Apocalypse Of The Dead (49 page)

Aaron had a pretty good idea what that was, just as he was also pretty sure that he had just been bumped as Jasper’s personal confidant.

As Aaron closed the door, Michael Barnes let his gaze turn on Jasper.

“You’re gonna have a busy night ahead of you, Michael. I’m sorry. I hope you’re up for it.”

“Whatever you need, Jasper.”

“Those troops are coming here because their base is overrun with the infected. When they get here, I want them to see that things aren’t any better here.”

“A few hundred zombies won’t deter them, Jasper.”

“No. But a couple thousand would.”

Barnes looked at him for a long time.

“Our fences wouldn’t be able to hold against that many.”

“They won’t have to, Michael. Because there’s something else I need you to do, too.”

Sirens echoed through the building.

They were inside the hospital again. Over the sirens, Nate could hear shouting and gunfire and people running down the hallway outside his room. Kellogg had made sure Nate knew what to do when the infected got inside the hospital, and Nate didn’t waste any time. He threw a heavy flannel shirt over his T-shirt and jeans, laced up the boots they’d given him, and slipped into a thick gray jacket with a fur collar. Then he went out into the hallway. Soldiers were running down the stairs to his left. A faint odor of electrical smoke hung in the air. There were bodies on the ground and blood splattered on the walls. One of the bodies off to Nate’s right was still moving, trying to claw his way toward him.

Nate turned to his left and headed for the stairs. The building was a large, ten-story cube built around an oval-shaped central hub. Nate’s room was on the fourth floor. In order to reach the cafeteria, where Kellogg had told him to go in case the hospital was overrun, he had to take the south stairwell down to the second floor and then come back toward the hub. He and Kellogg had walked it several times after that day on the column, and he knew the way even through the thickening smoke and the darkness and the wailing of the sirens.

He didn’t get scared until he stepped off the landing on the second floor. There were bodies everywhere. Not just people in regular civilian clothes, either. Dead soldiers, too. In the darkness it was hard to tell who was still moving and who was dead. He could hear moaning. A hand grabbed his ankle and he jumped.

“Get off,” he said, and kicked at the hand until the grip slackened and he was free.

He started to move, watching his step through the mangled bodies and the still-writhing fingertips clutching for a grip on the bloodstained floor.

There were spent shell casings all over the floor. They skidded out from beneath his boots and made it hard to walk. Somebody spoke to him from the floor, but he couldn’t understand what the man was saying and he kept walking.

Farther down the hall from where the double doors to the cafeteria hung open was the entrance to the building’s central hub. Nate knew that from there he could look down onto the first floor and the main entrance to the hospital. The walls around the entrance were glass, and Kellogg had said that if the zombies were going to enter the hospital, it would almost certainly be through there. There was no practical way to defend against it. Now, listening to the moaning coming from behind the doors that led to the building’s central hub, Nate figured the big one had already happened. The volume was tremendous. It sounded like a train was going through the downstairs lobby.

He turned toward the cafeteria’s double doors. There was a thick puddle of blood just inside the doorway, and a long blackish smear leading off into the darkness.

“Doc?” he called out.

A groan from the back of the room.

“Doc?”

“Nate. Back here.”

Nate followed the sound through a jumble of overturned tables and chairs. After a few steps, he could smell something bad, like shit and rot mixed together. He gagged on the smell, but didn’t vomit. The black smear on the floor glistened like oil.

He found Kellogg propped up against a collapsed display of hoagie sandwiches. There was blood on the counter above him, and sandwiches were strewn about on the floor. Kellogg was sitting in a puddle of blood, one arm draped over a nasty-looking wound that curved from the left side of his chest down across his stomach. Most of his shirt was gone. What Nate could see of the wound was a crusty yellow rimmed with blackened flesh. Pus oozed up from the deepest part of the wound.

“Doc, holy shit.”

Kellogg managed a faint laugh. “Looks bad, huh?”

“What happened?”

Kellogg held up a pistol that he’d had tucked under his thigh. “One bullet left,” he said.

“You saved it?”

The doctor coughed, spraying black wads of phlegm onto his chest. He looked up at Nate with rheumy, glassy eyes.

“So you’re gonna do it then?” Nate said.

Kellogg nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice was so faint Nate had to lean in to hear the words. “It’s hard to talk.”

Nate knelt down next to Kellogg, cursing his own stupidity. He knew he was supposed to say something. The man was dying, for God’s sake. This really smart man was dying, and here the guy was stuck with an idiot who couldn’t think of anything beyond “Sorry, dude” to say.

“Nate.”

“Yeah, doc?”

“Listen.” Kellogg coughed again. When the coughing stopped, he was winded. It took him a long time to start again. “Listen,” he said. “This is important.” He put the pistol down. There was a lanyard around his neck with a flash drive hanging from it. He took it off and held it out to Nate. “I want you to take this,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It’s all the work we’ve done on you. I think”—he stopped there and caught his breath—“I think we’re done.”

“You mean you found it? A cure? Doc, that’s huge. I mean, right? That’s huge, right? It’s what all this was for.”

Kellogg nodded.

“But what am I supposed to do with it?”

Kellogg closed his eyes. His breathing was ragged, labored. Nate could hear something rattling around inside his chest, like beans in a can.

“Doc?”

Kellogg opened his eyes again. They were bloodshot and starting to turn milky.

He said, “Nate, you need to escape this place.”

“How? Where am I supposed to go?”

Kellogg shifted impatiently. He was breathing hard. “Listen,” he said. “Colonel James Briggs is leaving here tonight with his command staff. There’s a civilian compound not far from here that seems to be doing pretty well. I told Briggs about you and how important it is that you get away from here. He’s going to try to get that civilian compound to take our people in. I want you with him.” Kellogg’s eyes swung heavily toward the flash drive in Nate’s hand. “You need to get that to somebody who can do something with it.”

“Doc,” Nate said. He felt helpless. “I can’t.”

Kellogg shook his head. “No, Nate, listen to me. Remember when I called you a true nihilist?”

“I remember.”

“Nate, we come to nihilism because we feel like the world is empty. The Buddhists call it samsara. It means disgust with the world. It doesn’t matter what we do. We’ll never change the fact that the universe is a sterile landscape without any meaning.”

“But you said we can make our own meaning. Like running into daylight.”

“Yeah, I did. I still believe that, Nate.” Kellogg paused and tried to catch his breath. “Jesus, it hurts to talk. Hold on, give me a second.” He reached for the pistol but couldn’t grip it. “Nate, I don’t have much time. There’s still so much I want to tell you.”

“Just tell me what I’m supposed to do, doc.”

“I can’t, Nate. That’s the point I’m trying to make. There’s only one answer to the absurdity of living in this world, but I can’t tell you what it is. It’s a different answer for everybody. It’s confusing, I know. I can’t simplify it for you. I want to, but I can’t. All I can tell you is that the search for an answer is an answer in itself.”

“Even a world filled with bad answers is still a world you can understand.”

Kellogg nodded weakly. “That’s right. But Nate, I trust you. I think, if you look, you’ll find an answer that makes sense to you. You’ll find a reason to get this cure to where it needs to be.”

“So you really think the world is worth saving?”

“I don’t know, Nate. You’re the one running into daylight. You’re the one who’s gonna fill it with meaning. Or not. It all depends on what you do.”

“But I don’t want that responsibility.”

“It doesn’t matter, Nate. Living creates that responsibility. If you don’t choose to die, you have to choose to live. It’s the only question in philosophy that has a yes-or-no answer.”

Nate lowered his head. Kellogg was shaking badly now, about to turn.

“Help me with this, Nate.”

Kellogg was fumbling for the gun at his side. His fingers couldn’t wrap around the receiver.

Nate sniffled, then helped Kellogg grip the gun. “It’s heavy,” Kellogg said.

“I don’t want to do this, doc.”

“It’s okay, Nate. I can do it. Go on now.”

Nate rose to his feet and backed away.

“Doc, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say to you.”

Kellogg rested the pistol across his chest. His eyes rolled in his head, but he managed to lock his gaze on Nate’s.

“Put that thing around your neck.”

Nate slid it over his head.

“Just tell me yes or no. What’s your answer?”

“Yes. My answer’s yes.”

Kellogg nodded. “That’s courage, Nate.”

“Because there are consequences?”

“That’s right. That’s good, Nate. Now go. This’ll take care of itself.”

Nate watched him for a moment, still feeling stupid and inadequate, then turned and headed out to the hallway.

He stopped there and waited for the shot.

Not everything about life in the Grasslands was bad. There were some bright spots. And, for Ed, one of those bright spots was Sandra Tellez.

They’d met a few days before, while she was helping out in the med clinic. Ed had spent that entire morning on top of the east fence, repairing the damage from the last time the infected had broken through. Overnight, the wind had piled snowdrifts along the base of the fence, and from his perch he could look north and east across a vast, pillowed range of white where the earthmovers pushed the zombies that had been shot that morning into burn piles. But the fires hadn’t started yet and the air still smelled clean. The sky was a huddled gray mass sitting low on the plains, like fog, giving the surrounding countryside a sheltering look. It was intensely cold up there on the fence, so cold that not only did his hands refuse to work but so did his mind. He found himself drifting, thinking about people he had known and lost, and before he knew it, his jeans had frozen to the wooden rail on which he was sitting.

Two men had to peel him from the fence. He couldn’t bend his legs, so they had to carry him to the clinic. It was a simple wooden cabin with a portable sink in one corner and a foam-top table they’d salvaged from a real medical clinic over in New Salem. Ed was facedown on the table.

Sandra Tellez had come in like a breath of fresh air. He’d seen her around the compound and thought she was pretty. He’d always had a thing for Latinas. He liked the way they could hold on to their youthful appearance well into their forties and fifties.

“Well, this ought to be interesting,” she said. “How you feeling?”

“You asking me if this hurts?”

“Does it?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“What happened?”

“I froze it to a fence post.”

She blinked. And then she started to laugh.

“It’s not funny,” he said.

“Mr. Moore, you nearly froze your ass off. And I mean that literally. You gotta admit, that’s funny.”

She laughed again, and this time he couldn’t help but smile. “I like what it does to your face when you laugh,” he said.

The smile wavered on her face, but didn’t go away. “Are you hitting on me, Mr. Moore?”

“Just making conversation,” he said. “That’s okay, isn’t it?”

Her smile became a smirk. “The way I see it, you got two choices.”

“Oh? What are they?”

“You can either lay there and wait for your pants to unfreeze or you can let me pour some hot water over your butt.”

“How long do you think it’ll take my pants to melt?”

“Don’t know. An hour maybe.”

He shrugged. “Might not be so bad, with a little company.”

“You’re a sly old devil, Mr. Moore. You are hitting on me.”

“Call me Ed,” he said.

Later that afternoon, she joined him for lunch. She told him about living inside the quarantine walls in Houston, and it was the first time he’d heard anybody talk with any authority on the way the infected changed over time.

“They’re excellent scavengers,” she said. “That’s one of the biggest changes. The new ones, the ones they call Stage One zombies, those exist by killing and eating whatever they can catch. That’s why so many of them die off. They either can’t catch enough to live on or they die from eating whatever they catch.”

They were sharing roasted turkey legs and spaghetti squash and mashed potatoes with a weak brown gravy. Ed watched Sandra cut off a pat of butter from the serving dish on the table between them and mix it into her squash.

“What about the other kinds of zombies, the later-stage ones?”

“The Stage Three zombies, they’re scary good at finding food. Whenever we’d see them, we’d tail along, waiting to see what they’d find. More often than not, they’d lead us to something good. The trick was to take them out before they had a chance to taint whatever they found. I remember this one time they led us to somebody’s stockpile of canned goods and fresh water. We ate good for about a week on that.”

“Would they have been able to open the cans?” Ed asked.

“I don’t know, maybe. The Stage Three zombies can do some pretty weird stuff. I’ve heard stories about them answering to their names, stuff like that. They can open doors and climb ladders and even play dead.”

Ed shook his head. “That’s amazing that you survived all that time.”

“Survival was never a question with me. I never once doubted that I was going to live. When I saw my daughter die, I think that was it for me. That was the moment I knew I was going to live. That sounds weird, right? I mean, you always hear people say that if their child died, they wouldn’t be able to live another second. I used to think that, too. But then, when it happened”—she shrugged—“I don’t know. It was strange. I just couldn’t let her memory go. Does that make sense? It’s like I could keep her alive, at least some part of her, by remembering her. I couldn’t give up. Does that make sense?”