Moriah (8 page)

“How I look, brother?” David had the visor on Victor’s helmet up.

“You’re looking something fierce, brother.”

“What do you think, Victor? I look fierce?”

“Very.”

David smiled. “You hear that, brother?”

“Okay, let’s head back.” Gammon said to the group. “Victor’s friends are going to notice he’s missing pretty soon. They’re gonna come looking for him, so I want to be in place.”

They moved out as a group, Rodriguez bringing up the rear, purposefully straggling behind. Chang was in front of him, but Chang wasn’t paying attention to anything. After a few yards, Rodriguez stopped and stood still. When Chang disappeared into the trees, he checked the safety on his H&K, turned, and crept back towards where he’d last seen Red.

* * *

The days were growing shorter and she enjoyed her time in the night, its chilled touch on her face, a thin blanket folded on her lap lest she take cold. The glaucoma had taken her vision many years before, but she remained curiously attuned to her environment, aware of the slightest sounds from the woods around her, perceptive of the comings and goings of the raccoons and the other animals.

When Cosmo’s wife had been alive, she had been his lover, the one he snuck off to visit in her cabin, a cabin he had built for her to keep her close. When Cosmo’s wife had died, he continued to visit, and as Cosmo’s sons grew he brought them along and she inducted them upon the path of carnal knowledge. She was already an old woman then, but she gladly served. In return, they brought her wild game and, in the winter, cords of wood to heat her one-room shanty.

She sat outside her home on a stool, her back to one of the log posts, a corn-cob pipe in her puckered mouth. She twirled a chin hair around an arthritic index finger.

She knew someone was there before they announced themselves.

“Well then who is it come to visit Maude?” she asked by way of greeting.

“Where’s my father, Maude?”

Chase
. She’d known the boy, his person, since his birth; known him in a different sense since the time he was ten. She knew his physical attributes and irregularities from when she’d had sight, from the touch of her hands on his body, and she did not think of them as deformities. What stood out most for her about Cosmo’s son was not his distorted appearance, which she could no longer view herself, but the clarity of his thought, the lucidity of his mind. His was the sharpest and therefore most dangerous intellect among Cosmo’s many children, capable of turning the white-hot rage on and off when it suited him.

“Maude,” Chase repeated, “where’s my father?”

He’d been away hunting, missing the events that had transpired in the past days.

“He’s gone looking for some fools, Chase.”

“How long?”

“Better part of a week, I figure. You been to the house?”

“Yeah, I been to the house. Winslow…” She wasn’t sure, but she thought his voice cracked when he spoke his brother’s name.

“Poor little Winslow,” she murmured in sympathy. “What you thinkin’ of doin’, Chase?”

“I’m goin’, gonna find dad, hope he ain’t finished the job first before I get there.”

“You leave tomorrow morning you’ll catch up to ‘em in a day or two I bet. Why’nt you stay and keep an old lady company?”

“I’m leaving now, Maude. I should be with my brothers.”

“You ain’t like them boys, Chase,” she said, and it was true because he wasn’t. He was less animal, and at the same time so much more dangerous. “Stay. Let ‘em do whatever it is they gonna do. They be back soon enough.”

But he was gone. She could tell that without seeing. She couldn’t care less about the men and women Cosmo and his children pursued, though she hoped for their sakes Cosmo had taken care of business before Chase showed up.

* * *

Riley rested in the tent she’d woken up in earlier that day. She sat in a folding wooden chair at a folding wooden table. She’d slept a little more and then she was wide awake and thought it was better to be seated with her thoughts than lying down with them.

She’d couldn’t get Anthony out of her mind. Her brother. Dead. It still made no sense. Anthony was the whole reason they’d come out here.

Ev and Troi. Riley wondered if they were still alive. How could they be? Could they have gotten away like she did? Maybe the red-haired girl and the others had only followed her? Maybe they’d found Thomas and the other man dead and were worked up into such a furor that they abandoned their hunt, ignoring Ev and Troi, chasing only Riley? She wanted to think so, but Riley did not.

She opened the book they had said was Bear’s. It was his book, but he hadn’t written in it or anything. It was some guy’s depressing story of being trapped as the zombie outbreak unfolded. Riley couldn’t imagine what life had been like for people at that time. Her father had lived through it, but he never spoke of it.
These people she was with were intent on leaving for Africa in the next day or so. They hadn’t asked her to come. Riley didn’t want to go anyway. She wanted to get home, wanted to recover. And then she wanted to come back out here and find the people responsible for Anthony’s death. She wanted to find them because she wanted to kill them all.

If she thought about it too much, it would drive her crazy. Instead, Riley cracked open the book and began reading.

The brain has to be destroyed
, she read.
That’s all there is to it…

* * *

Rodriguez looked for Red in the trees, and when he couldn’t find her, he leaned up against a trunk. He waited and listened. She was out here somewhere, he knew. They’d been out here for a few hours now, waiting for whatever Red thought was coming.

Freaky little girl. He’d heard whispered stories, third hand, how Thomas saved her when she was just a little kid from a group of men who’d been plowing her.

Rodriguez didn’t want to fuck her. Skinny little runt. He only wanted to kill her.

MacKenzie was his best friend. And Red killed him. First, she’d broken him. When Mac came back from his three nights in the woods with Red, he’d told Rodriguez what had happened out there. How Red had strung him up in a barbed wire net, how she’d let Zed paw at his feet. Little cunt had probably sat there the whole time, watching everything. And what was worst of all, Rodriguez thought, was that Mac had come to believe the little psycho had done him an enormous favor.

Rodriguez knew Red was dangerous. He’d seen her fight. He knew she could handle those blades. She was five-foot-nothing, but Rodriguez knew he didn’t stand a chance tangling with her hand to hand, not if she had one of her knives on her. He considered the H&K HK416 in his hands. If he could get a clear shot at her, he could take her out. She was pretty fucking fast, but she wasn’t faster than a bullet.

Little Red had never really fit in the whole time Rodriguez had known her. She kept to herself, talked little, wasn’t like everyone else. But no one fucked with her, because everyone knew if you fucked with Red, you were fucking with Thomas, and no one wanted to fuck with Thomas. But Thomas was gone now, so the little bitch didn’t have that going for her any more.

Rodriguez knew what he’d do. If she had her back to him, he wouldn’t even give her a chance. He’d just cut her runt little ass down before she knew what’d hit her. For Mac. For his friend.

It suddenly dawned on Rodriguez that someone was standing behind him. He turned to look and it was Red. She held a hand up to his mouth and a finger to her own. “Shhhh…”

He looked around, didn’t see a thing. How the fuck had she done that, snuck up on him? Bitch. Rodriguez knew he was lucky that she didn’t want him dead. The thought angered him more. He waited impatiently. What were they standing there for and when was she going to take her hand off his mouth?

After awhile, she removed her hand and nodded over her shoulder, indicating they should move. “You first,” Red told him. Rodriguez looked at her with the N4 in her hands and he started walking, thinking to himself, again, she didn’t want to kill him, because if she had, he would be dead already.

He followed the path he had last seen Chang on and wondered if he could turn fast enough and take her out. She wouldn’t be expecting it, wouldn’t see it coming. Well, actually, Rodriguez thought, she was walking behind him, so she
would
see it coming. But there was no way in hell she could dodge his bullets. No one was that fast.

He liked that idea. Let her last thought be that he’d lit her up. Maybe he could scream out, “This is for MacKenzie” or something as he turned.
Nah
, too many words. “For Mac,” maybe. Something like that. He could put a few slugs in her and catch up to the others before noon. Yeah,
for Mac
. That’s what he’d do, there was some kind of poetic justice to—

The mutant rushed out of the trees, snarling, swinging a human head on a chain.

Rodriguez reacted, raising his H&K. The head thunked on the HK416’s receiver, knocking the assault rifle from him and sending Rodriguez to the dirt. He looked up, the deformed beast towering over him.

Red leaped nimbly over Rodriguez and onto the thing, burying both four-inch push daggers in its chest. It roared out in anger and tossed her from it.

Rodriguez scrambled towards his H&K and came face to face with a zombie. The mutant had not been alone. It had made its way through the trees, each of its gigantic hands around the scraggly neck of a zombie, the undead struggling futilely against it the entire way. When the mutant attacked Rodriguez and Red, it had thrust the zombies ahead of it first, propelling them onto the path.

One zombie had fallen down and was regaining its feet. The other confronted Rodriguez.

Red had left her push daggers buried in the mutant’s chest. She came at it again, thrusting with the Robbins of Dudley dagger in her left hand. The mutant took the blow in its meaty forearm, the five-inch dagger disappearing in its forelimb. Undeterred, the beast rushed forward into Red. She yanked the dagger from its forearm and cracked the monster across the face with the dagger’s steel knuckles. If it noticed the blow, it gave no indication. The thing’s right hand reached out and wrapped itself around Red’s throat, crushing down on her windpipe like a vise, simultaneously lifting her from her feet.

Rodriguez couldn’t wield a blade like Red, but he could hold his own. He whipped his boot dagger from its sheath and buried it in the decaying head of the zombie facing him in one fluid motion. Rodriguez dodged to the side, expecting the second zombie to attack. It stood there on the path, stinking and moaning, looking from him to Red and the mutant choking the life out of the girl.

Hanging from its outstretched arm, Red thrust the trench dagger into the monster’s head. It grunted when the blade entered the side of its head and still, somehow, the thrust didn’t kill it. Worse yet, Red’s dagger was lodged there. With the oxygen cut off to her lungs and brain, Red let the Robbins of Dudley push dagger go, her right hand yanking one of the four-inch daggers from mutant’s chest, stabbing down with it, her left hand coming up with the doubled edged fifteen-inch weapon. She flicked her wrist as she wielded the blade, slicing ragged trenches through the thing’s face, blinding it in one eye.

Still it refused to release her.

Rodriguez looked from his rifle on the ground to the zombie before him. The beast hissed at him but turned and staggered towards Red and her assailant.

Another flourish of the doubled-edged blade destroyed the mutant’s remaining eye, and it finally dropped her, grasping at its own face, roaring out in anger. Red gasped air through her damaged throat and did not relent. Her right arm came around with the throwing hatchet, burying it in the creature’s knee. The mutant’s leg went out from under it and it went down on one leg.

Red hacked at its other thigh until that one collapsed underneath the beast as well. Cosmo’s son took its hands off its face and reached out blindly for Red, looking to grab her and draw her in close where it could destroy her, but the little red-head was already in close, the karambit gouging flesh from its face and neck.

Rodriguez tore his eyes from the spectacle and made for his automatic rifle.

The mutant lashed out wildly, its blow pushing Red back three feet. She stumbled into the zombie that was coming for her, its arms outstretched. Before its teeth could sink into her flesh, Red twisted and punched it in the face, her knuckles cracking it in the mouth. The zombie staggered back a step, stunned. It was just regaining whatever limited senses it had when Red’s throwing hatchet buried itself in its head. The handle jutting from its skull, the undead sprawled bonelessly.

Red glanced down at her hand and moved in on the blinded beast kneeling there, hooking it under the chin with the karambit. With a grunt and a heave, she took its throat out in a spray of blood.

The force she put into ripping out the creature’s neck turned her around, and before Red’s mind fully registered that Rodriguez had taken up his H&K and leveled it at her she was already diving away from the mutant. Rodriguez’s automatic rifle chattered, blood erupting from the mutant’s dying chest. Red’s hand flicked up, steel flashing as it covered the distance between herself and Rodriguez.