C
HAPTER
4
When Niki Booth awoke, she was on her stomach in the bed of the truck, a tan-colored boot right in front of her face. Her hands were cuffed behind her back. The truck bounced on the bad roads, telegraphing every bump through its worn springs to her aching ribs. Every breath was an effort. Every bump brought tears to her eyes.
“She’s awake,” one of the black shirts said from above her.
She turned her head to the side and looked up at the man. He was a lot older than she, forty maybe. He had a long, stringy red beard and freckles on his neck and face, and a tattoo of a raven on the inside of his left wrist.
She tried to roll over, but the pain in her side made her wince and then she started coughing up blood. Big phlegmy wads of it darkened the dirty bed of the truck. She groaned.
And then she caught herself. These bastards weren’t going to see her hurt. She steeled herself against the pain and looked up at her captors, scanning their faces, their clothes, the way they handled their weapons.
The black shirt with the raven tattoo followed her gaze to his hand and adjusted his grip on the shotgun, perhaps thinking that she was debating her chances of getting the weapon from him.
“It’d be a mistake,” he said, and the faintest hint of a smile touched his mouth. It suggested that he wouldn’t mind if she tried, though.
Another bump in the road caused her to roll to her left, and when she did she got a view of the second guard. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigarette and looking across the deserted city. The shotgun rested across his thighs. He was even older than the first guard. He didn’t even bother looking at her. The expression on his face, Niki realized, was boredom laced with sadness at the way the world was now.
Niki rocked back in the other direction, toward the first man.
“Keep still,” he told her.
“My ribs hurt. I think you broke something.”
“Yeah? I hope it fucking hurts.”
She rolled over onto her right side so she could get her legs free.
“What are you doing?”
“I can’t breathe. How about loosening these cuffs?”
“Yeah, right. Just sit still. We’re almost there.”
The truck hit a pothole, bouncing her off the bed. She winced. Every bump sent a pulse of pain through her ribs, sharp as a knife in her side. Niki closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, forcing the pain down, down, down. A moment later she was still breathing hard, but she had the pain mastered. If she was going to get out of this she needed to act quickly, and that meant playing dirty.
She rolled over onto her shoulder and arched her back, turning her breasts up toward the black shirt.
“Please,” she said, a bit of the helpless female creeping into her voice. “Loosen them up just a little. They hurt real bad.”
He didn’t react, at least at first.
He was looking right into her eyes, still tough, still the pro. But she could see the sweat on his forehead, his Adam’s apple pumping up and down in his throat. Finally, he broke. He glanced at her breasts and swallowed, and Niki knew that she had won a little ground. Men and boobs, she thought. God, they’re idiots.
The redheaded soldier looked at the older man across the bed from him, hesitated for a moment, as though about to ask permission, then seemed to think better of it.
He stood up. Took the keys from his belt.
“Turn over,” he said. “Put your ass up here where I can get at those cuffs.”
She could see him waiting for it. She could see his grip loosening on the shotgun. And when she saw the barrel of the gun swing up and away from her, she kicked, planting her heel squarely into his balls. He doubled over with a grunt, the air rushing from his lungs. She twisted over onto her back and kicked again, this time catching him under the chin and sending him sprawling over the side of the truck.
“What the . . .” the older guard said.
He jumped to his feet. Niki was watching his knees. As soon as she saw his weight come down on his left knee she kicked it, and a momentary thrill shot through her to hear the crack of his bones.
Spinning over onto her shoulder blades she jammed a heel up into his teeth. He fell backward, the shotgun falling overboard onto the road when he grabbed the side of the truck to try to keep from falling.
She didn’t lose any time. Niki rolled over onto her knees just as the driver hit the brakes. When the vehicle stopped she was ready.
She jumped over the tailgate and hit the road running.
To her left was nothing but vacant lots. She turned right and ran for a series of mismatched concrete buildings, the colors faded from years of neglect and exposure. Where there were buildings, there were places to hide.
She heard the familiar
whumpf
of their shotguns and felt something hit her in the back, but it wasn’t hard enough to knock her down. They were still using the rubber rounds, and those things only had a range of twenty yards or so. Beyond that, they were just a nuisance. She’d been hit harder during sparring practice.
It didn’t slow her down. She ran toward the buildings and veered to her right, looking for a way to create distance and conceal her position. The more buildings, the better, just like in training; and the building at the far end of the row was a storefront, mostly windows, the glass all busted out. She glanced through it, saw the way was clear around the corner, and ran for it.
Three black shirts were waiting for her near the back of the row of buildings, advancing abreast in a skirmish line.
She stopped and turned.
The ones from the truck were already sprinting around the front of the store.
The older guard she’d kicked in the teeth drew a bead on her with his shotgun, and the last thing she saw before the world went black was the orange-white blast of fire from the end of his muzzle.
She was back in the bed of the truck when she came to.
The guards pulled her roughly to her feet and handed her down from the truck. Only then did she see she was back in the bank parking lot, the Pizza Hut across the street. The infected were all around her, watching her with their dead white eyes. Many of them appeared to have fed recently, for their faces and their hands were wet with blood.
A zombie crossed in front of her path, dragging a severed arm. From the shred of fabric still clinging to the wrist she realized the arm belonged to either Steve Lewis or Tommy Bishop, the men who’d volunteered to come with her.
“Oh no,” she groaned.
But there was no time for her to mourn. The guards were leading her toward a smoky fire in the middle of the road. She felt a cloud of menace envelop her. Squatting in front of the fire, a bloodstained St. Louis Cardinals hat next to his left foot, was Loren Skaggs. He wore only a loose-fitting pair of blue jeans. The rest of him was covered head to toe in red paint. Even from ten feet away she could smell the waves of rot and corrupted flesh rising from his skin. Her stomach heaved, but she pushed it down.
He looked nothing like the stoner kid she’d known back in high school. The infection had ruined his face. Old abscess scars, barely hidden by the red paint, pitted his face. One ear had been nearly torn from the side of his head, but had since healed. It was an imperfect fit now, the earlobe pointed forward much more than was natural. The rest of his face looked like it might slide from his head at any moment.
He was stoking the coals with an iron rod, watching the brand at the end turn orange hot. He turned toward her, still stoking the fire, and his eyes were very white against the red paint on his face. His lips parted to show his yellowed teeth.
It wasn’t really a smile. There was too much gloating in it, like a predator savoring the prey beneath its claws.
She flashed back ten years, to Gooding, Illinois. Niki had just graduated from the University of Nebraska with a degree in Child Development. She wanted to teach elementary school. And then Hurricane Mardell hit, and the nation’s economy just sort of dried up and moved on down the road. The Midwest was already hurting before the storm. But after, it died on its feet. When she returned to Gooding, she found no jobs, no schools in need of teachers. The town was dying. Most of the shops up and down Main were for sale. Some had their windows boarded over. The scourge of meth was everywhere. The only good-looking, non-druggie guys she’d known growing up were shipping off for the military.
And then, while shopping for some canned beans and tomatoes at the Family Pantry, she’d turned the corner and saw her town’s death personified in the form of Loren Skaggs, son of Gooding’s police chief. He’d been one of the metalheads smoking in his truck between classes back in school, Queensrÿche concert shirt on his bony frame, haunted look in his eyes. He played around with meth in high school, but now he was its poster boy. Rail skinny. Losing his hair. Cheeks sunken. Dark circles under his eyes. Bad teeth. He’d been trying to read the labels on a wall of antihistamines and turned to look at her. He smelled like something that had died on the side of the road three days earlier.
“Hey,” he said, “I know you.”
She’d recoiled from his breath. Looking away, in equal parts horror and dismay, she’d turned down the first aisle she saw and walked straight to the registers.
“See you around, Niki,” he’d called after her, and coughed.
She paid and left in a hurry. The memory of that hideously vacant smile shook her, but she would have swum the Mississippi to trade it for the smile he was giving her now.
Niki bit down on her lip, fighting to master her fear. She tried to tell herself that the red paint he wore was just crazy, but the truth was he sent an icy shiver down her skin.
This must be how the people of the Calimar compound felt when he and his army of black shirts and zombies came for them, she thought. Nearly three thousand people. People she knew. He hadn’t wanted more black shirt converts, or even more zombie slaves. His army came with torches lit, their minds bent on murder and sending a message to the other compounds.
The Red Man never even gave them a chance to surrender. He and his black shirts burned the perimeter fence and put the school and barracks and medical center to the torch. Those who were able tried to flee, only to get swallowed up by the Red Man’s zombie army waiting in reserve. But most were cornered in the dining hall.
Niki had led a contingent of her soldiers into Calimar two days later, all of them wearing biohazard masks as protection against an endless plague of flies. Blood had stained everything. There were huge coagulated pools of it on the floor of the dining hall and spattered on the walls. Swirls of it on the ceiling. There were broken teeth embedded in the tables. Bodies lay mangled and tangled in piles. Niki had given the order to burn the rest of the complex and then gone back to Ken Stoler at Union Field. She and Stoler had been at odds for a while before then, but that day marked the beginning of the end of their friendship. And when she considered how she had come to be a traitor to the people of Union Field, and turned her back on the man who had taken her in and turned her from a feral hunter into a leader of men, she thought of that day at Calimar.
And now, here she was, about to die at the Red Man’s hand. Ken Stoler would probably appreciate the irony.
The guards had let go of her shoulders. She hadn’t even realized it. She’d been standing there, light-headed, her mind still drifting over the events of the last two years, when suddenly she became aware that she was supporting her own weight. She was swaying like one of those zombies waiting on the edge of the road. Niki squeezed her eyes shut and willed herself not to fall. She would not let herself do that. She didn’t dare. And when she spoke, there wasn’t the slightest tremor in her voice.
“Hello, Loren.”
He hesitated for just a moment, then went back to stoking the fire.
“What do you think you’re doing, Loren? This is suicide for you. You know that, don’t you? My people are going to tear you to shreds.”
He shrugged. “That’s the price of doing business where we play, isn’t it?” His eyes never left the fire.
“What’s this about, Loren?”
The muscles along his back tensed. He jabbed the poker into the fire, no longer stoking it, but attacking it.
“No one is coming for you, Niki. Let’s not pretend.”
“What happened to you, Loren?”
“I would have thought that was obvious.”
“No, I can see the change you’ve been through, all that ridiculous paint you wear. That’s not what I mean. What happened to your mind? The last time we spoke you sounded like the meth had charred your mind to cinders. Now, you actually sound like you can string a sentence together. So what happened, ’cause from I’m standing, you may be the only person who ever got better by becoming a zombie.”
“Ah,” he said, “you’re trying to tease me.”
“Would that do any good?”
“Sexually, you mean?” He looked back at her and chuckled at the stricken look on her face. “Ah, no, I see that’s not what you meant.”