Empire (19 page)

    Mike led Shipley back the way they'd come, and they searched the mall parking lot for rotters. There were none. The shelter was being rapidly consumed by flames, filling the early morning sky with black smoke.

    "Don't try running, or anything else." Mike told Shipley. The other man snorted. "If I wanted to run I'd have already done it. If I wanted to do something else, I'd have already done that too."

    Shipley had deserted the military, had run from his prison sentence, but with a purpose. He wasn't a coward. He was running TO something, not FROM it.

    He'd deserted with two other soldiers: King, a female, and Bish. The pair were in love, and talked all the time about escaping the badlands and finding some lost beach to fuck on for the rest of their days. Shipley had thought they were both out of their gourds but kept his mouth shut.

    They tromped across the dry, barren earth with a few stolen supplies. There was no safe cover under which to set up camp, so they each slept with one eye open. Tried, anyway. More than once Shipley had been stirred from a foggy dream to spy King thrashing atop Bish like she was a porn star. More than once she was watching Shipley while doing it.

    "I'm bit." Bish said one morning while picking the charred skin off of an unlucky lizard. He pulled up his camouflage tee and showed Shipley a bite on his side. It was old. "How long ago?" Shipley demanded. They hadn't seen a rotter since they deserted.

    "A few weeks?" Bish shrugged. "I don't think I'm infected. The window's five to ten days before you croak, isn't it?"

    "They don't know. They don't know shit about it, no matter what they say." Shipley replied. King was relieving herself behind a bush. "She know?" He asked.

    "She's seen it." Bish bit into the lizard with a crunch. "She don't care."

    Because she can just plant herself on my face once you're dead, Shipley thought. He took a tiny sip from his canteen. "Maybe I can't get infected," Bish mused through a mouthful of guts. "It's like Gerry, you know, how she can't get pregnant."

    Bish was functionally retarded, Shipley decided, and went hunting for his own lizard.

    It was a few nights later that Bish slipped into a coma. He'd just shot his wad, and King shook Shipley awake with a rumpled shirt held to cover what he'd already seen.

    "Maybe it's heat exhaustion." She said while he looked over the unconscious soldier. She'd pulled on the bottoms of her fatigues and was walking around topless; Shipley ignored the swaying of her breasts as she took shallow breaths.

    "He's dead." Shipley muttered. They didn't have anything to decapitate Bish with, let alone torch him. The cheap combat knives handed out to grunts by the Army could barely cut a steak. Shipley would have to saw at muscle and bone until the blade broke, then wrench the head completely off.

    King wailed. "He can't be! How did it happen? Not the bite! It wasn't the bite!!"

    "OF COURSE it was the bite, you fucking..." Shipley spat and turned away. He pulled out his knife and she seized his wrist. "Please don't do this to him! Just leave him in peace--"

    "Cut the crap! You didn't love him!" Shipley plunged the knife into Bish's throat. King opened her mouth, but no sound came out. "I know what love is," Shipley said softly, and started sawing.

    Bish threw him off with a gurgling cry.

    Shipley lost the knife in the darkness. He scrambled to his feet and saw Bish sitting up, blood gushing down his bare chest.

    "Oh GOD!!" King sagged, sobbing hysterically. Bish turned to look at her and more blood spurted from his ragged wound.

    "King - Gerry! Get away from him!!" Shipley crawled in circles trying to find the knife. How far could the fucking thing have gone?

    "I DO love you!" King cried, taking Bish's face in her hands. He stared dully upward, and she knelt to kiss his mouth.

    Shipley's finger found the tip of the knife. Cursing, he grabbed the handle. King's muffled scream rang through the night.

    Bish tore her lips away, greedily gashing at her face, one arm wrapped around her back and the other mauling her breast. Blood spilled over his face, into his gullet, and his wide open eyes stared into hers the entire time.

    Shipley buried the blade in the back of Bish's head. There was no response from the undead; as the tip of the knife emerged from his mouth, he met the dying King in a hungry kiss.

    Grasping the handle with both hands, Shipley threw all his weight against it. Bish's head was ripped from his neck.

    King slumped over on the headless, spasming corpse of her lover. Shipley wrested the knife from the zombie's skull and stood over her, sawing into her throat. He screamed to drown out any sound she might make, and screamed and screamed and screamed until he was utterly alone with the soldiers' unrecognizable remains.

    Gerry King was the first and last living person he'd ever killed.

    "Here we are." Mike pointed up the staircase of an apartment building. The sun had risen a bit and, though the sky was slightly overcast, it cast its warm light down upon them. Things almost felt normal - normal meaning Jefferson Harbor without a family of rotters prowling inside its walls.

    Mike followed Shipley to the landing, then had him stand back. He rapped on the door. "Cheryl! It's me."

    A series of locks could be heard turning. Cheryl yanked the door open and wiped tears from her eyes. "There was one out here! It had a shovel, going from door to door, and I didn't think it could get in but if it had been here when you came back--"

    "It's okay, the coast is clear." Mike stepped into the doorway. "We've gotta go. There's a safer place downtown, with other people. I just need to grab a few things, then we can go."

    Yet he didn't go in. He stood beside Cheryl, closing his grip around Voorhees' pistol. There was ammo inside, but her eyes had already met those of the man on the landing.

    "This is Shipley." Mike said.

    Cheryl smiled.

    "Hi."

    Just before noon, a series of explosions rocked Jefferson Harbor.

    Boiling smoke tore into the sky as tongues of flame reached heavenward; at the east end of town, the great gates set into the city wall were flung from their hinges like so much rubbish on the wind.

    The medical plaza went up in an unimpressive smattering of flames, but the Donner Convention Center's entire roof swelled like blistering flesh and was ripped away by the explosions within. And the city landfill ignited like a mountain of gas-soaked rags, spewing noxious black smoke that seemed to swallow the sun and stretch its tendrils across the sky.

    Gene stood at the edge of the flames and studied the smoke tower. His cheek was scabbing over where the pipe had cut him, before he died; gaseous rumblings in his lower organs had ceased and he felt less pressure inside his abdomen. He was regenerating.

    Noon. Voorhees and his survivors were taking the scenic route to the police department. He led them into a long-abandoned construction site to rest. Duncan pointed out the numerous empty buildings across the street, but the cop just shook his head. "Don't trust 'em."

    "But--"

    "Did you not hear those explosions earlier? Look at the smoke out there. Let's stay out here a while - we can spot a rotter coming from blocks away in any direction."

    "What if Mike and the others reach the PD before we do?" Palmer asked. "Does he know how to get in?"

    "He can figure it out."

    "Wheeler--" Jenna began. Voorhees shot her a dark look. Staring right back at him, she went on. "He said something about the 'Addison estate' - a house in the swamp?"

    "I said that. The house in the swamp part." Palmer sat on a concrete slab and peered up into the steel ribcage of an unfinished office building. "Addison was a doctor who lived out on the west end. That was years and years ago, he's got to be dead."

    "Well, what about those rotters then? Wheeler said he recognized them. He called them kids."

    "I'm hungry." Kipp mumbled. Wendy patted his head. "We'll eat soon, honey."

    "It looks like rain." Voorhees observed. Jenna walked past him to Palmer. "Wheeler called the rotters kids."

    "The children that Addison took in, the children of the wealthy. I wouldn't be able to recognize any of them, especially if they were undead. I don't see how Wheeler could have."

    "It's just..." Jenna sighed, picked up a rock, tossed it into an open basement. "It's something."

    "We all want answers." Palmer replied, in a counseling tone. Jenna flinched. "Reverend, don't start with that."

    "I wasn't going to say anything about God, if that's what you mean. If God knew something that He was willing to share with us, I'd sure as shit know by now. I ask Him every morning and every night. Look. We were all born into a world with undead. We've all spent our entire lives asking questions, and we each desperately want something to hold on to. An answer." Gesturing around the site, Palmer smiled bitterly. "You really think there's an answer in Jefferson Harbor?"

    "Why are we still alive?" Lauren asked. She was looking at Kipp, who had knelt to follow a beetle's progress over the soil.

    "Laurie, please. I want to find out about these Addison kids." Jenna said.

    "Let it go." Duncan grumbled. "The Rev's right."

    "They were working together!" Jenna shouted. Lauren went white and pressed a finger to her lips; it went unnoticed. "I've never seen anything like that! And all of them looked PERFECT. Didn't you notice? They almost seemed alive. Not a mark on them! Those clothes...somebody KEEPS them. Somebody ALIVE."

    She pointed to the darkening sky. "Those explosions..."

    "Okay, now you're grasping at straws." Duncan stood to face her. "I'm a journalist, Jen. I made a whole fucking career out of seeking answers, taking picture after picture of those things until they all looked alike to me. They were here before any of us, and they'll be here after we're gone. All we can hope is that we're not walking among them."

    "Very moving, Mark. You want to jot that down before you forget?"