow that cut off half the world in front of me. At least if I got onto the road surface I would be able to see what was coming for me in two directions. I vaulted over the berm and climbed up on top of a rusting car.
Behind me a crowd of zombies looked up, hundreds and hundreds of red eyes staring right at me. They started forward, lumbering and shambling, not as a body of people would but as animals might, crawling over one another to get at me.
I looked around and then up. Overhead was a giant road sign, its green paint faded almost to bone white. It was mounted on a construction of steel girders that had sagged but not completely collapsed over twenty years. I rushed over and leapt onto the girders, which bounced a little but held my weight. The corroded steel crossbeams bit painfully into my fingers but I forced myself upward, ever higher, pulling myself up one handhold at a time until I was perched on the back of the sign, my legs dangling ten feet above the surface of the turnpike. The girders groaned and squeaked alarmingly and the whole construction swayed a little, but it held.
The zombies gathered around the base of the girders. They stared up at me, reached for my trailing feet. One or two of them tried to climb up after me, but they just didn’t have the coordination.
I couldn’t go down. They couldn’t come up.
I remember very little of the next eighteen or so hours.
CHAPTER 16
No water, no food, no sleep. No energy, no ability to even think—I was too terrified. I clung to my perch like a bird in a hurricane, while all around me the zombies hungered for me, raged for me, but could not come an inch closer.
In my mind’s eye all I see is a single image, though that picture is seared permanently into my memory. I can see every detail of them, not just their red eyes and their lank hair but every piece of torn clothing they wore, every sore and scrape and gouge on their faces. The jagged shapes of their fingernails.
Time passed; the stars wheeled overhead. Eventually the sun came back up, and most of them drifted away. Most, but not all. Five of them remained, clawing at the girders that supported me, occasionally smacking or slapping the steel beams so I couldn’t even doze—not that I would have, since it might have meant falling from my safety directly into their arms. Dew collected on the steel support beams around me and I licked at it in my extremity. There was no food, but my brain kept convincing me there had to be, that there must at least be some more of those mints, useless as they were. My free hand kept rummaging through my pockets, looking for mints that weren’t there.
My other hand had cramped into a solid claw by that point, still holding the knife in a death grip. I couldn’t unbend those fingers.
Not that I would want to.
The time passed somehow. It always does.
Nothing lasts forever, not even the horrors in this life.
To tell the truth, I don’t like thinking about the time I spent up on that metal scaffolding behind the road sign. When I do, my shoulders tense up and I start to sweat. It was a long time ago, but my body remembers.
Eventually I saw something moving, far up the turnpike, coming from the south. Moving toward me, slowly growing bigger. I thought it must be another army of z
ombies, come to fight over my body when I finally succumbed and dropped to the asphalt, curled and dry. I didn’t pay it much attention at first.
Slowly details began to coalesce. It was actually a vehicle of some kind. I knew next to nothing of cars, but it seemed to be a big one. What I now know is called an SUV.
I was so parched, so mentally strung out by that point there was no emotional weight attached to seeing that vehicle. I didn’t suddenly sit up and wave at it. I didn’t take heart from its appearance. It was a vaguely interesting detail of the landscape. It wouldn’t change anything, couldn’t change anything, because the universe had frozen into a certain shape, a shape where I waited to die and the zombies waited for me to die, and there could be no other way for things to shake out.
The car kept coming closer, though. It got bigger, and its image shimmered a little in the heat haze on the concrete. I could make out more details. It was dark green in color and had tinted windows. One of its headlights was broken. Coils of razor wire were attached around its doors and on its top.
When it got close enough that I could see the streaks of dust on its hood, it slowed down and I realized it was going to stop, that it wasn’t just going to roar by underneath me, bent on its own business. No, it was going to become part of my life.
The zombies noticed it about then, too. They started to turn to face it. They couldn’t know what they were looking at; they could hardly imagine what the future held in store for them. But it was a moving object in their field, something else to focus on besides the piece of meat up on the girders that refused to fall down.
The SUV rolled to a stop, twenty feet away. So close. I’d begun to think I could just jump down onto its roof and ride it away. I didn’t care I would probably get tangled in the barbed wire on it. Just going somewhere else, moving on, seemed worthwhile.
The zombies started shuffling toward it. The driver’s-side window rolled down. Things seemed to happen out of order, or perhaps I just had no sense of time, as sleep deprived as I was. A man’s torso and arms and head craned up out of the window, his body twisting until he was sitting on the sill. He gestured at the zombies, spoke to them.
“That’s good. Line up for me,” he told them. He didn’t seem afraid at all.
When they were close enough, he reached inside the SUV and then brought out a gun, a short rifle that I would later learn was called a carbine. It made a sound like a power tool, and bits of bone and hair sprang up from the zombies’ heads. One by one, they slumped to their knees, then fell on their faces or backs on the road surface. Then they were all gone.
The man looked up at me then. He cleared his throat as if he was waiting for something. When he didn’t get it, he sighed. “You’re supposed to say something,” he told me.
“I am?” I said, except all that came out was a painful creak. I cleared my throat as best I could and repeated, “I am?”
The man shook his head. “Yeah, you dumb fuck. When you see somebody with a gun,” he said, hoisting the carbine over his head, “say something. Anything. Zombies don’t talk. People do. You want them to think you’re people. So you say something.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well. Hi.”
“Hi yourself. You been up there long? Yeah, I can tell you have. All right.” He seemed to consider something. Maybe whether it would be worth his time to wait for me to climb down from my perch, now that it was safe. “Show me your left hand.”
I lifted it as far as I could. Showed him the tattoo on the back of it. This, at least, I understood. He wanted to know if I was a positive or not. This kind of taxonomic quizzing is common in the wilderness—Are you a zombie? Are you a positive? Are you a fed?—and is carried out in any number of rituals. No one out there can ever trust another, not at least until they’re sure they belong to the same tribe.
“Aw, what the hell,” he said. He started squirming back down inside his vehicle. “I’m going to eat something,” he told me before he disappeared. “Then I’m going to move on. If you’re in this car when that happens, that’s fine. If you’re not, that’s your business.”
He disappeared inside the car and rolled his window back up.
I still had the presence of mind to start climbing down from my perch as fast as I could.
CHAPTER 17
For a long time I couldn’t speak except in monosyllables. I was just too weak. My benefactor made up for it by talking a great deal.
“You’ve got some stones, I’ll give you that,” he told me. “You must, being out here on foot. Didn’t nobody ever tell you how stupid that was? Stones, but stupid. I’m Adare. You were up there a while, huh? Too stupid to come down. Too stupid to give up. I gotta say I kind of like that. Here.”
He handed me a bottle of water. I nearly cried, I was so grateful.
When I’d clambered down from my perch and then joined him in his car, I’d assumed he was alone in there. He wasn’t, but he might as well have been. Besides the two of us, the car was full of girls, all younger than me. They were drab, mousy people, and they never said a word unless they were spoken to, which was very rare. Mostly they just stared out the windows, no expression at all on their faces. Some of them had tattoos like mine, plus signs inscribed on the backs of their left hands. If they caught me looking at their tattoos, they quickly pulled their sleeves down to cover them. I was to get to know them individually, later on, but for the time being they were simply other human bodies, other nonzombies, and their presence alone was encouraging. It seemed it was possible to survive out here—if you had someone like Adare looking after you.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“Finnegan,” I told him, because Finn, the name I usually used, was what my parents had called me. It felt like a child’s name. I had some absurd notion I could treat this man as an equal.
Absurd, because he was twice my size. Maybe forty, maybe younger—it can be hard to judge ages out in the wilderness. People wrinkle fast out there. He had a beard and a flannel shirt and six earrings in one ear, silver hoops that looked like they had some special significance I couldn’t guess. He was not fat at all, just big—big through the shoulders, big through the arms. His seat was pushed back as far as it would go and still his knees brushed the steering wheel.
“Dumb name. I’m calling you Stones from now on,” Adare said, and then he laughed at his own joke. He had been eating a piece of stale bread when I got in the car. He wiped the crumbs off himself now—I would gladly have swept up those crumbs and made a feast of them, but I didn’t dare—and got the car moving. I knew nothing about how to drive, and it seemed like he was constantly adjusting levers, twiddling knobs, and almost dancing with his feet as he accelerated and braked and clutched around potholes and debris and abandoned cars.
It was neither warm nor cold in the SUV; Adare could adjust the temperature. A radio was mounted in the dashboard—he kept the volume low, so we could talk, but underneath it all was the old nerve-jangling music they played on EBS between the service announcements. There was plenty of water, stowed away in a compartment on my side of the dashboard, and it was clean and sweet.
The transition from my perch above the zombies to this rolling extension of the comforts of home was so jarring I couldn’t even get it through my head. Within a few minutes it seemed like I’d always been in the car, just as a few minutes before it might have seemed I was always on the road sign. Maybe that had something to do with the way the road just flowed beneath us, a stream of concrete unending and boundless. Maybe I was just so hungry I was hallucinating. I considered begging Adare for some food, but it seemed impossible. I think I was more frightened of the man than I had been of the zombies.
Which was strange, because if he was a little uncouth, he was certainly friendly. He told me how glad he was to have me aboard and how I was going to change everything for him. “Another man on the team. That’s key. That’s
mission critical. Yes, sir, things are going to be better from now on.”
He was not a positive, he assured me, nor was he with the government. “I’m a king of the road, like in the old song.” I didn’t know the song he meant. That didn’t matter at all to Adare. “I go where I like, Stones, do what I feel. I work my way up and down the ’pike, collecting a few luxury goods from this town or that, and I sell what I find to the military for food and water and fuel. It’s a good life.”
“A looter,” I said, except—the military shot looters, the radio had always told us that. How could he trade with them if they knew what he was?
“That’s the technical term, I guess. It can mean a lot of different things, though, Stones. Don’t forget that. Not all looters are created equal. I’m one of the good ones.”
I had to admit there seemed a world of difference between Adare and the predatory woman who had chased me into Fort Lee, the fur-draped looter whose knife I still had at my belt. Adare hadn’t tried to kill me or enslave me yet, for one thing.
“You must’ve come from a city, huh? Yeah, from New York, that’s the closest one, the closest one still going. I’m guessing you don’t know the lay of the land yet. Let me tell you a little something for free, Stones. You play nice, you get along, and nobody fucks you. Take me, for instance. The feds, they could shoot me any time they wanted, sure. They’ve got standing orders for that—martial law. Now, that’s just the rules, and some people, they can’t live with rules. So they run around scared like rabbits, trying to stay under the feds’ radar, robbing and killing and doing whatever desperate shit they must, just to keep breathing. Now other folks—yours truly being a perfect example—understand the importance of rules. The desperate need for a civil society. Maybe they have to kiss a little brown, now and again. Maybe they’ve got to doff their hats and call people sir. In the navy I learned all about that. You fucked around, you got the shit jobs, or maybe you ended up in the brig. You saluted when you were supposed to and you shined the right shoes, you did just fine. Nothing’s changed where that’s concerned. I perform a valuable service, as far as the government is concerned, so they turn a blind eye to my movements. I provide the things they need to stay sane, right? And I help keep this road clear, moving debris when I have to, blowing away some red-eyes when they pop their heads up. Every fed on this road knows Adare, and they all know to let him pass; they know to even give him a friendly wave when he drives by. Because I play nice with others. It’s the most important thing in the world.”
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