Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands

by Meredith, Peter

  Chapter 30

  Cole felt the earth spin for a moment and he swayed and had to grab the countertop. “No…no, I didn’t kill anyone. I used a tranquilizer gun. It’s not a real gun.” He forgot all about Sergeant Phillips and went to Brunker and gave him a shake. “Hey! Brunker!” The eyes didn’t blink. The head only lolled to the side.

  “Maybe there’s poison in the darts,” Corrina said, rubbing her arm where she had poked herself with one of her darts the night before. A tiny jab had been enough to knock her out for hours. At the time it had been blissful, now she was wondering if she had nearly poisoned herself. It wouldn’t be the first time. “Does anyone know what’s in those things?”

  “It’s probably just a stronger than normal tranquilizer,” McGuigan said. “Something that would kill a normal man.” He gave Cole a side-long glance.

  “He wasn’t normal!” Cole cried. “You heard Jon. He said Brunker had dirty blood. And you all saw how he was acting. He was acting crazy. He was acting like one of them.”

  While all eyes were on Cole, Sergeant Phillips slid his pistol out again. He wasn’t going to be the next “accidental” death. “So, you’re going to listen to one of them? That’s the craziest thing I’ve seen so far. Maybe someone should dart you.”

  “Everyone shut up!” Hamilton snapped. “We all saw Brunker was messed in the head. He was becoming one of them, which was sad and all, but it made him fair game. I’m not gonna fault Cole on this one. But I am sick of hearing that thing talk. It isn’t right.” Without asking anyone for permission, he shoved the hood back over Jon’s face. “Better already.”

  This brought on a long uncomfortable silence. There was still a dead body lying there out in the open. It drew the eye. Corrina kept thinking that it was looking at her, while Cole couldn’t stop looking at it. Eventually, he wrapped Brunker’s rags around him tighter and dragged him outside where the wind howled. Above him the sky was black and green.

  Not far away it seemed to be raining and yet the drops never touched the ground. They became mist and were swept away. He was just wondering if the radiation was causing this when the meter in his pocket began buzzing furiously. “I guess so,” he muttered as he headed back inside.

  Something odd caught his eye and he paused in the doorway wondering what was different. Something was out of place. “Fuuuuck,” he cursed, seeing what it was. “The other Dead-eyes are gone,” he told the group. “They must’ve slept off the tranquilizer and got up and walked away.”

  “No,” McGuigan said in a hollow whisper. “You mean all we have is Jon and…” His eyes slid to Sergeant Phillips.

  “I ain’t one of them!” he bellowed, gripping the Riker with both hands. “If I was, wouldn’t I be all crazy and bitey? Have I bitten anyone? Huh? No! So, back off.”

  He waved the gun and everyone had the same reaction, they lifted their hands, palms out. “That’s fuckin’ right,” he muttered, before going to a corner of the room and settling himself down, the pistol sitting on his knees.

  Cole knew that people showed signs of infection at different rates and he figured it was just a matter of time before Phillips began ranting. When it happened, he hoped to God that Hamilton would shoot him in the head right away. Cole didn’t think he could do it, not unless Phillips was actively threatening someone or if his eyes turned black. He couldn’t shoot another human or even a partial human.

  An hour ticked by and then another, and still Phillips didn’t fly into a rage and his eyes seemed no darker than anyone else’s. On a whim he said to Phillips, “Your mother loves you.”

  “Huh? You don’t know my ma. You don’t know anything about her.”

  It was a borderline reply—many Dead-eyes couldn’t exactly remember their mothers and would fling out a defensive answer to the empath question. He tried his usual follow-up question. “Your neighbor had a baby two days ago. She is small and beautiful. Her skin is a delicate pink and her legs are chubby. Now, the mother is boiling her baby for dinner.”

  Phillips pointed his gun at Cole. “Did you get bit, mother fucker?” He looked around at the others for support. “I’m not the crazy one, he is. You guys see it, right? Right?”

  McGuigan smiled thinly and, unable to pick a single non-verbal response, nodded his head at the same time that he shook it. “It’s actually a game that the bounty hunters play. It’s a response game. If someone said that to you at a bar, what would you say?”

  “I’d punch him in the fuckin’ throat,” he answered without hesitation. “I would, too, and that ain’t crazy. That’s normal.”

  Cole grinned. “It is normal. It’s perfectly normal. You may not be infected.”

  “I know I’m not infected,” Phillips replied. With his free hand he touched his cheek and jaw. “I feel the same as always. I look the same, don’t I? Ham?”

  Hamilton shrugged. “Yeah, if you mean ugly, you do.” He laughed loudly as if this was the first joke ever told. Phillips’s relief was so great that he laughed right along with him. Corrina laughed along with them, leaning on Cole’s shoulder.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine. It’s good news. Ol’ piggy over there ain’t dyin’.” She laughed at this and fell over so that she was grinning up from Cole’s lap. “I can see up your nose. You got a whole forest of hairs up there.” She giggled at this as well.

  “Are you high?” he asked in a whisper.

  This sobered her up. “No, of course not. H-How would I, uh get anything out here? This place ain’t exactly jumping with dealers. I’m uh just happy for, uh, Sergeant…”

  She drew a blank and Cole said, “Phillips.”

  “Yeah, him. I’m happy he ain’t dying. I’m happy for all of us.”

  “She sounds high to me,” Hamilton drawled. Phillips was quick to agree. In a way he was even happier than Corrina, who was sailing high on whatever the tranquilizers were in the darts. He really wasn’t going to die. With the realization, his head ceased pounding and he stopped sweating as if he’d just run a mile. He laughed and was suddenly ravenous. When he dug out his little pack of food, everyone else did as well.

  They ate and then slept until mid-morning when Jon ceased being Jon. He growled and groaned as he fought his manacles. It was something of a downer. On the flip side, Phillips was still Phillips, and the storm had passed and the meters were no longer buzzing. Confident that Jon would never get out of the manacles or the room, they left him behind and stepped out from the shelter of the building, expecting to find a great change in the world only to be both disappointed and relieved.

  It was the same ugly harsh lands.

  As ugly and harsh as it was, it was nothing compared to what they found a mile further west. They walked in a kite formation with Cole leading, Hamilton on his right, Phillips on his left, Corrina in the middle and McGuigan taking up the rear. He was supposed to be trailing by at least ten feet, however he was so nervous about being attacked from behind that he kept creeping up on Corrina.

  He stumbled into her as they crested a slight rise and looked down on an immense empty basin at least a mile in width. Within it there were no trees or buildings. There weren’t even rocks, at least none big enough to be seen from where they stood. The land had been scorched black and that blackness went deep.

  “It must be where one of the bombs went off,” Cole said in awe. “It must’ve vaporized everything.” The power of such a bomb was too much for their minds to comprehend and after a few moments of staring, they turned back and aimed for some derelict structures that had survived only because they had sat behind a hill that was now gone.

  Judging by the weak rays escaping the dark clouds it was just after noon. They had nine hours to find at least two more of the creatures and get them back to New York. Normally, nine hours seemed like a long time; just then the minutes were skipping by.

  “Should we try baiting them with blood?” Hamilton asked after they had trudged a mile without seeing any sign of zombies.

&nbs
p; “Whose?” Phillips asked, suddenly worried about the integrity of his skin more than he had ever in his life. “I say pointdexter should give it up. His is probably the cleanest. It’s got to be cleaner than the skank’s, that’s for certain.” He laughed quietly. No one joined in.

  Corrina started to get her back up but then grinned. “Yeah, I’m a skanky slag. I wish I could help but no one’s gonna want my blood. And Cole is a drinker. He’s always more’n half drunk. It’s why he killed all those people. He can’t help it when he’s in one of his drunken rages. You should…”

  Cole clapped a hand over her mouth. “That’s enough. You heard her, Shamus, let’s have that blood.” He pulled out his water bottle and drank down the last of his water. “I think a third full should do it.” With everyone staring at him, McGuigan didn’t feel as though he had a choice.

  “Uh, how?” They hadn’t been given knives and he wasn’t about to let anyone shoot him.

  It was the wrong question. Everyone looked around and each found something that could cut him: a jagged, rusting hunk of metal; the back end of an old Coke bottle; a shard of dinner plate; and a brick with what looked like old blood on it. This last was Hamilton’s offering. “I say conk him on the head. We can give them an entire body. I bet they would come for that.”

  “We’ll use the glass,” Cole said, ignoring Hamilton. “Let’s have an arm, Shamus. You can look away if you want.” Although he felt he was about to throw up, McGuigan stuck out a stiff arm, clenched his teeth until he thought they would crack and resolutely watched as Cole dragged the glass across the inner aspect of his forearm.

  The blood came, not in drops or in a small carefully aimed stream, but quickly, pouring out of the cut and down his arm in a wave. For a few moments, it didn’t look like it would stop and McGuigan felt a thrill of panic rise in his throat. He fought it down with difficulty and was glad that Cole had a firm grip on his hand; no one knew that it was shaking. More blood coated the outside of the bottle than went in and yet there was so much of it that soon the bottle was as full as needed.

  “That’s a lotta blood,” Corrina said, glassy-eyed and dazed. Cole had asked her to get something for the cut and she handed McGuigan the cleanest cut of rag she could find. It was a piece of a filthy blanket that had been blowing gently from beneath a rock.

  “Thanks,” he said, forcing a smile. Filthy or not, it was better than leaving a trail of blood for every Dead-eye west of the Hudson to follow.

  Cole guided them to the sturdiest building in sight, which wasn’t saying all that much. Like so many others it was twisted, and leaned over a field of broken concrete. The nukes had buckled the ground beneath it, lifting the back end of its foundation while sinking in the front. It looked like a strong wind could drop it on their heads.

  He sprinkled blood around before setting the bottle a few feet from the building. “Ham, you and Phillips put yourselves in that room,” Cole said, pointing up at a third floor office. “And us three will be on the same floor in one of the rooms on this side. Remember, we’re darting them. And, more importantly, don’t let yourselves be seen!”

  “No shit,” Hamilton said. He elbowed Phillips. “Next he’s going to tell us not to get bit. Ha-ha!” Phillips’ euphoria over not becoming a zombie had run its course and he couldn’t bring himself to even fake laugh. After the last onslaught, he wanted to get under cover as soon as possible. He even led the way, crouching behind his scattergun.

  The building was empty, which was a good thing since it barely supported their weight. As Cole went to the edge of the office he had chosen, to gaze down at the bottle of blood, the entire structure shifted and groaned. A little pebble rolled past him and leapt off the edge to plink among the concrete slabs below.

  “No one move!” Cole hissed. The warning wasn’t needed. Corrina was clinging to the bare frame of a doorway. The door itself, as well as most of the drywall around them was gone, eroded by the radiation and the elements. Those same factors had eaten away at the metal lattice. The beams and girders were corrupted by rust, and by the trillions of microscopic holes that had been burrowed by the radiation. The huge metal columns were strangely soft, instead of being brittle like one would expect.

  Across from Corrina, McGuigan was on his hands and knees looking very much like a frightened spider. “Maybe you two should stay there,” Cole suggested. Afraid even to make a sound, they both nodded.

  The building groaned and shifted under Hamilton’s and Phillips’ weight as well. “Oh, this is a fucking great idea, Cole,” Hamilton hissed from off to their right. “Could you’ve picked a worse building? Huh? Is it possible for you not to fuck everything up?”

  “Shut up,” McGuigan snapped.

  Hamilton laughed loudly. “Why? There ain’t nothing out there.” The dark clouds above gave midday an evening feel and yet there was enough light to see that nothing was stirring except for windblown trash.

  Cole wanted to say: Let’s give the blood time, however they didn’t have time. A few minutes, yes, but not hours. “Hold on,” he told Corrina and McGuigan, meaning it literally. He crawled back to the door and then made his unsteady way back to the stairs. The walls here were made of reinforced concrete and the stairs were sturdy enough to bear his weight. He went up four stories to the top floor, where the wind howled.

  An insurance company had owned the building and had kept the majority of its paper files on the top floor. Most of it had either blown away or had melted into nothing from ten-thousand storms, but there were still a few rusted filing cabinets lying about that held reams of paper. Cole opened one up and went to pull a stack of paper out, only to have it crumble to flakes in his hand.

  He guessed that flakes or not they would still burn. He made a wall from a few old desks, dumped the remains of the filing cabinets onto the floor and lit it. The pile went right up in a roar. He fed the flames with the ratty cushions off an old couch and then he threw the couch into the flames as well. Wooden desks went in next, then a pile of cabinets that had fallen from a wall. Soon there was a bonfire going. He wiped his hands and looked out to see the results of his handiwork—and nearly choked.

  Dead-eyes were streaming in towards the building from every direction. He had hoped to get twenty or thirty coming their way, but there were hundreds of them. “Aw crap!” He hurried to the stairs and took them two at a time until he was on the third floor.

  Corrina was now lying in the doorway. “They’re here! Mc-Wiggy says he saw one coming.”

  “There’s gonna be a few more than that. Maybe you should get away from there. Let’s shut that door. Yeah, and maybe barricade it. Grab that desk and…” Someone, Hamilton probably, whistled a piercing note, more than likely to alert them to the zombie threat. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got it. Keep stacking stuff, Corrina.”

  He slid to where McGuigan was lying, hugging the floor. “Gimme your dart gun.” McGuigan was only too happy to hand it over. Cole then sent him to help Corrina. When he had scrambled away, Cole pulled his rags around him and inched towards the edge where a huge pane of glass had once been set. There was nothing left of it now except crystalline dust that glittered in the feeble light. Making sure to stay hidden beneath the rags, he lifted himself slowly upwards until he could see the horde.

  The sight of a thousand zombies all within a stone’s throw drained the strength right out of him. They surged like a black wave, covering the broken concrete with their bodies and coming right up to the building. The fire had summoned them, however it was the blood that sent them into madness. Without any external order, they all began heaving back the slabs, looking for the source of the blood.

  Cole didn’t think he would ever have a better shot at darting some of the creatures. They were so tightly packed that he really didn’t have to aim, he simply stuck the gun over the edge and fired into the cluster. He popped off McGuigan’s and Corrina’s as well, and was just reloading his own gun for a fourth shot when the creatures gave up trying to dig their way to the blo
od and turned their attention to the building.

  They flooded the first floor, tearing apart everything they came across. Going up the stairwell was more of an accident of positioning rather than a conscious decision. Pressure from the back forced some into the stairwells, where it was either go upwards or get trampled.

  Corrina heard them coming and instinctively knew that her flimsy barricade wouldn’t hold against more than one or two of them. She skittered along the floor, going from wall to wall—yes, the tilt was bad, however, the idea of tripping and rolling into the mass of dead was enough to have her gripping the wall like she was dangling off a cliff.

  “They’re coming!”

  Cole refrained from firing the dart gun and squirmed back from the edge. “How many?” If she said any number less than ten, he’d try to dart them and ride out the storm.

  “Lots! Like, lots and lots.”

  Lots wasn’t an accurate number, but judging how wide her grey eyes were, he knew that the number was closer to a hundred than ten. He took her by the elbow and found the central hallway. McGuigan was already there, looking pale. “We’re trapped!”

  “We’ll go up. There’s another stairwell in the middle of the building.” They ran down the corridor, stopping only to hiss for Hamilton and Phillips.

  “What did you do?” Hamilton demanded. “Were you seen? Talk about an idiot! How tough is it…” Cole didn’t have time for bitching. He ran for the staircase and bowled over a Dead-eye as he opened the door. There were only a few on the flight of stairs in front of him, but below that was an uncountable mass.

  He fired the dart gun, dropped it and yanked a scattergun from his back. “To the top floor!” he shouted above the sudden inhuman screams of the dead. It was too late for stealth. The scattergun let out a gout of fire and lead, and sounded like an explosion in the cramped confines of the stairwell. “Up! Up!” he yelled pushing Corrina on. Her first inclination had been to run back the way they had come.

  They went upwards as Cole kept back the flood with his scattergun. Once Phillips was past, he followed them up, turning randomly to blast one of the dead. At the top floor he ran into his friends standing in a knot. They had opened the door, but hadn’t stepped through. Cole’s bonfire had eaten through the roof and had turned into a five-alarm fire. Fire was pouring down from above and everything that could burn was dancing with flame and chugging out oily black smoke.