Apocalypse Of The Dead (54 page)

So far so good.

He looked to his left, making eye contact with the drivers of the other two RVs. Both drivers waved back.

“Hold on,” he said over his shoulder.

He put the RV in gear and eased into the gas. He could feel the heavy vehicle sliding on the ice, but they were moving.

Richardson appeared at his side.

“You got more infected coming through the gate.”

“I see ’em,” Billy said. He checked his rearview mirror and saw that the other two RVs were falling in line behind him.

“Hang on,” he said to Richardson, and he dipped into the throttle.

The big RV lurched forward, fishtailing a little on the ice and snow. Ahead of them was a knot of the infected. Billy braced for the impact and drove headlong through the crowd, bodies bouncing off the front bumper with dull-sounding thuds.

A moment later, they were through the crowds and through the gate and heading out of the Grasslands. The world was an endless white desert stretching out before them, the sky a dark gray mass of storm clouds stretching the length of the horizon.

“They all make it through?” Richardson asked.

Billy checked the rearview mirror. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, we’re all clear.”

Less than ten minutes later, Richardson was pointing at a dark line of vehicles on the road ahead of them.

“I see it,” Billy said. “Who do you suppose that is?”

The vehicles were moving slowly, deliberately. There were bodies on the road ahead of them, and as Billy slowed, they could see gunshot wounds.

“Whoa, Billy,” said Richardson. “Stop!”

Billy hit the brakes and the big vehicle slid to a stop.

From behind them, Ed said, “What’s going on? Why’d you stop?”

Richardson pointed out the window. “You see that?”

“Yeah,” said Billy.

White shapes were sliding down the snowbanks along the side of the roads. Soldiers, black rifles in their hands standing out against the snow and their white snowsuits.

“What’s going on?” Ed said again.

Billy looked back over his shoulder. Ed was trying to stand; Sandra was trying to hold him down.

“The cavalry,” Billy said. “Day late and a dollar short, but looks like we’re saved.”

Beside him, Richardson laughed.

Nate Royal hurt everywhere. His first attempts to move, to roll over, went unheeded by his muscles. Every inch of his clothes, even his hands and his eyelids, were encrusted with ice.

At last, he managed to roll over onto his back. The room around him was entombed with ice.

His breath steamed in front of his face. He felt like some little bastard was going to town on the inside of his head with a sledgehammer. Every muscle was stiff, every joint frozen. His eyes burned. His chest felt like it was getting squeezed and it hurt to breathe. He couldn’t feel his hands. He couldn’t even curl his fingers into a fist.

Groaning, he rolled over onto his side and sat up. He recalled the beating he’d taken at the hands of Michael Barnes. They had forced him to tell about the cure and then gotten mad. They’d asked him about the cure, but they hadn’t pushed the issue. He was glad for that. Lying was one thing, but lying while taking another of those beatings was another. He’d been lucky they stopped when they did.

The flash drive was still there. He could feel it.

He fumbled with his pants until he finally got them down around his thighs. Everything hurt, his gut especially, and taking down his pants felt like he was getting murdered all over again.

Wincing, he put fingers into his ass and pulled out a Ziploc baggie.

A low groan escaped his lips.

He opened the bag and took out the flash drive and dropped the lanyard over his neck.

Only then did he rise to his feet and walk outside.

There were bodies everywhere. One man was on his back, a hand raised skyward like he was trying to take something from a shelf. Icicles hung from his fingers. Dimly, Nate remembered the sounds of the fighting from the night before.

“Couldn’t kill me,” he said, and laughed. He was a cockroach, life’s little symbol of endurance in the face of a dispassionate universe. The thought filled him with a mad sort of glee, and he laughed until the cold air caught in his lungs and made him cough.

He looked around.

He was standing in the field near one of the bigger buildings, looking toward the pavilion. There were hundreds of bodies over there, all of them encrusted with ice. It was too enormous to take in, all that death.

Nate wandered closer to the pavilion. He had to step over arms and legs bent and frozen at irregular angles. Here and there, he saw bodies on their backs, mucus frozen in tiny icicles from the corners of their open eyes and their nostrils. He saw men and women holding hands, their palms fused together by the cold. He saw young women clutching babies to their chests, and all that senseless wasting of life made him want to vomit. It was dreadful.

“Fucking maniacs,” he muttered.

He turned away from the bodies and scanned his surroundings. The Grasslands compound was hugely vast and bleak. The sky was a deep, stormy gray. The wind blew snow, gritty as sand, across the fields to the north, where a single coyote loped across a barren plain. The fence was lost in fog, but he figured that the gate had been left open. There was no other way for a coyote to get in.

He wondered which way to go. Kellogg’s words echoed in his mind. It didn’t matter if he wanted this responsibility or not. You either chose to live, or chose to die. It was a yes-or-no question, no middle ground. Choosing to live was an acknowledgment that life has some sort of meaning. Whatever that meaning was, for him at least, was tied to the cure Kellogg had stored on the flash drive around his neck. For the time being, that was reason enough to go on living. He would bring this back to the world. What they did with it was their problem.

So he turned once again and found the rising sun. That way is east, he thought. As good as any.

And, shivering against the cold, the ice crunching beneath his boots, he made his silent, solitary way into daylight.