The Passenger (Surviving the Dead)

by James Cook

  Rather than get violent, Gideon had clenched his teeth and listened. He heard the spiel about opportunistic infections, proper drug regiments, taking precautions. He kept calm by imagining how surprised the doctor’s face would look if he slammed a fist into his jaw. Or how unruffled the good doctor would be if Gideon jammed a dirty needle into his arm, all the while chanting about how it wasn't a death sentence.

  The world darkened a little more, in reality this time, as clouds moved in. Gideon thought it appropriate. The memories stung now more than ever—the other half of the equation that kept him running.

  Julia left him as soon as he broke the news. She'd suspected his infidelity for years; no wife whose husband stayed gone on business trips as long as he did could do otherwise. She screamed at him, called him names, threw things, all over one mistake. Gideon held himself in check.

  Julia cursed him as she dragged her suitcase to the front door. He tried to stop her, reason with her. He felt the razor-sharp memory of his hand squeezing her arm as she pushed him, trying to make him let go. He squeezed harder, pulling her away from the door.

  Until then, he had managed to bottle up the rage, the injustice of it. All his life had been a lesson in channeling those impulses into more productive behavior. But when she slapped him, teeth bared with the effort of swinging her arm as hard as she could, his vision went red. There was a short gap, a flashpoint where time passed but no memories penetrated the haze.

  The next thing he remembered, Julia was standing over him, her back against the door as she clutched her bleeding face. Gideon’s left eye hurt like ten kinds of hell, and his balls ached all the way to his teeth.

  Julia left that day, and it was the last time he ever saw her. There was no pity on her face, nothing of the love and adoration he'd seen on their wedding day. Staring up at her then, he would have accepted fear or anger or even hate.

  Instead, she had sneered at him and called him a fucking coward.

  From there, the memories grew vague. He kept up with the medications because, no matter how dark the horizon, Gideon could be relied upon to protect Gideon. A lesser man might have fallen to pieces and crawled to others, begging for help or sympathy.

  Gideon took another path.

  He got trashed.

  Months of working extra hours and hoarding cash were punctuated by breaks filled to the brim with hedonism to make the Romans blush. When he planned those forays, there was never any intent to do anything stupid. But once the booze soaked his brain, considerations like telling women his HIV status or even wearing protection became unimportant.

  When the world fell apart, he was coming off one of his benders. He'd missed the news, having spent over a week in an expensive hotel room drinking, snorting cocaine, and banging whores. It didn’t help that he had shattered the TV on the first night.

  It wasn't quite instantaneous, but when Gideon dried out enough to leave the room and heard the newscasts, he began to worry. The talking heads said it all, how the dead were rising, how the infection was spreading, how the chaos was building like a storm. The President assured everyone the military would soon have the situation under control. Stay in your homes, he said. Don’t panic.

  Gideon was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. He could read between the lines; the plague was out of control. Things were getting bad, and quickly.

  When the Outbreak hit Gideon’s town, he was long gone, running ahead of the storm with a trunk full of medicine stolen from every pharmacy he could rob. Two days and a gun to his head later, the car and his pills were gone.

  On foot, the plague caught up to him. Gideon found himself in the middle of it, surviving despite the odds. He'd done so for a long time, now.

  After the first few weeks of trying, he gave up searching for the right medications. He wasn't truly sick, then, but he knew it was only a matter of time. So he'd gone wandering, surviving day to day, eventually finding a measure of peace.

  Until he found the meth.

  The house had looked normal enough on the ground floor, but when he’d gone down to the basement, the normalcy ended. Whoever had set up the lab knew what they were doing. It wasn’t one of those filthy, cluttered death traps he’d seen on the news so many times. This setup was clean, orderly, professional. Clearly labeled chemicals, properly stored. A set of beakers and burners that would have been right at home in a high-school science lab. And sitting on a shelf, separated into bundles packaged tightly together with clear cellophane, was the meth.

  Hundreds of pounds of it.

  Gideon couldn’t even guess at the street value. He’d always been partial to cocaine, but hey, any port in a storm. He’d taken all he could carry. After smoking some and feeling the tingling rush of strength that came with an amphetamine high, he realized he could carry more. So he went back and stocked up again until his pack had bulged with the stuff.

  It wasn’t nearly as heavy as it used to be.

  Slowing his pace, he wandered over to a large stone on the side of the road and sat down, warming himself in the sun. The thin glass pipe no longer burned his fingers when he smoked, calluses having long since formed in curious lines across his fingertips.

  The swarm followed, and the fresh sense of hyper-reality brought on by the atomized crystal flowing into his lungs made the ghouls stand out even more sharply against the lovely day. His memories since beginning his habit were vague in many places, but when he lit the pipe, those first days came back in vivid detail.

  What began as an escape—a break from the fear that every little cough and sniffle would be the illness that ate him alive—had evolved into a crushing addiction. Just as Gideon had no way to know when HIV would transition into AIDS, he didn't feel the damage from the drugs building up inside of him.

  The psychosis took root in his already anger-ridden mind, brain chemistry and structure irrevocably altered by time and the painful memories of his life before the Outbreak. Whatever tenuous grip he’d had on sanity loosened bit by bit until, finally, it fell away altogether.

  That was when the killing started.

  At first, it was runners. People out on their own with no permanent place to live. A few here and there, mostly after arguments. Those early kills were crimes of passion and opportunity, fueled by hate and justified by his situation. As time went on, his psychosis grew worse and worse, and as a consequence, so did his crimes.

  Gideon watched the swarm and planned his next move. Broken Bridge had been the end game. The finale. His tomb as well as his greatest accomplishment. After all, he had survived the end of the world only to face a future limited by the disease slowly dissolving his immune system.

  He sat on the rock and watched the swarm grow larger. The high wasn't as powerful as he'd have liked—the plight of the junkie—but it was enough. It quieted the hungry thing entwined in his brain. Had a person approached him then and asked why he did the things he did, the question would have brought only a blank stare. Purely hypothetical, of course, as he hadn't allowed a person close enough to speak without killing them for months.

  If he had to die, why should anyone else be allowed to live?

  The monster inside him purred at the thought, wanted to know how to proceed. Gideon shouldered his rifle—a military sniper carbine stolen from the body of a dead soldier—and stood, full of energy. He didn't know where to go from here, hadn't planned for victory.

  But he knew what he'd like to do. Better, he knew where to ask the right questions.

  *****

  “I want to know where the people are,” Gideon said in an even, almost bored voice. “I asked your friends, but they didn't answer.”

  The clearing was strewn with bodies, but the swarm would be on its way soon to clean up the mess. Gideon never let them get too far behind. They were so easily distracted, his little darlings. The loud crack of the rifle—three fast shots to take out the guard, and one a few seconds later to lame the woman—would draw their attention.

  The rest was knife
work.

  Five people killed, and easily done at that. One dead man to start, one injured woman clutching at the spurt of blood jetting from her leg, and the same question asked for each of them before they died. The next two were teenagers, too rebellious to do more than spit in his face. His weapon cowed them, but not enough to make them give in.

  Two quick slashes, and the mud turned red around them.

  The other pair of corpses were an older couple, too horrified to even attempt to answer when Gideon spoke to them. Which led him to the woman, who now had a belt cinched tight around her thigh and her hands tied behind her back. Gideon straddled her stomach.

  “Hey,” he said, tapping the woman on the forehead with a crusty fingernail. “I'm waiting. Talk to me. Where are the people?”

  She stared at him, terrified, but with a defiant gleam in her sky-blue eyes. “Fuck you. You're going to kill me anyway. Just do it.”

  “That's true,” Gideon replied. “You're gonna die, that’s for sure. But it's up to you how much pain you feel before then.”

  The woman glanced at his crotch, eyes widening. Gideon laughed.

  “Sorry, sweetheart, but that's not gonna happen. That old thing stopped being much use a long time ago.” He fumbled around the pockets of his coat, stained with the juices of the dead man he'd pulled it from, and eventually produced a small butane torch. He clicked it to life.

  “I want to know where the people are,” Gideon repeated as he held the blade of his small knife to the blue-white flame.

  The woman's breathing quickened, but she closed her mouth into a tight line. Gideon cocked his head at the display of self-control, birdlike in his curiosity. Without changing expression, he pressed the flat of the blade against her cheek, the tip just below her eye.

  Skin sizzled, the smell somewhere between chicken and bacon. He pulled the blade away when the sound stopped, not bothering to ask again. The monster wanted pain and Gideon agreed with it, and both of them were dangerously close to forgetting their purpose.

  A second, louder wave of sizzling was broken by the woman's pent-up scream. Gideon stared at her as she shrieked in agony, wonder and confusion on his face.

  For a fraction of a second, the person he used to be took over. Just for a flash of time, he saw her for what she was: a victim. Pity came along for the ride, an emotion so dusty and unfamiliar he couldn't reconcile it with the furious hatred driving him. Then the random firing of long unused synapses ended, and Gideon leaned in once more.

  “I'd like to say I won’t ask you again,” he said, grinning. “But the truth is, we've got some time before my friends show up, and I'm having fun. So please, feel free to stay quiet.”

  “No!” the woman shrieked, her breath fanning out his lank hair. “North. Go north about five miles. You'll come to a little fort off the highway. A town a few miles northeast of here uses it as a trade depot. Watch long enough, you'll be able to follow them back home.”

  A tear rolled down her cheek at the admission. Gideon darted in and flicked his tongue across the droplet.

  “Thank you,” he said with genuine warmth. “You runners and your little camp sites. All of you share them, keep them in good shape. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Even animals are smart enough to look for prey at the watering hole.”

  Gideon put the tip of the knife against her chest at an angle. Slowly, so slowly, he pushed until the blade slid between the ribs, its back scraping against the sternum. The woman screamed, tried to get away, but he had practice at this.

  He stopped the blade when he felt resistance.

  “The point is sitting against your heart,” he said casually. “An ounce of pressure and you'll be gone in a minute. During that time, you should think about how stupid animals are. Always going back to their safe little places no matter how often the wolves attack them there.”

  With her last ounce of strength, the woman followed the example set by the murdered teenagers and spit in Gideon's face.

  “They all do that,” he said, and pushed.

  *****

  Hours after the swarm cleaned the flesh from the bones of his victims, Gideon found himself cleaning the blood from his knife again. The small town was right where it was supposed to be. There was even a group packing up from a trade when he got there. An older man and two young women. Gideon repeated his trick, now getting stale and not as much fun.

  The older of the two girls gave him detailed information about the nearby community. More a city, from what she'd told him. Hundreds of people, a huge wall, but no interior defenses. A fortress on the outside but soft in the middle. A perfect target.

  “Steel City,” Gideon muttered, pushing greasy locks off his face. His hand came back red. The last few minutes with the girl had gotten ... intense.

  He said the name again, rolling it around on his tongue. Only now that his blood began to calm, and what passed for rationality began to reassert itself, did he wonder why the place was called that. He glanced down at the rapidly cooling corpse on the ground and felt a small pang of regret. Not at the murder—that was as close as he came to pleasure nowadays—but that he hadn't asked her to explain.

  It nagged at him, but the monster inside took over. That was how he saw it, at least. In a dark corner of his mind rarely exposed to light and certainly never visited, Gideon knew the truth. Whatever destruction had befallen his brain, it had only distorted and magnified what was already there.

  The monster was him, a version of him freed from the shackles of his already shaky conscience by severe neurological trauma. Had Gideon the bravery to admit it, he might have managed enough control to end his life without more mayhem.

  But a lifetime of being a bully, of lying to himself, of fantasizing about all the ways he could avenge perceived slights, had created conditions perfect for a monster to grow. Gideon could be relied on to protect Gideon, after all.

  Even from himself.

  SEVENTEEN

  At 0700 hours, Cole grabbed Ethan by the toes of his right foot and shook vigorously. Ethan came up swinging, as he always did, but this time he didn’t hit anyone. Cole had already backed off a few steps, remembering very well the last time he’d stood too close to his friend after waking him up. Ethan came back to himself, eyes clearing, and cursed.

  “I gotta stop doing that. I’m gonna hurt somebody one of these days.”

  “S’cool, man.” Cole smiled. “No hard feelings. Happens all the time.”

  “Not to you.”

  Cole shrugged, his smile fading. “Looks like the survivors came back.”

  Ethan climbed out of his bedroll, got to his feet, and looked where Cole was pointing. Zeb and his men were approaching, followed by a group of armed, hard-faced children and two adults, also armed and grim-looking. Most of the children were tweens and teenagers, but there were a few toddlers as well, the smallest of them being carried by older children.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Hey man, at least they’re still alive.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Ethan looked over his shoulder and saw Holland struggling out of his tent.

  “Zeb’s on his way. The survivors are with him.”

  “The kids?”

  “Yep.”

  Holland groaned and sank back down into his sleeping bag. “Wake me up when it’s time to move out.”

  Ethan ran a hand over his face while Cole chuckled beside him. “Isaac, get these guys up and moving, please. I’m going to go have a word with the good sheriff.”

  “Cool.”

  After slipping on his boots, Ethan rinsed his mouth out with water from his canteen, spit it over the edge of the roof, and climbed down the ladder. He knew he must look a sight with his red-rimmed eyes and short, scruffy beard. But right then, he just didn’t give a shit.

  When he reached the bottom of the ladder, Zeb spoke up first, waving a hand at the two adults accompanying the children. “Sergeant Thompson, this is Alicia Meyer and Omar Terrell. They were guarding t
he children last night when the swarm hit.”

  Ethan raised a hand in acknowledgment, nodding once. Now that they were closer, he could see the survivors’ exhaustion as clear as day. They wavered on their feet, unsteady with dehydration and hunger, none of them looking as though they had slept a wink in the last twenty-four hours. The adults had the haunted, gaunt-faced look of having suffered severe mental trauma: the thousand-yard stare. Ethan had seen it many times, both on other people and looking back at him in the mirror, but the sight of it never stopped twisting in his chest.

  When he shifted his gaze to the children, he saw a mixture of anger and fear tightly hidden under an ingrained watchfulness. Their eyes darted left, right, up, down, the same conical pattern used by soldiers to scan large environments for signs of hostiles. Each of them clutched a weapon, ranging from small-caliber firearms to bows-and-arrows, and even a few handmade crossbows. Some of the older children had simple melee weapons such as woodcutting axes, machetes, or crowbars strung across their backs. All in all, they looked like a formidable little fighting force. And again, looking at their dirty, angel faces, Ethan had to try very hard not to cry.

  “Do any of you need medical attention?” he asked, clearing his throat.

  The woman, Alicia, glanced at him skeptically. “You a doctor?”

  “No. I’m a medic. Used to be an EMT back before the Outbreak.”

  Her skepticism faded, and she went back to just looking tired. “Thanks for the offer, but we’re fine. Nothing a little food, water, and rest won’t fix. I’m more concerned about the immediate future.” She inclined her head slightly toward the children behind her.

  It occurred to Ethan that on their walk from the main gate, the children must have undoubtedly seen the carpet of dead bodies littering the streets. Most of the corpses belonged to the horde that destroyed Broken Bridge, but at least a few of them were neighbors or relatives. Parents even. Although it was tragic, he was glad his team had put down most of the reanimated townsfolk outside the gate where the children couldn’t see them. Small mercies.