Apocalypse Of The Dead (3 page)

But what was the sense in worrying about it? It didn’t matter anymore.

Not without the boy it didn’t.

Not to Robert Connelly.

There was another thud against the door and it splintered. A shard of plywood skidded across the deck, landing near his feet. Bloody fingers tore at the hole in the door. A face appeared at the widening crack, the cheeks and lips shredded to a pulp, the small, dark teeth broken and streaked with blood. The moaning became a fierce, stuttering growl.

That might be Bobby there; it was hard to tell. But it didn’t matter.

Robert looked over the controls. The boat would run itself. And it looked like they had enough fuel to finish the voyage. There was nothing left to do here. He stood as straight as the rolling deck of the boat allowed and prepared to run for it.

There was a hammer on the chair beside him.

He picked it up. Tested its heft.

It would do.

The door exploded open.

Bobby and two others stood there. Bobby’s right hand was nearly gone. So, too, were his ears and nose and most of his right cheek.

“Ah, Jesus, Bobby,” Robert said, grimacing at the wreckage of his son.

They stumbled forward.

Robert moved past Bobby and swung at the lead zombie, dropping it with a well-placed strike to the temple.

The other closed the gap too quickly, and Robert had to kick it in the gut to create distance. He raised the hammer and was rushing forward to plant it into the thing’s forehead when Bobby grabbed his shoulder and clamped down with a bite that made Robert howl in pain.

He knocked the boy to the deck and swung again at the second zombie. The claw end of the hammer caught the zombie in the top of the head and it dropped to the deck.

Bobby was on him again.

He grabbed the boy and turned him around and hugged him from behind, determined not to let go. A group of zombies was bottlenecking at the door. Robert knew he had only a few minutes of fight left in him. He charged the knot of zombies at the door and somehow managed to push them back. Hands and arms crowded his face, but he wasn’t worried about escaping their bites. Not at this point. All that mattered was getting on top of the cabin and up into the rigging.

Bobby struggled against his hold, but Robert managed to get his left arm across Bobby’s chest and over his right shoulder, pinning the boy’s arms. With an adult, it wouldn’t have been possible. But with a boy, and especially with a boy who had existed at a near-starvation level for two years, Robert managed fairly well.

The zombies clawed at him. They tore his cheeks and arms and neck with their fingernails. One of them took a bite out of his calf. But they couldn’t hold him.

He was breathing hard by the time he reached the top. He could feel his body growing weak. The infection felt like somebody was jamming a lit cigarette through his veins. But he reached the top of the rigging, and once he was there, he slipped a small length of rope from his back pocket and looped it around Bobby’s left hand, then around his own.

“It’s all right,” he whispered into Bobby’s ear. “Don’t you worry. We’re together now and nothing else matters.”

In the distance, he could see the bobbing string of lights that marked the Florida coast. Fireworks exploded above the horizon.

It was the Fourth of July.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

The zombie, his child, struggled against him. It wouldn’t be long now. He felt so weak, so sleepy. Soon, nothing else would matter.

They were together. And that was enough.

“That’s what counts,” he said. “I love you, Bobby.”

It was a cloudy, humid morning. Some of the prisoners were trying to sleep. Others were gazing vacantly out of the bus windows as it made its way southward through the heart of Sarasota, Florida’s coastal district. Billy Kline had his head against the wire mesh covering the windows, watching the others as they swayed in their seats to the motion of the bus. Beside him, Tommy Patmore was absently pulling at the loose threads of his work pants. The mood was subdued, quiet, each man lost to his own thoughts.

A few of the guys had their windows down, but not even the occasional draft of sea air that managed to find its way into the bus could cover up the smell. Their work clothes were little more than heavy-duty orange hospital scrubs with SARASOTA COUNTY JAIL stenciled across the back, and though they were supposedly washed after every use, they nonetheless stank of mildew and sweat and something less definable that Billy Kline had only now identified.

It was the rank odor of despair.

He’d been thinking a lot about despair lately. There were times when he felt it as a physically immediate and distinct sensation, like the burning itch between your toes after a few days of taking communal showers; or the painful swelling in your bowels that came with your first few meals; or rolling over at night and seeing the man in the cot next to you enveloped in a living haze of scabies. But there were other times when it was more tenuous, like when you heard the resignation in your mother’s voice when she said good-bye at the end of your ten-minute Tuesday-night phone call; or when you seethed with a cold, mute rage every time some bored guard emptied everything you owned onto his desk from a paper grocery sack and picked through it like he was looking for a pistachio kernel in a pile full of shells.

He felt so much rage.

Billy was twenty-five, halfway through an eight-month sentence for selling stolen property to undercover officers. Before that, he had done two months for car burglary, charges dismissed. And the year before that, he’d done three months, again for car burglary, and again with the charges ultimately dismissed. There had been other visits, too.

But this time was different.

This latest round of trouble had finally pissed his mom off to the point where she no longer asked for explanations or feigned credulity when he provided them unsolicited.

This time, he had finally hit bottom.

Beside him, Tommy Patmore sucked in a deep breath.

Billy leaned over and whispered, “You’re gonna unravel those pants you keep picking at ’em.”

A murmur.

“What’d you say?”

“Be quiet.”

Tommy glanced furtively around the bus. No one was paying any attention to them.

Billy followed Tommy’s gaze and frowned. “What’s wrong with you?”

One more look around.

“Ray Bob Walker came to see me this morning before we left. They asked me if I wanted to join.”

Billy sighed inwardly. He’d been dreading this.

“And? What’d you say?”

Tommy looked at him. It was enough.

“Ah, Tommy, you gotta be shitting me. What were you thinking?”

“Be quiet, Billy. They’ll hear you.”

“Fuck them. Tommy, I told you those Aryan Brotherhood assholes will get you killed. Is that what you want? You know what those guys do. What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“Be quiet,” Tommy said. “They’ll hear you.”

He looked around the bus again. Billy looked, too. He saw a lot of bald heads: a mixture of blacks and Mexicans and white guys. The Mexicans and the white guys all had prison tats on their necks. The white guys came in two body types. You had the big guys, stout, meaty, biker types. They tended to be the older ones, doing time for robbery or check kiting. Then you had the lean ones, wiry, wild-eyed. They were the loud ones, the meth heads, the fighters, the ones with something to prove.

Tommy is going to fit in well with the younger ones, Billy thought. He had the body type. He had the same desperate air about him, an urgent need to fit in somewhere, anywhere. But then, all the young white guys who joined the Aryan Brotherhood started out that way. They were all angry, frustrated, a little frightened to find themselves alone in a world that demanded so much and yet seemed to promise so little in return. The Aryan Brotherhood offered safety. It offered direction. It offered a society that gave its members rank and made them something special within their own little world. It offered an “us” and a “them.” For someone like Tommy Patmore, the appeal was irresistible.

But they hadn’t looked twice at Billy. With a last name like Kline, they all assumed Billy was Jewish. But if he was, his family had neglected to tell him about it. And yet his name was enough to brand him a Jew in the eyes of his fellow prisoners. It made him a sort of nonentity, a prisoner like the rest, yet distinct enough that he didn’t fall inside any of the racial lines that sharply divide all U.S. jails and prisons. At six-one and a hundred and ninety pounds, he was big enough and tough enough to stand in the no-man’s land between the gangs, but it was a precarious existence. He was always watching the man behind him, because that man could turn on him at a moment’s notice, and maintaining that nearly constant state of vigilance wore Billy down, exhausted him.

That was the big reason why he hated to see Tommy Patmore get sucked into the gangs. He liked Tommy. Now, Tommy was one more individual he’d have to watch out for.

“Just do me a favor, would you?” Billy said. “Do your time smart. If they try to talk you into hurting somebody, get the hell out. The last thing you want to do is spend the rest of your life in a state pen someplace.”

Tommy swallowed the lump in his throat. Then he looked down at his hands folded in his lap.

That was all Billy needed to see.

“Ah, Tommy, you are one dumb son of a bitch. What did you agree to do?”

“Please don’t say anything.”

“What are you going to do? Tell me.”

Tommy looked around, then folded down the waistband of his pants, exposing a five-inch-long piece of tin that had been hammered into a crude shank, some duct tape wrapped around the blunt end as a handle.

“They haven’t told me who yet.”

“Ah, Tommy. For Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t say anything, Billy. Please.”

“I won’t,” Billy said.

He looked away in disgust.

In his mind, he tried to wash his hands of Tommy Patmore, though it wasn’t as easy as it should have been.

They were pulling into Centennial Park. The Gulf of Mexico stretched out before them like a flat green sheet of cold pea soup. Gulls circled over the water, filling the morning air with noise. The smell of the ocean was thick and pungent and pleasant. Billy closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. For a moment, he imagined that all his problems were somewhere else.

But it was the last quiet moment he would ever know.

The driver parked the bus in the middle of a nearly empty parking lot, and things started to happen quickly after that.

Billy shuffled off the bus with the others.

A few of the men stretched.

A guard came by and collected their SID sheets, the 3 x 5 index cards that contained all their personal information and that they had to present to the guards every time they moved from one place to the next.

Billy and three of the others were pulled off the line and brought over to the equipment stand.

A guard handed Billy a canvas sack with a strap meant to go over one shoulder and a sawed-off broom handle with a dull, bent spike shoved into one end.

“Collection detail,” the guard said. “You’re with Carnot. Over there.”

Deputy Carnot, who the prisoners called Deputy Carenot because he didn’t seem to give a shit about anything except talking on his cell phone, waved his men over and pointed them toward a large plain of grass south of the parking lot. He didn’t even have to stop talking on the phone. Billy and the other members of the collection detail had all done this before. They knew the drill. Fan out. Fill your bag. Empty it into the garbage sacks brought up by the runners.

Billy worked steadily for the better part of an hour, going up and down the grassy expanse of Centennial Park, spearing trash, while the others went around emptying garbage cans into sacks and carting them off to a Dumpster that had been brought in for their use. It was easy work, mindless, and in his head he was drifting.

All that morning, the wind off the Gulf had been trying to clear the clouds from the sky, and it was finally starting to succeed. It was getting hot. Billy walked over to where Deputy Carnot was sitting in a lawn chair next to a yellow watercooler, talking on his cell phone.

“Hey, boss, you mind if I get a drink?”

Carnot gave him a frown and a dismissive wave of his hand. I don’t give a shit. Do what you need to do and lemme alone.

It sounded like he was talking to his girlfriend. Billy shook his head and smiled. Then he filled a paper snow cone cup with water and leaned on his trash spike while he drank it down in one quick gulp. It felt good going down, cold and clean.

He leaned down again for another drink, and that’s when he saw it.

He froze.

About a hundred feet away, DeShawn James, one of the younger black guys on the work crew, was wrestling with a heavy trash can, trying to pull it out of a wooden bin so he could empty it. Behind him, hugging a line of shrubs and coming up fast, was Tommy Patmore.

Billy could see the tin shank glinting in Tommy’s right hand.

Damn it, Tommy. You are one dumb son of a bitch.

Billy glanced at Carnot. The man was oblivious, still talking on his phone. No one else seemed to have noticed Tommy making his move either, and that was good.

Billy filled his cup, stood, and looked away, anywhere but at what Tommy was doing.

And that’s when he saw the man coming down the sidewalk toward him. His right arm was dark with dried blood, but he was walking normally, which is why Billy didn’t clue in right away that he was looking at a zombie. Like everybody else, he had seen the news footage from Texas. He had seen the infected wading through the flooded streets of Houston, their movements jerky and uncoordinated. He had seen the fighting in San Antonio and Austin and Dallas. He had read about them in magazines and seen the public service announcements on TV, telling you what to do if you should ever encounter one of the infected. But none of that occurred to him just then. All he saw was a man who didn’t look right but who sent a shiver down his spine just the same.

It wasn’t until he saw the man’s milky eyes that everything clicked.