Zombies: The Recent Dead (61 page)

There was no gate or door in the barbed wire for us to pass through. Instead a couple of boys who were watching the captive slack dragged out a sheet of plywood and leaned it up against the barrier, making a ramp for us. The girl refused to climb the ramp. Maybe she thought she’d get splinters. “My name is Cher,” I told her. “I’m what your dad calls a Roadie. You know what that means?”

“Half human being, half wild folk,” Winona said, watching the boys instead of me. “You travel between the Stores. You cross Dead Man’s Land, to conduct our trade. That makes you our servant. Do you know what I am? I’m the daughter of a Manager and you’ve been hired to protect me.”

“I suppose that’s so, on this side,” I said. I picked her up by the back of her pants and threw her over the wire. Behind me on the loading dock I heard someone gasp and someone else yell. I ran over the ramp and kicked it back, cutting off the only way in, getting shut of the place. I grabbed her yellow hair and stared into those green, green eyes. I showed her my spring-lance, a coffee can on the end of a wooden pole. The can concealed a spring-loaded steel spike long enough to skewer most heads. “Now we’re in my world, little girl. Now you’re nothing but ghoulbait. Understand?”

Why was I so hard on her? She needed to behave, of course, or she could get us killed. But there was more, a special reason to hate her, and it could be summed up in two words: Full up.

That was what they told my grandfather when he went to the great stores along the New Jersey Turnpike with me in his arms, back when the highways were still crowded with the fleeing going north and going south. “Full up,” they said at Barnes and Noble. Full up at CostCo and TJ Maxx. No room for us who waited too long.

So he took me into the wilds, which at that time were lush and green but no higher than your ankle. The mowed lawns, the abandoned houses of suburbia. We hid where we could and moved on every morning. We lived on canned food and we listened to the radio in the dark, listened to static when that was all there was, hoping to hear of shelter somewhere, real shelter.

Full up. They were all full up before we arrived. Not enough food to go around, not any more room, they told him. He died in the wild and I could have joined a tribe in Montclair, they would have taken me in but instead I crushed his head with a rock before I’d even begun to weep. I would not be a wild woman, a friend to the dead. I would not be a savage.

I didn’t go hungry for long. The Stores needed me and my kind. We meant communication and trade and that meant survival. They let me sleep on their floors. They paid what I asked. And every time I looked one in the eyes I saw those words again, and I hated them all over again. There was no room in my heart for this girl. I was full up, too.

We couldn’t make the thirty miles to Home Depot in one day but I wanted us as far from the WalMart as possible before nightfall. The commotion our leaving made would draw too much attention—probably for days to come Winona’s father would be watching ghouls circle his perimeter, looking for the source of all that noise. He would lock his big loading gates and pray for them to leave him in peace, for his fence to hold them back.

We didn’t have that option. I pushed us hard. I led Winona through a drainage ditch behind the store, through reeds taller than me and water scummed with mosquito larvae. On the far side we had to cross an old asphalt access road, a broken field of smooth black fragments with bright green weeds sticking up in unnatural rectilinear patterns. It took us most of an hour to get to the far side and over the sway-backed fencing there. It would have taken me a quarter of that time, alone. They don’t need proper shoes in the Stores and what she had were old passed-down sneakers so well-used the laces were crusted in place.

Beyond the road the woods began, the real dead man’s land. I saw the signs of ghouls everywhere, on every scraped tree trunk, on every broken branch. I was looking for one thing, to convince myself I wasn’t just being paranoid. When I finally found it I felt almost relieved.

In a clearing in the shadow of a creaking utility pylon where the high grass grew yellow and thin I saw a splash of red. I pushed through the sighing vegetation to get closer and bent to touch the ground. A broad swath of grass had been bent back, crushed by the weight of a human being. Blood soaked the ground and turned the long stalks red. I dug around amidst the roots for a moment and came up with a broken leg bone—too long and thin to be human. Probably white-tailed deer. The femur had been cracked open so the marrow could be sucked out.

I squatted and ran a few blades of the grass through my fingers, letting the dried blood powder away like rust. Winona stared at the discarded bone as if it might come back to life at any moment. She’d probably never seen a meat bone before that wasn’t in the bottom of a stew pot.

“There’s one nearby,” I told her, whispering. The dead don’t linger when they’ve eaten and there was nearly no chance of the ghoul still being within earshot. Still I don’t make a habit of raising my voice out in the woods. “He ate recently so he’ll be strong and fast.”

“But so he’s full, then, and he won’t attack us,” she said, her fingers brushing the fibrous surface of the femur. She wasn’t scared. The little idiot.

“A living thing, an animal might not but this is a dead man. If he can’t find human he’ll eat deer or rabbits or mice. If he can’t find meat he’ll chew the bark off of trees and stuff himself full of grass. He doesn’t care if he eats so much he pops, he’ll still want more, even if it just slides down his gullet and out the hole in his belly. The more he eats the hungrier he gets.”

She shrugged and laid back in the grass, probably exhausted after her long hike. I could see it in her eyes. She didn’t need to worry, she thought. I would protect her.

So I did just that: I yanked her up to her feet and got us moving again, despite her exhaustion.

You smell them first, long before you see them. It’s a mixed blessing—scent is a fickle sense to have to rely on. The stink of decaying meat keeps you on your toes but you can’t tell what direction it’s coming from. You could walk right into the ghoul and not know it. They don’t make much noise. They never talk or cough or sneeze.

I had him in my nose for most of the afternoon, on and off. Once I thought I saw him but it was only slacks, a whole line of them on the crest of a hill. They walked in single file, the one in front missing most of the flesh from his skull. Just red-shot eyes rolling in a blank skull. Their clothes, filthy and torn, still kept the colors of the old time. Some of those colors never fade. In red and blue and purple T-shirts and dresses they looked almost merry up there, silhouetted against the setting sun. They walked without looking to the side, without knowing where they headed. This is their world now and they’re safe within it as long as the don’t get too close to the Stores. I kept the girl down, hidden under a berry bush until they were gone just to take care.

In the middle of an overgrown housing development I hauled Winona over the splintered remains of a picket fence and into a house that had only been partly burned down, most of its roof missing but the walls solid as when they were put up. The stink of the ghoul was everywhere—he couldn’t be more than a quarter mile away, even if he was upwind. Inside I held the door closed by shoving furniture up against it. It was the best I could do short of boarding us in and that’s never a good idea. I let the girl collapse on an old water-stained sofa and searched the place. Green saplings grew through the floorboards of the living room while old pictures, still bright and fresh, lined the stairway to the upstairs. Smiling people out in the sunshine, boats on clean water. The frames of the pictures were riddled with wormcast and some had rotted away altogether.

Night came down, early as it does in October. The girl refused to sleep on any of the house’s beds they were so infested with bugs. Instead she wanted to stay up and talk. I sat in one corner of an upstairs room under a hole in the roof, the spring-lance across my knees and listened, too tired to shut her up properly.

“My children will be managers,” she told me, at some length. “Great men, great warriors and they will finally rid the land of the monsters. That is the destiny of my line. The story was told often around our fires.”

I shifted slightly—the carpet under me was damp. “Is that why you’re going so far away? To have babies?”

She nodded readily and gave me a smile that could have sold toothpaste in the old time. “To be wed to the General Manager of Home Depot and to bear his heirs.”

“The big man’s tired of fucking his first cousins,” I guessed. “Makes sense. They’ve got bad skin out that way ‘cause it’s too close to the old chemical plants. Me, I never gave much thought to a baby. Just one more corpse to walk the earth in the end.”

“That’s doom talk, and it’s not allowed at WalMart,” she scolded me. She played with a DVD case she’d found in the entertainment center, the card insert showing a man dressed like a bat. She opened and closed the plastic with a snap, over and over again, snap snap, snap snap. A good sound of well-made pieces fitting together perfectly. Everything sounded like that in the old time. “It’s not just about babies, anyway. This will be a strategic alliance, uniting two Exits and drawing borders for future conquests to come. I imagine you have no use for politics—”

“Shush,” I told her. I’d heard something downstairs. She kept prattling on for a minute till she saw that I meant it. The sound came again. Wood screeching on wood. Furniture scraping on a hardwood floor. The ghoul was testing my barricade.

They can smell you, just like you can smell them, and they don’t need to rest. You can’t hide for long.

A chest of drawers squealed and crashed as it fell over. A chair tumbled away from the door. I lifted the windowsill as quietly as I could and gestured for Winona to go on, out onto the roof. The second-floor window let out onto a slope of rotten shingles that skidded out from under her and she wouldn’t let go of the sill.

I crawled over her and carefully slipped my way down to the gutter so I could look over the edge. The ghoul looked up at the same time and we made eye contact. He had on the loose gray pants of a wild man, stained now with deer blood. Most of his hair had fallen out and something had eaten his lips, leaving ragged skin that failed to cover his crooked teeth. His eyelids were gone too, giving him the look of a bloody death’s head.

I skittered back onto the roof. Below I heard him redouble his efforts, slamming a bookshelf to the side. He would be through the door soon. Winona started screaming. “Kill it! It’s right there! Just kill it!”

It was an eight foot drop to the ground. There were some scraggly bushes down there to break my fall but I landed badly and lost a fraction of a second jumping back up to my feet. By that time the ghoul had turned to face me, slaver running out of the hole in his face. I could see the blotchy sores on his gray skin, I could hear his teeth grinding together in anticipation.

“Do your job!” Winona howled. Her fingers couldn’t hold her on the slope of the roof and suddenly she was sliding, falling on the loose shingles. I had been one step ahead of her—bringing the spring-lance around to line up my shot I was a breath’s span away from firing when she called me. I managed to ignore the distraction of her falling off the roof. The dead man didn’t—he swung his head up and to the side, looking for the source of the noise.

The spring-lance connected with his head, but not in the right place. The coffee can slid back, triggering a latch, and the lethal spike clanged out of the sheath and into his flesh. His jawbone exploded inside his fragile skin, yellow teeth flying from his mouth to clatter on the ground. The blow knocked him backward and off his feet but it had failed to penetrate his brain.

I jumped back and looked up at the roof. Winona had fallen into the gutter, which had bent but not broken. I only caught half a glimpse of her—a pale shape hanging in the darkness. Meanwhile the ghoul was recovering from my attack. The spring-lance was useless until I could crank back the spring.

He stood up, clutching at the place where his jawbone had been. His eyes focused on me with horrible slowness.

“Winona!” I shouted. “You stay there and be quiet!”

The ghoul started in to charge me, his head down, his broken fingernails stretched out to grab and tear my clothes and my skin. I turned around and headed into the woods, running as fast as my legs could carry me.

The dead are slow. You can outrun them, for a while.

“Come on, girl! Winona! Show yourself!”

She wasn’t there when I got back. Which was the bad news. I couldn’t find any blood or torn clothes, either, meaning the ghoul didn’t get her. That could be very bad news. It could mean she’d run off on her own. I doubted it.

It took me most of the night to outrun the ghoul. He was a tough character, real strong, but none of them are ever as fast as a living person. If you don’t exhaust yourself with sprinting, if you don’t trip on an old curb and break your leg, you can escape them. It’s how I’ve stayed alive so long.

I lead him in a wide loop through the subdivision, up cracked streets and through backyards full of play sets rusted down to twisted scrap. I could hear him behind me, smell him too, but I kept my eyes on my feet. I could step on an abandoned toy or even an old lawnmower lost in the high grass and it would be over. I could trip over an exposed cable or pipe. I could run right into a tree and give myself a concussion.

You have to not panic, is all. I kept my heading and I kept moving. Well before dawn his stench was just a memory in my nose, a last whiff of corruption that lingered on me well past the time I’d lost him. I circled back, made a wide circuit around the row houses in case he caught smell of me again. Eventually I wound up right where I started, ready to resume my travels.

Except Winona was gone. I tore the house apart looking for her, turned over every decaying mattress, broke open every closet and scared a few mice for my trouble. I looked all around the yard, constantly aware that the ghoul was still nearby. I searched the nearby houses.