Moriah (9 page)

Staggering back, Rodriguez’s arms flailed, the barrel of his H&K whip-sawing towards the trees. The handle of one of Red’s push daggers was stuck in the middle of his chest. Somewhere it registered for Rodriguez that this meant the blade itself was inside him.
Aw shit
. He hadn’t even seen her pull the dagger out of the mutant. She
was
that fast. Mortally wounded, Rodriguez steadied himself and caught Red’s eye.

She had landed flat on her palms and the balls of her feet and pushed herself up to a crouch.

Rodriguez knew he was done. First Mac, now him. The thought flashed through his mind in less than a second and then he was swinging his arm wildly, attempting with the last of his strength and control to bring the barrel of his H&K around at Red.

She rolled and came out of the tumble with her Noveske N4, the assault rifle rattling as she unloaded on Rodriguez with the three hundred round drum magazine. Red put half the drum in him before letting her finger up off the trigger.

There was a death rattle behind her from the mutant on the ground.

She shook her head in disgust. The path was silent again. Rodriguez had kind of surprised her. Not that he had tried to kill her. She figured he’d have gotten around to that eventually. But that he’d tried here, now. It didn’t surprise her he had failed.
Idiot
.

Red held her hand up and looked at it.

She was the idiot.

She’d cut the skin of her knuckles on the teeth of the zombie she’d punched in the mouth. She knew what that meant, the same way MacKenzie had known what it’d meant when he’d been bitten.

Dammit
.

Red wouldn’t allow that.

She let the N4 drop to the ground and drew her 9mm Stechkin. How ironic, she thought. But how right. Red thought about Thomas and how good he had been to her and Tommy. She swallowed and before she could change her mind she rolled her head back, pressed the barrel of the pistol to her chin and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Red looked at the Stechkin again. It hadn’t fired. She could have cried, and as she cleared the jam, preparing to complete what she’d begun, the thought occurred to her that maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that the gun hadn’t fired.

Tommy and Gammon were going to trade that Victor guy for the woman. This wasn’t over yet. Infected or not, Red had to see it through. She had a few hours at least, maybe half a day at most. She could do this.

Putting the pistol away, Red bent to pick up the N4. She shouldn’t have tossed it down onto the ground like that, she thought. Red looked from Rodriguez’s body with the push dagger’s handle sticking out of his chest, to her blades buried in the mutant, to her throwing axe in the head of the zombie. She did not look forward to retrieving the blades and cleaning them off.

* * *

“Riley, you awake?”

She couldn’t see him, backlit by the daylight in the tent flap, but the deep baritone was unmistakably Dee’s.

“Yeah.”

“Can I come in? Talk to you?”

“Yeah.”

She’d been lying there thinking about Anthony for some time.

Dee had a Coleman lamp, the flame extinguished. After Riley had turned in, several of the others had stayed up and talked. He found the folding chair and sat down in it, placing the lamp on the floor near his feet.

Riley was sitting on the bed. “I can’t sleep.”

“Yeah, me neither. You thinking about your brother?”

“Yes.” She didn’t know Dee well but she felt she could talk to him.

“I’m sorry that happened to him…to you. I’m sorry about what Tris said last night, about your father.”

“No, she had his number. She knows him, all right.”

“I wonder if my dad knew your dad. I’d think he must have.”

“You miss him a lot still, don’t you?”

“Every day. It’s hard to talk to people about. See, to all of them, he was almost… it was like he was more than human. It’s like talking to someone about a god, to the Bishop—to Fred—about his god. It’s hard to convey to them what he meant to me, as a boy, as a man.”

“And Tris doesn’t help there either.”

“I do love Tris. And I know she loves me. And I know she loved dad, too, as much as she talks ill about him. She’s just got issues.”

“That story she told about having to kill her husband and children…”

“Yeah. I guess it doesn’t get much worse than that. I mean…” Dee thought about Riley’s situation with her brother and decided not to address it. “You were born after—you don’t remember the outbreak, do you?”

“None of it.”

“Yeah, well, I was a little boy. I remember some things. I remember it as clear as yesterday when I met Bear and Bruce and Kevin and all. Tris too. You know, they all had families, all of them. And then they didn’t. They don’t talk much about it.”

“What was Bear like, as a person?”

“He was quiet most of the time. He taught me how to fight, how to survive. Whatever he didn’t know, he had others teach me. Tris and Bruce…others that aren’t around anymore. You know, he’s been gone long enough, and I’m old enough now—got some distance between those days—I can say this about him: my father was extremely driven. I don’t want to couch it in religious language like the Bishop, like Fred, but it really was like he was answering some calling.”

“We learned about the zombie wars in school,” Riley told him. “It was never a given that human beings were going to win.”

“I don’t think I ever realized how bleak it was, even as a little kid. I mean, I’ve seen Bear and Tris and the army go at it with millions of those things. Millions. And
win
. And after every battle there was another one looming. I guess, if I had been old enough, it might have crossed my mind that the battles were never ceasing, that as soon as one had been won, there were dozens more, right? I know it was hopeless for a lot of people. We had so many casualties, and they weren’t all at Zed’s teeth. But I was a kid. What did I know?”

“Well, our side won, right?”

“Pretty much. There’s still pockets of them here and there. Those trees and mountains where I met you? Out by the bomb? A few hundred of them up in there.”

“And Africa?”

“Africa should be pretty hairy.”

“You guys have come this far, you’ll make it.”

“You know, Tris wants to find those people that were following you.”

Riley had been thinking about them too. “So do I.”

“Most everybody else, though, they understand the importance of getting this show on the road. We have to meet the others at the coast. When they get there, they’re not going to wait forever.”

“I know, Dee. I don’t expect anyone to help me. I mean, you’ve helped me so much already. I’m safe here. I’m finally safe.”

“What will you do?”

“I guess I’ll find my way back to New Harmony. And I’ll tell them what happened. I don’t know what I’ll tell my dad. I’ll get some people together, and we’ll go and find Tommy and the girl. And we’ll kill them.”

“That’s the thing that always bothered me about this,” admitted Dee. “Like Zed wasn’t enough for all of us to worry about. You’d think, if something was going to have the power to band us together—Zed would have been it, wouldn’t it?”

“But it did, Dee. For the most part. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, out here, on the move all this time. In New Harmony it’s different. The only other people you’re going to come across out here are the ones that don’t want to be a part of any society, the ones that were thrown out.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that.”

“Bear never wanted to settle down?”

“I don’t know, maybe…” Dee said, reflecting. “But I don’t know if he could. She was wrong, you know.”

Somehow Riley knew Dee was referring to Tris. “How do you mean?”

“We spoke, the night before he went away.” Dee meant himself and Bear.

“What’d he say?”

“We talked about the difference between remorse and regret, and you know what he said? He said remorse was regret for something you’d done in your life. And regret was, well regret was regret that you
hadn’t
done something in your life. He told me he had no remorse, for any of it. But he said he did have a regret.”

“Which was?”

“He told me—and you’ve got to understand how weird this was, coming from him…I mean, he was larger than life, yes? He said he regretted he never got married. He said he regretted the fact that he never loved anyone the way a man was made to love, was made to love another, to love a woman.”

“Well, judging by the stories, it sounds like he was too busy killing.”

“That’s just it. And here’s the thing. The difference between him and Tris? He recognized it, and it bothered him. Tris doesn’t. Bear felt that what he had done all those years, fighting like that, that it had left him incapable of love.”

“What’d you say to him?”

“I told him that me—” Dee touched his chest to emphasize the words “—my person—my existence—that I gave lie to that claim.”

“How’d he respond to that?”

“He smiled. He was so…big. I know you’re probably thinking to yourself, why does that matter? But this is the thing about Bear. I’ve heard other people say, when they were kids, how their dads or moms or whoever seemed so big to them, and then when they—the kids—get older, they get bigger than their dads and moms. But Bear? As I got older and grew, he got bigger. And I don’t just mean physically.”

“You were living with a myth,” remarked Riley, thinking back to a conversation in a bar with a drunken tracker.

“And that’s why—when he talked to me about how he wished he’d gotten married? That sounds so mundane, doesn’t it? I’d never seen him that vulnerable. I don’t know. Part of me didn’t like seeing him like that. You have to understand. He was more than human to me.”

“I do understand, Dee.”

“Thanks.”

“He was your dad.”

Dee rubbed his mouth with his hand.

“And that was it? You never saw him again?”

“Never.”

“Do you have anything to remember him by?”

“He left behind some of his weapons. He’d given me this a long time before.” Dee drew the .357 magnum from its holster. “Be careful. It’s loaded.”

Riley made sure to keep the barrel aimed away at the floor as she hefted the revolver in her hand.

“This is nice.” After studying it from several angles, she handed it back to him. “Well, you’re not going to ask me to marry you, are you?”

Dee laughed, taken aback. “
No
.”

“Listen—”

There was a commotion outside.

“Come on,” Dee didn’t bother to holster the Colt Python. He rose, grabbing up the lantern. Riley followed him, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders against the day’s chill.

As soon as they’d stepped outside, Kevin came running up to them. “Dee!” he yelled. “They got Victor!” Men and women were moving around the camp, preparing for something.

“What happened, Kev?”

“Command tent,” Kevin called as he trotted past, “now.”

* * *

Inside the tent, Tris was sharpening the blades of her sickles on a whet stone. She had a determined look on her ruined face. She wore black-grey camouflage pants and a black tactical assault vest brimming with flap pouches. The dozen other men and women present looked up as Dee and Riley entered.

“This is her fault,” someone said, pointing at Riley.

“Shut up.” The anger in Dee’s voice was unmistakable. “Shut up! You know what? Get out of here. Get your ass out of here now. You hear me?”

The man left sheepishly.

“What happened?” Dee asked Tris.

“Whoever those people were, chasing Riley?” Tris didn’t take her eyes from her work. “They snatched Victor.”

“What? How do we—”

“They left a note.” Fred Turner held his cat. “They said they were willing to trade. Her—” he indicated Riley, “—for him.”

“I’ll go,” Riley stated.

“They can’t be serious.”

“They’re serious,” stated Bruce. He and Kevin wore black vests that matched Tris’.

“I’ll go.”

“They’d better not touch a hair on Victor’s head.”

“They won’t,” Riley mentioned quietly.

“What?” asked Kevin. “How do you know?”

“I just know. They’re not like that. If they told you they’d trade him for me, that’s what they’ll do. And I’ll go.”

“So what are we going to do?” Carrie wondered.

“I’ll go to them. This wasn’t right. It
was
my fault this happened. If I wasn’t here—”

“Riley, be quiet.”

“No, Dee,” said Tris. “Let’s hear her.”

“Just give me a gun or something.” Riley pointed to the grenade around Tris’ neck. “Just me one of those.”

“This girl got moxie, huh?” Tris held her sickles up to the light in the tent, admiring the shine of the blades.