Last Rites (20 page)

Will kept looking around as the others worked. There was definitely some movement in the trees, but it wasn’t coming closer so Will said nothing. He wasn’t afraid of whatever dead people they’d find there, but of what he’d have to do to them if they were found.

“Hey,” said Chris. “What’s that? Something moving?”

Shit, now he’d spotted the movement. Kid was kind of a pest, even if he weren’t as cold and brutal as the others. Yeah, that about summed up the guys—cruel or clueless, and only the former seemed to last very long.

Will raised the rifle so he could look through the scope. “Something,” he said. “Can’t tell what.” He wasn’t lying, either. He could just see an occasional motion at the base of one tree, but it was too much in the shade for him to make out what it was.

Garrett stepped up next to him, observing the trees, then looking around closer to where they were standing. “Chris—take the F.N.G. and check it out,” Garrett said. “We’re out in the open here, none of them can sneak up on us while you’re out there. But snap it up. And do
not
go further back in those trees to where we can’t see you. Just walk up and shoot whatever the fuck it is. Be sure you use a silencer, even though I bet they know we’re here already. We need to hurry up. This place is still too hot.”

Will and Chris started off toward the trees, Will dividing his attention between the tree line and the ground just in front of them, wary for any more traps. When they were right next to the spot where he’d seen motion, Will could finally make out a human form, sitting under the one tree. It was a dead girl, wearing one of those striped shirts and holding an aluminum bat across her lap. She looked enough like Rachel that it made him shiver—same build, same hair, even if it had faded to an unnatural hue. Just sitting there. Didn’t even snarl. Just stared at him with clouded eyes, her mouth open a little.

“What’s it doing?” Chris said. “Why doesn’t it attack?”

“Probably injured, can’t move.”

“Well, shoot it and let’s go.”

“Why? She’s just a girl. She’s not doing anything.”

Will turned to see Chris’s shocked expression. “What?” Chris said. “It’s not a girl. It’s just a dead thing. It’s not good for anything anymore. Just kill it. It’s grossing me out.”

“How can you say that? People don’t have to be useful for something.”

The kid’s look hardened a bit, like he’d been coached in a certain way of looking at things, certain phrases that had to be said to brush aside doubts. “Yeah, they do, actually. But that’s not even a person. It’s not even alive. So kill it.”

Now the girl did snarl as she raised the bat. She’d looked resigned before—now she looked defiant. “See—it’s dangerous,” Chris said. “Put it down.”

“She’s just doing that because you’re standing right next to her, talking about shooting her in the head. So shut the fuck up.”

Now Chris looked amused as well as shocked, and still with that hardness of someone who could deny the reality right in front of himself with complete certainty. “No—you shut the fuck up. You gone crazy? They don’t understand anything. She just wants to eat us. She would if she could.”

“Maybe, but she can’t. And look at her—she knows what we’re saying. You can see she does.”

Chris looked at the girl, then back to Will. “All I know is it needs to be killed.” He reached for his own weapon and Will grabbed his wrist. That was a big step, and Will didn’t know where it would lead, but it happened before he could really think about it.

“Hey!” Chris said. He looked like he also knew they’d gone too far now, that it had escalated past posturing, past the point where you could laugh it off.

“Don’t,” Will said. He knew he could probably smack the kid around pretty easily, but an altercation with another team member was going to complicate life considerably. He’d probably be working at the corner store after today, making half as much money. The girl wheezed and Will knew he’d made the only choice he could.

Chris glared at him and Will didn’t know how to end or defuse the situation. Then there was a shout from the direction of the truck stop. After a second it was followed by a long scream and a series of gunshots—not one weapon, but several, firing maybe as many as ten shots in a couple seconds.

Will pulled Chris away from the girl and shoved him toward the sounds. “Come on,” he shouted. “They need us. Go.”

After setting Becca in the woods, Lucy and her two remaining friends shuffled back to rejoin the main group of dead. Lucy looked around the crowd. She hadn’t done a head count before the attack, but the battle had clearly taken its toll. She guessed twenty or so hadn’t made it back, and the mob was now maybe a little over a hundred—not counting the smaller children, whom she couldn’t see among the others.

Lucy still wondered why such young people had come on this outing—or why they were even in the camp in the first place. She’d asked the other women about the children before, in camp, but they’d shrugged and said they were there to fight, like everyone else. That really didn’t make much sense, though when they’d left that morning, some of the men had made a point of shoving the children along with the crowd leaving the gate.

Walking to the truck stop and battling the other dead had taken all day and it would be dark soon. They couldn’t risk tripping and hurting themselves, so they sat down beneath a nearby overpass. Some of the men went among the abandoned cars there, sniffing. Lucy thought at first they were checking for hidden enemies, but she couldn’t quite make out what they were doing, it had gotten so dark. From their sounds, they were dragging stuff around and breaking things, but these were not the screams and howls of battle. Then Lucy caught the scent of gasoline. Another hideous stench the living people loved so much, and it made her recoil and shake her head.

“What the hell are they doing?” Lucy asked, looking from Christine to Carole, who both sat near her.

“Fire,” Carole said. “Keeps wild men away.”

“Yeah,” Christine grunted. “Scares regular people like us enough. Wild men really hate it. Makes them run far away.” There was a pause. “They’ll probably ask you. They never can do it themselves. Men—clumsy and scared.” She gave a coughing kind of chuckle.

“I know,” Carole said as she got up, joining her friend in laughter as she brushed herself off and ran her fingers through her hair.

Lucy was about to ask what they meant, when Ben approached them. Lucy studied him more closely than before. Most of the dead looked much paler than when they were alive, including black people, but his skin had remained a very dark shade. He’d kept a lot of his bulk and muscle tone as well. Lucy remembered how Becca had said he was one of the nicer men in the camp—not just because he was in better shape than most of them and more pleasant to look at, but because he was respectful, didn’t try to intimidate others or demand things. But he was still a man, so Lucy eyed him and rose to her feet as he got closer.

Ben looked at Lucy and gave her a little nod. “What’s your name?” he asked. He had a nice voice, too.

“Lucy.”

“That’s a pretty name—pretty like you. Who gave it to you?”

“My man.”

He smirked. “Ah. So you don’t want to be my woman, either? Why do all you pretty ladies treat me so badly?”

Carole laughed at this as Ben turned toward her, holding out a small object. Lucy couldn’t see what it was in the darkness.

“You light it, lady?”

“Yes, Ben,” Carole answered. Her voice sounded different than normal, higher and more nervous.

He smiled, showing rows of teeth better than most living people had. “You sure you don’t wanna be my woman all the time?” he said to Carole. “I keep lighter. You light fires. People would respect us. I’d protect you. It’d be nice.”

Carole gave her huffing laugh as she took the lighter. “Oh, Ben, you ask that all the time,” she said. Then she surprised Lucy by slipping her arm around Ben’s waist. “I like things the way they are. You can hold me as we walk over, so your friends will see. Then I’ll come back and sit with my friends. Okay?”

Ben put a big arm around her. “Yeah. That’s okay. Nice to hold you sometimes.”

“I know. I like it too,” Carole said as they walked away.

“She likes to flirt,” Christine said when they’d gone. “It’s good for her. You should try, too. It’s normal. Makes things easier.”

Lucy sat down next to the older woman. “Yeah, maybe someday,” she said. “I don’t trust people too much.”

Christine nodded. “Yeah. That’s normal, too.”

There was a crackling, whooshing sound as a large flame leaped up nearby. The assembly of dead people sent up a collective gasp, then settled into an agitated murmur for a few moments as they struggled to overcome their fear. When they nearly had, another flame erupted from the other side of the overpass, so they were flanked by fires. Their murmuring resumed, then finally died down as Carole returned to Christine and Lucy.

They sat there through the night, then resumed their march as soon as the sun was up. Walking by the blackened circle of debris that had been the fire the night before, Lucy thought it didn’t smell so bad now.

They continued through the morning, until they reached the outskirts of a town. Stopping at the top of a hill, they looked down on the remains of the settlement—just a collection of low buildings around a central cluster of multi-story structures. Most everything was so overgrown you could barely tell they’d been human constructions at one time, though the top floors of the taller buildings were still visible.

Lucy squinted. She thought she saw movement among the buildings, but couldn’t be sure.

The crowd was jostled around again, as they had been at the truck stop, though this time the men came through and rounded up the children, taking them to the front.

“What are they doing?” Lucy asked.

Carole shook her head. “It’s not nice. Don’t ask. Just wait till we have to fight. Isn’t that bad enough?”

Lucy tried to see over the other people, but she wasn’t tall enough. She had the most driving curiosity about this, as well as a sense of dread. Just ignoring it wasn’t going to work.

“No, I want to know,” Lucy said as she started to make her way through the crowd.

“I’ll go with her,” she heard Christine say from behind.

Lucy got to the front of the crowd, with Christine emerging a moment later to stand next to her. Eight small children—they looked like they’d been about five or so when they died—were in front of the main group. Ben was off to the side, looking down on the town through those things that make everything look closer. Not a telescope—that was one long tube, whereas these were two short ones that you held up to both eyes. A microscope? No, that was something else.

It almost seemed as though Ben were supervising or directing, while the other men took bundles from the duffle bags and attached them to the children’s backs. Lucy looked more carefully at the children who were facing her direction. They appeared as ambivalent as the dead usually were about anything other than fire and live humans. They didn’t show fear or nervousness or even much interest in what was being done to them, their heads lolling around as they were jostled about. One boy who caught Lucy’s attention looked rather nasty and belligerent, baring his teeth as she stared at him. But he might have been squinting at the sun, or grimacing at the strap being pulled too tight. You never knew.

When the children were prepared with their backpacks, the men turned them all toward the town below. Ben stepped forward to address them.

“Men down there are
not
our friends,” he shouted. His voice was soothing and commanding at the same time. “They are bad men. They hurt our friends yesterday. You understand?” The children grunted and nodded. “You go down there.” He pulled two aside. “You two—go inside their big buildings.” He came down the line to the next two and separated them. “You two—there’s a pile of cars and trucks in the middle of town—climb up on it. The rest of you—make noise. Get bad men to chase you. Then run away from them—but do
not
come back here. Stay down there and find as many bad men as you can. Then let them get close to you. Pull the strings in your hands. Then you go.” Ben held his hands over his head. “You go—up to where Santa and bunnies and fairies live forever. They’ll be nice to you. They’ll give you so much love. You’ll be happy. You’ll never be hungry or scared again. You be proud now. You are heroes. Now—go!”

The children lurched down the hill as best they could, in an uneven, tottering sort of jog. Lucy watched their small heads bobbing in the grass, which was almost as tall as they were.

She turned on Christine. “They send them in there? With—things?” She hated it when she couldn’t remember a word, especially if she was trying to say it to someone else, but now her anger was increased by this monstrous scene, and by her own complicity in it. “With b-b-bombs?” She was so worked up she was stuttering now too, which further added to her shame, frustration, and rage.

Christine looked completely unperturbed—though there might have been the tiniest spark of sympathy for Lucy, a shred of pity, almost, for someone who could still feel the obvious wrongness of all this. She put her hand on Lucy’s shoulder. “It’s better this way,” she said. “A few die, so others won’t.”

Lucy pushed her hand away. “I don’t care. This isn’t better. This isn’t right.”