The Crossing: A Zombie Novella (2 page)

Jessica grabbed my wrist.

I started to speak, but the look on her face stopped me.

With a glance, she gestured toward the gaps in the wall. A moment later, a male zombie stepped into view. It stopped and slowly turned its head toward us. The thing’s hair was a stringy mess, matted with dried blood. Its beard was filthy. Its mouth swarmed with flies. What clothes it had left were little more than soiled rags hanging from its emaciated frame. The wind shifted. It was cold enough to cut us to the bone, and though it carried the zombie’s stench with it, I didn’t dare shiver or gag. Reacting would get us killed.

After a bit it went on its way, leaving us alone again.

I let out the breath I’d been holding. “That was close,” I said. “Thanks.”

“
Tell me about it.” Jessica pointed to the door. “It should be clear now.”

TWO

My first night in the Zone I got caught in a sudden, hard rain that left me cold and miserable. I wandered into an abandoned bus depot looking for someplace warm to sleep. Jessica and the rest of her group were huddled in the back, barely visible in the darkness.

They watched me, alarmed because they didn’t know me, but intrigued because I didn’t look like they did. At that point my clothes were still fresh. My skin wasn’t sun-burnt. I wasn’t starving. For a long, uncomfortable moment we stared at one another, nobody speaking, nobody moving.

Then this woman separated from the crowd and walked toward me. She almost looked like a zombie herself, emaciated, filthy, face sunken and haunted-looking.

Only her eyes were different. They were bright, full of life.

And, when she got closer, I could see they were curious, even friendly. There was warmth there that reassured me.

“
What in the world were you doing out in the rain?” she asked.

“
I...” It was hard to speak, I was trembling so badly.

“
Didn’t you see the clouds forming?”

I shook my head.

“
You couldn’t smell the storm coming?”

“
I’m cold,” I said. My tone demanded mercy, not questions.

“
I wouldn’t doubt it. A storm like that, even the zombies have enough sense to get indoors.”

“
Can I stay here?” I asked. “Just for the night?”

“
That depends.” She looked me up and down. “Are you hurt? You bit anywhere?”

“
No. Just cold.”

She paused for a long moment, studying me. Her face was an honest one, and I felt like I could actually see her in silent discussion with her conscience.

Then, out of the blue: “I’m Jessica.”

“
Samantha,” I said.

“
Samantha, or Sam?”

I tried to smile, but my lips were turning blue from the cold. “Sam,” I said.

“
Sam it is. Come on, let’s try to get you warmed up.”

Jessica led me to a corner away from the door and showed me where I could sleep.

And that was how I spent my first night in the Zone.

THREE

When I woke the next morning, she was nudging me in the shoulder. I looked around, disoriented, and it took me a second to realize we were the only two people left in the depot. The others were outside on the road, set to leave.

“
If you want to come with us we have to leave now.”

“
Where are you going?” I asked.

“
East of here. We’re gonna cross the wall into Free America.”

I think my mouth must have fallen open. “Are you serious?”

“
Of course I’m serious. You want to come or not? We have to leave now.”

I couldn’t believe my luck. My publisher had commissioned me to sneak into the Quarantine Zone, make a circuit of South Texas, and get back out again. I was to report on the conditions of the people there and come up with something to challenge the government’s claims that the necrosis filovirus was so widespread as to make reclaiming the Zone a suicide mission. I knew going into it that it’d be a dangerous assignment, but I figured it’d be no less dangerous than being an embedded reporter in Afghanistan or Iraq. It wasn’t a necessary risk by any means, but it was a risk I was willing to take, especially when the whispers of a Pulitzer started to reach my ears.

My publisher hired one of their other authors, an ex-Navy SEAL, to sneak me through the Coast Guard blockade of the Texas coast. He got me onto a weed-choked beach near Port Lavaca in the middle of the night. I still remember the sour look on his face when the wind carried the sounds of moaning in our direction. “You sure you want to do this?” he said. “I can get you out right now.”

“
No,” I said. “I want to do this. I’ll be okay.”

“
Where’s your weapon?”

I hooked a thumb toward my backpack. I had a .40 Glock concealed within a hidden compartment at the bottom of my bag, plus three loaded magazines, for a total of 46 rounds - 46 more than I figured I’d need. “I have it in there where I can get it.”

The wind carried more moans our way.

“
If I were you, I’d have it out and ready.”

“
I’ll be okay. I know what I’m doing.”

I don’t think he believed that for a second. All he was supposed to do was drop me off on the beach, and yet he had our Zodiac boat loaded down with night vision goggles and machine guns and a box of something that looked a lot like grenades to me. He kept asking me if I was sure I wanted to do this, and it was starting to get old.

“
I’ll be fine,” I said. Our plan was for me to meet him on the same beach three weeks later. I had a cell phone with which to signal him. It was my first experience as an embedded reporter, but I had done my homework. I knew the lay of the land. I had studied up on the infected. I knew how to evade them, and how to deal with them when I couldn’t evade them. In my mind, it was all going to be quite simple. “I’ll call you,” I said.

He shrugged and quietly slipped back out to sea.

But then came that night in the rain, and my chance meeting with Jessica. When she asked me to join them, I jumped at the chance. Busting the wall – something the government assured us was impossible, but that pretty much everybody believed was happening on a regular basis – was just too much of a story to pass up.

In my eagerness, I got up too fast and upset my backpack, spilling the contents on the floor between us.

Jessica reached down to help me pick up my stuff, but paused when she saw what I was carrying. She moved my pens and notebooks out of the way, uncovering the iPhone and a battery powered charger. I saw her mind racing.

Dark clouds of suspicion gathered in her face.

“
Who are you?” she asked, her brow furrowed.

I’d been advised to keep my identity a secret for my own protection, but something told me I could trust Jessica. She had been the first to extend any sort of welcome, and she had come back for me while the others were ready to leave me sleeping in that bus depot.

“
I’m a writer,” I admitted. “I’m down her to write a story on life inside the Zone.”

She stared at me for a long moment in frank, slack-jawed amazement. She must have thought I was out of my mind. And then she laughed.

“
Hey Jessica,” one of the men called from the road. “You coming or what?”

She waved to the man, then turned back to me. She studied me, my clothes, my shoes, shaking her head the whole time. “Well,” she finally said, “we’re leaving. You want to see life in the Zone, I guess now’s your chance.”

So I left with them.

We walked a long while, and the whole time I was thinking of the quarantine wall, and what it would mean for these people to get into Free America.

The idea of a wall to protect one society from another is an old one. Ancient China tried it. The Communists tried it. The U.S. tried it along the Mexican border. But none of those historical precedents were entirely effective. They all came with a great cost in human life and a lot of insane politics. Political borders, after all, rarely coincide with societal borders. To think otherwise is just plain stupid. Fences may make good neighbors, but walls do not keep countries safe.

That is, until the zombies rose from the flooded ruins of Houston. The military was able to contain the outbreak by constructing a wall that stretches from Gulfport, Mississippi to Brownsville, Texas. Imagine the scope of that project. That’s 1,100 miles of cement, chain link fencing and endless spools of concertina wire, all of it constructed in the span of a month and a half. Many have claimed it is one of the modern wonders of the world, while the critics maintain it’s a wonder it doesn’t have more holes in it than a fish net. But according to the government, and several independent quality control groups and news outlets, it doesn’t. The wall is sound. It’s the truth Free America entrusts its safety to, and its impermeability is, to most Americans anyway, a lock-step guarantee.

But Jessica and her group didn’t believe it. Lots of people break through every month, she assured me. And I could tell she honestly believed it.

Yet when I pressed her, she didn’t seem to have much of a plan.

“
We want to get across somewhere between Flatonia and Weimar,” she said.

I waited for more. But after a moment, I realized there wasn’t more.

“
That’s it? You don’t know where? I mean, exactly? That seems like an important detail to me.”

“
How can I know something like that? That’s up to the coyotes, isn’t it?”

“
I guess so,” I said doubtfully. It seemed like an awful lot to take on faith, though. After all, to trust your life like that to a total stranger seemed crazy. But I answered myself with the same mental breath: Wasn’t that exactly what I was doing here with Jessica?

“
How much do they charge?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Nobody in the Zone has any money.”

“
Well, how then?”

She glanced around to make sure no one was looking, then showed me a handful of jewelry. They were nice, but nothing special, a few necklaces and charm bracelets, probably worth a couple hundred dollars at most.

“
Is that how most people pay, with jewelry?”

“
Mostly, yeah. It’s the easiest way. But I’ve heard people paying with all kinds of stuff. Gas they’ve siphoned off old cars. Drugs they found in pharmacies. Liquor. Anything people want you can usually trade with.”

This was insane, I thought. I guess it showed on my face.

“
What?” she said. She was amused by my distress, I could tell. She was almost laughing.

“
I just don’t see how you can be so blase about it. Where exactly you’re gonna cross; how much it’s gonna cost; those things seem like a big deal to me. I mean, right? You see that? They’re important. It scares me you’re not more worried about it.”

The bemused smile went away from her face, replaced by a bitter seriousness. “There’s always a way for a woman to pay her way,” she said.

“
Jessica, I...”

She didn’t flinch. “I won’t go on living this way. Not in the Zone like this.” She gestured to the soiled rags that passed for her clothes, at her emaciated body that barely hinted at a woman’s natural curves any more. “Tell me, what would you do?”

“
I don’t know.”

When I went on with my questions, I was more subdued. I’d been humbled.

“
What do you plan to do when you get to Free America?” I asked.

“
I taught Fourth and Fifth Grade before the wall went up. I thought maybe I could do that again.”

“
What about friends, family? They could help you get back on your feet.”

“
Maybe. I hope so. I had a boyfriend, you know. His name was Robert. He did IT stuff for an oil company. Made pretty good money. He was smart. We were living in an apartment together down in Corpus, but he left for a job in Oklahoma about a month before Mardell hit.” She ran her left hand down the length of her right arm, fingers touching the cuts and scars and fresh bruises there. “I guess there probably isn’t much chance of picking that up again.”

“
You never know,” I said, in what I hoped was an encouraging tone.

She gave me a weak smile. “I won’t kid myself. That old life is gone. It’d be like that Tom Hanks movie. Remember the one, he’s on that island...”

“
Joe vs. the Volcano
?”

She grinned. “The other one. The deserted island one. Remember? His plane crashes?”

“
Castaway
.”

“
That’s the one. I was thinking of the end, after he gets rescued. Remember that? He goes home and his wife...what’s her name?”

“
Helen Hunt.”

“
Helen Hunt, that’s it. Remember what happens when he tries to go home? Helen Hunt’s character has remarried and they have that awkward moment on the doorstep. Life has passed him by, and there’s nothing he can do about it.”

I nodded. “You can’t go home again.”

“
I remember hearing that. Was that from the movie?”

“
No,” I said. “Thomas Wolfe.”

“
Ah.”

We talked about the movies. We liked a lot of the same shows -
French Kiss;
Sleepless in Seattle; While You Were Sleeping;
anything starring Molly Ringwald - and that was nice. But it didn’t last. It couldn’t last. The movies are the movies, and real life is something else entirely. Jessica had changed too much. This world, this awful place, had changed her, and we both knew it. Soon she grew sullen and morose again.