Z 2135 (11 page)

They ran through the woods without
stopping.

Every time Ana thought she couldn’t bear
more, ill-fortune surprised her. Her arm was pocked with diseased, rotting
flesh beneath the bandage, spreading out and up into her arm—yellow blisters
itching, burning, eating her alive.

Liam blurred beside her. Running without ceasing, labored only by her pauses. He
should run faster—staying with her was death.

Are they following?

Ana didn’t know. What she thought was the
rustle of pursuit might’ve been the forest mocking.

No, they were alone: her, him, and the
burning inside her.

Liam tugged at her wrist, the healthy
one, and pulled harder. “We have to go faster.”

Easier said than done.

But she tried all the same.

They were headed for The Outback, an
abandoned town bordered by eucalyptus that shaded the acres around it. On the
other side of The Outback, they’d find the road leading to Hydrangea … and
her father.

They had learned about the real Outback
at Chimney Rock—an endless desert in a place called Oz, from long ago. No one
knew what the city was called before someone from The Barrens pounded a sign in
the dirt, where the eucalyptus thinned. The sign said, The Outback: Zombies
Usually Flawking,
flocking
misspelled. Duncan had told them about
The Outback, two days before they found it, and five before Paradise found
them.

I’m burning.

Nothing good in The
Outback. Most stories
taking place in The Outback ended horribly, and Ana had no idea why anyone ever
went there. She couldn’t imagine how many worse stories went untold.

They were lucky; their first time wasn’t
bad. They stumbled through, Duncan so hungry for contact after finding nothing
but danger following the burning of West Village. Camps and villages—even
Bands, so Ana was told—all used The Outback as a training ground. There were
always zombies near or around it, way more than usual and for no reason anyone
could explain. Crowds seemed to self-spawn. Between zombies and training, The
Outback was a churning nest of life and death.

I am black inside.

Pain shot like bullets through Ana’s
body. She pushed herself to keep up, guilty because she was forcing Liam to
drag a walking corpse behind him.

His voice rang out from somewhere in the
blur. “Snap out of it!” Liam stopped and spun her to face him.

She fought for his eyes.

He put his hand to her cheek and said,
“Ana, can you hear me?”

She looked at him, dazed, then nodded.

“Can you hear
them?
”

She listened. Far off—the crackle of
leaves, the snapping of branches.

The scent of rage.

“Maybe.” A stutter, then, “Yes, I think so.”

So.

Much.

Pain.

“I know how much you’re hurting, but
we’re almost there. A few minutes more, okay? We’ll figure something out in the
city. Just stay with me, another few minutes.”

Liam didn’t wait for an answer, trotting
forward and tugging Ana by her unbitten wrist. They ran a few more minutes—
3 or 30, it no longer mattered—then
into a clearing before crossing it and racing through the mint-scented haze that
surrounded the fields of eucalyptus.

They stopped at the sign where the woods
surrendered to what once had been a thriving metropolis. The Outback was an
iron reminder of what the world lost. Even if what they had heard whispered
about Sutherland leading a revolution against The State was true and the
impossible actually happened—that world could never return. It was warped, past
bent to broken.

Streets were crumbled or, in many cases,
overgrown with vegetation. Ivy crawled up every structure. In the distance,
buildings leaned at sharp angles as if stretching against nature. Ana pictured
them leaning too far and toppling, then shuddered with the sense of
claustrophobia creeping in.

Mountains of concrete lay in broken piles
that looked in some places randomly scattered and in others somehow neatly
arranged. The Outback crawled with zombies, many on the streets and even more
inside the buildings, sometimes drifting in front of windows like specters.

Despite that, The Outback was so big that
it offered many places to hide if you were careful. The hope, Liam had said,
was that they’d lose the bandits behind them … without meeting more along
the way.

Liam pulled Ana into an alley so they
could catch their breath. “Everything will be fine. We’ll stay alert and out of
sight, get some rest, then leave when it’s safe. Okay?”

Ana nodded.

She looked at Liam for the first time
since their flight and saw how vulnerable he was. He had one empty gun and was
missing the other. His bag of trinkets from Duncan—each one engineered to keep
them alive—was gone. She hoped they’d find new weapons in The Outback, before
something found them.

 “In there,” Liam pointed across the street to
what looked like a hollowed-out liquor store. They ran toward it. Ana did her
best to keep up as Liam held her hand, until he let go and ducked inside the
old store. She followed, getting just inside the entrance before he said, “Stay
here, I’ll be right back.” He quickly and quietly plunged into the darkness of
the empty store. He soon returned wearing a brittle layer of calm.

Seconds later Ana heard a commotion outside
the store, not too far off. Before she could open her mouth, Liam caught her
look and violently shook his head. He slapped one hand over her mouth and put a
finger to his lips as he pulled her behind an empty, broken shelf, out of view.

The bandits were outside the shop, boots
crunching on the caked debris. Ana knew that if they were caught it was all
over, especially since Liam had no ammo.

Ana had no idea how many were left, but
it sounded like a lot. They were loud too, inviting zombies to their hunt. She
was crouched low, and Liam silently motioned for her to follow him. They made
their way behind the counter in the store’s rear, and when he looked back at
her, she held his eyes, telling herself they weren’t going to die, so Liam
could see
that
instead of the truth.

Finally, the voices faded away and Liam
peeked over the counter. He descended with a nod—all clear. They waited a few
more minutes, then crept out of the store.

Liam went first. Ana followed closely
enough that Liam was just a brushed finger ahead. He paused in the doorway,
looked left, right, and everywhere else with a glance. He turned back to Ana,
nodded again, and stepped into the street.

They wove through the broken roads,
navigating crumbled concrete, glass, chunks of rotted wood, and twisted metal.
Tall buildings blocked the sun, and made The Outback seem darker than the
forest.

“Where do we go?” Ana asked quietly, able
to speak now that her wrist pain had subsided to an ache less than murder.

“I don’t know,” Liam said, voice just
above a whisper as he crept toward the corner, ducking around a low-hanging
sign. “Zombies could be hiding anywhere, in any building. We can take them out
quietly if we have to, but killing leaves a path for the bandits. We’ve got to
get through the city, though, and find the river to the west.”

Liam made a sudden move to his right,
toward an ancient car, and Ana’s heart leapt into her throat. But he reached in
without hesitation and pulled a crowbar from the interior, the tool peppered in
a thick layer of powder. Just as quickly, Ana calmed down—they were armed now. Barely.

 Ana
pointed to a tall building two blocks up—at least ten floors, plus a few after
that. “Sorry, but I don’t think I can go on much more. I need to rest.”

“Rest?” Liam said, surprised, as they’d just
woke. But then he seemed to remember her injury, her infection.

She felt like a hindrance, and hated it.
If he were on his own, he could probably navigate The Outback far easier. But
her head was swimming, and she was short of breath. Running away from the
bandits had taken everything she had, and now she needed to refuel.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just need a little
bit of time to rest.”

She had started to explain more, but he
cut her off, “No, it’s OK, we’ll find somewhere to
hide out.”

Ana looked up at the tall building she’d
pointed out and said, “If we go high I think we’ll be safe. Didn’t Duncan say
that zombies usually avoid climbing stairs or something? Even if a few strays
got ambitious, they wouldn’t cluster. We could take them out one by one on our
way to the top.”

“No,” Liam said. “That’s a longer walk to
the top than you realize. If the bandits happen inside, they’ll find a trail of
dead zombies to the top.”

“That’s assuming we’re killing zombies in
the lobby. If they don’t see any evidence there, why go further? At least not more than a couple of floors. We go as high as
we can, avoiding, not killing, and that should throw them off. I can make it to
the top, Liam.” Ana straightened her shoulders. “Besides, if we go high, we can
get a better view of the city and map a path out, right?”

Liam looked at her, thinking.

She added, “If they’re coming up the
stairs, we’ll hear them. We’ll know where they are, but they’ll only be able to
guess where we are. Eventually, they’ll give up, right? Or get chased off by
zombies or other bandits?”

 Liam
didn’t exactly smile, but it was close considering he was in the
zombie-infested Outback. “Let’s go,” he said, and turned toward the tall
building.

They ducked, Liam first, through a warped
metal door frame—long since missing its glass—and headed for the stairs,
conveniently right in front of them. The stairs rose from the lobby, narrowing
into darkness. The lobby was wide, which made it hard at first to make out the
zombies inside. There were five of them, Ana noticed. The zombies looked up,
one at a time, each registering an undead version of surprise before ambling
toward them. Luckily they were slow, the sort of zombie that was only
threatening en masse. Liam and Ana easily ran through them—not bothering to
fight, feeling they’d be safe once they were up the stairs. They were one
flight up, though, when they saw two zombies: a man and a woman.

So much for zombies not
climbing stairs.

The woman was four steps up, blocking the
stairs. Behind them, they could hear the shuffling zombies making their way
after them.

Adding insult to injury, the bandits
burst into the lobby below, one of them finishing a sentence: “… yeah, I’m
sure.”

Liam gently pushed Ana down two stairs,
backed up beside her, then planted his foot one more step behind and drove his
crowbar forward into the male zombie’s face, killing it instantly. Before he
could pivot toward the female zombie, Ana was running toward her. She slammed
her body against the wall. The zombie gnashed and snarled as Ana ducked low
and, she hoped, hopefully out of reach.

The zombie screamed,
a siren to the bandits.

Liam leapt past Ana, crashing his crowbar
into the zombie’s face and dropping her to the stairs. Below them, in the
broken doorway of the second floor, zombies shrieked.

One of the bandits screamed, “They’re up
there!”

Liam grabbed Ana’s hand and they began
racing up the stairs, making it one more flight before the bandits caught up
with the zombies on the second-floor stairwell.

Suddenly: screams, human and zombie;
grisly gnashing; four energy blasts perfectly spaced; a wet slap; two thuds; a
stumble and a curse; the scampering of feet.

Liam and Ana continued up the stairs.

As they ran, Liam screamed, purposefully
drawing more zombies into the stairwell behind them.

They hit the rooftop doorway as more
gunfire erupted several floors below. The bandits were
too well-armed to be delayed long enough for Ana and Liam to escape. They’d
have to stand off against the bandits 14 stories above The Outback with nowhere
to go.

Ana was hoping—the entire run up—that
they’d find an advantage on the roof. Somewhere to hide or
something to shift their odds or change the game. As they raced from the
doorway and toward what looked to be a large water tower, Ana asked, trying to
catch her breath, “How many bandits do you think there are?”

“Not many. Ten, maybe a
few more.”

“Think we can take them?”

“Hell if I know, but we’re going to try
our damnedest,” Liam said as they ducked behind the tower and looked around.

The nearest building was at least four
stories shorter. Even if they could survive the fall, the gap was too far to
jump.

There were three other towers on the
roof, along with several 10-by-10 wooden boxes. Ana had no clue what they were.
But there were no other doors, or places to run.

“So this is it?”

Liam nodded, peeking past the tower—their
only pathetic cover—ready to face whatever emerged. Ana knelt
beside him, catching her breath.

The stairwell door exploded open. His
false confidence vanished, along with the color from his face.

Adam sat in the City Watch van’s
passenger seat, noticing how much different The City looked from a Watcher’s
side of the glass.

Chief Keller didn’t walk him down
personally, saying it was better for Adam to serve as the Chief’s eyes and ears
without the overt connection in the other men’s eyes. Adam had asked if other
Watchers already knew that he went to the Chief’s office all the time, and
Keller said yes, but that everyone also knew he felt an obligation to look
after the son of Jonah Lovecraft. And it was well established that since he’d
lost his own son, he couldn’t stand to see young men, particularly ones with
promise, lost to The Dark Quarters. Keller had assured Adam that many of the men already considered
Adam one of them. They’d loved his father like a brother, and by extension,
they loved Adam.

“You’re already in the system. Simply
give your name to Dispatch and they’ll send you out on the next call. This is a
learning experience above all else,” the Chief had reminded him, “but you
should also try to have fun.”

So Adam had walked down to Dispatch
alone, giving his name to the man with the bulbous nose sitting at the front
desk. “You’re here for a ride-along, eh?” The man seemed friendly, despite his
red face, which looked angry at a glance.

“Yes,” Adam nodded.

“Pretty young, huh?” the man said, but
his face broke into a genuine smile.

Adam nodded.

“Good for you. Now, a ride-along is just
what it sounds like: you’re along for the ride, to see what a Watcher goes
through on a daily basis. You can definitely ask questions, though, as many as
you want. The Watchers will give you a good idea of what you can expect in a
few years, when you’re out in the field … at least they’re supposed to.”

The man looked at the screen then turned
back to Adam. “You have Fogerty and Carson, so you should have an OK time.
Carson’s a good kid; you’ll like him. Fogerty’s an old bastard like me—don’t
believe a word he says unless you plan on hating the world.”

Adam laughed and said OK. The man pressed
a button on his desk and called for Fogerty and Carson. A few minutes later a
good kid and an old bastard led Adam to their van.

Fogerty said he’d been on City Watch
forever, and looked it. They were only gone from the station for a few minutes
when Adam decided he didn’t like Fogerty at all. Fogerty had a personality like
Adam had expected Chief Keller’s to be, judging from Keller’s appearance. But
while Keller was kind, Fogerty seemed mad at the world.

Everyone they passed on the streets was
suspect to Fogerty: a crook, dirtbag, or mouth breather, whatever that was.
Fogerty seemed like the sort of City Watcher Michael and others were right not
to trust—an officer who probably caused more trouble than he prevented.

The other cop, Carson, was nice. He
reminded Adam a little of Michael. He was very tall and very skinny. He had a
long neck and a soft voice. His eyes seemed smaller than the rest of his face,
and while he only spoke one word for every hundred of Fogerty’s, Adam wanted to
hear all of Carson’s.

After they left Municipal they cut over
to Commuters, across the Exurban, and through the manned checkpoint into The
Dark Quarters—the scariest part of City 6, by far.

Since everything with his dad, Adam
started having more varied nightmares. Before that, his bad dreams
always
had been about The Dark Quarters; they’d started when he
first saw The Quarters as a setting on some of his favorite shows.

While many parents and authority figures
used The Dark Quarters as some sort of cautionary tale or to tell their own
children how lucky they were in comparison, Adam’s parents never did. That
didn’t stop him from obsessing about the place from an early age.

Adam remembered in school hearing about a
kid born in The Quarters; he was so deformed that no one would claim him.
Apparently the boy found people who would care for him a day or two at a time,
but no one to love him or take him in permanently. Worse, The State wouldn’t
allow him in the orphanages because of his deformities. The State didn’t
believe in helping weakness thrive. It was far more merciful, according to the
One True Leader Jack Geralt, to allow nature to thin the herd of the sick and
dying. That was the only way to build the overall strength of The State. And
what was good for The State was good for all.

The deformed boy, over the years, grew
bitter and angry. Eventually, he started killing people, and—for reasons nobody
knew or understood—began eating them.

He was known as The Dark Quarters
Cannibal, and became one of the most notorious Darwin Games contestants of all
time. The moment Adam heard the cannibal’s story, he dreamed of getting lost in
The Quarters, searching winding alleys for his parents. Adam would run through
his dreams, every time ending up at the end of a dead-end alley. He’d hear the
cannibal whistling, humming pleasant tunes as he cornered his victims. Adam
always managed to wake up just as the killer was raising a blade to stab him.

The dreams had plagued Adam for most of
his life, until the ones about his father started late last year.

Now, to go into the very place that was
the source for so many of his nightmares had him feeling both apprehensive and
eager to put the childish fears behind him.

 Adam
remembered something the Chief had said that made him wonder how a kind man
like Keller could be so cold.

“There will always be a need for a place
like The Dark Quarters, Adam. We could clear it tomorrow and it would grow back
in a month, slowly at first, until it was swollen again, fat on its vice. It is already
what it needs to be. The City can’t take care of everyone, not without hurting
the many. Would you rather have a small family where you could feed everybody
and keep them happy, or a large family with everyone
starving?”

“A small family,” Adam had said.

“Exactly,” Keller agreed. “And that is
why places like The Dark Quarters must exist, so the people who deserve
happiness can find it.”

Looking out the windows of the Watcher
van, Adam started to get a feel for what Keller was saying. While City 6 was
hardly a paradise, it was leaps and bounds above the squalor running rampant in
The Dark Quarters: tall, filthy buildings shoved so close together they seemed
like some sort of elaborate scheme to defy gravity; bags of trash everywhere
the eye could see; and people who looked so dirty, neglected, and haunted, Adam
was sure they’d plague his sleep for years to come.

If Keller was right, and there were
really only two choices—some people happy and well fed while others were cast
to The Quarters, or everyone barely living—Adam supposed he was glad he had the
better life. Still, as he looked around, he felt guilty that others suffered
for his meager prosperity.

Carson pointed to a parking lot up the
street, crammed with cars. There was a man with a large rifle standing guard in
the lot. The man wore some sort of uniform. It wasn’t City Watch, but still
looked official. “We’ll park there, then head out on
foot. You ready?”

Adam nodded. He couldn’t wait.

“Just stay with us and you’ll be fine. We
won’t let anything happen to a Lovecraft,” Carson winked.

They parked the van with Hech, the man
with the rifle who promised to keep a “real good eye” on it. The way they joked
around with one another, Adam figured they’d been parking with Hech for a
while.

For 15 minutes they walked The Quarters.
Unlike his grousing in the van, Fogerty stayed mostly silent save for an odd
grunt or to correct something Carson said—never the specificity of his words so
much as
how
he said them—while showing the Cadet
“The City’s seedy underbelly.” He told Adam that he would probably be doing
most of his early Watcher’s work in The Quarters, and pointed out the crumbling
tenements, decaying like the addicts inside them. He said they were getting
through most days strung out on Crash, an illegal street drug that clung to The
Quarters like paint to walls. It was cheap and kept users hazed for days,
helping them forget the despair in their lives. The drug numbed them,
pleasantly at first, then not so much until it eventually fried their brains
and left the users for The City’s incinerators.

Adam was surprised by how many people he
saw buying, selling, and taking the drug out in the open, just like he was
surprised by half-naked women walking or hanging out windows of some of the
rundown buildings. It seemed like everything was for sale in The Quarters,
whether it was drugs, stuff (most stolen or refurbished trash, Fogerty told
him) from homes turned into storefronts, or people themselves.

At the end of their
walk, a tall man with skin stretched so tightly across his face it looked like
paper, sold something from a crate called Beans—advertised in large block
letters on a cardboard sign behind him.

“What are Beans?” Adam asked Carson.

“Nothing you want anything to do with.”

Fogerty said, “They’re dream pills. But
you never know what you’re gonna get. You could get a dream where you’re
surrounded by blondes and doing stuff in their mouths, or you could get one
with zombies. You never know, Kid. Beans are Russian roulette with your sleep.”

Adam couldn’t understand there being so
much illegal activity, right in plain sight. They were Watchers. Even though
Adam was only a Cadet, it was
their
job to put an end to
the bad stuff. But there was so much, and they were walking right by, watching
rather than
Watching
.

“Why aren’t we stopping them?” Adam asked, his voice low. “And why aren’t they
afraid of us or hiding their bad stuff?”

Fogerty said, “What, you gonna kill one
roach so another hundred can skitter out from a rock?”

Carson looked over at Fogerty with a roll
of his eyes and said, “Killing one in plain sight doesn’t bring the others out
from a rock, and even if it did, at least you got one.” He turned to Adam and
set a hand on his shoulder. “Great question, kid. I once
wondered the same thing. Why do
you
think it’s the way it is?”

Adam looked from Fogerty to Carson.
Fogerty had a point, about the roaches.

“Because there’s too
many?”

“That’s a part of it.” Carson smiled.
“See, there has always been crime, always will be. It’s in people’s nature. No
matter what we do, or what sort of laws we pass—no matter how high we build our
Walls or how hard we work to keep monsters outside—we’ll always have some
inside too. We can never stop all crime. That’s impossible, and every society
before ours has made the same mistake by thinking they
could
stop it. We can’t do that, not ever.”

He took a look around—even just talking,
Carson was every bit City Watch, and he never seemed to let his guard down.
Satisfied for the moment, he continued.

“But what Jack Geralt figured out that no
one ever figured out before is that the best way to stop crime is to let it
happen, but keep it in a part of The City where it won’t affect the majority.
The Quarters affects a relative few; they’re all gated in like animals, and
that’s best for all of us. We patrol The Dark Quarters to make sure nothing too
awful is brewing, but as long as people aren’t killing one another or plotting
against The State, City Watch leaves the drugging, gambling, and whoring mostly
alone.”

Adam heard the Chief in his head:
No one ever finds themselves in The Dark
Quarters entirely by accident.

“Then why are
we
here? Why are there so many Watchers assigned to The Dark Quarters?”

From what Adam knew so far, patrols in
The Quarters were mandatory for most new Watchers. Some (like Fogerty) never
left. Special Assignments were rare, though the Chief promised that Adam was
equally rare, and that he probably wouldn’t have to spend much time in The
Quarters.

Carson was about to explain, but Fogerty
cut him off.

“We’re here because it teaches us to look
criminals in their ugly fucking faces, and looking criminals in their fucking
ugly faces teaches us to be ready and recognize our enemy better. More
important, we can contain the threat in The Quarters before it spreads out to
the places that matter.” Fogerty jerked his thumb in no particular direction,
indicating Municipal, Commuters, and all the rest of City 6.

They crossed the street, their van now
out of sight. Adam was starting to feel claustrophobic, like the tall, dark
buildings were closing in around him.

Fogerty stopped in front of a small
market, and looked at Adam, “We’re going in here, so just keep your mouth shut
unless spoken to, got it?”

“Got it,” Adam said with a nervous gulp.
He looked at the storefront, a shoddy looking place with a boarded-up window
and bars over the glass door.

They entered the shop and Adam looked
around, trying to figure out why they were stopping here. Though old and poorly
stocked, it seemed like a regular business, unlike the many crate-shops lined
up along the streets.

The shelves had barely anything on them,
mostly food rations and small, seemingly random household items. The overhead
lights were a low blue, and hummed as they flickered. They passed a worn
payment counter and went into a hallway so narrow it felt like the walls were
closing in. Carson nodded at an ancient, dark-skinned man with a foot-long
beard, sunken eyes, and hands shoved inside his long dark coat. He sat on a
stool in front of an old wooden door with peeling purple paint,. The door once said something in big black letters, but
the letters had long ago faded, leaving Adam with no idea what they might have
read.

Fogerty stepped in front of Carson and
rapped his knuckles hard on the door in a pattern—once, twice, then once again.

The door opened immediately following the
final knock, and Adam found himself looking up into the yellowing eyes of a
giant black man with teeth that looked as big as playing cards and hands the size
of melons. His hair shot out from his head like a helmet; he had more than
anyone Adam had ever seen—thick and black, made from a million tiny curls. He
was dressed in what looked like a giant sack—burlap stitched together—as if
nothing else could possibly fit him. His pants were dark, with lots of pockets
like the ones City Watch wore. His boots looked City Watch too. He looked from
Carson to Fogerty, from Fogerty to Carson, and finally down at Adam. He
laughed. The sound was giant, a bellow, and seemed to flicker the thin blue
lights as it thundered the market.