Dead: Winter (21 page)

“Well here is the deal.” I decided it was one of those times to be the group leader. “We are going to break this to Jamie together. But before he is awake, I want Teresa wrapped up in as close to a shroud as we can manage. I want a pyre out in the clearing and her body placed on top of it.”

“I think that can be done,” the doctor agreed.

“And as soon as you
think
you know what caused this, you find me and tell me first.”

“Agreed.”

“I will get a couple of the guys started on the pyre; you and Sunshine get her cleaned up and in the shroud.” It wasn’t a r
e
quest, but I didn’t think that Dr. Zahn would have any sort of protest.



“I will do the best I can,” Billy insisted, “but this snow is really starting to become a problem. Jon and Sunshine are hel
p
ing me, and we have a tarp over the area, but if this storm doesn’t let up soon, we’ll have to find a place to keep her.”

“Did the newcomers get back from their thing?” I asked, realizing that other than the young boy and girl, I hadn’t seen any of them.

“Nope,” Billy replied with a shake of the head. “And that is another thing; we are not set up to deal with their dietary needs.”

“Huh?” What the hell needs did anybody have besides just getting food?

“They can’t eat a lot of the stuff we have stored up. You’d be surprised how much of it has pork for one.”

“Okay, well then they can figure that out for themselves,” I snapped.

“Steve?” a voice whispered from behind me.

“What!” I spun around. Didn’t anybody understand that we’d just lost one of our own today? And to make matters worse, she’d just up and died in the grips of the infection that turns folks to zombies without being bitten. What fresh nigh
t
mare were we about to enter? If people could simply turn for no reason, then maybe this stuff had gone airborne. If that was the case, all we’d done was for nothing. Was I the only person considering the ramifications of Teresa’s death? Was I the only one besides Jamie emotionally destroyed?

“Sorry,” Melissa said, stepping back from me like she was afraid I would hit her.

“Oh, Melissa, I am—” I was on the verge of apologizing when I didn’t know what to apologize for, or where to begin.

“No,” she cut me off, “I know how you get when things get crazy and I shouldn’t have snuck up on you…it’s just that I can see you really need…” her voice trailed off and the tears spilled over.

“You,” I finished. “I need you.”

She came to my arms and I just held her for a moment. Teresa’s words rang in my head.
“I see how she watches you…”
Did she really watch me? She must because she obviously saw how rattled I happened to be at the moment.

“So it’s true?” Melissa whispered in my ear.

“What’s true?” I pulled back to see her questioning look.

“Teresa.”

That was all it took. It was the twig removed that allowed the entire dam to burst. Just the simple act of hearing her name was more than I could handle. I felt my eyes burning with the sadness, and then everything got blurry as tears came in a rush. I was only partially aware that Melissa was leading me som
e
place.

“She loved you almost like a father,” Melissa said as she sat me down. We were in the kitchen. I was only vaguely aware that a pair of blurry figures hastily exited the room, leaving us alone.

“No,” I disagreed. “Maybe a brother.”

“No, she told me so many times after something would happen, that if you’d have been her dad, she would have been lucky; and that Thalia is, in her exact words, the luckiest kid in the world. That is a quote.”

“But after how many times that I screwed things up—”

“And took responsibility for it and changed things so it wouldn’t happen again,” Melissa inte
r
rupted. “You have no idea how rare that is, or was, even before the apocalypse.”

“And how many times did she and I go at it about choices being made for the group?”

“And she said that she wouldn’t have given in on a single one of those times if she didn’t trust you completely with her life.”

“And now she’d dead.”

“You didn’t have anything to do with that,” Melissa insis
t
ed.

“And now I have to tell Jamie…” I started, but the words caught in my throat.

“And that is why
I
love you so much,” Melissa said as she pulled me close. “You are an amazing man, Steve Hobart. And I think everybody has forgotten what you have done and continue to do every single day that keeps us all together.”

“Steve!” Fiona burst into the kitchen.

It couldn’t be another crisis
, I thought.
I don’t have the e
n
ergy to face another one right now.

“Jamie is awake and Dr. Zahn said to get you right away before he has a chance to start asking questions,” Fiona finished.

I turned to Melissa and kissed her forehead. I scrubbed at my face with my sleeve and took a deep breath.  She squeezed my hand and nodded.

Together we left the kitchen and headed to where Jamie was waking. I would deliver the news to him that would break his heart and quite possibly shatter him to the core of his being.

As I entered the main room, everybody was standing still, like they were afraid to move or make a sound. I was thankful that somebody had taken Thalia and Emily some place where they weren’t going to have to see or hear any of this. Sure, they would be sad, Thalia especially would miss Teresa.

Outside, I could see the snow coming down hard. It was almost impossible to see past the ove
r
hang of the porch; and it was horizontal which meant that the wind was adding to the mix.

Since the first night all of this began, I’d become convinced that the worst sound in the world was the sound a person makes when those things tear into their flesh; that scream that only comes from a person literally being eaten alive.

I was wrong. There is one that is worse…the sound a person makes when his heart is figuratively torn out of his chest.

Aaheru pulled his truck off the road. Actually, he was only aware that a road was somewhere in the vicinity. This he knew b
e
cause there was an oasis directly across from another. This could only be the work of the Egyptian Transportation Depar
t
ment. It was for the tourists who would foolishly drive over two hu
n
dred kilometers through nothing but desert to reach Cairo.

The reasons were varied, but still idiotic as far as Aaheru was concerned. Tourists who wanted to see the “real” Egypt made that drive. If they wanted to see this mythological
real
Egypt, then venture into the alleyways where children mu
r
dered each other for scraps of food. Of course, it was all gone now. The over population had been the nation’s undoing. Families living with three and even four generations under one roof had allowed the sickness of undeath to spread like fire in an oil field.

Two days ago, he had led his chosen people out of the City of the Dead. The irony was not lost on him that the Jews had their own fabled exodus from Egypt. They had survived the A
n
gel of Death as had Aaheru’s people. Only, he would not walk the desert for forty years.

They were headed for Alexandria and would reach it tomo
r
row. It was normally only a few hours by car, but there had been a highway before. Now…like most of the country except for that little swathe alongside the Nile, Egypt was being reclaimed by the desert sands.

“What is it, my brother?” Ahi had climbed out of his own vehicle and walked up to Aaheru’s.

“Up ahead.” Aaheru pointed. “The sand swirls without any wind.”

Ahi climbed up on his leader’s truck to get a better look. Sure enough he could see the prismatic glitter of a sand cloud reflecting the sun’s light. Had it been a cloudy day like the last couple, they would not have seen it. He brought his binoculars up and took a closer look.

“At least a few hundred,” he reported as he climbed down.

“Bring the bus forward,” Aaheru ordered.

Ahi bowed his head. He would do as he was told because to disobey was unthinkable. When they had left the City of the Dead, it was discovered who would be blindly loyal to Aaheru. The people wanted a leader.
No
, Ahi corrected,
they needed a leader.
Aaheru was a natural fit. He was taller than anybody else and very muscular. His skill as a soldier and a fighter was u
n
matched. A few had tried. None of them remained.

Ahi respected Aaheru almost as much as he feared the man. He made the decisions that nobody else wanted to make. N
o
body had wanted to say it, but if they’d stayed behind the walls of
Qarafa, el-Arafa
, none of them would have survived to see the spring. It was a simple fact. Food was already b
e
coming scarce and the numbers of those abominations grew every day.

The old men and cowards who had argued against leaving had served a purpose in the end. They had been brought forward by those who had sworn their allegiance to Aaheru—including Ahi—and brought to the southern wall. Well, most of them had. The rest were put in chains and loaded into a bus.

“As you command,” Ahi said with a nod.

He walked back along the convoy of pieced together trucks, vans and haggard-looking cars. A couple of the occupants had climbed out to take advantage of the stop to stretch their legs. Some of the men were passing back and forth bottles of water.

“What is the word, brother?”

Ahi glanced over to see Markata sitting on the hood of a Range Rover. Two women lounged b
e
side the shaved headed man showing a bit too much of their skin for his liking. Markata always had a smile on his face like he knew more than anybody else. The thing was, he always seemed to have i
n
formation about things. He’d known about the plan to leave the City of the Dead before Aaheru had called his council meeting. Ahi did not care for Markata.

“Perhaps you could tell me,
jusho
,” Ahi sneered. He watched the man stiffen at the derogatory term for just a second before that false smile returned.

“Could it be that our leader has sent you to fetch bait?”

Ahi dismissed the statement and continued down the idling convoy. As he passed a couple of the vehicles, he motioned for its occupants to join him. He had a job to do and would hand pick a few of the men to help.

By the time he reached the bus, seven men were at his side. A dozen faces peered out of the wi
n
dows; fear had been replaced by acceptance on a few. All of them were over sixty and deemed useless by Aaheru; Ahi’s only problem resided in the three women.

The driver opened the door. “Greetings, my brothers,” he said.

“Two,” was all Ahi said in return.

The driver looked over his shoulder and called out, “Two of you are needed by the commander.”

There was nothing for a few seconds, but then a pair of the elderly men rose and walked to the front of the bus. When they stepped off, Ahi produced a key from his pocket. Without a word, he u
n
locked the shackles on their wrists and then bent down to do the same for their ankles.