The Phoenix Trilogy (Book 1): World On Fire (5 page)

    "We'll
stay here with you tonight. It's getting dark, and we need a place to rest. You
can consider this a chance for you to prove you're as friendly as you claim,
and in the morning, you can come with us." Natalie noted that he wasn't
leaving much room for choice in his statement, and Marco must have sensed her
uncertainty.

    "Look,
I know it sounds like we're kind of, what's that word that soldier used, we're
kind of 'commandeering' your home, but the alternative is you toss us out on
our asses and hope we find a safe enough place to crash. That's not exactly a
nice thing to do, given current times, you know?" He offered a sheepish
grin, shrugging his shoulders as if to convince her that the heavily armed trio
were more akin to lost puppies than wolves.

    Natalie
closed her eyes for a moment. It wasn't like she had a choice, and this way,
she could get to know them a little bit better. At least it gave her time to consider
their offer, assuming it even was an offer.

    "Okay,
yeah. Come on up. Don't mind the smell, there's a twice-dead corpse halfway
into the living room." Natalie had already begun to climb the ladder as
she spoke, but a sound from BJ caused her to look back. He had seen the zombie
legs in the window and started to move toward the deck, with Rico stepping
alongside him. Marco glanced back at her, his voice carrying the subtlest edge
of tension.

    "Any
other bodies we should know about? Those things are dangerous to leave
around."

    "Trust
me, it's dead. Brains on the carpet and everything." As she talked,
Natalie briefly remembered throwing up. She felt a hint of red creeping into
her cheeks, and hoped they wouldn't notice. Marco whistled to his friends,
noticing the other walker that Natalie had dealt with. Rico and BJ had pulled
the corpse in the window free, and were dragging it some ways down the street.

    "Yeah,
no, that's not really the problem. They eat their dead, it’s like their meal of
choice. Do you really not know this stuff?" Marco was keeping watch, his
eyes raking the distant road, but his remark was clearly aimed at Natalie. This
time, she couldn't hold back her blush.

    "Look,
I've been hiding for most of this. It's not like I was going to make a point of
conducting science experiments on these things for kicks." She was feeling
defensive, but Marco just laughed.

    "Seriously,
think about it for a sec. Zombies are supposed to eat people, but if that were
true, how do more zombies get made? I mean, it can take a while for somebody to
come back from the grave, right? Sooo, if a couple
blighters
are chowing down on a body for an hour, it’s not exactly
going to be in tip-top shape when it gets back up, is it?" He paused for a
moment to toss her a knowing look.

    He
was clearly expecting her to fill in the blanks, but Natalie was just now
realizing the truth of what he was saying. Without her response, he kept going.

    "All
the rot-bastards that you've seen, how many of them look like they've really
been eaten up? None. Bites sometimes, here and there, but just enough to kill a
man. After that, they get left alone. These things may be mindless sometimes,
but they've got an order to what they do. They want their new converts to be in
good condition. It's the reason you don't see bodies lyin’ all over the place.
You die a human, you get back up. You die a zombie, they eat you and move on.
For as crazy as they can get, they still need food to give 'em the energy to
hunt. They're dead, but they're flesh-powered, and calories are an important
part of every diet." He chuckled at that, his cavalier attitude rubbing
Natalie the wrong way as he motioned for her to continue up the ladder. A
moment later, they were joined by BJ and Rico.

    They
had stacked the bodies on top of each other some distance away from the house,
clearly wanting to ensure no
thing
stopped to eat nearby, and it looked
like they were ready to rest. Whatever exhaustion Natalie had been feeling, she
found herself deeply unwilling to fall asleep in strange company. It was a
feeling she hoped would pass.

    As
they settled in, the trio unpacked sleeping bags and rolled out their kits in
the den with Natalie. Getting comfortable, Marco picked up a flask and took a
swig of something that made him wince.

    "Listen,
if we're gonna be haulin’ you out of here in the morning, there's some things
you're gonna need to be smarter about." Natalie started to retort before
catching herself. It was true that she had been on her own and in hiding for
the majority of the outbreak. Most of the information she had was second-hand,
through various other survivors she had passed on her way from place to place.
She hadn't paused to consider how little she might actually know.

    Marco
must have picked up on that. Natalie forced down a growl as he flashed a cocky
smile, leaning against the wall with an aura of pompous superiority before
speaking.

    “Class
is in session! My name is Marco, but you may call me Mr. Professor.” BJ was in
the corner, his attention fixed on nothing in particular, while Rico rolled his
eyes at his cousin. Grabbing her journal, Natalie nestled herself into the
couch. The man might be a bit overbearing, but she wasn't too proud to accept
information that could save her life in the future. Pen in hand, she began to
write down everything Marco said.

I'm
not really sure where to start. "Dear Diary, today I killed some zombies
and made a couple of friends" seems a little out of place, but I guess it
isn't far from the truth.

Marco, Rico, and BJ. Or,
as I first came to know them, Smarmy, Cautious, and Hardcore. Honestly I like
my names for them better, but I'll keep that to myself for now.

I'm not sure what to make
of them, but they seem like they know what they're doing, and Marco has been
telling me a lot of things I didn't know. There's a whole other side to the
apocalypse that I didn't think about, some pretty dark and disturbing things I
hadn't pieced together.

I’ll admit, I’ve never
really had a lot of cause to consider it much beyond "don't get yourself
killed, kiddo," and I didn't spend a whole lot of time talking to other
survivors about it. Most of the time, the outbreak was the last thing anybody
wanted to bring up in casual conversation, so it’s not like it was a topic that
was hard to skirt around. Add to that the fact that I've tried to avoid people
as much as possible, and it seems pretty reasonable that I would be a little
uninformed.

In fact, pretty much since
the dead started walking, I've been alone. Occasionally I spent a night with a
couple of strangers on their way from Point A to Point B, but I always left as
quickly as I could.

Being around other humans,
getting to know them, it's painful. They all have such sad stories, about
people they've lost or the things they've seen, and I don't want any part of
it. Hard enough to keep my chin up without all of the extra heartbreak.

I'm lucky, in a way. I
don't have any family left to worry over me, or for me to worry about. My mom
was a devout "Christian" who couldn't bring herself to abort her
pregnancy, but never wanted to have me, either. Soon as I was born and she had
the strength to leave, she shoved me off onto my dad and got the fuck out of
Dodge.

Dad, bless his heart, he
didn't have a clue what to do with a baby girl. He did his best, but trying to
make enough money to support us ate up most of his time, so I was left to my
own devices when it came to learning about the world.

We were close, don't get
me wrong, and I could talk to him about anything as long as it didn't have to
do with periods or boys. I just didn't get a lot of chances to have a
heart-to-heart, and when I was nineteen, he died. Heart attack, brought on by
stress, the doctors said.

I spent a long time trying
not to blame myself for that.

Anyway, my grandparents
had been dead for a while, I never had any siblings, and neither did Dad. I was
on my own, and given my experience with people up to that point, I wasn't exactly
keen on making friends. I'm friendly enough, always remember to be polite when
I'm supposed to be and everything, I just don't really like company.

That was fine before the
end of days came along, but now I'm starting to see there are some serious disadvantages.
Like not knowing half of the things that are going on around the world, for
one.

For a time, you could flip
on the TV and get a decent update on the news, but then stations started
getting abandoned as people moved to safer pastures. The internet was a total
clusterfuck of rumors and nonsense that made piecing together anything even
remotely resembling the truth an impossibility.

Pretty soon, for one
reason or another, it got a lot harder to pick up on things unless you saw it
first-hand. You could listen in on emergency broadcasts, but finding a way to
hear them got harder and harder to do. Most places had lost power, and a car
was basically an express ticket to getting yourself killed with all the noise
they made, so using them just as a radio was inconvenient to say the least.
Unless you had some kind of portable equipment specifically designed for
emergencies, you were probably out of luck.

The next best thing was
word of mouth, and like I said, I wasn't so fond of camaraderie. The end result
is I wound up being further out of the loop than I'd thought. There were a lot
of things that I just took for granted, but the more Marco talks about it all,
it sounds like this whole thing, all the
undead
and
people dying, it was definitely intentional. Somebody, or something, wanted to
make this happen.

It's things like how the
zombies operate. Marco told me about how they only eat their own dead. If they
catch you while you're living, they'll rip you up a bit, but they're not after
food. They do just enough to kill and convert, for the most part. It gets
scarier when you start to realize they're only hunting us.

Earlier today I had an
incident with a
walker
and a raccoon, and I thought for sure
the raccoon would be good bait. It didn't work, but at the time I wrote it off
as bad luck. Marco tells me that it probably wouldn't have worked either way.
The things will watch animals, chase them sometimes, but they tend to leave
them be unless they're attacked first.

What in the Hell does that
mean? They're supposed to be mindless, shambling reminders of somebody we used
to be, but they have the concept of "defense" ingrained somewhere in
their heads, like a sense of what, preservation? That shouldn't be possible. I
mean, none of this should be possible, but that's a whole other ballpark of
unsettling. What if there are other parts of them that are still human, after
all? Ugh.

Now, nobody in Marco's
band is military, but they've managed to pick up a thing or two from listening
in on conversations that suggest this goes deeper than it looks. I guess the
government has been fighting more than the zombies, lately. Uprisings from
civilians who blame them for everything, soldiers who are sick of being accused
and think it’s time to do what they want for a change.