Apocalypse Of The Dead (23 page)

“Huh,” he said. “Maybe I got a break.” God knows he was due for one.

And then he thought, Well, fuck it. I got lucky once. Maybe I’ll get lucky again.

He stood up, leaned an ear against the crack at the edge of the door, and listened to the rain pattering down on the grass outside.

Nothing.

He pushed the door open, wincing as it creaked, but he kept on pushing.

The sky was washed out and gray, a watercolor smear over the row of houses. Rain puddles dotted the yard. But he was alone. He listened, and when he didn’t hear anything, he took off running toward his house. He rounded the corner of the alley and heard somebody shooting.

He ducked behind some bushes.

Lucky thing, too.

Three of those zombie things were shambling down the side street to his right, dragging half-eaten legs, trying to grasp with hands that were too mangled to work.

Nate looked over to his left and saw two guys in white plastic suits, like something out of a science-fiction movie, gas masks over their faces. They had military-looking machine guns.

The lead white suit called out, “Police officers. Stop moving. Put your hands over your head.”

The zombies lumbered closer, like they didn’t hear.

“Stop where you’re at or we’ll fire.”

The second white suit had a radio in his hand. He said, “Team Seven-Alpha. Evans and Avenue G, three confirmed. Request permission to fire.”

Whomever he was talking to must have given him the okay, because a moment later a three-round burst of gunfire slammed into the lead zombie and nearly took his head off. The body went tumbling backward.

The other two zombies kept shambling toward the white suits. They didn’t even flinch at the gunfire, just kept right on coming.

Two more bursts took them out.

Nate’s eyes went wide.

He jumped to his feet and ran the other way. His feet slid out from under him on the wet road and he probably looked like a tangle of arms and legs, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to get away from there.

“Hey,” one of the white suits yelled. “Hey, stop. Stop!”

Nate put his head down and ran.

But he didn’t even make it across the street before the demon in his knee raised its ugly head and down he went.

He looked back just as the white suits closed on him.

“What the hell are you doing, man?” the first one said. He sounded winded and angry. “We’re trying to help you. Didn’t you hear the warnings on TV?”

Nate was confused. He looked from one white suit to the other. They knew what he’d done to Jessica Metcalfe. That’s why they were here, fucking cops. Why were they fucking with him like this? Just knock his dick in the dirt and be done with it.

“Where have you been all day?” the other white suit said. “The evacuation is mandatory. Everybody’s gotta go.”

“I—,” Nate said, and had nothing beyond that. He shrugged.

“What’s wrong with your knee?” one of the suits said. He wasn’t pointing his machine gun at Nate, but he still looked ready to use it.

“I hurt it a few years back,” Nate said.

The white suits relaxed a little. The one closest to Nate slung his rifle over his shoulder and held out his hand and said, “Can you stand? You need a hand up?”

“Thanks.”

Nate took the man’s gloved hand, and the plastic crinkled in his grip. The man started to pull him to his feet, then suddenly let go of Nate’s hand and backed away. Both soldiers brought their machine guns up.

“Hey, you’ve been bit,” the first white suit said. “Your shoulder.”

“What are you trying to pull?” the second white suit said. “You didn’t think we’d notice?”

The first white suit took out his radio and keyed it up. “Team Seven-Alpha, send us the wagon to Evans and Avenue G. We got one injured that hasn’t turned yet.”

“Team Seven-Alpha, ten-four,” came a man’s bored voice on the other end. “Is he secured?”

“Ten-four. He’s compliant.”

Nate covered his face with his hands and groaned at his bad luck. He heard a faint clattering of metal, and then, before he knew what was happening, one of the white suits was slapping him into handcuffs.

Nate looked at the cuffs and then up at the suits.

“What are you going to do to me?” he said.

Neither suit answered.

“Can’t you just let me go home? Just let me go home?”

But there was no answer.

A white police van pulled up to the curb.

It had started to rain a few minutes before and Nate was soaked through to the skin. The world had turned gray and depthless. The white suits got in position beside him and with a wave of their rifles directed him to the rear of the van. Nate offered no resistance. He stood up from the curb and walked where they pointed. They opened the rear of the van and Nate was shocked to see that it already had six other people inside. They were all injured to one degree or another, and they all stared back at Nate with hollow, vacant eyes that were at once tremendously sad and deeply terrifying.

“Get in,” one of the white suits said. “Sit there.”

“I don’t wanna,” Nate said.

“Get in or get shot,” the other white suit said.

Nate took a look around. This was the neighborhood where he had grown up, where all the fucked-up decisions that were his life had played out in a pathetic tableau. It was all but deserted now, and in the gray sheets of rain that covered everything with a depthless smear, the black, huddled shapes of the houses seemed oddly inviting, as though all of this was a mistake and it wasn’t too late to start over.

“Hey, buddy. Come on. Hop up.”

The compassion in the white suit’s voice shook Nate out of his thoughts. He stared at the man.

“I’ll never see it again. Will I?”

The white suit shook his head. It was a barely perceptible gesture behind the gas mask.

Nate nodded, then climbed into the van. He sat down next to a man in a mud-stained business suit. Blood was oozing out from under the man’s legs and running in muddy rivulets down the white metal bench upon which he sat.

Nate sat down next to the man.

The man met his gaze, his eyes red-rimmed and haunted looking, and then turned away in silence.

They were on the road for a long while, but eventually the van pulled into a muddy field and stopped.

The door flew open.

Three white suits were standing there, two of them with machine guns. The suits were standing inside a narrow, muddy lane bordered by tall black fences of metal wire. Behind them was a gate made of the same metal wire, and beyond that a large fenced-in area where several hundred people milled listlessly about.

“Get down. Move it.”

“Where are we?” Nate asked.

“Get down here,” the white suit said. “Move it.”

Nate climbed down. The white suits stepped back along one of the fences and leveled their weapons at him.

“Stand there,” the man said, pointing at the opposite fence.

Nate did as he was instructed, then stood by and waited as the others were led down from the back of the van.

The white suit got out a radio and said, “Open the inner gate.”

The fence creaked as it slid open.

Nate watched it slide away, then turned back to the white suits.

“Go on,” the man said.

Nate looked inside. He saw a lot of sad, vacant faces staring back at him.

Something in him rebelled.

He turned suddenly and said, “No. No fucking way.”

He tried to run, but the only place to go was back toward the van.

Under it, he thought.

He dove into the mud and tried to scramble under the rear axle, but he wasn’t fast enough. One of the white suits grabbed him by his ankles and pulled him back out.

Nate turned over, and the last thing he saw before everything went black was the butt of a rifle speeding down toward his face.

They took I-40 from Barstow and stayed with it all the way into Arizona. At Kingman, they turned south onto 93 and started seeing traffic fleeing north from Phoenix, a trickle of headlights going God knows where.

The news on the radio was grim. Along the East Coast, the outbreak was spreading up from Florida at a staggering rate, and people were fleeing west as fast as they could go. Out west, California was in complete chaos, and a military effort to quarantine L.A. had been abandoned when troops there were overrun. Efforts around the Bay Area were more successful, though according to CNN those troops were expected to be withdrawn within the next few hours so that efforts could be focused in defending safe areas in Colorado. He listened to the reports and shook his head. The country was sucking into itself, withdrawing into its breadbasket, abandoning its coasts.

Robin stepped through the partition and took a seat behind him.

“Hey,” he said.

She leaned forward and rested her chin on his shoulder. Despite spending the last eight hours or so on the road, she still smelled nice.

“How is he?” he asked. After Barstow, Colin had raved violently before finally regaining a measure of his composure. But with the calm would come embarrassment over the cowardice he had shown back in Barstow, which he compensated for with more violence. Several times, Jeff had been forced to pull over so he could help to restrain him. Robin had been taking care of him since then, and from what Jeff saw, she had pretty much taken charge of things on the other side of the partition. Katrina Cummz and the other two blondes seemed to be doing everything she told them without question. And there hadn’t been any more screaming from Colin in over an hour.

“He’s calm now,” Robin said. “He’s resting. He’d be better if he could get some sleep, though. How about you? You okay?”

“I’m okay,” he said.

“You sure? Driving’s not a problem?”

“I’m okay,” he assured her. “The acid’s pretty much gone now. The trick is to keep focused on the road. The trouble is, I’ll start thinking about stuff and I’ll tune out for a while.”

“You want some company?”

Her face was serenely calm, though the red rimming her eyes told a different story. Looking into her face, he got a sense that this woman had her act together, and he was a bit ashamed at himself for being surprised by that. He’d always resented Colin and his friends for their arrogance, the sense of entitlement that came with their money and guaranteed futures. It made him feel like a charity case, like every handshake and introduction was a patronizing pat on the head. He winced inwardly now with the realization that he had looked on Robin in much the same way that Colin and his friends had treated him.

“Jeff?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, and shook himself. “Yeah, some company would be great.”

She pointed out the windshield. “The road.”

The bus shook as the tires drifted onto the rumble strips.

“Got it,” Jeff said. “I’m on it.” He got the bus back on the road and put both hands on the wheel and gave her a wink in the rearview mirror. “Got it,” he said.

She chuckled. “Great.”

She moved over to the edge of the seat so he could see her without having to look in the mirror. The road rolled on beneath them. An occasional headlight beam would light up her face, then slowly slide away, leaving her in darkness again.

She said, “So what does Mr. Jeff Stavers think about while he’s up here all alone, drifting off the road?”

“Hmmm?”

“You said you start thinking about stuff and you drift off. I want to know what that stuff is. What goes on in Jeff Stavers’s brain?”

“Not much of anything,” he said.

“That sounds like a cop-out to me,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”

He watched the road in the pool of light from the headlamps and he was tempted to tell her that it was complicated. That there was so much it was hard to put into words. But that wasn’t the truth. He knew that. What he was thinking was pretty simple.

“I’ve got this feeling like we’ve crossed some kind of threshold,” he said. “There’s the world like it was, and then there’s the world like it is now. Or like it’s going to be. It’s still changing, still evolving. I know that. But I’ve got this sense that…that—”

“That we’ve been cut free of our pasts.”

The frustration he had felt at not being able to find the right words cleared from his face, and he looked at her with renewed surprise.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it exactly.”

She smiled at him.

“Why don’t you find a place to pull over?” she said. “You could use some sleep. We both could.”

Ed Moore rose at dawn and walked out of the tent he shared with the other men from the Springfield Adult Living Village and stretched. He was looking for Billy Kline. All around him, spread out over a five-acre grassy field south of the Marine Corps Logistics Base outside Albany, Georgia, were more than two thousand military-issued tents. They were packed in like bees in a hive. There was trash everywhere. The pathways between the tents were crisscrossed with laundry wires. The ground was worn into muddy troughs after the previous morning’s rainstorms, and you couldn’t walk more than a few feet from your tent without getting stained with mud up to midcalf. Though it was only a few minutes past sunrise, and much of the landscape was still shrouded in early-morning shadows and haze, the hive was already bustling with refugees trying to get a head start on the crowds that would soon be gathering around the mess halls and the commissary and the medic stations.

Ed frowned at the commotion. This was not at all what he had expected, and he was feeling the vague, unfocused anger of the disillusioned. True, the military had made good on its promise to feed them, clothe them, get them into shelter, but he was appalled at how haphazardly things were being run. Art Waller had yet to receive anything more than a cursory examination by a Marine Corps medic. He was inside the tent now, running a high fever. He’d kept Ed up most of the night with his coughing. There were generators and heaters inside the tents, but no fuel to run them. There were no showers. The only bathrooms in the camp consisted of a row of twenty port-o-pottys that had become disgusting messes by the end of the first day. It was useless to bag your garbage. Field mice and raccoons and feral cats made nightly forays into the camp, and by morning, the bags were gutted and the refuse left to rot all afternoon in the sweltering sun. Everywhere he turned, he saw a reflection of his own frustrated anger staring back at him from other residents of the camp.