He hadn’t thought of that trip into San Antonio in a long time. A lot had happened since then. The Ben Richardson who went on that trip wasn’t the same Ben Richardson who now crouched in the doorway of a ruined Pizza Hut, watching the rubble like a hunted animal. The world had changed. He had changed. And he hated that about himself.
But she was looking at him.
He stared at her, not blinking. Did she recognize him? She didn’t seem to. She just seemed surprised to see another living person there.
“Run,” she mouthed silently. “Run!”
He didn’t move.
She hesitated for a moment, then looked over her shoulder at the zombies coming into the parking lot. Their moaning was much louder now.
She looked back at him, no sign of recognition on her face, and said, “Run, damn it!” One of the zombies stepped on a large piece of glass and the crack made Sylvia whirl around. “Run,” she said again, and then trotted off toward the back of the restaurant without giving Richardson another look.
The zombies were almost even with the door now. Richardson could hear their feet shuffling across the trash-strewn pavement, their moans forming a chorus of strained overlapping rhythms.
Richardson pulled back into the shadows and held his breath.
From where he stood he could see a small section of the lot behind the restaurant. There was a two-story red brick building there with all the windows gone. Tall grass and sunflowers had grown up around the edges of the building, giving it a long-abandoned look. He wondered why Sylvia had run off in that direction. He’d come from those parts on his way into downtown and he knew there was nothing of any value over there. Just more empty apartment buildings and quiet streets.
So where was she going? And why was she trying to get the zombies to follow her? He couldn’t see her anymore. And he couldn’t hear her over the mounting feeding call.
Zombies shambled into the grass at the edge of the lot, still moaning, arms dangling at their sides, heads canted to one side as though their necks weren’t strong enough to hold up the weight. Out of habit, he counted them. Sixteen in all.
He’d counted eighteen before, so there were at least two more up near the front of the building. Richardson wanted to follow Sylvia Carnes, but he knew he had to think of his own survival first.
Be the camera, he pleaded with himself. Don’t be stupid.
Ducking back inside the restaurant, he went to the front windows and scanned the street. There was nothing there but ruined buildings and more wrecked cars. He couldn’t see the other two zombies he’d counted earlier, and that bothered him. He listened, and when it sounded as though the moaning had receded, he holstered his pistol and his machete, grabbed his rifle, and headed out the side door in a crouch.
He hugged the wall as he moved to the front of the building. There he stopped and scanned the street again.
All clear.
The air had a crisp early morning coolness to it, and he could smell the pungent earthiness of the Mississippi River less than a mile away. He glanced up at a large cloud bank overhead. He didn’t think it would rain, but he had moved his poncho to the top of his pack before he set out that morning, just in case.
Looking out at the street once more he tried to get his bearings. There was a street sign about fifty feet to his right, hanging by a single screw from an overhead traffic light. The sign was covered in grime, but it looked like it read FLORISSANT. He took the map from his back pocket and tried to figure out which way to go. He had heard of a trading market down near Herculaneum, and he figured he could get there by going south along the river. If he had his coordinates right that meant going south from his current location to Fourteenth Street, then east on Cole to Broadway, and from there he’d continue south to Herculaneum. It was going to be a long haul. Three or four days, maybe, depending on what he did or didn’t encounter along the way.
He pocketed the map again and stood up just as a woman’s voice sounded from the far side of the road. It wasn’t Sylvia Carnes. This was the voice of a younger woman.
He’d been conditioned by years of living on his own, surviving by his wits, to drop down into a crouch and look for cover at the first sign of trouble.
He did that now.
Off to his right he could see the shell of an old supermarket, and across the street a Church’s fried chicken stand and a bank parking lot. Tall, spindly weeds grew up through the cracks in the asphalt.
Richardson started looking for escape routes.
He wouldn’t be able to make it across the street without being seen, and that meant his only option was to go back the way he’d come or go around the far corner, into the narrow gap between the Pizza Hut and the white concrete building next door. He’d been lucky once hiding inside the oven, but he knew he couldn’t count on being lucky a second time, especially as all the noise was likely to make the place pretty popular here in a bit. He’d outlived everyone else he knew by playing it smart, and that meant not pushing his luck.
Roving camera, he thought. Just be the camera.
Staying low, he moved quickly along the front of the Pizza Hut and turned in to the narrow gap on the far side of the building. He knelt down in the shadows and turned to watch the street.
Four people, two big guys with AR-15s and two young women in their twenties, were walking through the bank parking lot. The women looked like they were carrying hunting rifles. The men—one walking point, the other, who wore a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, trailing behind—were obviously the lookouts.
They could be a scavenging party, he thought.
But that didn’t look right. Like Sylvia Carnes, their clothes were in good repair. Their shoes were fairly new, and not held together with duct tape like his were. That meant they spent most of their time inside a compound. But a scavenging detail would have something to carry supplies in, like a horse-drawn truck, or a shopping cart, or a sled of corrugated tin with a rope or a chain to drag it by.
Maybe they were scouts for a larger party.
Somebody was running off to Richardson’s right. The four people stopped and turned toward the sound. A moment later, Sylvia Carnes came trotting across the street. She went right up to the group. They obviously knew each other. The three women grouped together to talk. Sylvia Carnes was gesturing back in the direction she had come, and Richardson figured she had intentionally led the zombies away from the street in order to allow these four to move through in relative safety. That much made sense, at least. It was a risky strategy, but a proven one nonetheless.
But what were they up to?
He heard the sound of something hitting a hurricane fence off to his left. Four zombies had emerged from between a pair of red brick buildings. The zombies were trying to climb the hurricane fence, which meant they were in Stage II or maybe even Stage III of the infection. They would be trouble. It was hard to fool them with a simple diversion.
The guy walking point had already noticed them and was motioning the others to take cover. But he was too late. Four, then six, then nine more zombies entered the parking lot behind them, cutting off their retreat. Richardson spotted another five staggering toward them on a side street next to the Church’s chicken stand.
He swallowed the lump in his throat as he scanned up and down the street. The infected were suddenly everywhere, coming from the alleys between the buildings and climbing over fences.
When the moaning started it was almost deafening.
Richardson felt confused and frightened. How did this happen? Where had they all come from so suddenly? In the early days of the outbreak, the zombies had been able to fill a street like this instantly. He’d read Eddie Hudson’s book about San Antonio right at the beginning of the outbreak, and at first he’d thought Hudson was just embellishing to make himself sound more embattled than he’d really been. But then, in Houston, he’d witnessed seemingly empty streets suddenly become as crowded as the hallways of a sports arena right after the game gets out, and that convinced him Hudson had been telling the truth.
The zombies, especially Stage I zombies, tended to mass together. Slow as they were, it was easier for them to make kills that way. But most zombies didn’t survive the first few weeks of being infected. Between the injuries that made them zombies and the things they ate after they became zombies, very few lived the eight or nine months it took the disease to progress to Stage II. That was the main reason he’d decided to chance a walk through St. Louis. It would have been suicide to walk through the city in the early days of the outbreak, but he figured after eight years, he’d be okay. He realized now the folly of that decision. There were more zombies out in the street in front of him than he had seen in the last month combined. But where had they all come from?
Sylvia Carnes and the others made a run for it. They crossed over to Richardson’s side of the street and ran south, skirting behind the burned-out hulk of a car to block one of the zombies running their way.
They were close enough now that he could hear one of the younger girls tell the two men to cover for them. She was the one in charge. Even a quick glance was enough to tell Richardson that. She wore a formfitting gray sweatshirt, black BDU-style pants, and black combat boots. Her dusty brown hair was cut short. She gestured a command and the party broke into two groups, the men remaining in place to cover the retreating women.
A man whose arm had been chewed off above the elbow stepped into the street right in front of Richardson and started to moan. One of the men fired a three-round burst into the man’s chest, spattering the wall next to him with blood and wet clumps of lung tissue.
“That one right there!” the woman in charge said.
Both men were firing now, the street echoing with loud pops.
“Fall back that way,” the woman said.
“There’s too many of them,” Sylvia Carnes said.
“Just go. Move!”
Richardson lost sight of them in the commotion. The two armed men moved to either side of a wrecked car and fired into the approaching zombies with well-disciplined shots. Richardson knew he had to get out of there. It was stupid to stay. There were way too many zombies out there now, and while these two guys were good, they weren’t going to stop the flood.
But where did the women go?
Richardson scanned the front of the building to his right. He didn’t see them. Richardson watched the zombies to see if any of them had changed direction to pursue the women, but none had. They were closing in on the two men, who were firing with everything they had now.
It was only a matter of time for them.
Richardson was left with a decision, he knew that. He could stay and play sniper and maybe help the two men, or he could turn and run.
His instincts told him to run. The two men were toast, surrounded, no chance of fighting their way through. But at the same time there was a part of him that refused to play into that logic. Richardson had traveled the country for the last few years, and he had seen survivors who thought they could eke out an existence by pretending to be one of the infected. Folks called them Fakers, and they were disgusting sights, often times looking every bit as much zombie as the crowds of infected in which they moved. Their survival strategy was to abandon all sense of self, existing without purpose, without a future. Richardson had watched one such Faker get mauled by a pack of the infected in a small town in Missouri and the experience had left him with mixed feelings. The man had evidently lived for many months as one of the infected, for he had so completely given up his sense of self that he refused to cry out, even as the zombies tore the plumbing from his belly. Richardson’s empathy had nearly made him throw up. But another part of him felt an obscene sense of vindication. After all, what kind of life had the man really had? Was he giving up anything worth holding on to? Richardson didn’t think so. After all, anyone who would give up their sense of self was already dead.
And running out on two people willing to fight to the bitter end seemed too much like giving up.
Knowing he was going to regret this, he raised his rifle to his shoulder and lined up the sights on a zombie across the street. But even as he released his breath and flexed his finger on the trigger, the noise of a truck downshifting made him lower the rifle.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a working vehicle. What had it been, eight months? A year? Long enough, certainly. And yet, here he was, looking at not one, but four pickup trucks advancing down a side street toward the two men. The trucks were matte black and rode on large, off-road tires. They were caked with white streaks that looked like bird shit, like they’d been parked under a tree full of grackles, and from their throaty exhaust notes Richardson figured them for big block V8s, the kind of super duty gas hogs he hadn’t seen since before Hurricane Mardell wiped out the nation’s domestic oil and gas industry.
A few of the zombies turned toward the advancing caravan, but failed to get out of the way. The lead truck ran over one of the zombies and knocked several others to the side with its grille guard. At first Richardson thought they were the cavalry for the two men in the street, but he could see now that wasn’t the case. The two men looked terrified. It was plain as day in their expressions, and for a moment he thought the men might try to push their way through the zombies that had surrounded them.