“Ben?” It was Sylvia’s voice. “Ben, are you okay?”
He looked to his left and saw part of the little girl’s face on the floorboard, empty, bloody eye sockets staring up at him.
“Ben?”
“Get her off me, Sylvia. Jesus, hurry.”
The passenger door opened and they pulled the little girl’s body off him. “Careful of all the glass,” Sylvia said, as she helped him sit up and then climb out of the wrecked car.
He stood and checked himself for wounds, any possible sign of infection.
“You okay?” Sylvia asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Come here,” she said. “There’s something you need to see.”
She turned and walked down the driveway. The two adult female zombies were there. Both, he realized, had an ear missing.
“Look at that,” Sylvia said, pointing to one of the zombies.
The woman had been wearing jeans and an Ohio Buckeyes sweatshirt. She looked like a scarecrow inside the baggy clothes. Not sure what he was supposed to be seeing he let his gaze wander down to her ankles. One of her pant legs had been pulled up to her knee, revealing a small, black box about the size of a pack of cigarettes strapped to her ankle. It was beeping quietly.
“What is that?” he asked.
“It’s an ankle monitor,” Sylvia said. “The kind they used to put on people who were on house arrest.”
He was still feeling a little sick from all the adrenaline going through his system, and it was hard to focus. A lot of half-formed questions rose up in his mind, but he wasn’t able to articulate them.
“Why?” was all he managed.
“They were tracking her. They were tracking her while she was tracking us.”
“Who?”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
He looked at her, still confused.
“The Red Man,” she said. “Remember last night, when we told you his father used to be chief of police in Gatling. Where else do you think they would have gotten this kind of equipment?”
“I don’t . . .” he said, and then trailed off with a shrug. “Why not just capture us?”
“I think that’s obvious. The Red Man is hoping we’ll lead him to Don Fisher.”
“Why us? Doesn’t he have Niki?”
“That’s exactly my point,” Sylvia said. She looked almost triumphant. “If he’s tracking us, that means he hasn’t gotten anything from Niki. Best case scenario, that means she’s still alive, still holding out.”
He almost said, “But the worst case . . .” Fortunately, he stopped himself. Avery was hanging on their every word. He looked at her and nodded. Then he turned back to Sylvia. His head was beginning to clear now. He examined the car where he had nearly died. There was blood all over it, running down the hood and the fenders. Richardson let out a long breath, and then turned his attention back to the blinking ankle monitor.
“Do you think they have any way of knowing we killed their trackers?”
Sylvia shrugged, but before she could answer, they heard the sound of trucks in the distance.
“It’s him,” Avery said. “What do we do? We got to hide.”
“Not in the building,” Richardson said. “That’s the first place they’ll look.”
“Where?” Sylvia said.
Richardson reached into his pack and removed the tarp he’d made from the old Gilley suit. “Under here,” he said. He looked around and his gaze fell on a section of an overgrown ditch thick with tall brown weeds. “Over there. That ditch across the street. Come on.”
C
HAPTER
8
Nate Royal woke with a fire burning in his head. He blinked his eyes open and the daylight stabbing in on his eyes only made the pain worse. Groaning, he fell back into the hammock he’d suspended between the service station’s rusting gas pumps and closed his eyes.
He was not doing well.
He skin was filmed over with a cold sweat. Sometimes he felt like he was burning up; other times there didn’t seem to be enough blankets in the world to keep him warm. The clouds in his head never seemed to clear, and even when he tried to work through it, really concentrate, his heart would start to race and he’d grow short of breath. Not for the first time that week he wondered if he was going to die.
He suspected that what he had right now was the flu. A really bad case of it. There’d been that old man he’d shared a campfire with the week before, the one who kept him up all night with his hacking cough and sneezing and his moaning in his sleep. Maybe he got it from him.
But did it really matter? Hadn’t he been going downhill for a while now anyway? Even if he hadn’t gotten sick from that miserable old man, he would still be in a bad way. He was hungry all the time. His face was so badly sunburned that he could barely touch it. He kept losing his supplies. They were stolen, or misplaced, or forgotten, whatever. They just disappeared on him. A lot like the rest of the world.
He’d seen a farmhouse a few miles down the road, but had decided to pass it by because there might have been people sleeping inside and he didn’t want to be around them while he was sick. He felt weak and defenseless, and all he wanted to do was curl up like a dog behind some bushes somewhere and hide, to be by himself. Now he realized how stupid that had been. What he needed was someplace warm to rest. Some clean water to drink. What he needed—
The thought broke off cleanly.
He heard the muffled cracking sound of glass breaking underfoot, and suddenly he knew he was being watched.
Very slowly, he opened his eyes and turned his aching head toward the sound.
There were three of them, standing there, watching him. A little girl of about ten, just a few feet from him, and two older women behind her. They stood absolutely still, draped in the shadows of the gas station’s awning like something materializing out of a nightmare. They didn’t make a sound.
Even through the fever clouds in his head he knew they were infected. He could see it in their yellowed, bloodshot eyes, and the way the flesh slacked off the bones of their face, and the deep black hollows under their eyes. The two women had dried blood all over them. It was matted in their hair and crusted around their mouths and down the front of their clothes.
But not the little girl. She was a zombie, too. He knew that. But she was wearing clean clothes, and her hair, though oily and dirty, was free of blood.
He was hallucinating, he decided. A trick of the shadows. Nate raised a hand, his index finger outstretched as though he was about to lecture them, and then he let it fall. He didn’t have the energy.
Not even to defend himself.
“Go ahead and kill me,” he muttered. “You got me netted in this thing like a country ham. You ain’t gonna get a better chance.”
A country ham.
He’d seen a bunch of them hanging in fishnet bags from a ceiling in a ruined deli in Atlanta a few years earlier. In the dark, he’d seen spiders moving all over them.
Now he was the country ham, and the zombies were the spiders.
But the thought didn’t frighten him. Nate wasn’t afraid of the infection that the zombies carried. For reasons that had been explained to him many times, and yet he still didn’t understand, he was immune to the necrosis filovirus. He had been bitten at least fourteen times in the last eight years, with the attendant scars to prove it, but the disease was unable to gain purchase in his body.
When the quarantine wall fell, Nate had been living in Martindale, Pennsylvania, with his dad and his dad’s girlfriend Mindy. Up through his mid-twenties, he’d led a thoroughly disappointing life, one spent drinking beer and smoking dope and watching lots of porn and pretty much avoiding anything remotely close to responsibility. But that all changed when the outbreak spread through the East Coast like a wildfire. Bitten by a zombie during the evacuation, he’d retreated, scared and all alone, into a neighbor’s lawn mower shed. Shortly afterwards, a roving military squad discovered him and put him in a holding cell with hundreds of other infected victims. But while the others became zombies, he did not, and for several hours he clung to the top of a chain-link fence, with hundreds of the infected snarling below him, reaching for him, while soldiers in biohazard suits watched him from the other side of the fence. Finally, he was taken down by a team of military doctors and turned into a lab rat.
But they did derive a cure from his blood. And if only the doctors who worked on him had lived, he thought, maybe that would have counted for something.
He blinked at the zombies. They were still standing there, watching him. “Come on. Do it.”
But they didn’t move.
Their eyes shone in the dark. The weight of their stares was oppressive. He could smell the faint charnel-house odor of them in the still morning air, but he couldn’t hear them breathing. They were enveloped by stillness so perfect, so absolute, that they seemed to have been transmuted into granite, like statues in a graveyard. A chill crept over Nate’s skin, and he shivered involuntarily.
Run, he thought. He was immune to their sickness, but that didn’t matter. Their stillness was something completely new. It terrified him, and that little voice inside his head began to scream: Run! Get away as fast as you can.
Then, without warning, all three zombies turned their heads as one and stared down the road. And that simple gesture, like their heads were all mounted on the same pivot, turned by the same dial, scared him more even than their stillness had.
He leaned his head forward and tried to see what they were looking at, but there was nothing there.
Nate turned back to the zombies. “What are you . . .” But he trailed off, the question left unasked. The zombies were leaving. They turned and walked into the daylight, staggering along a crooked path to the woods at the edge of the pavement.
One by one, they slipped into the woods.
“What the . . . ?”
With effort, he climbed out of the hammock and stumbled to the edge of the awning’s shadow line, one hand on a rusted pole to support his weight. He watched the zombies disappear into the thicket, and he realized with a sense of horror and shame that he had been ready to die. Had they attacked him, he would have welcomed the death that followed. He rubbed the computer flash drive that hung from a lanyard around his neck and coughed. Had it really come to this? Was he really giving up?
There used to be writing on the flash drive, but it was worn down and faded now from all the long nights he spent rubbing it with his thumb, thinking about Dr. Mark Kellogg, the man who had encoded the cure onto the drive and then slipped it into Nate’s hand as he lay dying.
He tucked the flash drive back inside his shirt.
“We are put into this hostile, alien world as isolated individuals,” Kellogg had told him, shortly before he died of suicide by pistol to keep from turning into a zombie. “We can learn to like other people, even love them, but we can’t ever truly know them, and so we remain isolated. We’re not allowed to know why life has meaning, not for sure anyway, and yet we feel compelled to create some sort of answer. It’s an absurd downward spiral of impossible things, and yet it is our lives.”
Nate leaned on the support pole and stared miserably into the thicket where the zombies had disappeared. He’d never felt so lonely as he did now. More than fast cars, more even than pretty girls, he missed Kellogg. In the short time he’d known him, Kellogg had become like the father Nate never had. His own father—his real father—was a small, stupid man, who saw in Nate a reflection of his own limitations and failure. They had hated one another, and as far as Nate was concerned, the outbreak was about the best thing that had ever happened to them.
But Kellogg was different. He had taken the time to talk with Nate, really talk with him. He explained how sometimes the world didn’t make sense. He explained how the only thing that really mattered was looking for a way to make life make sense. The answer itself didn’t matter, because there probably wasn’t one. Not a perfect one, anyway. Only the looking for an answer made any difference, because when you stopped looking, you started dying.
Sometimes, Kellogg spoke to him. Nate, from time to time, saw him standing next to him, heard him talking with him. He had met a Thai man around Phoenix several years back who told him that holy people sometimes communed with the ghosts of those who had been important in their lives and still had lessons to teach, and sometimes Nate liked to think that the vision he saw was really the ghost of Kellogg trying to keep him alive. It was a pleasant thing to believe.
But of course Kellogg hadn’t appeared to him lately.
Nate closed his eyes, and he could almost hear the man saying, “Even a world defined by bad reasons can give you cause to live. You must find those reasons, whatever they may be.”
“But I tried,” Nate said. He opened his eyes and scanned the crumbling gas station around him. “I tried really hard.”
Kellogg was standing there, smiling calmly.
Nate smiled back. “Hey, Doc.”
“The cure, Nate. That’s your reason. You have to get it to somebody who knows how to use it.”
“But what else am I supposed to do? I can’t go much farther.”
But Kellogg was gone.
Nate waved a fly away from his face. He heard the noise of a young woman’s voice coming from the road, and instinctively, he stepped back into the shadows. Stop, watch, and listen before you meet new people. Be careful what you tell them. Know who they are before they know you. That had been some of Kellogg’s best advice to him. It saved him numerous times over the years, and he followed it now without hesitation.
Turning toward the gas station, he happened to catch his reflection in a grimy, jagged triangle of glass still clinging to the edge of the window, and he sucked in a shocked breath. It was a world without mirrors, and it had been a long time since he’d seen his reflection. He hadn’t been a bad-looking guy back in the day. He’d had a few girlfriends. But he looked bad now. He’d lost so much weight. His hair was down past his shoulders, ratty with oil and dirt, as was his beard. Flies swarmed around his face, dipping now and then toward the raw sunburn cracks in his skin.
No wonder they didn’t attack you, he thought; then waved the flies away from his face and disappeared into the shadows of the station’s service bays, where it was hot and smelled dusty and stale.
There were three of them, a man and woman who looked to be in their fifties, and a younger girl, who looked to be about twenty. The girl looked nice. A little thick around the middle, maybe, but nice. She had pretty blond hair, and Nate hadn’t seen that in a long while.
The man and the woman were out front as they approached the service station, and only then did Nate realize he’d left all his gear strung up out there.
They’d steal it all, he realized; and then, Christ, not again. Why couldn’t he hold on to his gear?
He thought maybe he had time to dart out and grab it before they saw him, but then the pretty blond girl stepped around the man and the women and pointed at the hammock and said, “What’s that?”
Dammit, Nate thought.
“A hammock,” the man said.
Nate studied the three, and it took him a long moment to realize that the man was dressed differently from the two women. The women wore baggy sweatshirts and BDU-style pants over Magnum Hi-Tec boots that looked practically brand new. But the man wore jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt and tennis shoes that were held together near the toe with duct tape. He carried a heavy-looking backpack and a pistol at his belt, and he looked to be the only one who was armed.
Maybe they were okay. They looked okay.
The man came forward and examined the place where the hammock’s ropes were tied on to the gas pumps. “Hello?” he called out.
“Ben!” the older woman hissed. “What are you doing?”
Kellogg appeared at Nate’s shoulder. “Wait a moment,” he said. “Just wait and watch. Know who they are before they know who you are.”
“Okay,” Nate whispered.
He watched them. They were looking around, studying his meager possessions on the ground when a glass bottle scraped along the asphalt down at the road. All three of them turned at the same time. It was weirdly similar to the way the zombies had turned. But where the zombies had stared in eerie silence, these three newcomers gasped.
Nate followed their gaze down to the road and saw the little girl zombie standing there, waiting for them. She’s trying to lure them out in the open, Nate thought: and answered that thought with the same mental breath, It’ll never work. They can tell she’s infected.