Mutated - 04 (16 page)
Authors: Joe McKinney
Richardson studied Nate’s face for some sort of reaction, but there was none.
“Well,” he said, pushing on, “after we reached the wall we just decided to keep going. I mean, we couldn’t stay there, you know? So we wandered north until we saw signs for a community this preacher named Jasper Sewell was forming.”
“The Cedar River Grasslands.”
The words stopped Richardson cold. “That’s right,” he said. “You heard what happened at the Grasslands?”
Nate didn’t answer right away. He looked around the bare, dilapidated farmhouse. He wouldn’t meet their eyes.
Finally, he said, “I was there.”
“You were there?” Richardson said. “At the Grasslands?”
Nate nodded.
“Uh, look,” Richardson said, “it was kind of a small community. And I was there for about three months. I got to know pretty much everybody. I don’t remember you.”
“I was there,” Nate said. A slow struggle seemed to be going on behind his scraggly beard and dirty face, like he was arguing with himself about how much to say. But at last he said, “I was at Minot Air Force Base. The doctors there were working on me because I’m immune to the disease that makes people into zombies.” He ducked his head slightly and reached under the collar of his shirt and pulled out a flash drive hanging from a lanyard around his neck. “They were using me as a guinea pig to find a cure. There was a doctor there named Mark Kellogg. He managed to find the cure, and he put it on this right before the base was overrun. They all died. All of them except for a few of the officers. They put me on a helicopter and flew me to the Grasslands, hoping to keep me safe.”
“Oh my God,” Richardson said. “Now I remember you.” His past was rushing up to meet him, and it was coming faster than he could process. First Sylvia Carnes, and then this guy, another survivor of the Grasslands. He didn’t know what to say.
But Sylvia didn’t give him a chance to say anything. She knelt down beside him and said, “Nate, you said there was a cure. You have it? You have the cure there?”
Nate made a fist over the flash drive.
“This doctor,” she said, her voice almost trembling with excitement, “is he the one who gave you the Tamiflu and the antibiotics?”
Nate shook his head. “No, some guy gave me those.”
“Who?” Sylvia said.
“I forget. Some guy. I met him down by the river. He was camping there with his family.”
“What was his name, Nate? Did he tell you his name?”
“Yeah, uh, something Fisher. Weird dude. Looked like he was crippled or something. His legs didn’t work. He had to pull himself around, like a snake, you know? It was kind of creepy.”
Sylvia made a sound that was part laugh, and part disbelief. “Don Fisher,” she said. “Was that his name, Don Fisher?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Nate said. “Sounds right.”
“Did you tell him about the cure? You told him that you were immune?”
“Uh, no,” Nate said.
“You didn’t. Nate, please tell me you’re kidding. You met the man who could have interpreted that flash drive, who could have produced a cure, and you didn’t say anything.”
Nate didn’t speak, which Richardson figured was probably for the best, for the next moment Sylvia grabbed two big handfuls of her own hair in fists clenched so tightly the knuckles cracked. Her body was shaking with anger. Then she stood up and stormed out the front door, giving the wall a good solid kick as she left.
“I’m sorry,” Nate said, turning to Richardson. “I didn’t know. Doc Kellogg, he told me to never tell anybody about the cure unless I was sure they were on my side. And after the Grasslands, everything’s been so confusing.”
“It’s okay, Nate,” Richardson said. “It’s nothing we can’t fix. I hope.”
C
HAPTER
12
HAPTER
12
Two days later, after Nate was well enough to travel, they entered the outskirts of Herculaneum. It was late morning and already hot. There wasn’t much of a breeze, just the muddy earthy smell of the river nearby, and the sun was beating down on the back of Richardson’s neck. He felt like he was being punished.
Richardson and Sylvia were out in front, while Nate Royal and Avery Harper followed about twenty steps behind. Richardson, breathing hard, wiped the sweat from his face with a rag and then folded the rag into a small square and stuffed it back into the pocket of his jeans. He was carrying his own pack, plus all the rifles they’d collected from the dead soldiers at the farmhouse battle, and the weight was starting to drag him down.
“You mind if we stop for a sec?” he said.
Sylvia looked at him. She was frowning with frustration.
Richardson was certain he saw fear there as well. With good reason, too. The night before she’d told him it had been years since she’d been this far from the compound, so this was all new to her. And the carefully constructed plan Niki Booth had set up for them was falling apart. For the first time in a long while, Sylvia Carnes was working without a safety net.
It probably didn’t help matters that he’d been with her the last time she did that, back in San Antonio.
Sylvia looked over her shoulder at Avery and said, “How much farther?”
They were standing in the middle of a long, straight street, ruined buildings on either side of them. Most of the wooden telephone poles that ran the length of the street were still standing, but here and there a few had fallen and were blocking the street. Weeds and spindly shrubs grew out of cracks in the sidewalk and along the base of the buildings. In the distance, they could see the shadowy outline of a big industrial wreck, the remnants of a lead smelting plant.
Avery Harper pointed at the smelting plant and said, “We’re almost there. We just keep going toward that. The free trading market is just around the right side of it.”
“Okay,” Sylvia said, irritably. “I guess we can rest for a second. But just for a moment.”
She shook the hair off her shoulders and then pulled it back into a tight ponytail. Richardson watched her as she tied it off with her black ribbon, wondering why she bothered. The way her hair frizzed up on her, she’d be retying it before they made ten blocks.
He tried to remember her the way she’d been back in San Antonio. A little heavier maybe, softer looking, her hair still black. The years since then had made her lean and given her face an almost birdlike angularity. A funny thought occurred to him: at times, she looked an awful lot like the lawyers in the pen-and-ink drawings in the Charles Dickens books he’d had in his apartment before the outbreak. He smiled inwardly at the thought. She would be offended by the comparison, even though he didn’t intend it that way. Far from it. She was actually quite pretty, knobby elbows and hooked nose and frizzy gray hair notwithstanding.
“What are you looking at?” she said, not even trying to disguise the petulance in her voice.
“I was trying to remember if you wore glasses.”
“What?”
“Did you? Wear glasses, I mean? I’ve been thinking back to San Antonio and I can’t remember if you wore glasses back then.”
“ No.”
“You didn’t? I could have sworn you did.”
“I said no. Besides, you just said you couldn’t remember.”
“I was just asking.”
“No, you weren’t. You weren’t making any sense. First you say you’ve been trying to remember but you can’t. The next minute you’re swearing that I did. You don’t make any sense, Ben.”
He didn’t know what to make of that.
“I was just asking,” he said.
She let out a frustrated sigh and rolled her eyes. She was carrying their water and she slid off her pack and took out a bottle of water and drank from it.
“You want some?” she asked.
He took the water and drank from the bottle and handed it back to her.
“Thanks.”
She handed the bottle to Avery.
Sylvia scanned the buildings and the side streets for signs of movement. They had already seen a few turkey farmers driving their flocks to market and vegetable dealers with their carts and several people hauling wheelbarrows full of pecans and walnuts, and the increased activity had them all on edge.
“Just out of curiosity,” he said, “what did you guys do for people who needed glasses? Did you have an optometrist in the compound or something?”
“What?”
“It must have come up, right? I mean, Ken Stoler wears glasses. I remember that from Eddie Hudson’s book. I’m sure you had other people there who wore glasses, right? Prescriptions change over time. Glasses break, get scratched. People need new ones all the time. How’d you guys handle that?”
She stared at him, her mouth agape. “What are you asking me for? I told you I don’t wear glasses. How the hell should I know what people do to get new glasses?”
He adjusted the packs on his shoulders.
“I was just asking.”
“Jesus, Ben, drop it, would you? You always do that. You don’t know when to leave well enough alone. You just keep picking at me.”
“Me?” he said. “I can’t leave well enough alone?” He knew the argument wasn’t going anywhere, and by speaking all he was doing was fueling her fire, but he couldn’t help himself. He said, “Hello? Pot, you’re black.”
“I’m what?”
“It’s an expression,” he said. “The kettle calling—”
“I know the expression. But you’ve got it backward, you moron. It’s the pot calling the kettle black. The hypocrisy is on the pot’s side, not the kettle’s. You’re calling me the pot while you’re ignorant of your own hypocrisy.”
“Hypocrisy? Sylvia, Jesus, I was just asking you what you guys did for glasses.”
She threw up her hands and made an angry huff. “Idiot,” she muttered. Then she turned away and stormed off.
He watched her go. He’d made her mad, and he didn’t understand how the whole thing had gotten so out of control. It was just an honest question. And a not very important one, in the great scheme of things. He should have just let it go.
But it wasn’t all his fault, he reminded himself. She’d been like this since the battle at the farmhouse, since meeting Nate and hearing that he could have saved them all a whole lot of trouble if he’d simply introduced himself to Don Fisher. It wasn’t hard to figure out she was disgusted by that missed opportunity. He was, too. But that didn’t account for her being angry with him.
Or maybe it did. Hell, he didn’t know. It’d been six years since he’d spent any time at all with a woman. More than twenty since he’d lived with one. Most of what he remembered of women was like trying to picture a diamond through a pawnbroker’s grimy yellow display case. But now that he thought about it he did remember that they saw the world differently from men. They weren’t pragmatists. Yes, they had reason. But it wasn’t the same kind of reason that men had. When they thought about a problem, they didn’t think in a straight line, from problem to solution. Their way of thinking made countless loops and diversions on its way to a conclusion. They seemed to thrive on subtext and implied meaning, the kind of things that men just didn’t have the time or patience for. Richardson found the whole thing really aggravating.
“Are you two married?”
“Huh?”
It was Nate Royal talking to him. Avery had paused for a second, then hurried on after Sylvia, leaving Richardson and Nate standing there.
“You sure act like you’re married.”
“We’re not married,” Richardson said. He adjusted the packs on his back and started walking after the women.
“Is she still angry with me?” Nate asked. His expression was wide-eyed and innocent.
“Yeah, I think so,” Richardson said.
“Oh.” Nate walked on sullenly beside him for a few moments before adding, “So, why is she taking it out on you?”
Richardson stopped and looked at him. Nate’s fever had broken that first night after the battle at the farmhouse, and the next morning Richardson had gotten a pair of scissors and a razor and some soap and helped Nate get himself clean. They’d shaved his beard and his head and now all that remained of the shaggy mess that had once hidden his face was a light brown shadow of stubble on his cheeks and the top of his head. He had looked like a refugee from an Iron Maiden concert. Now he reminded Richardson of the wraithlike extras Hollywood movies used to show in Victorian era mental hospitals.
But he didn’t look so bad that Avery Harper hadn’t taken an interest in him. Shortly after his big cleanup, Nate and Avery had actually hit it off quite well. So much so that when Richardson and Sylvia had returned from gathering water and walked into the farmhouse’s entranceway they’d seen Nate on his back on the floor, Avery sitting next to him, his hand on her leg while she laughed at something he was telling her.
“I don’t like that,” Sylvia had said.
“They’re just kids,” Richardson had responded.
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“Sylvia, you taught college. You know how this goes. Kids’ll be kids. You can’t keep ’em apart.”
Sylvia had let out a noise somewhere between a groan and a growl, and with that one gesture she’d made it clear what she thought of Nate and Avery hooking up.
And he’d said a silent prayer for Nate.
“Mr. Richardson?”
“Huh?”
“I said why is she taking it out on you?”
Richardson laughed to himself. “You ever been married, Nate? Lived with a woman, maybe?”
“No. I lived with my dad and his girlfriend before the outbreak. Since then I haven’t had too much time with a woman, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, well, I knew Sylvia years back. There’s a history there.”
“You guys—” Nate made a lewd, two-handed pushing gesture, accompanied by a clicking of his tongue “—you know?”
“No. Not that it’s any of your business.”
Nate raised an eyebrow, then shrugged good-naturedly and let it drop.
A few minutes later they reached a slight rise at the edge of town that gave them a good view of the free trading market below. The primitive collection of tents and carts were bordered to the north by the ruins of a large lead smelting plant, to the west by a spaghetti-like tangle of railroad tracks, and to the east by the great expanse of the Mississippi River.
The free trading market was actually a lot larger than it appeared. Many of the more permanent vendors had reclaimed the abandoned boxcars on the railroad tracks and set up shop there. The main hive of shops and vendors were knotted together into lanes on the vast concrete slab that had once served as a loading area for trains and ships, but other vendors—mostly turkey and sheep herders—were spread far to the south, where their animals could drink from a large tributary that curled around the southern edge of old Herculaneum.
“Well,” said Richardson, pointing down at the bustle of humanity, “there it is. The Herculaneum free trading market.”
“Looks like fun,” Nate said. He caught Avery’s eye and gave her a wink. She giggled back at him.
Sylvia’s expression was hard. “There’s not going to be anything fun about it,” she said. “We all need to keep our heads. There’s a pretty good chance Ken Stoler has operatives down there. If so, they’ll be looking for us. We need to be on the lookout for them.”
They headed down a narrow business road, toward the market. There were others on the road with them, women mostly, standing in the doorways of the abandoned buildings. One of the women, a girl actually, no more than sixteen or seventeen, who looked like one of those sad-eyed waifs in the old Feed the World posters, leered at them with a crooked, black-toothed smile. She was skinny as a junkie, but her blouse was open far enough to expose most of her small breasts.
“Hey there,” she called after them. “You lonely?”
Nate veered toward her. “Hey there, yourself,” he said.
“Whatchu want, sweetheart?” the girl said.
Before Nate could answer Richardson grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back toward the middle of the road.
“What are you doing?” Richardson snapped.
“What?” Nate said. He flashed that wide-eyed innocent smile. “What did I do wrong?”
“Just cool it, okay? We can’t afford to draw attention to ourselves.”
Sylvia made another angry huff and walked off. Avery was watching the hooker, who was backing away into the shadows but still smiling at Nate, and her face was a rapidly shifting pattern of emotions, confusion and indignation and jealousy.
She ran after Sylvia. “What was that woman doing?” Richardson heard her ask.
He gave Nate a slap on the shoulder. “Come on.”
The crowds got thicker as they entered the market. It had been a long while since he’d been around so many people, and Richardson felt his anxiety rising with every passing moment. They brushed against him in a constant shuffle. Vendors bartered with customers, their voices loud, abrasive. A sense of claustrophobia welled up in his chest. He was sweating, breathing fast. He couldn’t stop swallowing.
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