My hand flies to my mouth. “Your daughter?” I mumble between my fingers.
She coughs out a small laugh. “Sort of. She was my dog. She was a beautiful black and white Huskita with the most sincere eyes you could ever imagine. She went everywhere with me. After the zombies came, she…” Her words trail off, and she seems to gather her thoughts together before she continues. “She wouldn’t leave my side for even a minute. We were out traveling, going from town to town, living off what we could find. It was no way to live, but it was living all the same, which is more than can be said for others. We came across a convoy one day. They had this stupid white flag raised over the lead truck, so I made myself known to them. Sasha and me stepped out into the road and they pulled over. This asshole got out, said he could take us to a safe haven. Of course I jumped at the chance. Since everything had happened, all I had wanted was for me and Sasha to be safe. I wanted everything to go back to normal again, for us all to get on with our lives. I just wanted to protect everyone!” Rachel grabs strands of her hair, pulling at it nervously and twisting it into tangles. “But when we got to the walled city, they wouldn’t let Sasha in.” Her chin trembles. “I told them I wouldn’t leave her, and this,” she moves her hair out of the way and points to a small, jagged scar at the top of her head close to the hairline, “this is what happened. When I woke, I was behind the walls and Sasha was gone.”
The truck lapses into silence
; apart from the truck’s rumbling engine and the rain splashing the windshield, there’s nothing else. I fumble around for the right words. People have lost friends, mothers have lost children, children have lost fathers, and this woman lost her dog. Yet her dog was her family; she was her child, her everything, and to have that stripped away must be equally devastating for her.
“So how did you get out of there?
And why did they take you in the first place?” I ask gently. Most people didn’t want to leave the cities; sure, it was bad—hell, even—but better the devil you know, right?
She snorts out a laugh. “I snuck out on one of their convoys a couple of months later.
Stupid assholes never even noticed me among all the bodies.” She chuckles to herself.
“
Bodies? What do you mean bodies?” I frown hard, my blood pressure spiking again.
“The dead bodies
—the zombies. They have to get rid of them somehow. Every couple of weeks they take them out to a landfill and dump them.” She looks across at me nervously, as if deciding on whether to share something with me. She comes to a conclusion and continues. “They were testing on them—zombies—trying to work out why they were what they were, you know, and how they were up and walking when they should be dead, I guess. Once they stopped walking and they were truly dead, there was no use for them, and of course then they started to really rot and stink.”
We both grimace at that. Deaders stink to high hell
, so I can understand the logic of wanting to get rid of the bodies, but something else dawns on me as we’re talking.
“They left the cities? I thought there
was no way out once you were in.”
“
That’s what I thought, that’s why I’d never tried to get to one before.” She watches me for a second. I can feel her stare at the side of my face without looking, and when I do chance a glance at her, I find I was right. “This one was special—this city. This wasn’t just a place to live, it was a testing plant. That’s why they wanted me…and any other people they could get their hands on. So they could test on us.” She frowns hard and then pinches the bridge of her nose.
I slam my
foot down on the brake pedal and the truck comes to a screeching halt. “Are you fucking serious?” She nods rapidly, her eyes wide. “They are testing on us? On humans? Turning us into those, those…things?”
She nods again.
“I, I don’t think that they wanted to, I think that they were trying to cure it…the disease.”
I frown at her, my lips pulled into a tight line as I try to hold back all the vicious
, vile words I want to throw at someone. But there’s no point in saying them to Rachel; this wasn’t her fault, wasn’t her idea.
“We need to keep moving,” s
he states quietly.
I
nod and start the truck moving again, my thoughts whirling at a million miles an hour, realizing that the game just changed in the most dramatic fashion. Every time I think I’ve met the worst of the worst, human beings manage to sink to a whole new level.
“I
’m sorry,” I say quietly, still deep in thought and wanting to get back and talk to Mikey. “I just can’t believe they would do that—test on people.”
She shrugs nervously.
“Did it work? Did they find out how to stop it?” I ask.
Rachel shakes her head
, looking depressed as hell. “Nope, not even close.” Her chin trembles. “I miss my dog. I miss Sasha,” she says, and I want to whoop the silly out of her. What she’s talking about and what she’s thinking about seem to be on very different scales: testing on people and turning them into zombies and her missing dog are two very fucking different scales of conversation. I try to ignore my inner temper tantrum and be nice.
I frown at her.
“You know she could still be alive.” I don’t know why I say it—maybe to calm my own temper down. It seems so random to be talking about her dog, given what she just told me about that walled city and the experiments, but I don’t know what else to say.
“In some ways that would be worse, knowing that she was
still looking for me. I mean, I couldn’t even find that place again if I tried. I could never go back there, not now.”
It
’s my turn to reach over and give her leg a squeeze. It’s a lame move, and not something I would normally do, but she seems to appreciate the gesture all the same, and I’m glad.
Two more days, I
realize, two more days before I can tell Mikey all this information. That’s if I make it back alive, anyway. Another thought creeps up on me: what if she’s wrong? What if each city was a cover for something else? Maybe they weren’t built for safety. It stands to reason that if one of them was built for testing, then surely others were built for other things too.
“Big
trouble spot coming up,” she says without looking at me.
Ra
chel reaches over and gives three sharp knocks on the cab wall instead of two like the previous time. We wait and listen for the knocks to be returned, and I turn to stare at her with an eyebrow lift.
“What trouble is it this time?”
“It might be nothing, but the last two out of three times we came down this road there was an ambush—at least an attempt at one. So again, no matter what, you don’t stop the truck for anything, you got it?”
I nod. “Okay.”
“You keep us at forty miles an hour, no less. These assholes will take us for everything we have and then some,” she says grimly. She reaches down to the floor and grabs another gun. I wonder why she doesn’t open the window this time, but when a bullet hits the side of the truck, I understand why. Rachel looks over and sees I’m only at thirty-five. “Speed up,” she yells, as more bullets hit the metal.
I do as she says, pressing down harder on the accelerator and making the truck lurch
forward. I try to keep my eyes on the road in front, but every now and then movement catches my eye and I look left and right, seeing faces in the tree line. I look to the front again as a woman steps out into the middle of the road up ahead.
“Rach
el!” I yell. “There’s no way I can avoid hitting her.” I look at her nervously, but she doesn’t return my stare, merely bows her head.
“Keep going,
” she says without hesitation.
I watch the woman getting closer and closer and
realize that she’s crying; she doesn’t want to be standing there—she’s being forced to.
“Rach
el, I can’t fucking hit her, I’ll kill her!” I ease off the accelerator.
“Don
’t stop!”
“But, Rach
el . . .”
“Don
’t fucking stop, Nina!” She leans over as the truck hits twenty-five miles an hour and presses down on my thigh, making me speed back up again.
“Get off me! I can
’t kill her, Rachel, don’t make me fucking kill her!” I try to bat her hands off me, making the truck swerve violently to the left. The woman in the road covers her head with both hands, and through the rain and the swishing of the windshield wipers I see her tortured and starved figure as she gets closer to me. “Fuck, Rachel!” I scream as the truck hits the woman’s frail body at forty-five miles an hour. The truck lurches over her body, finding it harder than the deaders’ rotting corpses but still easier than it would be with any other type of vehicle.
Maybe I imag
ine the feel of her bones crunching under my tires. Maybe I imagine her screams and the pop of her skull. All I know is that I murdered an innocent woman. I gag on the bile that flies up my throat, but swallow it back down. Rachel keeps herself pressed against my thigh for another mile or so, and I don’t bother to fight her. There’s no point now; I killed that poor woman.
We don
’t talk for a long time; there seems nothing left to say to one another. That and I fear that if I speak to her now, I’m more than likely going to pull my samurai sword out and hack her into tiny pieces. So I say nothing, I keep quiet and follow the road. She only talks to me when she needs to tell me which direction to turn. The rain even begins to calm down a little, which is a nice reprieve.
As night begins to fall,
Rachel looks at the map again and bangs four times on the cab wall. When it’s returned, she points at a small circle on the map.
“Take the next left and at the end of that road we
’ll be going right.”
I nod
but still don’t say anything.
“Don
’t hate me,” she whispers. It’s funny, I know she’s not a weak woman—she’s very far from it—but right now she seems it.
“I don
’t hate you,” I reply. “I just don’t like you very much right now.” I fight back the tears that are threatening to fall.
She had her reasons, I know she had her reasons,
is all I can think.
“Okay, I can handle that.”
At the end of the road I turn right like she said, and now that the rain has all but stopped, I can see a lot clearer. This road is wider, though we’re still on back roads and not main highways. I know we’re getting back to real civilization, and with that could be more trouble. I grit my teeth and keep on driving. Whatever happens, there’s no going back now.
We enter a run
-down town. Most of it seems like someone has tried to burn it down to the ground at one point: houses with roofs caved in, melted playground equipment in what was once a front yard, cars nothing more than burnt-out rusted shells. Bones litter the roadway—either from residents that got caught by the deaders or by deaders that got caught by someone’s rampage, I’m not sure. I try not to pay too close attention to those.
We keep going straight through the
town, passing vandalized storefronts. One after another they have succumbed to the years, through fire or ruin. Time has not been good to this town. I get a bad feeling about this place, and Rachel seems to be back on high alert, her window rolled all the way down, gun in place; but her finger is free from the trigger, so I guess it must be just precautionary.
We come to a small intersection
and Rachel tells me to go left. Trees have overturned here after getting too large for their spots, and I have to drive up and over the sidewalk to get past. I know it’s okay to do this now, but human nature still wants me to adhere to the rules of the road. Sometimes it’s harder to ignore those feelings, and I can’t help but be glad when I can get back on the road.
“Keep going all the way to the bottom of
the road and take another left,” she says, keeping her eyes firmly out the window.
I nod, and then
realize she can’t see me. “Okay,” I say quietly. It seems like a time to keep quiet, even though this truck is the noisiest damn thing around here.
A deader steps out into the road, turning
toward us with jerky, slow movements. It raises one arm, the other lying dormant at its side, and opens its mouth to groan at us. It takes one or two steps forward, finding it difficult with what looks like a snapped anklebone, and then stumbles to its knees. I feel a little sorry for it: how long must it have taken to get up to walking? It reminds me of a tortoise trying to roll over. As we pass it, it continues to reach and I slow down, taking a cautionary look at it. Both eyes have been gouged out, and the arm that was still by its side was only still because it wasn’t actually there at all. The arm seems to be missing completely; a single shirt sleeve hangs down, blowing in the breeze. I look away, not wanting to see any more, but wonder how long that image is going to stay in my head.
“That was pretty gross,
” I mumble to myself.
“They
’re all pretty gross.”
I look across at her and shrug. “Yeah, they are, but some are just so…” I struggle for the right word.
“Over the top?” Rachel suggests.
“Yeah, exactly. They
’re so over the top dead. I mean, I don’t even want to think about how they got into such a shitty state. They’re rotting, I get that, but that guy only had one arm, and where the fuck were his eyes?” I wrinkle up my nose. “God help me, if I die out here, please put a bullet in my head and don’t let me come back as one of these things.” I roll my shoulders, feeling all kinds of gross.
“You
’re not going to die out here. For one, Mikey would kill us for letting that happen, and two, you’re as bad-ass as they come,” she chuckles.
I snort
out a laugh. “I’ll take that compliment and raise you a ‘you’re pretty bad-ass yourself,’” I joke.
“I
’m sorry I made you kill that woman. Please believe me when I say it’s for the best.”
I clench my teeth hard. “Okay,
” I say. “I’m taking it you have experience with stopping to help and getting fucked over?”
I see her nod from my peripheral vision. “It didn’t end well. We lost a couple of crew members and more innocents on their side than I would like to remember. It wasn’t pretty.”
“If they’re innocent, then why are they with them?”
“They have nowhere else to g
o. Better the devil you know…” She trails off and I leave the rest of my questions unanswered.
We pass a supermarket
and I see movement inside. Rachel sees it, too, and gestures for me to slow the truck. I don’t stop, but roll at an easy five miles an hour. A deader shambles out of the store, a filthy flowery skirt flapping around its ankles for its trouble. It growls and heads toward us, almost tripping over a decaying corpse on the sidewalk to get to us.
Another follows close behind it, a once obese balding man whose guts look like they may have been rotting from the inside out
, the way his stomach looks so overly bloated with toxic gasses. I wipe my hand across my lips, feeling my mouth water at the thought of his churning rotten guts. As another deader pulls itself along the ground in an army SAS fashion, I see Nova come from around the back of the truck. She and Michael must have jumped down, and together they head for the trio of dead. I stop the truck and watch as Nova grips hold of the flowery deader by the throat and it returns the favor and grasps to her jacket. She’s careful to keep her fingers away from its snapping jaws as her other hand swings around and rams her knife into its forehead. It begins to slump to the ground, its hands still gripping her clothing as she steps back and shrugs out of its grip. Michael, meanwhile, has tackled the obese deader to the ground by grabbing it from behind. He sits astride it, his entire weight resting on top of the bloated stomach as he tries to keep a grip on it and keep it in place. Nova jogs over and happily slams her knife through its forehead. At the same time, the guy’s stomach decides to give way and a weird suck and pop sound can be heard as Michael collapses into the insides of the now very dead zombie.
He jumps up
and out of the rot, swearing, while Nova bursts out laughing. She stops when she gets wind of the smell coming from the rotting insides, though, and covers her mouth. Both Rachel and I are laughing too: Michael looks so pissed off, and I think we’re both more than glad that we don’t have to sit in the back of the truck with him.
“Jesus, that
’s gotta be worse than skunk stink, right?” I say. “Urghh, roll the fucking window up, Rachel.” I gag on the toxic fumes that have made their way over to the truck.
Rach
el happily obliges and looks at me with a half grin and a smirk. I roll my eyes and smile back before glancing over her shoulder.
Nova and Mikey are arguing again
, and for once Nova doesn’t look too happy. Who can blame her, really, though? I realize we’re missing a deader and I frown.
“There
’s a deader missing,” I mumble.
“What?”
“A deader. There’s a deader missing,” I say again, louder this time. I lean right over in my seat to try and scan the ground, but there’s no sign of it anywhere. The creepy little SAS deader has disappeared.
Rach
el opens her door and jumps down. “I’ll look for it,” she says, looking back in at me before screaming in pain. Her face contorts as she stamps her foot down, over and over, and I realize where the missing deader is hiding.