The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) (8 page)

When he was within fifty yards of the tree house, Ron was aware that the dead chasing him were still out of sight. He risked calling out.

“Kid,” he almost yelled. “Hey, Kid! It’s me! It’s Ron! Lower a rope, dude! They’re after me.”

Behind him, he could hear the tramp of hundreds of feet. In a couple of
minutes,
they would
see him, and they would swarm to the place. If they did that, all Ron and Oliver could was hope that the razor wire kept them away from the base of the tree house, and if that wasn’t to be, that their sheer weight would not crumble those cast steel legs.

Risking another call, Ron was almost ready to give up and pick his way through the maze of wire and shimmy up the poles when he saw the kid’s face appear over the edge of the catwalk that surrounded the spacious cab of the house. Without a
word,
the kid flung a rope ladder over the side and in less than thirty
seconds,
Ron was up the length of it and lying on the catwalk while the kid pulled the ladder up behind his guest. Just as they both hunkered down, out of sight, the dead appeared on the street, moving as a single mass that was like a stream of rotting, stinking, flowing meat.

Their collective roar filled the air with their single desire.

Sitting up, Ron looked across at the boy. He was leaning against the wall of his home. He blinked. The kid did not look good. The thanks that he knew he had to give were secondary, so he gave voice to something more important.

“Hey, Kid. Are you all right? You look sick.”

The boy looked back at Ron
.
His hair had been very
blond
the first time Ron had encountered him, but now it had faded to a darker shade, almost a light brown. Cutter never figured the kid’s parents had dyed his hair. It was just the situation peeling away anything that was bright and living from the face of the Earth. His eyes were still pale blue--the horrors hadn’t taken that. But his features were blank—almost nothing child-like remained in Oliver’s English features. He was just very tired in that respect, and of
course,
the things he had witnessed had been harder on him than on an adult.

Cutter reached out with his left, clean hand and tapped the youth on his shoulder. “Oliver? Are you okay?”

The boy nodded. “Yeah, I’m okay, Mr. Cutter.”

Ron sighed, relieved.

“I’m just tired, is all. I had to go scavenging for some stuff yesterday. I ended up doing more running than scavenging.” A cold smile crept across his pale, pink lips. “Heck. The city’s packed with them this week. More than I’ve ever seen before, I think.”

Ron looked down at the street, peeking over the edge of the tree house porch. The area around them was indeed filling up with the shamblers.
Hundreds
of them
were
milling around, searching for the man
they had
been chasing only moments before. Where could he have gone?

“Danged if I don’t think you’re right, Kid.” He rolled away from the edge. “Can we go in your place?” Ron asked. “We can talk in there so they can’t hear us. I want to compare notes with you.”

Oliver nodded and together they crawled to the door, pulling it slowly closed behind them as they went in.

Once inside, Ron stood and looked around. No matter how many times he saw this place he never got used to it. Some banker had spent probably more than a hundred grand on this rich kid’s toy. It was, for all intents and purposes, a small house on stilts. It stood beside a hefty poplar tree and once upon a
time,
there had been a metal ladder on that tree leading up to the house. But the kid had disengaged it at the top and pulled it down. Thereafter
,
he had used a rope ladder for access, pulling it up behind him when he came back from his scavenging. The place was a big central room with a bathroom at the rear and a small bedroom. In its
day,
it had been wired for electricity and had running water. Somehow—as with so many remaining houses in town—the water still ran.
Of
course,
there was no electricity unless you could rig a generator
, and
The Kid had no generator. Still and all, the place was a kind of palace.

“I think they’re coming out of the countryside,” Ron told Oliver. “I’ve been noticing it for a couple of weeks. Last time I talked to Colonel Dale, he said the same thing.”

“He told me that, too,” Oliver said, his voice so small and high that it hurt Ron’s heart to hear it. No matter how resourceful the kid was, he was still just a little boy. Standing over him, Ron figured Oliver for no more than four feet eight inches tall.
He had
tried to get the boy to stay with him, but there was always resistance to that. The boy just didn’t quite trust Ron.

“You’ve talked to Colonel Dale?”

The boy nodded again.

Ron wasn’t really sure that Colonel Dale really was a Colonel. He claimed to be, but having never served in the military, Ron never knew what to ask or what to look for when the man spoke about his rank and what he’d done in the Service.
It
didn’t help that the military service that he claimed to have been a part was that of
Great Britain
. Also, there was something faintly feminine about Colonel Dale, so the fact that he’d been an officer made Ron wonder if the Brits had ever had a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy.

“What did he say to you?” Ron looked for a place to sit and chose a recliner that was his favorite when he was there. He pointed to it and shrugged. Oliver shrugged back, agreeing.

“Ah, he just told me to be really careful. He said that the deads were creeping into town and that they were all over the place. He said some people had been killed by them the past couple of days.”

Ron jumped at that. “He did? Who got killed?” As far as Ron had been able to tell, there were about a thousand living people in this part of
Charlotte
. Of
course,
he didn’t know them all, but he’d sat and done his math based on people he saw and the movements of folk through the streets from time to time on a daily basis.
He had
come to a rough approximation of about a thousand still alive here. That was out of about a hundred thousand who had formerly called the city center their home.

The kid threw up his hands. Ron noticed that his hands were dirty and he wanted to tell the boy to wash them. But he held his tongue. “He said something about a guy named Ryder getting cornered at the Target Store. And a woman named Maggie Pierce getting chased down on
Tryon Street
a couple of days back. Some others, but he didn’t give me any names.”

“That’s all?” Ron didn’t know those names at all.

“And he told me to be extra careful.” He paused, looking at the maple hardwood floors some rich fellow had had paid thousands of dollars to have installed in his boy’s tree house. “And he asked me for about the hundredth time if I wanted to come stay with him or someone else. He said there’s a guy two blocks away with a wife and three kids. Said they wouldn’t mind another kid.”

“That would be the Lunds,” Ron said.

“Yeah. That’s right. He mentioned their name. I think I saw them a time or two. Their mom called to me once.” He stopped. “But I just kept on goin’. I’m not a little kid. I don’t need a mother and father. And I especially don’t need any little kids hangin’ around me.” At that, Oliver stood and walked across the room to his kitchen. He turned on the water and filled a glass, drank it down. “You want some water?” he asked.

“Yes,” Cutter answered. “I do, indeed.” As he crossed the big central
room,
he went to the sink.
However,
before taking the glass of water from Oliver he took the time to clean the blood from his hands. The kid hardly seemed to notice and said nothing as Cutter scrubbed the stains from his hands. He gulped down the water and put the glass back on the sink. “You know,” he mentioned, “eventually the system’s going to break down and the water will stop flowing. We should set you up something to catch rainwater. I’ve got them at some of my safe houses. It would be pretty simple to rig one here.”

“Okay,” Oliver replied
,
as he edged over to one of the windows to peek out through the blinds. “They’re really out there,” he said. “You drew a big crowd.” It wasn’t quite an accusation, but nearly so.

“Sorry about that,” he apologized. “But you were my best bet.”

“That’s all right,” the kid replied.

“Anyway,” Cutter said, plucking his pack from the floor and reaching inside. “I brought you something.” He labored to dig into the pack. “It’s at the bottom
,
because I was going to stop here on my way back, not on my way out,” he admitted. Finally, he got his hand on what he was after and withdrew with a box of cartridges. “I loaded these for you.” He handed the heavy box to the kid. “200 rounds. For your .22,” he said.

“Gee, thanks!” Oliver was genuinely pleased. “I really need these!” For the first time
,
a smile cracked the sad façade of his features. Cutter smiled back
, but then he
considered the comment.

“Well, heck, Oliver. I was just here a couple of days ago. You had a hundred rounds on you then. How many do you have left?”

The smile went away as quickly as it had come. The boy shrugged. “Maybe…thirty.” He seemed to think for a moment, the ideas churning. “Fuck it,” he finally said. “I’ve got 19 rounds left from what I had last time you were here.” Looking up into Cutter’s face there were almost tears in the boy’s eyes. The kid was fighting to keep the emotions in check. “I got cornered. I had to use up most of my handgun ammo to get out of a…a really bad fix.” The boy sighed, letting out the tension. “But I got out of it.” He stared off into a scene that only he could recall. “Barely, though,” he whispered.

“I’m sure you
did
what was necessary,” Cutter told him. He patted the boy on the shoulder, reassuring him. “I know you’re not one to waste anything. Anyway…now you have 200 more rounds. I’ll make you more when I can. If you have any empty shells, let me have them before I leave.”

“Sure,” the kid told him. “I gathered up about fifty of the brass shells,” he said. “That was all I could grab up. It was—well, it was really bad.”

Before Cutter could reply to that, the kid turned and
peeked
through the blinds. Outside
the living dead packed
the streets. Their moans and inhuman calls filled the air. Anyone holed up in that area would stay that way for the time being. Anyone headed in their direction would certainly turn and flee. Either the collective roar would warn them away, or the stench would let them know to veer off and head elsewhere. “I think you’re probably going to have to lay low here for a while. Until night, at least. They’ve got the scent of fresh meat and they’re going to hang around for a while. I can tell.”

Of
course,
Oliver was right, and Cutter resigned
himself
to a wasted day.
He would
have to find the fuel for casting his bullets later on. Well, there were worse places to wait out the walking dead. “All right if I bed down here on the couch?” he asked.

“Sure,” Oliver said, his face brightening again. “We can play cards!” There was still a boy there, but buried a little more every day.

**

Something woke Cutter in the night. He came awake with a start,
and
dealt quickly with that brief moment of confusion, not recalling immediately where he was. Blinking the sleep from his
eyes,
he peered around. Moonlight filtered in through the slightly opened blinds
, and
he remembered that he was in
The Kid’s
tree house and not likely to be in danger from the dead. The odds that any of them could climb up were pretty much zero.

Still, something had awakened him. He sat up and looked around, his night vision coming on slowly as he adjusted to the dark. The room was empty of any other figure
except
Cutter. He could make out the angles and curves of the room’s furniture,
the
windows,
and the
closed doorways. He hadn’t been having a nightmare, which were common for him.
Nevertheless,
something had disturbed his sleep. He held his breath and just lay still, waiting.

And there it was. A sound. A voice. Very small, and muffled, but definitely there.

Cutter stood and padded across the big central room. It was coming from the kid’s bedroom. Quietly, he padded over on his bare feet and stood by the door, listening.

It was
The Kid
. He was crying in his own tortured sleep. “I miss you,” the boy was saying. “I miss you Momma and Daddy. I miss you. I miss you…”

**

When the sun peered back over the horizon, Cutter was ready to leave. He had just been waiting for
The Kid
to rise so that he could tell him. He waited until the door to the boy’s bedroom opened and the youth came out.