Apocalypse Of The Dead (33 page)

Alto, Texas: August 1st. 2:40 P.M.

Stopped for lunch. I’m eating a Snickers bar, a couple pieces of bread, some beef jerky. Washing it down with a warm can of Coke.

I want to talk about something that happened here in Alto yesterday. A lot of people, Sandra Tellez especially, have been complaining to Barnes about the pace he’s keeping us on. We made it into Alto yesterday about 10 o’clock in the morning. The heat was just starting to make the walking unbearable, and most of us were ready to stop, find some place to hole up, and take it easy for a few days. Barnes refused. He wanted to push on. He always wants to push on.

Sandra told him they had a few elderly folks and children. Even a few of the young people in their twenties were getting sick. She demanded they stay in the area for as long as they could, until they could get healthy.

Barnes said, “Sure. Okay. How about food?”

“We have a few trucks. You can take a few men out to gather what you can from the surrounding towns.”

“And the zombies? What about them?”

“What zombies?”

He pointed behind her.

I was standing next to Sandra. I looked where he pointed and didn’t see anything but a large, grassy field. Here and there, I saw a few dead bodies. At least I thought they were dead.

“They’re not dead,” he said. “They’re sleeping.”

I looked again, and sure enough, you could see a few moving here and there. One of them rolled over.

I was shocked.

“Why?” he asked me. “I thought you made a reputation for yourself studying these things. Isn’t that what you made that field trip to San Antonio to do? Isn’t that what you set out to write your great zombie book about?”

I was too stunned by the field of sleeping zombies to answer.

He said, “You’re the one who’s been telling me that they’re just living people with a disease, like leprosy or something. Well, living people have to eat. They have to shit. And they’ve got to sleep.” He turned to Sandra. “Well, if you want to stay here, what do you want to do about them?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Then, more quietly, “But these people don’t have anything left, Mr. Barnes. They need to rest.”

“Fine,” he said.

He grabbed me by the shoulder and told me to go to a barn at the edge of the field where the zombies slept and quietly open the front door. It looked to be a good quarter mile away from where we stood. A long way to run when you’re standing out in the open, surrounded by flesh-eating ghouls.

He told Sandra to get everyone out of sight and make sure they stayed that way.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Just be ready with that door,” he said. “When I tell you to, you slam it shut.”

I went off and did what I was told. Sandra did what she was told. Barnes, meanwhile, walked out into the field of sleeping zombies and started whistling, one of those ear-splitters that seems to carry for miles.

Here and there, sleepers sat up and looked around for the source of the whistling. The infected are predictable in some ways; other ways they’re not. You can always count on them to go after something living if they spot it. But you can’t always count on them spotting it. Or hearing it, either.

Barnes had to whistle himself hoarse before he had a good number of them getting to their feet. Then the moaning started. That did it. I’ve become convinced their moaning is a trigger, the way certain gestures or sounds from a lead mare will trigger a herd of horses to change direction or suddenly break into an earthshaking gallop. That moaning, I think, is a key means of communication among the infected. Not the same kind of communication as speech or writing, obviously. More instinctive. Come to where I am. Food here. That sort of thing.

When the moaning started, the zombies—about twenty in all—got to their feet and followed Barnes. Barnes, for his part, calmly walked to the barn where I was waiting. He walked so slowly there were several times I thought he was about to get knocked down, but he never did. He just kept walking into the barn. I heard noises from inside, and I tried to figure out what he was doing, but it was no use. The noises were too indistinct, and I was too scared.

I heard them gathering inside the barn. It took nearly twenty minutes to get them all inside, but I wasn’t aware that it had happened. The first notice I had was when Barnes ran up beside me—scared the ever-loving crap out of me, too—and yelled, “Slam it shut, slam it shut.” He put his shoulder into the door and together we slammed the thing shut.

He put a bar over the door and that was that. The field was clear, all except for a few that couldn’t move well enough to walk.

“We’ll take care of them in a bit,” he said. “For now, let’s go get one of them gas cans from the truck.”

“What are gonna do?” I asked.

“Burn ’em,” he said, matter-of-factly. “What the hell did you think I was gonna do?”

“That seems inhumane to burn them.”

“They’ll kill us or turn us if we give ’em a chance. So what’s inhumane about burning ’em?”

“Good point,” I said.

Most of us hate Officer Barnes. We think he’s a tyrant, insane, abnormally cruel. But there’s a reason we keep following him.

He does keep us alive.

Dialville, Texas: August 6th, 10:00 P.M.

From Alto over to Elkhart, then north to Palestine, east again over to Rusk. We’re all over the place.

I’m hot, thirsty, irritable. If I never see another pine tree in my whole entire life, it’ll be too soon.

Christ, will we never make it out of Texas?

Frankston, Texas: August 10th, 7:15 P.M.

We have plenty to eat. It may not all be good stuff, but there’s plenty of it, lots of junk food, stuff that doesn’t have to be refrigerated. None of us are going hungry.

Sandra Tellez has done a wonderful job getting people organized, keeping them fed. She is, I think, a natural leader. She speaks, and the others fall in line. No discussion, no second-guessing. Maybe they recognize that she survived this way for nearly two years. Who knows? But whatever that elusive quality of leadership is, she has it.

And that’s part of the reason why I’m troubled.

I came to Sandra with something I saw the other day. Jerald Stevens is hoarding food. I was suspicious when I first met him in Houston. I was concerned when I saw him eating that ten-pound turkey breast right after we escaped the quarantine zone. Now I know it’s true. I’ve seen him do it. He has pounds and pounds of candy bars and beef jerky and moldy old sandwiches and bags of chips and God knows what else stashed away in his pockets and under his shirt and even inside his pants.

The hoarding I can understand. That’s the kind of thing a man can get over—that is, once he sees there’s not a need for it anymore. But it’s not just the hoarding. He’s eating constantly, and it worries me.

The other day, I saw him eat an entire country ham. Have you ever seen a country ham? We’re talking fourteen to sixteen pounds of pork. He gnawed it down to the bone during one of our daily marches.

And then he ate dinner with the rest of us, had seconds, and ate a candy bar in his sleeping bag while the rest of us drifted off to sleep.

Sandra didn’t think it was that big of a deal. She gave me the line about them surviving off scraps in the quarantine zone. She said he would swing back to normal soon enough. Let him be, she said.

But I disagree. I don’t think this is a phase you grow out of, like wetting the bed or chewing your nails. I think this is a bona fide mental illness.

Barnes, of course, had his own opinion. “Fuck him,” he said. “If he wants to eat himself to death, more power to him.”

Carrell Springs, Texas: August 14th, 8:20 P.M.

Right at dusk—the sky on fire with copper and red and orange, the land a dark purple along the horizon—a miracle happened.

For days we’d been hearing infrequent broadcasts on the AM radio bands about Jasper Sewell and his Grasslands village. Our group was divided. Most wanted to head that way. A few others, Sandra and Officer Barnes among them—the two of them on the same page for once—didn’t want to go there. Not to be with some religious nut job, they said.

And then, right outside of Carrell Springs, all of us dripping with sweat, tired, barely able to hold our chins up as we walked the last few miles into another town whose streets stank of human carrion, we saw writing on the road. The letters were huge, painted in white.

They read:

Cedar River National

Grasslands

We are going there

You should too

We all stopped and looked at it. Nobody spoke for a long time. Finally, I walked forward and tugged on Officer Barnes’s sleeve.

“What do you think?” I said. “These people. They need a plan, a destination.”

I looked at Sandra.

She nodded.

After a long time, Barnes did, too.

The cop was out in front, the zombie in the blue dress right behind him. Jeff grabbed the knife and staggered slowly to his feet. The world was swirling around him in a blur of faces and noise. He swayed drunkenly, unable to control his balance. A beer bottle smacked into the side of his head and caused him to rock back on his heels. A moment later, his arms were pinwheeling out of control as he fell back into the barbed wire.

A hand shoved him roughly back toward the center of the gazebo.

“Get in there and fight, you pussy!”

The floor was undulating beneath him. He stood there watching the approaching zombies, his shoulders slumped, his mouth hanging slack. His hands felt like they weighed a ton.

The cop was on him, but his hands were still handcuffed behind his back and all he could do was snap at Jeff with his teeth.

Jeff stepped to the side and pushed the cop to the wall, where he fell in a clumsy heap.

The zombie in the blue dress stepped around the fallen cop and reached for Jeff. Her right hand looked like it had been broken at some point after she turned, and the fingers hung uselessly from the hand like locks of hair. The top of her dress was torn away and hung about her waist, her white bra almost black with blood.

Jeff kicked at her and managed to land a blow right behind her knee that sent her to the ground. She grunted as she fell, but showed no signs of pain.

By the time she rose to her feet again, Jeff was scrambling for the cop. He was leaning against the barbed wire and couldn’t get back up without his hands. Jeff came up behind him and slammed the knife down into the side of his head with a wet-sounding smack.

The cop stopped moving almost immediately. Jeff still had his hand on the knife. He looked down at the blood seeping around the submerged blade and for a horrible moment he thought he could actually hear it pumping out of the wound. Everything fell away but that sound. Jeff was lost in it, shocked and thrilled and terrified by what he had just done.

The zombie in the blue dress put her ruined hand on his arm and she felt cold.

He yanked his arm back and rolled away from her. She came after him, but the sound of the blood pumping out of the cop’s wound had done something to him, energized him. He could feel the drugs surging through him now. He jumped to his feet, ran around the zombie, and grabbed the hilt of the knife sticking from the side of the cop’s head.

He pulled at the knife, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Come on, damn it. Come on.”

He was straining with everything he had, but the knife still wouldn’t come loose.

A hand came through the barbed wire and shoved him away from the corpse. Jeff batted the hand away. Through the screen of wire, he could see one of the bikers laughing at him, taunting him. But Jeff couldn’t hear him. The man’s mouth was moving, his eyes bulging with drunken excitement, flecks of white spit flying off his lips, but there was no noise.

Behind Jeff, the zombie in the blue dress was groping for him.

He turned. He was trapped between her and the corpse and the wall of barbed wire. The biker was still shoving him back away from the wall. Jeff grabbed the man’s hand and pulled it inside the gazebo with him as the zombie in the blue dress brought her teeth down on the spot where Jeff’s shoulder had just been.

She got a mouthful of the biker’s wrist instead.

The man screamed, and the zombie, now focused on the man, slid off Jeff’s shoulder.

Jeff stood up just as the man managed to free himself. The zombie tried to force her head through the barbed wire, but somebody kicked her in the face and knocked her backward into the gazebo.

Jeff’s chest was heaving. He looked down at the zombie and knew he had to do something. Then his gaze fell on the bra across her back. The clasp was coming loose, held together now by a single hook. Before she had a chance to stand, he reached down and pulled the bra apart. She was struggling to stand up, and as she moved, he managed to get one strap of the bra free from her arm and pull it up sharply, looping it around her neck until it formed a tight garrote. He put his knee in her back and pushed her facedown onto the wooden floor and he held her that way until she stopped squirming. The muscles in his arms were screaming at him by the time he let go of the bra and stood up.

The air was full of shouting. The gazebo was spinning, the faces leering in at him were distorted, alien, and frightening.

Then Gaines was standing in the gazebo with him.

“Harvard,” he said. “Holy shit, man. That was awesome. Come on.”

Gaines pulled him out of the gazebo and into a roaring crowd. Men were pushing him, congratulating him, slapping him on the back.

The crowd zippered open in front of him. On the ground, looking pale and frightened and angry, was the man who’d been bit by the zombie in the blue dress. He was on his knees, his face wet with sweat, his arms covered in blood. His lips were trembling.

“Here you go,” Gaines said.

Once again Jeff felt something forced into his hand.

He looked down and saw a gun. He turned to Gaines, his expression one of complete confusion.

“Kill him,” Gaines said. “Ain’t got no choice. He’s gonna turn.”

The man on the ground tried to protest, but the others held him down.

“Do it,” Gaines said.