Eric was silent, keeping his head down as he walked.
When they reached the farmhouse, Gabriel motioned for them to stay. He turned toward the house and approached the steps. He only made it up two of them before the door opened and a man stepped out, presumably the farmer, looking first at Conrad, then at James and Eric, then finally at Gabriel.
“You here for the car?”
Gabriel nodded.
The farmer gave them another once-over, shrugged, and said, “Follow me.”
He took them to the barn. It was dark inside, only a modicum of light cutting through the slats, illuminating the floating dust and the shadow of the sedan parked in a stall in the back.
“Keys are already inside.” The farmer, an old stoop-shouldered man with a withered face, used his fingers to wipe some dust off the hood. “Should run just fine for you. Ran the engine a little every week, changed its oil almost every six months, and that’s about it. Albert never told me to do nothing else to it.”
Opening the driver’s door, Gabriel said, “It’s fine. Thank you.” He bent in and came back out with the keys, walked back to the trunk and opened it.
When the farmer stepped over to see what was inside, he whistled and said, “Oh my. I never knew all that was in there. Albert really prepared you for the worst, didn’t he?”
Gabriel had pulled aside the false bottom to reveal a small arsenal beneath, a dozen assault rifles and pistols and what looked like to Conrad when he stepped forward to peek inside a scattering of plastic explosives. Before his eyes could adjust enough to the dark, though, Gabriel had reached forward, extracted a mobile phone, and slammed the trunk shut. He handed the keys to Conrad.
“You’re going to have to drive.”
It was then Conrad noticed that almost all of the car’s windows were tinted. The only window not completely tinted was the front windshield.
Gabriel went over to the farmer and shook his hand. He said thank you again, then leaned forward, whispered something into the farmer’s ear. The farmer listened a moment, his withered face expressionless, before a kind of shocked understanding came to his eyes. His mouth half-open, he slowly regarded Eric.
“Why, it really is you, isn’t it?” the farmer said. “I wish Lydia was still here to see you. She’d love to see what you’ve become.” He shuffled a step forward but then paused when Eric took a step back. “Don’t you recognize me, Eric? Don’t you know who I am?”
There was a heavy silence.
Gabriel stepped forward and placed a hand on the farmer’s shoulder. “Thank you again, but we have to go.”
The farmer said, “Tell me you’re happy, Eric. Can you at least tell me that?”
Eric, his face tense, shook his head slowly, looking at Gabriel for help.
“Come on,” Gabriel said to them, and turned the farmer around, spoke to him once more.
Conrad watched them as James and Eric got into the back of the sedan, watched Gabriel whispering to the farmer and the farmer nodding and whispering back. When Gabriel shook the farmer’s hand one last time and turned to get in the car, Conrad asked what he had said.
“Remember how Eric was manufactured?” Gabriel tilted his head back toward the farmer. “That’s the father that raised him.”
The farmer stood off to the side, watching them, his face pinched with grief. He stood there and was quiet as Gabriel squeezed into the back of the sedan. He stood there and only shook his head slowly as Conrad got into the driver’s seat.
“Good luck,” the farmer called, “good luck,” and he raised his hand and held it up as the sedan’s engine started; he began waving it as the sedan rolled away, out of the barn, and into the light.
The Kipling Zoo
had once been the premier zoo in Olympus. It had hosted a wide array of animals, from lions and tigers, to giraffes and elephants, to monkeys and snakes. But once The Zoo opened across town (named for the fact that it was
the
best zoo in the world), the Kipling’s attendance dropped. Soon it was too much for the owners to maintain on such a small budget, and they had no choice but to sell the animals and close. The property had been built in what had become the Ward, and no business in its right mind wanted to open up anything there. For years the city had talked about tearing the zoo down and putting in low-income housing, but there had just been too much black tape. So for decades it sat untouched, its gates closed and locked to the world. The only people who entered it now were the homeless, rebel teens, and the police who once a week came in and kicked them all out.
At least this was what Gabriel said as they drove through the city, getting closer and closer to the old zoo.
Conrad barely listened. He was still thinking about his wife and son. Gabriel had given him the phone as they’d sped down the Shakespeare, and he’d used it first to dial Denise’s mobile phone. He’d expected it to ring four or five times before her voicemail picked up, but instead an electronic voice informed him that the number had been disconnected. When he tried the house he expected the answering machine to pick up, but the phone rang and rang and rang, which meant Denise had disconnected it herself, or worse, someone else had done it when they’d come to take her away.
But he would have to deal with that later. Right now he had to focus on the task at hand, which was taking them through downtown Olympus and into the Ward. Here the houses and buildings went through a sudden transformation where they appeared sunken, dirty, cheap. Windows boarded over, some buildings gutted out, an endless number of walls covered in graffiti.
“See these people?” Gabriel said as they drove down Dickens Avenue, the kids playing on the sidewalks, adults watching from porch steps and drinking from paper bags, some homeless crouched against the sides of buildings, bundled in blankets. “You think they chose to exist this way? Maybe they did. But place them in a different part of Olympus, in a different part of the world. Give them a chance to do something else. It’s just like Gray’s poem, all these people with so much unused potential.”
They passed a corner store, bars over its windows, three hustlers outside playing the corner, waiting for their next customer.
“You want to know something else they won’t teach you in school? After the Zombie Wars, when the Government was trying to establish itself, they wanted everyone to be equal. No rich, no poor, everyone’s all the same. It didn’t last a year. The system was chaos. Communism sounds great on paper, but when put to the test it always fails. So they switched to capitalism, which was what their living helpers had told them to do all along, and that’s why you have the world you have today. People getting richer, people getting poorer, people not being able to afford enough to feed themselves.”
The Kipling was five blocks away now, the wrought-iron gates growing larger, the cages’ steepled roofs rising into the sky.
“So put yourself here, Conrad. You don’t have imagination, I know, but just try it. Try to imagine what your existence would have been like had you been born and raised in this section of the city. Different parents, different home, different upbringing. Your father wouldn’t have been who he was, so would you even have become a Hunter? Would you be the same man you are now? Would you have married the same woman that became your wife? Would you have had the same child that became your son?”
Conrad continued down Dickens, passing the Kipling on the right. He went to the intersection and made the turn, started back toward the rear of the zoo.
“That’s existence,” Gabriel said, sitting slouched in the backseat, staring out his window, “that’s life. Understanding your potential and doing something about it, not just waiting for something to happen.”
There were some abandoned buildings at the rear of the zoo, what had once been used for maintenance. Conrad drove between two of these, cut the engine, and unclipped his seatbelt. He grabbed the mobile phone off the passenger seat, stuck it in his pocket, and opened his door.
They grabbed everything they could from the trunk, the assault rifles, the extra ammunition, even the two plastic explosives. There were also two pairs of night-vision glasses which Gabriel and James took. Then they turned away from the sedan, started toward the fenced-in zoo, toward the waterworks building.
Litter was scattered all over the pavement, pieces of shattered glass glinting in the sun. The afternoon was so quiet Conrad could hear the detritus crunching under the soles of their boots.
They came to one of the gates, James with one of the plastics in hand, but the lock was already cut and they walked straight through. The same was true of the waterworks building. Not only had the windows in the door been shattered, but the deadbolt had been smashed out. All they needed to do was push it open and step into the dark.
Here there were cardboard boxes, blankets, discarded needles and empty bottles. A few magazines lay scattered around, the kind with not only naked men and women but also children. Conrad, disgusted, kicked away one magazine that showed a dead having intercourse with another dead made up to look like a living.
James, the bomb put away and a rifle now in hand, led them farther into the structure. Walking quietly like he had when he was Tracking, taking his time, he took them through one doorway after another, until they came to a locked iron door.
The explosive was set, timed for just one minute, and they hurried out of the room and waited the long sixty seconds before there was a sudden boom and then they reentered the room, dust everywhere, the plastic big enough to destroy the lock but not too big that it would cause the rest of the building harm.
Once the dust settled, once James was able to open the door, they entered into a narrow corridor. They went down steps. At the bottom of the steps was another iron door. Unlike the one they’d just gone through, this door was locked by a large iron wheel. Forgotten for decades, disused for even more, this door was now their entrance into the Labyrinth.
Two miles and
an hour later they came to a third iron door, the Milton Maximum Security Prison right above them. They’d arrived with about fifteen minutes to spare. In an hour Eugene Moss would be executed just outside the Herculean, in the same courtyard Scott, Garry, Brooks, and Ruth had been executed. Because Philip wanted to avoid any and all hassles when it came to the swarm of media and possible protesters, Eugene was being transported via a method almost everyone in the city had seemed to have forgotten.
The darkness was palpable, the silence thick. The only sounds as they negotiated the various pathways had been their hushed footsteps scraping the ground, the zombies’ labored breathing, the distant squeaking of rats. Soon it was just the zombies’ labored breathing taking up the dark silence, Conrad knowing where each of them stood by their intake and release of breaths. He’d been in dark this entire time, Gabriel and James the only ones with the night-vision glasses, Conrad walking with Eric between them and trying not to trip or run into Eric every time Gabriel stopped.
Gabriel had already gone over the plan of attack, how they were going to surprise Eugene Moss and his entourage of armed guards. Now there was nothing else to do but wait out the silence and count down the seconds until the inside lock was disengaged and the door opened.
Then, in the dark and hushed silence, James whispered, “What’s that?”
They listened.
Eric whispered, “Is that …”
“Shh,” Gabriel said. He had been sitting on the ground but now quickly stood up. “Follow me.”
Conrad had been standing this entire time, leaning against the wall. He didn’t know which way Gabriel meant to go, to the left or the right, and he turned to the left only to walk into James, who, wearing the night-vision glasses, pushed him back to the right.
They started down the corridor, as quietly as possible, while the faint and distant sound of footsteps grew closer.
They didn’t get far. They turned a corner and Gabriel stopped, tried turning back, and then all at once the new footsteps became even louder, much more frantic, and there were shouts, yells, commands to stop, and before Conrad knew it lights came on, a dozen different flashlight beams cutting the dark, Gabriel and James crying out as they tore off their glasses. Eric was pushed into Conrad, Conrad tripped and fell down, and before he had a chance to stand back up more lights were in his eyes and a gun was aimed at his face and he immediately went for his own gun, the one he’d somehow dropped, he went for it because he wasn’t going to expire in this lost and forgotten corridor beneath the city, he wasn’t going to expire without seeing his son one last time.
Then a voice said wait. It said lower the weapon. It said get out of my way.
The gun aimed at his face disappeared, another set of footsteps approached, and that same voice now said, “Hey there, Al, didn’t expect to see you down here. How’s your mom holding up?”
“Believe it or
not, I had you pegged for a Hunter the moment I saw you. Standing there along the highway, your thumb sticking out, I asked myself just what in the world was a Hunter doing trying to hitch a ride. Especially since Hunters are now more powerful than ever.”
They had moved about fifty yards away down the corridor, making lefts and rights, and now they were crouched together in a circle, the four of them and the seat-bouncing, cigarette-smoking, pistol-carrying truck driver. Only he wasn’t a truck driver. And his name wasn’t Ben. And the load he’d been transporting, it wasn’t
for
the new Hunter General and his army so much as it was for those zombie sympathizers getting ready to take a stand against them.
“How did you know I was a Hunter?” Conrad asked. He stood leaning against the wall, staring down at his pistol.