“Avery, honey, it’s okay. We’re going to have to trust somebody. We can’t help Niki on our own.” Sylvia studied Richardson for a long moment. Then she said, “It didn’t take very long for Niki to completely redo the way Union Field sent out patrols. Niki organized our defenses, trained our people. She turned a bunch of clueless survivors into a fairly professional fighting force. She and Ken Stoler were very close.”
“Were?” Richardson asked.
Avery nodded. “Before the Red Man came.”
“Tell me about that,” Richardson said. “What’s his story?”
“There used to be five other compounds just south of Union Field,” Avery said. “We used to trade with them fairly regular. We knew each other. Then the Red Man came with his zombies and his black shirts and one by one they took over the compounds.”
“When did this happen?”
“The first one was Wagner-Green. It fell about a year and a half ago. After that it was Las Cruces, then the Wilhelm-Crowder compound, then Mud Flats. Niki and some of the men from the Calimar compound managed to push the Red Man back into St. Louis. For a while, we all thought he’d given up, but then he went after Calimar. Niki was there right afterwards. She told me it was . . . awful.”
“And Calimar, that was . . . when?”
“About two months ago.”
Sylvia put a hand on Avery’s arm. To Richardson, she said, “Niki and Stoler got into a really bad fight after that.”
“About what?”
“Ben, you don’t understand. When the Red Man takes over a compound, he’s usually after people. If they’ll join him voluntarily they can become one of his black shirts. If not . . .”
“They get turned?”
“Most of the time.” She frowned. “But he didn’t do that at Calimar. He was furious about losing to them at St. Louis. I saw the pictures Niki and his patrols took of what they found at Calimar. Ben, he didn’t even try to take prisoners. He slaughtered them all.”
Richardson was quiet, waiting for her to go on. Lightning flashed outside, followed by a deep, bellowing roll of thunder.
“After Calimar, Ken wanted Niki to take the fight to the Red Man. He thought if they beat the Red Man once, they could do it again.”
“But Niki didn’t agree?”
Sylvia shook her head. “She said that would be suicide. She said the Red Man would just keep her busy in the field while the rest of his troops did to Union Field what they did to Calimar.”
“So she wanted to fight a defensive war?”
Sylvia and Avery smiled at each other. “No,” Sylvia said. “Niki wouldn’t even consider fighting a defensive war.”
“So . . . what then?”
“Niki was looking for a cure.”
Richardson stared at them, a half smile on his face. “You’re joking?”
“No, Ben, I’m not. She was pretty sure she found one, too. That’s why we left Union Field. That’s what we’re doing out here.”
Richardson shook his head in dismay. “Sylvia, that’s absolutely ridiculous. I have been all over this country. I’ve even been into Mexico a few times. People everywhere talk about finding a cure. It’s like some kind of fairy tale.”
“That’s what Stoler said.”
Richardson laughed. “Huh, what do you know? I never thought I’d agree with that idiot on anything.”
“It’s real, Ben. Niki believed in it.”
“Yeah, so much that she turned her back on however many people you’ve got back at Union Field. She’s your best fighter, and she went off hunting red herrings when her people needed her most. No wonder Ken Stoler is pissed.”
Sylvia’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand, Ben.”
“I understand things just fine, Sylvia. I understand that there’s no such thing as a cure to the necrosis filovirus. The only cure for a zombie is a bullet in the brain.”
“Now you really sound like Stoler.”
“Yeah? Well, it sounds like he finally came to his senses, if you ask me.”
“That’s the difference between us, Ben. You never did believe.”
“And you were always a dreamer, Sylvia.”
She slapped her palm down on the floor, kicking up a thin cloud of dust. “You don’t mean to tell me, after everything you’ve seen today, that you still believe these people can’t be saved. I would think this, finally, would convince you.”
“What do you mean, after what I saw today? Were we watching the same thing? Because what I saw was some guy who fed a living person to a huddle of zombies, and then deliberately infected another man. That doesn’t sound like somebody in need of saving. What I saw was a man in need of being cut up into little bits and buried beneath a ton of lime.”
“He’s insane, Ben. I’ll give you that. But he is regaining his sense of self. He is living proof that the disease isn’t permanent. That’s there hope.”
“Hope? Sense of self? Sylvia, I didn’t think it was possible, but you might actually have gotten crazier since San Antonio.”
“Crazier?” She pulled her hair and made a noise that, to Richardson at least, sounded a lot like a growl. “What do you think is going on out there, Ben? The Red Man is proof that this disease can be dealt with. You’ve seen him with his troops. Surely even you can see that he’s capable of working with uninfected people to achieve a common goal. That’s all we want. We want to coexist until a cure can be found.”
“That’s not gonna happen, Sylvia. Look around you. There’s nothing left. We have one chance to survive, and it doesn’t involve subjugating ourselves to some freak of evolution.”
“Freak of evolution?” Sylvia scoffed at him. “That’s nice, Ben. Is that really what you think this is? How can you study so much about this disease and still be so ignorant? I have tried to—”
“Don’t call me ignorant. I’m not the—”
“Stop it, both of you!” It was Avery. She had her hands cupped over her ears, a gesture that reminded Richardson of a child cowering in a closet, trying to shut out the noise of the screaming his parents made while they fought. Looking at her, he saw himself a long, long time ago, frightened, alone, feeling small in the face of a very large and very unfriendly world. “Please,” she said again. “Don’t yell anymore.”
Sylvia crawled across the floor on her knees to the girl and hugged her. Richardson watched her go. His blood was up and he still wanted to hash it out with Sylvia. It was just like San Antonio all over again. The only difference was that it had taken them a whole day together before they were at each other’s throats. He wondered if that was a good sign.
He also found himself wondering about the curious dynamic between the two women. The girl clearly looked up to Sylvia like some kind of mother figure. But why would she lean on her the way she does, he wondered. She’s twenty years old. Living in the world she lives in, she should be stronger than that, more independent.
Sylvia stroked the girl’s blond hair. She looked at Richardson and motioned to the iPad with her chin. “Can you turn that thing off ?”
“Sure.” Richardson tapped the STOP button at the bottom of the screen.
“Avery,” Sylvia said, “Do you want to rest?”
The girl nodded without speaking. Richardson handed her the coat from his pack and Sylvia rolled it up as a pillow for Avery.
Within moments she was asleep.
“Let’s step outside,” Sylvia whispered.
They went out to the balcony and watched the advance winds of the storm blow trash and dust down the street below. The river was a thick dark line in the near distance, and they could smell it on the wind. Somewhere behind them they could hear a dog barking, very faintly, but otherwise it was quiet. That was one thing about this world that Richardson liked. It was always quiet.
Sylvia turned to face him, her frizzled hair rustling against her cheek. He didn’t like the strange look on her face, as though she were about to gloat.
“What is it?” he asked.
“The cure is real, Ben.”
“Oh come on, Sylvia. You’ve already tried this one on me. There isn’t going to be any cure because there isn’t anyone to—”
“Ben, there
is
a cure. It’s already been found.”
The smirk on his face remained for a few moments before he blinked at her. Then it faded. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
She wasn’t smiling anymore. Her light blue eyes flashed in the darkness, and he could tell how excited she was.
“But . . . how? Where is it?”
“That’s what we’re doing here, Ben. We’re going to see the man who’s working on the cure. His name is Dr. Don Fisher. He’s immune, Ben. Or, at least mostly. Niki heard about him through her foraging parties. He was bitten more than four years ago, and he hasn’t turned. It crippled him, but it didn’t turn him. He’s been working on a cure ever since. This is it. We think he’s finally found it.”
Richardson was shaking his head. “But you haven’t spoken to him? I mean, how do you know this is the real deal?”
“It is, Ben. We just have to find him. Niki’s foraging parties made the arrangements. We were supposed to go to Herculaneum tomorrow and meet a man from Union Field who’s agreed to help us. He’s got AR-15s like the ones we have. Niki told me to trade those weapons for passage on a trawler down to Chester. We’re supposed to meet Fisher there on Tuesday of next week.”
“That’s . . .” He trailed off. He had no idea what to say. To him, the whole thing sounded insane, but, at the same time, if it was real . . . the possibilities were endless.
He shook his head. Crazy.
“But the Red Man has Niki now. Don’t you think that changes your plans?”
She shrugged. “I trust in Niki Booth, Ben. I trust in her like nobody I’ve ever met. If you knew her like I do, you would too. The Red Man won’t get anything out of her.”
A few light raindrops splattered on his hands and face. The next instant the rain swept over them, and they moved inside the building. Sylvia looked down at Avery, who had curled up in the fetal position and was cradling Richardson’s jacket like it was a child’s teddy bear. She was sleeping soundly.
Sylvia turned to face him. And when she spoke again, she was whispering. “I know you don’t believe in this, but we’re going to do it. We’re going to bring back a cure. This is too important to fail.”
C
HAPTER
7
The next morning Richardson woke before dawn and dressed by candlelight. The floor creaked as he walked toward the patio door. Sylvia rolled over, murmuring thickly, but didn’t wake. Avery was curled in a ball next to her, sleeping soundly. Richardson waited for a moment, letting Sylvia settle, then went outside.
The storm had passed during the night, leaving a clean, earthy smell on the air. There was a light breeze and the early morning chill felt good against his skin. During the night the rain trap they’d set out had collected almost a gallon of fresh water. It wouldn’t be enough to bathe with, which a quick sniff had told him he sorely needed, but at least they wouldn’t be leaving here with dry throats. It wasn’t all bad, he guessed.
But a rude squawk made him freeze. He’d been kneeling next to the rain trap, but when he heard the bird sounds, he closed his eyes and steeled himself against the horror he knew was waiting for him.
He opened his eyes.
The crows were back, staring at him. There were hundreds of them. They sat on the patio railing, on the light poles and wires, on the edges of roofs, on derelict cars and in trees and on signs, hundreds, thousands of eyes turned on him in silent judgment.
He stared back at them, trembling. He remembered what it was like when he came back to the Paradise compound six years earlier to find everyone he cared about getting fed upon by crows. Remembered the sight of all those people, twelve hundred in all, getting picked clean to the bone by birds that squawked and fought over the scraps.
You won’t get me, you carrion birds, he thought. You missed me when you came for my friends in Montana, and you won’t get me now. You ate the people I loved most in this world, but you didn’t eat my heart. That you won’t ever have.
Though even now the memory of all those carrion birds, black as soot, glassy-eyed and squawking furiously at each other, made him cower in fear. Richardson and a few others had gone down to California to get seeds for the coming spring. They were gone four months. When he left, Ed Moore and the blind girl Kyra Talbot and Billy Kline and Jeff Stavers and all the others were alive and well, arguing about whether or not to open the compound to the hundreds of refugees coming north because they had heard of the wonderful things Ed Moore was doing in Paradise Valley. Billy had warned refugees would bring diseases, but Ed had overruled him. Fate had proven Billy right. Richardson never figured out what had done the killing. Bubonic plague? Cholera? Yellow fever? Anything was possible. But when he was standing there in the middle of the compound, snow swirling around his feet, he remembered thinking that causes didn’t matter, not when everyone you loved was dead. How he had loved those people. He and Robin Tharp and a few others from the original Grasslands group had walked from body to body, shooing away angry birds and trying to figure out who was who, but all Richardson could think about was how much love had just gone out of the world.
“Ben?” Sylvia said from behind him. “You okay?”
Richardson stiffened, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Fine,” he said, without turning around. “You guys about ready to leave?”
“Just about. How much water did we get last night?”
He turned, sniffled, and handed her the trap. “Looks like about a gallon.”
She took it from him. She looked at him curiously, watching his eyes. “Thanks,” she said. “You want to have that breakfast now? Green beans and beef jerky?”
He nodded, grateful she had the good grace to leave his grief alone.
Later, when they were packed and ready, Richardson dangled his rope over the balcony. They scaled down to ground level and he pulled the rope down after them and stowed it in his backpack. Then they set out, walking through the darkened ruins without speaking, their feet sloshing in the muddy puddles left by the rain.
The ruins seemed deserted, as Richardson expected them to be. Most of the infected, he knew from long experience, preferred to hunt in the daytime. Walking under cover of early morning darkness, they hoped to get out of the city proper by dawn.
They got on Interstate Highway 55 and followed it all the way to the southern edge of town without seeing anything. There weren’t even any rats scurrying around. Even still, Richardson couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching them. He kept stopping, and turning, scanning the road behind them.
Once, it took him so long to start back up that Sylvia and Avery had to double back to him.
“What is it?” Sylvia asked.
Richardson strained his senses against the darkness. He heard the dull drone of cicadas in the overgrown fields on either side of the highway. The chatter of birds. The wind whistling through the holes in buildings. And something else. A wet, rattling sound. Like a man struggling to breathe through lungs nearly flooded with phlegm.
“We’re being followed,” he said.
She scanned the road behind them, and then the buildings off to the west. “Yeah, I think you may be right.”
Richardson glanced east. Daylight was overtaking them. Already he could see reds and oranges spilling over the horizon. Up and down the highway, the ghostly shapes of long-abandoned cars waited silently for nothing.
“I don’t like this,” Sylvia said. “We’re too easy to spot out here.”
“It can’t be the Red Man, can it? Following us, I mean. If he had us in sight, wouldn’t he just overtake us with his trucks?”
“I would think so,” Sylvia said.
“Could it be Ken Stoler?”
She grimaced. “God, I hope not.”
They passed a ruined movie theater on their left and Richardson slowed to look at it without even realizing what he was doing. Abandoned buildings like this fascinated him. Pulled him in. Even before the outbreak places like this had held a special fascination for him. Now, they were everywhere. Like this theater. Grass had grown up in the parking lot. There were a few cars abandoned there, but they had been stripped and a few had been burned. He could see skeins of metal wire encircling the wheels where the tires had melted. Beyond, the building was a mess. Gone were the windows and the glass front doors, all of them smashed. The lobby was a black maw that resembled the entrance to a cave. They had been showing
Duma Key
when the outbreak swept through here, but the D was missing now.
“What is it?” Sylvia asked. “You hear something?”
“No, just looking.”
“At what? The movie theater?”
He nodded.
“Do you miss it?”
“Hmm? Miss what?”
“You know, the world. Going to the movies? Tater tots from Sonic. A McRib at McDonald’s? Concerts, picnics in the park, going to the bookstore, catching a favorite song on the radio?”
“And paying bills and traffic jams and politicians?” he said, smirking at her.
She had seemed playful when she brought up the topic, but her smile slowly dried up. “I guess not.”
“No,” he said, suddenly turning serious. “I’m not being fair, Sylvia. I do miss it. Sometimes. Every once in a while, I dream about how good things used to be. Do you do that?”
She didn’t answer, but he could tell by her expression that he’d touched a nerve.
He went back to looking at the movie theater, and for a second, he almost told her about a piece he’d written comparing zombies to abandoned buildings. Thinking about it now, there was actually something to it. Both, after all, were crippled wrecks somehow still on their feet. But beyond that, both were single serving–sized doses of the apocalypse. Both existed in a sort of temporal neverland, so that you could see their present reality, that of the wreck, but also hints of what they once were and the potential of what they could be in the future, all three realities existing at the same time, overlapping each other.
But he knew where the conversation would lead. Where Richardson saw the zombie as a dead end, a being whose only future was a long, slow trek into the grave, Sylvia saw a cause, a soul to be reborn. She was a dreamer; he was a realist. What could possibly come of that but another fight? Yesterday, he’d have been up for it, but today, he was too tired. And from her expression, so was she.
“You still looking at that thing?” Sylvia asked.
“It’s hard to look away,” he admitted.
“I thought you were collecting stories of people, not buildings.”
“I am.”
Sylvia considered the movie theater for a long moment. Then she said, “But there’s no passion in it, Ben. Last night, when you were telling us about what you’ve been doing, all the interviews you gathered, you sounded tired. You sounded like you were on autopilot. But I look at you now, the way you’re looking at that thing, and I see your eyes on fire. There’s passion there.”
He started to answer, and then realized he couldn’t figure out if she’d actually asked a question.
“You know what I think?” Sylvia asked.
“What?”
“I think you’ve been reading too much Wordsworth.”
He hadn’t expected that, and the smile that came to his face was cracked.
And, as though she possessed some kind of rudimentary mind-reading skills, she said, “I saw that copy of the
Lyrical Ballads
in your backpack last night. Let me guess, ‘Tintern Abbey.’ ”
He shrugged. “Guilty as charged.”
Sylvia turned away from the building to where Avery Harper was sitting on the tailgate of a rusting pickup truck, her feet dangling in the air like a little kid sitting in a big chair. The girl looked very hot and very tired. Her chin was resting on her chest and she looked like she was having trouble catching her breath.
“Avery, honey, you okay?” Sylvia called.
The girl looked up. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “Just resting.”
“Okay, go ahead and get ready to move out, okay? We’ll be leaving in a few.”
The girl waved a halfhearted acknowledgment.
Then Sylvia lowered her voice so that only Richardson could hear. “Ben, you want some advice?”
His cracked smile grew wider. “You’re offering me advice? I can’t wait to hear this.”
“I’m serious, Ben.”
He waited.
“Put away the Wordsworth. Read some Whitman instead.”
He let out a disappointed huff of air. “That’s your advice? Sylvia, you should know this about me. I despise Whitman. He was great at first lines, but piss-poor in the follow-through.”
“You’re not being fair to yourself, Ben. Don’t you see? You’ve lost touch with your real purpose. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you love the rubble more than the people.”
“Sylvia, the people you’re talking about, the ones I’m supposed to love more than the rubble, they’re eating each other. In a way, I guess that’s an improvement over the way things used to be. At least now there’s no duplicity. I mean, what you see is what you get, right? A zombie, all it wants to do is eat you. It’s not going to try and wine and dine you first, you know?”
But he couldn’t put her off track with sarcasm. He realized that as soon as the words left his mouth.
She leaned in closer to him. “Ben, I told you to read Whitman. I wasn’t kidding about that. You need to see that the zombie and the abandoned building are exactly the same. They are both in need of restoration. They are both in need of us to make the connection with them. Have you read ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’?”
He was startled at hearing his thoughts spoken aloud. But at last he shook himself and answered. “Uh, yeah, I guess. A long time ago.”
“Remember how he addresses his future readers. ‘It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall / The dark threw its patches down upon me also / The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious / My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meager?’ Ben, he’s talking about the same kind of personal negativity you’re experiencing. He’s talking about making connections between generations. He’s talking about the kind of continuity you’re craving, whether it’s with the person living a hundred years ago, or a thousand years from now. What he’s saying is that people are the only kind of continuity that truly matter. It’s what you’re doing with your stories, but I think maybe you don’t believe it anymore.”
She stopped there, as though she was waiting for him to argue, but he didn’t. Instead, he smiled.
And then a thought came to him. Shortly after the quarantine fell, he and a small group of refugees from Houston had made a cross-country trek to the Cedar River National Grasslands, to live in the compound built by a mad Mississippi preacher named Jasper Sewell. That had ended in a nightmare, with the senseless suicide of over a thousand people.
But for all of Jasper’s madness, he did have the gift of leadership. He had taken a weary collection of suffering survivors, and made them into a thriving community, a John Winthrop–style City on the Hill. And he had done it by identifying that glowing spark of talent within all of them, that one thing they were meant to do. He had made a porn star into an elementary school teacher, a Harvard-educated millionaire playboy into a manure-shoveling cabbage farmer, and a retired U.S. Deputy Marshal into an outlaw. What would he have made of Sylvia Carnes, Richardson wondered. The way she so doggedly held to her faith in the cure that might one day turn all these shambling hordes back into the humans they had once been humbled him. She was a teacher at heart. With her unbridled confidence in the potential of the human spirit, could she be anything but?