“Dad was-is-a realtor, and was showing a house to a client near here. He works a lot, so as a treat, he fixed it so that he would pick me up from school on his way home and we’d meet my mom for dinner. That was the day that everything happened. People at school started to get sick, so they called parents to pick kids up. But most of the parents were sick too, so all the students had to stay at school. I didn’t feel sick, and I didn’t want to catch anything, so I thought I’d wait for my dad outside.” She wiped her eyes again, pausing as she remembered. From across the room, I heard Anaru curse softly as he dropped something in the near darkness.
“He called my cell phone and told me to wait near the road. He sounded scared and anxious, so I started to get a little scared. I had thought it was the flu, but right after I hung up with him, I heard loud noises from downtown. Like fireworks. Then, Mr. Simpson came outside and he looked really strange. His eyes were really wide open, and he sounded funny and walked funny. I got scared and ran to the street. My dad got there right before Mr. Simpson made his way down the stairs, and we drove away, but as we were leaving I saw Mr. Simpson trying to wrestle with another student who had run outside.” She was crying in earnest now, but her voice was steady, if a trifle hurried, like she hadn’t talked in days. She probably hadn’t.
“My dad, he tried the police station, but it was empty. All the police were busy or gone, or had run away. So we tried the fire station. The trucks were gone and no one was here, but those things were outside, so we came upstairs. We thought that more people would come here…but they must have gone somewhere else.”
I looked at Anaru briefly, and we exchanged a look. It seemed heartless to tell the kid that she may be the last surviving resident of this town.
“How did he get bitten?” I asked, looking at him as lay there, unblinking eyes staring at his daughter, mouth opening and closing in hunger and desire.
She just shook her head, as she started to weep. Seconds turned to minutes as she composed herself. Anaru was rooting through a chest of drawers in the back of the room.
“It was my mom,” she said softly. “He told her to meet us here and she did, somehow. He let her in, not knowing about the bite.” She drew a deep breath. “It happened that same night…while dad was asleep. She was feeling sick, and he had stayed up with her, but somehow he must have fallen asleep. But we didn’t know about the bites. She woke up, and…”
“She bit him?”
She nodded mutely.
“Did you tie him up?” I asked, surprised.
She shook her head again. “No, he tied himself up. I did the last arm.” She looked up, defensive. “But he made me do it! I thought he’d be OK!”
From across the room, “Found ‘em! Bastard kept ‘em in his sock drawer!”
“Look Tristan,” I said gently, “We can help you out of here, but you’re going to have to leave your dad.” I paused, thinking of what she wanted to hear. “We can send someone back to help him after you’re safe, OK?”
She trembled violently and stood up. “No! I won’t! You can send someone back for me too! I won’t go! I won’t leave him!” She moved back, almost stumbling onto the creature itself as she retreated away from us. It bolted up once again, desperate and tantalized by the prospect of food so close.
I spared a glance for Anaru and nodded my head toward the stairs, signaling him back to the others. “Listen, it may be a while. You could starve up here, and if he gets loose…You should really come with us.”
Eyes wild, she moved around the opposite side of the bed, so that the twitching form of her father separated her from me. “I won’t, and you can’t make me! Send people back; I’ll wait!” She had squatted down now, virtually hiding under the bed. She was mere inches away from the creature’s face; close enough to smell the rotten stench of decay. I wasn’t going to change her mind, and if I tried to make her come, I might hurt her. Or vice versa. Save one by force and risk the many, or leave her to her own devices and condemn her to death?
My day wasn’t getting better as it went along; I wasn’t prepared for these kinds of decisions. Slowly, I unslung my rifle from my shoulder.
“You know how to use one of these?” I asked, putting it on the floor at the foot of the bed.
She nodded, calmer now. “My boyfriend goes shooting with his friends on the weekends. He taught me.”
“OK, I’m gonna leave this here with you, all right? We pulled the front doors down, so you don’t have to worry about those things getting in. I saw some vending machines downstairs, so you might be able to get some food there. I won’t make you leave, but if he tries to hurt you or gets out…” She just stared.
I moved toward the door. “You’re doing good, kid. Your dad would be proud of you.” It was what I would have liked to hear, if I were her. Her hand came up briefly in a small wave; she even spared a tiny smile.
“Thanks. You too.”
I ran down the stairs and saw Anaru looking out the back window.
“How we doin’?” I asked as I jogged to the truck.
“Mostly clear,” he said. “We can get to it if we move quick enough. It’s right outside.” He looked at me questioningly, sparing a glance to the ceiling. I shook my head, and he understood.
“Took you guys long enough,” said Kate, who was stooped over Sam’s still-unconscious form in the passenger’s seat.
“Yeah, well. The guy hid the keys in his sock drawer, and far be it from me to violate the sanctity of another man’s underwear drawer before trying the other options.”
She smiled briefly and I breathed an internal sigh of relief. I’d tell her later; quite frankly, I wasn’t sure she’d understand. I helped Kate get Sam out of the truck and we moved to the rear of the building as Anaru stood at the door, ready to push it open and sprint.
“What kind of truck we got back here anyway?” I said, not having bothered to ask before. Anaru just smiled and pushed open the door.
We moved through the door quickly and I started in surprise and elation when I viewed our new ride. I understood Anaru’s smile, as one of my own appeared stupidly on my face.
Chapter 22
A snowplow sat before us, large steel plow attachment duly attached and secured to the front of the massive, treaded vehicle. It was like a big yellow tank with a cowcatcher. Perfect for clearing snow, ice, and the occasional undead army.
Moving toward the cab, Anaru casually brained a zombie that shambled out from in front of the plow, sending it crumpling to the cement of narrow alleyway. He jumped into the driver’s side and leaned across, opening the locked passenger door from the inside. I could see several creatures turn their attention from the street to our little party.
“She won’t move fast, but we got nothing to worry about while we’re inside,” said Anaru, helping Sam up and into the four-person cab. I nodded and, still smiling, jumped on board behind Kate.
After a moment’s consternation with the ignition system, Anaru started the huge engine, and we rumbled forward. He maneuvered the huge machine out of the alley behind the station and onto the main road. As we rolled out of the alley and onto a side street, my thoughts flickered back to Tristan, and to the unnamed mother on Long Island who was going to be indelibly etched on my memory for years to come.
I remembered Earl, who knew he was bitten, but grasped for those last seconds of life, even though it put the rest of us in danger. It was a cruel irony that had been forced on mankind of late; only in the face of a disease that robbed us utterly of our capacity for reason and thought, what some might argue to be the defining characteristics of humankind-what some might claim distinguished us from the beasts of the field-were we forced to exhibit the traits that really made us human.
Compassion, self-interest, love, tenacity, greed. Hate. Fear. It was only in situations like this when you realize that what you consider to be civilization and society is only a front. Narrow confines within which self-interest motivates compliance. Once the rewards of compliance disappear-once self-interest no longer dictates civility, selflessness, or compassion, we see the true nature of the human being. At once selfish and brutal, they possess in the same shell a phenomenal capacity for love and sacrifice, a paradox that is only the more tragic for its singular revelation in times of abject misery, sorrow and terror. I shook my head in sorrow and confusion, brought back to reality by the cruel, grating feel of bodies disintegrating before us.
Creatures wandered in front of us but were shoveled to the side or plowed under. They were crushed and maimed, decapitated and severed. The steel plow spared nothing and no one as its large merciless teeth carved a path through their hordes as surely as a scythe through a cornfield. It took off feet at the ankles and smeared creatures into the pavement as they fell. Though we couldn’t see the front of the scoop from the cab, we knew it bore stark evidence of its gory passage.
We reached the outer edges of the town after what seemed like hours. The plow couldn’t move faster than 30 miles an hour, and the town was much larger than we had seen from the air, being in large part covered by trees.
That’s when we heard the gunshots. These weren’t only the sidearm discharges-the kind of shots we had heard in King’s Point-or even the kind that we had fired back in town. Spread out between the popping sounds of pistol and rifle fire was the concussing noise of much heavier ordnance. And it was being used close.
We met the soldiers about eight miles North of town and came upon them on a narrow stretch of mountain road. An APC had just finished plowing down a crowd of ghouls with a 50 caliber top-mounted machine gun when we came upon them, firing several warning shots in the air before we came around the last bend.
It was a small National Guard unit: four Humvees, two Bradley’s and about thirty men, all lightly if adequately armed. They were almost as shocked to see us, proceeding toward them in a snowplow covered with zombie parts and congealed brown blood, as we were to see them: a large number of uniformed, armed men stopped in the middle of the narrow road.
According to their commanding officer, they had been on a weekend training exercise in remote areas of the mountains, practicing mountain maneuvers for an eventual deployment to Afghanistan. No contact with the outside world was allowed to ensure realistic conditions, so they knew nothing of the outbreak until three days ago, when they encountered their first zed on their way down the mountain, back to what used to be civilization. At first, they thought it was some crazy mountain man, ranting and frothing at the mouth. Maybe rabid or just plain drunk. But he was bleeding, so they stopped to help.
Radios don’t work well in the mountains, and since it was a small exercise, and they weren’t expecting to have to be in touch with anyone, the satellite gear was left behind. Even cell phones were ordered to be powered off and stowed. No one questioned the order. After all, it was just a couple of days: the standard one weekend a month.
A soldier from the first vehicle had approached the creature as it slouched forward, completely unaware of what it was. He had stooped over to its head level, asked what was wrong, and was met with a moan and grasping hands. Amazingly, he hadn’t been bitten. A young man, he fortunately had the reflexes to deflect that first attempt, and instinctively brought his fist to the side of the thing’s face. It had dropped to the ground and the Colonel, particularly astute, had ordered him restrained and confined.
The medics informed him that the man might be contagious, and the Colonel ordered him tied him up. It wasn’t until a few hours later that they encountered more; a group this time, and far more dangerous. Two men were taken down and severely injured, another one had suffered a bite wound. That’s when the safeties came off. It had taken them days to make their way through similar small towns up and down the highway, and they were exhausted.
As I leaned against the side of one of their trucks, I could hear Kate and a medic conferring over Sam’s arm. She had regained consciousness, and was lying in the back of a cloth-enclosed Humvee, jacked up on painkillers. Kate and the medic stood outside, out of her earshot. Everyone knew what it meant to be bitten. It had yet to be seen whether you could excise the infection if you moved fast enough.
“There’s no way to tell,” Kate was saying. “We’ve seen people turn in a matter of seconds after they died, and we’ve seen people get turned within twenty minutes of being bitten.”
“Our guys, Sergeant Ames and Corporal Blunt, they turned within a half hour,” said the medic, clearly still coming to grips with the nature of this disease, “but they were both bit in arterial areas. Blunt took it in the neck. There was blood everywhere. It could’ve got into his system real fast, ya know?” He was young, no more than 19.
“Ames took the shortest. He took a bite on the leg, near the knee. He shot one of those fuckers all to hell and walked past it, thinking it was down. I mean he almost cut the damned thing in half-it’s guts were all over the pavement. But it grabbed him by the leg, and hauled itself up real quick, using his pants and climbing him like a tree. He clubbed it off, but not before it got a bite into his thigh.” His face was ashen, the pallor of someone who had seen too much in too little time.
Kate considered the information and spoke slowly. “OK, so we have two that turned within thirty minutes, both potentially receiving the infection through an artery. One potentially to the carotid, one potentially to the femoral. Both severe, both deep.” She shook her head as she saw me looking at her. “That’s why this damn thing spread so fast. If they hit a major artery, the victim turns within thirty minutes or less.” She turned to Sam, eyes uncertain.
“It’s been more than two hours since it happened, but there’s no telling whether it was slowed or actually averted by severing the infected area.”
“I trust your friend is doing better?” Colonel Sharp was a tall man with an imposing demeanor. His dark, short hair framed a rather wide, severe face. Bright green eyes peered out from above a bushy, yet neatly within Army regulations, mustache. He held a cell phone in one hand, and a pistol in the other. The former evidence of his attempt to contact his superiors, the latter evidence of the most recent engagement in the rear of caravan.