Read Mutated - 04 Online

Authors: Joe McKinney

Mutated - 04 (10 page)

“What are you thinking?” she asked him.
“I was wondering if Ken Stoler put you to work teaching poetry in his compound.”
“Not quite,” she said, chuckling to herself. “I do a little carpentry. Some gardening. I can also make a fairly good bottle of beer, believe it or not.”
“Well, you did spend an awful lot of time on a college campus.”
“True.”
“But no teaching?”
Sylvia pulled the black band from her pocket and used it to tie back her frizzled mass of gray hair into a ponytail. “I’m afraid not,” she said. She looked at Avery Harper, who was finally starting to look ready for the road again, and said, “Besides, you have any idea how hard it is to make Wordsworth relevant to twenty-year-olds? It was hard even
before
the world ended.”
A little farther up the road they saw sunlight glinting off something in the trees lining the left side of the highway.
“Could be broken glass,” Avery said.
Richardson wasn’t so sure.
They were kneeling behind a heap of wrecked cars, watching the trees for signs of movement. The plan had been to follow IH 55 all the way down to Herculaneum if they could, but now Richardson didn’t think that was going to be possible.
“Should we chance it?” Avery said.
“Hold on,” Richardson said.
He retrieved the binoculars from his backpack and scanned the trees. He saw a group of six men in BDU-style pants and dark T-shirts sitting around a campsite. They were drinking coffee, laughing. At least two of them had hunting rifles. The others had AR-15s.
“Damn it,” Richardson said.
Sylvia looked over at him. “What is it?”
He handed her the binoculars. “Look for yourself. Over there, by that patch of sycamores.”
Sylvia took the binoculars and pointed it at the camp. Then she lowered the binoculars. “That’s Jude McHenry’s squad,” she said to Avery.
The younger woman groaned.
“Friends of yours?” Richardson asked.
“That’s one of the squads from the Union Field. Niki trained him. McHenry’s about as dumb as the day is long, but he’s focused. Once he gets on our trail, he won’t lose it easily.”
“They don’t exactly look like they’re ready for an ambush.”
“That’s not their job,” Sylvia said. “Remember, they’re used to hunting zombies. The way Niki trained them, they’ll wait for us to get on the bridge over the river. Most of the force will be on the other side. Once we get on the bridge, McHenry’s squad will come up behind us and we’ll be trapped.”
“So Niki taught them that, and now they’re trying to use it on her? I guess they assume she’s still with us.”
“I said he was focused, not smart.” Sylvia turned to Avery and said, “Honey, we need a way out of here. Where do we go?”
The question surprised Richardson. “I’ve got a map, Sylvia.”
“And I bet it’s nowhere near as good as the one I’ve got. Avery?”
The girl looked behind them, then to the west. “That’s Meramec Bottom Road up there. We can follow that to Highway 21, which will take us to State Highway M. From there, we head east and cross back to 55.”
“Where does that come out?” Sylvia asked.
“Just north of Barnhart. That’ll put us about a day’s walk from Herculaneum. Assuming, you know, we don’t run into any other problems.”
Richardson was staring at her. Avery noticed it and looked away bashfully.
“You have a map of this whole area in your head?” he said, amazed.
She nodded.
“What are you, Rain Man?”
The girl cocked her head to the side. “Who’s Rain Man?”
“A joke,” Richardson said. It was suddenly clear to him why Niki Booth and Sylvia Carnes brought the younger woman along. “How much of this area do you have memorized?”
“All of it,” Avery said. “I like maps. If I see one, I can usually memorize it in a few minutes. City maps take a little longer, because of all the streets. But maps for areas like this, out in the country, they’re easy.”
“Impressive,” he said. And then, to Sylvia, “Sound good to you?”
“If Avery says that’s the way, I trust her.”
“Fair enough,” Richardson said. “After you.”
 
 
Meramec Bottom Road was a gently curving two-lane blacktop that had faded to gray from exposure and the constant scouring action of the dust that blew in from the open fields on either side of it. Here and there it passed through some thickly wooded areas, and occasionally they saw the remnants of big houses behind screens of trees in the hills above the road, but nothing moved. In the early morning sunlight, the air hazy and golden, it seemed perfectly peaceful.
As they walked, Avery began to open up. She made small talk to Sylvia, and sometimes to Richardson, telling him about the country they were passing through.
But she didn’t have his full attention. Ever since they’d left the highway, the feeling that they were being followed had intensified. At the limits of his hearing he could almost make out a faint doubling of their footsteps on the road, and while it might have been an echo from the tree line, he doubted it.
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.

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