Moriah (2 page)

Dee considered it.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Riley.”

Dee turned his back and walked away from her. “Let’s go, Riley.” She looked once towards where the hunters would be coming from before following him.

“What the hell is that?” she asked when they passed the bomb.

“It’s a bomb.”

“Is it dangerous?” Riley walked around it, giving it wide berth.

“Well, don’t go knocking on it with a hammer, if that’s what you had in mind.”

As they headed towards the trees and the hills, Dee warned her. “Look, there’s still a lot of Zed out here. We haven’t been able to get them all yet. So let’s keep it quiet, all right?”

He led her across the field and into the trees. The slope they ascended turned steeply upwards into a mountain. They had gone a couple hundred meters when they came across a green and black four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle parked in the middle of nowhere.

Dee shrugged out of the Belgian rifle and secured it on the side of the ATV. He straddled the machine and powered it up.

“Get on,” he told Riley. She looked at him and the quad, then back at the field. She put one leg over it sat down behind the big man.

“Hold on,” Dee told her as he gassed the four-wheeler. “Tight.”

* * *

“She came up here,” Red was saying, following the trail of dried, matted grass into the field. “And she stopped right there.”

Gammon stood silently and let the girl do her work. She was good. The
best
. Gammon noticed how Tommy stood there, looking off into the distance. Waiting for Red to tell him which way to go.

“But she wasn’t alone…” Red looked into the trees beyond the field.

“What do you mean?” Tommy asked before Gammon could.

“This set of tracks here, see?” Red knelt in the grass. “Those are a man’s boots. A big man. These here? These are our woman’s. They both head out over that way together…”

“Hey,” Frankie called out, “look at this!”

Keith’s face paled. “Is that what I think it is?”

“It’s a bomb,” his brother, David, averred.

Rodriguez was tapping on the bomb’s casing with the butt of his HK416.
“Don’t do that, you idiot,” shouted Gammon. “You want to blow us all to hell?”

Rodriguez looked at him, down at the bomb, and then took a tentative step away from it.

“How do you think that got here?” Frankie was looking around the field.

Chang, his broken arm against his body in a sling, put a hand to his forehead and squinted up into the sky.

“He was sitting here…” Red knelt down next to the bomb, one hand touching it gently, respectfully. “And he got up…and he walked over there to where she was. And then the two of them got up and went…” She pointed into the trees “…that way.”

Tommy was about to say, “Let’s go,” but no sooner had Red pointed then Tobias yelled out, “Oh, shit! Here they come!”

Three zombies were dithering their way, having emerged from the tree line ahead.

MacKenzie, Rodriguez, Tobias, Frankie and the brothers formed a firing line and immediately started to unload on them.

“3 o’clock!” Gammon yelled over the din and Red turned. Four more were coming towards them, falteringly. Red set down her N4 and drew the Stechkin APS, drawing the pistol from its wooden holster and affixing it as a shoulder stock as she broke from the group and walked off towards the gang of four.

Two of the original three zombies were already down. The third was jerking in place as bullets perforated it.

“One shot at a time,” Gammon was yelling as a couple of the men fired on full-auto. “How many times I have to tell you guys?”

Five or six additional undead had joined the first three, appearing from the trees.

“Fuckers!” Rodriguez cursed. He sighted through the scope atop his HK416 and fired a short burst. The side of a zombie’s head flew one way while its body fell in the other direction.

“Single shot, Rodriguez, you moron!”

“Red!” MacKenzie broke from the group and made off after Little Red. She was firing her Stechkin in three round bursts, zombies collapsing flat to the earth.

So intent was MacKenzie on reaching Red’s side that he did not see the legless zombie that had dragged itself through the grass. The hideous creature wrapped its arms around MacKenzie’s lower legs and brought him to the ground. No sooner had he landed on his side, the wind knocked from him and the thing bit into his exposed calf where his pants leg had ridden up over his boot.

“Shit!” MacKenzie kicked the zombie off, rolling away from the putrefactive thing.

The creature propped itself up on its palms, arms straightened. As MacKenzie watched in horror it chewed on the piece of him in its mouth.

“
Awwww,
no,” he groaned.

From seemingly out of nowhere Red materialized beside the zombie and buried the business end of her throwing hatchet in the top of its skull. The creature froze in mid-chew—its mouth gone wide, MacKenzie’s calf meat falling out—before splaying in the grass and dirt.

“This thing stinks.” Red wrinkled her nose distastefully.

MacKenzie stood up. His leg was bleeding and hurt like hell. The firing line had succeeded in bringing down the first wave of zombies that had disgorged from the trees, but there were new moans, and MacKenzie knew more undead were coming. Many more.

“How many times do I have to tell you guys?” Gammon was chastising the others. “When you run out of ammunition, don’t come crying to me.”

MacKenzie looked down at his leg.
Shit
. This was
not
his day.

“Chang, you got your kit with you?” MacKenzie heard Gammon call. “Then wire that bomb up for me, all right?”

“Can I get some help here maybe? I got one arm…”

“You all right, Mac?” Red was standing next to him. She inserted a fresh magazine in her automatic pistol.

Fierce cracks rent the air as Frankie and Tobias, taking turns with their sniper rifles, drilled the zombies that blundered along out of the trees.

“Nah, Red. I’m not all right.” MacKenzie held his leg out and shook it. He and Red stood next to one another, considering it. “If you ever see Janis again, Red,” he nodded, “Tell her I love her and the kids.” Red nodded back. MacKenzie turned away. “Make it quick, Red. Okay?”

MacKenzie was looking out over the river when Red put a three-round burst in the back of his head.

“So Mac got bit, huh?” Rodriguez stared in disbelief toward where his friend’s lifeless body lay. Red had rejoined the others around the bomb. Rodriguez had seen it when the Zed grabbed his buddy. He’d known Mac got bit, and he knew the outcome of
that
. But he felt like he had to say something. MacKenzie had been his friend.

“Yeah,” Little Red confirmed. “Mac got bit.”

Tommy was still staring off into the woods.

“Okay,” said Gammon. “From the sounds of it, we got a lot of zombies coming at us through them trees.” As he spoke Frankie fired, dispatching another. “Best to get the hell out of here. How’s that rig coming along, Chang?”

“Almost there.”

Red looked where Tommy was looking and thought ahead. “Don’t blow the bomb.”

“What’s that?” Gammon asked her.

“Don’t blow it yet.” There was conviction in her voice.

“Sounds like Red’s got a plan,” Keith remarked to David.

“You want me to stop?” Chang looked up from where he was running wires from the bomb to a detonator with his one good arm.

“No, finish setting it up. But I have an idea.”

“
See
,” Keith told his brother.

“What’s your idea?” Gammon asked the girl.

Toby fired and laid another zombie low.

“I’m done here,” said Chang.

“I’ll tell you about it on the way.” Red had already started walking off.

“Where we going?” Gammon called after her.

“She’s following the trail.” Tommy walked past Gammon, after Little Red.

“She’s following the trail,” Gammon repeated, looking towards the trees. Red was heading into them. Tommy and the others were following Red. The tracks of the woman they had chased and whomever she was with went off into the trees. There were zombies in the trees. Probably a lot of zombies. All of them, Gammon knew, heading this way now, drawn by the gunfire.

“Shit.”

Gammon thought that sometimes you just had to go along with the way events were taking you. “She’s following the trail,” he whispered under his breath, walking off after the others.

* * *

Riley clung to Dee’s back as the quad bounced across the rugged terrain for several kilometers. They passed between two mountains, slopes carpeted with multi-colored trees on either side of them. They raced along trails she would not have noticed alone on foot.

Without warning, Dee pulled the four-wheeler over.

“Why’d we stop?” She was off the back of the quad, putting some distance between herself and the man on the all-terrain vehicle.

“What? You think I’m going to do
what
to you now?”

Dee saw the look that crossed her face before Riley clenched her jaw.

“Oh no, I’m sorry…” he said quickly. “My god—what have you been through? Look, we stopped because I have to go to the bathroom, okay?
Really
.”

“I—I’m sorry, it’s just…”

“No, no, it’s okay. I was insensitive. But look, I do have to go, so why don’t you wait here—”

“Can’t you just go right here? I won’t look.”

The way she asked it, something in her voice. Scared. Desperate. Dee didn’t know who this woman was, or what she had experienced, but he felt for her.

“Okay, don’t look.”

Riley turned and looked back the way they had come. She’d left so much back there. Her brother. Troi and Ev. The guide, Krieger. Those killers. Lost in thought, she didn’t need to consciously ignore the sound of Dee’s urination.

“I’m good,” Dee announced when he was done.

They climbed back on the quad and drove for a while longer. It was cold on the four-wheeler and Riley huddled close to the warmth and expanse of Dee’s back. Her clothes, including the shirt and jacket she had stripped off the man she’d killed, were still soaked from the river, which wasn’t helping.

The quad crested a rise and Dee pulled it over again, letting it idle.

“Look.” He pointed, but Riley was already staring. Beneath them, perhaps two or three kilometers off, a column of men and women were marching across the terrain. Riley could see vehicles too: tanks and personnel carriers and helicopters flew over the procession.

“There’s so many of them.” She couldn’t believe it.

“About five thousand. Roughly.”

“You know them—who are they?”

“That’s Bear’s Army.” Before she could ask, Dee told her to hold on. He gave the quad gas and Riley held fast.

* * *

They reached the first sentries fifteen minutes later. Dee slowed the quad as they hailed him—Riley noted how the man she rode with was immediately recognized—and stared at her curiously. After another ten minutes on the four-wheeler, Dee and Riley pulled into the remains of a camp. Hundreds of burned-out fires were scattered around the terrain. A dozen tents of varying sizes remained, with people moving between them.
“D.L.!”

As Dee parked the quad, a short, stocky Hispanic man of medium height greeted him. Riley thought the guy looked around her age, maybe a few years older. He wore a bandana around the side of his head and his hair was spiked up out the top of it.

“Victor. What’s crackin’, nephew?”

“Africa, Dee. You back just in time.”

“Africa.” Dee harrumphed, pushing his goggles back on top of his cap. He and Riley were standing. “Guess I
am
back just in time.”

“I can think of someone who’ll be glad to see you...” Riley could tell Victor was messing around with Dee, the way he smirked as he said it.

“Yeah, well, what are you going to do?”

“No, D.L, home-slice. What are
you
going to do? Hi there, pretty lady.”

“Hi.”

“Victor,” Victor said by way of introduction, holding out his hand. Riley felt weird shaking it and telling him her name. A few short hours before she had been struggling for her life and now she was exchanging salutations.

“What’d this guy do to you, Riley?” Victor joked, alluding to her disheveled appearance.

“I think he might have saved my life. It’s too early to tell.”

“Yeah, well…” Before Victor could say whatever it was he was going to say, a woman’s voice spoke.

“Well. Would you look at
this
.” She was black, but it was difficult to tell at first because much of the skin of her face, hands and arms was blotched pink, burnt long ago. “The prodigal son returns.” Thick dreadlocks hung down past her shoulders while puckered keloid scars ran up and down her face from the burns.