Mutated - 04 (20 page)
Authors: Joe McKinney
Niki jumped back, her heart in her throat, her hand over her aching chest.
“Oh Jesus,” she said. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.”
She staggered backward and fell, landing on her butt. She was surrounded, and for the first time in her life she found that she couldn’t make herself get back up. This was the end of the line. Her train stopped here. She was down in the bowels of the zombie king’s lair and she was going to die here. The realization made her feel like she’d been run over by a truck. It flattened her, numbed her to the point that she was prepared to just let it happen. It wasn’t scary anymore. All she had to do was sit still and wait for death to clamp its filthy jaws on her.
She was crying, sobbing, when a series of bright lights came on. Black shirts, she realized, standing on the edge of the room holding hand-cranked spotlights.
Niki lifted her head and saw at once that she was in a large room, lined on either side by improvised cells constructed of chain-link fencing strung over recessed chambers in the walls. Leering from behind the fencing were hundreds of zombies. They pressed against each other, clawed at each other’s ruined faces, trying to squeeze through the diamond-shaped holes in the fence to get to her.
And hanging from the ceiling were three large bell cages, each one containing a zombie. It was the middle cage she had run into. The zombie inside was on his knees, his face wedged between the bars, his hands reaching for her, clutching at the empty air between them. Its milky white eyes never blinked, never looked away from the vein throbbing in her neck.
Horrified, she crawled away from it.
A door at the far end of the room opened a moment later and Loren Skaggs, the Red Man, strode into the room.
Instantly, the moaning stopped. A calm spread over the zombies as each one focused on Loren.
He walked straight for her, stopping at her feet and looking down at her with a murderous hunger in his eyes. For a terrifying moment, Niki wasn’t sure if he intended to eat her or not. He just stood there, breathing heavily, watching her.
“You’re bleeding,” he said at last.
She didn’t respond.
“What? No nasty comeback? Where’s the fire, Niki? What happened to Niki Booth, the ferocious zombie fighter?”
“Your soldiers hurt me, Loren,” she said. It was suddenly very difficult to keep her eyes open. She wanted to pass out.
“My soldiers haven’t even started to hurt you, Niki. The worst is yet to come. There’s so much more.” He knelt down so that he could look her in the eyes. “But you could stop that from happening. You know that, don’t you? You could tell me where Don Fisher is. Tell me where he is, Niki.”
“Or what?” Niki said. Being threatened woke something primal in her, something that refused to be cowed by Loren Skaggs. Zombie king or not, he was still the same old meth-head loser she’d known back in Gatling. “Or what, Loren?” she repeated, her voice stronger this time. “What do you think you can do to me that will make me betray everything I’ve worked for?”
He smiled.
“Niki, don’t fool yourself. You’re brave now. You’re full of anger and meanness. You even dare to look me in the eye. But I can take away everything.” He motioned toward the wall of faces watching them from between the bars. “Do you see them, Niki? There’s nothing behind those eyes but what I put there. They have no will but the purpose I put in their heads, and they will obey it, even if it means their own death. I can make you like that, Niki. I can take away your very soul. And when I do, there will be nothing left inside but what I put there. I will own every inch of you. I will do everything I ever dreamed of back in school.”
“Go to hell, Loren,” she whispered.
He laughed as he stood up straight.
“Niki, I heard you say earlier that I have gone insane. I don’t think you’ve judged the situation right. You see, I can be reasonable.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want Don Fisher. You know that. I know you can give him to me. And so, I propose to make a trade.”
“You’ve got nothing I want,” Niki said.
“Oh, I think I do.” He walked over to the hanging cage and stuck his hand through the bars. He waved away the flies that swarmed around the zombie’s sores. Then he turned back to Niki. “I remember you back in high school, Niki. You were everybody’s darling, weren’t you? A cheerleader, class valedictorian, volunteer at the Special Olympics. You were all kinds of hot shit.”
“The past is what it is, Loren. We can’t do anything about who we used to be.”
“That’s true,” he said. “But the past can tell us about who we are now. It can tell us the kind of things we’re likely to hold dear.”
“You’re not making sense, Loren.”
“Aren’t I? No? Then let me put it to you this way. Tell me where Don Fisher is right now, or I will pull every zombie for a thousand miles and use them to overrun Ken Stoler’s compound. Is that plain enough for you? Every person you have come to care about, every man, woman, and child, will be gnawed to the bone. There will be nothing left of your home. What happened to Calimar, that will be a mercy killing compared to what I do to Union Field.”
His face was lit with madness, and it rattled her. But it wasn’t the looming threat of his red body that frightened her. No, it was more than that. She had been a member of Union Field since she was twenty-two. Ken Stoler had taken a nearly wild young woman in charge of a twelve-year-old little girl and turned her into a leader among men. She had made friends there. No, don’t mince words, she thought. They’re your family. The people there in Stoler’s compound had become her family. Her recent fights and falling-out with Stoler were beside the point. They didn’t change anything, at least not where it counted. When she left Union Field, she left a lot more than a safe haven. She left her family. And the idea of Loren’s zombies killing them, improbable as it was, rattled her to her core.
“Do whatever you’re gonna do,” she said, praying that he would believe her. “I’ve got nothing there anymore.”
A sneer played at the corner of his mouth. “You fight better than you lie, Niki. I know what you’re really thinking. You’re scared, but not scared enough. You don’t think I can make good on my promise, and that’s why you think you can lie to me. You’ve seen what, a hundred, two hundred zombies? You think that is all I control. You’re wrong. Niki, I control them all. Have you ever watched an enormous flock of birds in flight? Seen the way they wheel and turn, like one mind is working them all? It’s morphic fields. I don’t know how, but I can see those fields. It’s like a fog that I can move and push. I can control it.” He gestured to the zombies behind the chain-link fencing. “I can control all of them without making a sound.”
“You believe that? Loren, you really are insane.”
“Niki,” he said, shaking his head. “You haven’t been paying attention. I know you’ve seen a quiet street suddenly fill with zombies. You’ve seen that, right? You’ve seen one zombie turn into a stadium full of them in the blink of an eye. Haven’t you ever wondered how that happened, how they converge on a victim so suddenly, so completely?”
She didn’t answer.
“Yes, you have, haven’t you? I can see it in your face. You’re wondering how it happens. But I know the answer, Niki. I know because I can see what connects them. I can make them do anything, go anywhere. And I can do it without ever leaving this room.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Like calls to like, Niki. A virus will invade a host, but it won’t make its presence known until it has sufficient numbers to control the host. We’ve known that for a long time, even though we’ve never understood how it works. I still don’t. But I can use it, Niki. If I concentrate, I can make a zombie in Los Angeles walk into the Pacific Ocean. I can make a crowd of them in Mexico City come north. Viruses are like that. No matter where they are in the host, they can communicate. It’s not telepathy, or pheromones, or any of that shit. But it happens just the same.”
He stopped there, watching her.
“You know what I think you need,” he said. “You need a demonstration.”
He didn’t take his eyes off her. He didn’t do anything but stand there. And yet, somehow, he delivered a message to the zombie behind her. It suddenly slammed itself against the bars of its cage, snarling, pounding on the metal.
She staggered to her feet and turned to watch it.
The zombie tried to tear a strip of iron with its teeth. It clamped down on the metal and tore at it, even after shattering its teeth. And when that didn’t work it jammed a shoulder into the gap and pressed hard.
An uninfected person would have given up, but the zombie pushed and pushed until it bent the bars, stripping the flesh from its shoulder as it forced itself out of its cage.
“Oh my God,” Niki said, backing up.
“He left here a long time ago, Niki.”
She turned to look at the Red Man. He smiled back, then gestured toward the cage. One of the strips of iron snapped from its rivet and clattered to the floor. The zombie, a huge flap of bloody skin hanging loose from its shoulder, slid through the newly opened gap and dropped face-first to the floor, its right arm snapping beneath it.
With its skin hanging down around its waist like a skirt the zombie rose to its feet.
“No,” Niki said. “No.” That’s a man, she thought. How can he still be alive?
It took a few faltering steps toward her, smearing the ground with blood. The zombie was less than five feet from her when it stopped and turned its diseased face toward the Red Man. It was swaying in a circular motion, barely able to keep its feet.
“He will walk a thousand miles more, if I want him to,” the Red Man said.
“Loren, stop it, please.”
“Then tell me where I can find Don Fisher?”
“Herculaneum,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. She couldn’t bring herself to look at anything but her own boots. All the fight had bled out of her. “I was supposed to meet him in Herculaneum this morning. He’s probably still there.”
The Red Man smiled. “Better and better, Niki. My zombies will move through Union Field, and then we will go looking for Dr. Fisher.”
“What?” she said, aware of the fear in her voice but unable to stop it. “You can’t. You said you just wanted Fisher.”
“I do want Fisher, Niki. And when you’re ready to give him to me, I’ll take him. But you’re still lying to me. You have three days to give me what I want. It will take at least that long for my zombies to gather at Union Field. If I have not heard the truth by then, it won’t matter—not for you, or for Fisher.”
With that, he turned and strode out of the room. And when the black shirts turned out the lights, the only sound she heard was the exhausted breathing of the dying zombie on the floor just a few feet away.
C
HAPTER
15
HAPTER
15
It was shortly after daybreak and the light was struggling to break through the mists and white vapors that clung to the marshlands on the Illinois side of the river. Though he had been in good spirits as they powered away from Herculaneum, a night of rain that had never really been more than a thick, cold mist had left Jimmy Hinton feeling sober and uneasily alert. As soon as possible, for fuel was worth almost as much as blood these days, he’d cut the motor and let them drift downriver along the Illinois side, where they were less likely to encounter any patrols from Ken Stoler’s compound. He knew it was unlikely Stoler’s goons would come this far, for they were rapidly approaching the Red Man’s domain, but one could never tell what Stoler might do. The man was an enigma. So they went on through the drizzly, miserable night, and for a while they traveled parallel to a dirt road that ran along the riverbank. They hid whenever possible in the thick overhanging cottonwoods because the banks were crawling with the infected moving south through the streams of mist, as though they were responding to some kind of migratory impulse, a Pied Piper call that only they could hear. Several times they’d turned as a body to regard the
Sugar Jane
as it drifted past, and on one such occasion the sight of all those eyes glinting in the darkness had been enough to drive a half-drunk Richardson down into the cabin, muttering something about apex predators. Now Jimmy Hinton was alone once more, regarding the feeble morning light and the white, cloudlike puffs of mist and fog that drifted like wraiths through the stands of rushes and out over the wetlands. The place was utterly desolate and darkly sinister with the threat of the infected lurking somewhere out there, their hungry moans echoing through the night.
Sugar Jane
as it drifted past, and on one such occasion the sight of all those eyes glinting in the darkness had been enough to drive a half-drunk Richardson down into the cabin, muttering something about apex predators. Now Jimmy Hinton was alone once more, regarding the feeble morning light and the white, cloudlike puffs of mist and fog that drifted like wraiths through the stands of rushes and out over the wetlands. The place was utterly desolate and darkly sinister with the threat of the infected lurking somewhere out there, their hungry moans echoing through the night.
He had pulled the
Sugar Jane
into the dead water under a towhead and broke up the outline of her hull with cottonwoods and young willow branches, like a latter-day Huck Finn. The process took a lot of work, especially for a man his age, but the unusually large amount of northbound river traffic they’d seen, and his jangled nerves, in his mind, justified the added caution. On a normal night, with the darkness so complete that you couldn’t see the water when you looked over the railing, it wasn’t unusual to hear the Bedouins on other boats beating on pots and pans or calling out to each other in friendly salutations. They’d touch off a candle and raise a light to each other as they passed. It was the custom of the river. It was good etiquette. But there had been none of that on this trip. In fact, a day before, just hours after they’d hustled away from Ken Stoler’s people up in Herculaneum, they’d seen a trawler much like their own steadily chugging upriver. Jimmy had hailed the pilot, a thin, bald black man, with a friendly wave. But one look at the stark and strangely haunted emptiness in the man’s eyes had caused the smile to shrink from Jimmy’s face and his hand to fall to his side, his fingers curled into his palm as though to pull the hail back from whence it had come. Jimmy had stared after the man as they passed, his face a pale yellow in the guttering candlelight, and the man had stared back at him, never saying a word. The man’s haunted expression never wavered, and it had unnerved Jimmy in a way that he couldn’t quite identify.
Sugar Jane
into the dead water under a towhead and broke up the outline of her hull with cottonwoods and young willow branches, like a latter-day Huck Finn. The process took a lot of work, especially for a man his age, but the unusually large amount of northbound river traffic they’d seen, and his jangled nerves, in his mind, justified the added caution. On a normal night, with the darkness so complete that you couldn’t see the water when you looked over the railing, it wasn’t unusual to hear the Bedouins on other boats beating on pots and pans or calling out to each other in friendly salutations. They’d touch off a candle and raise a light to each other as they passed. It was the custom of the river. It was good etiquette. But there had been none of that on this trip. In fact, a day before, just hours after they’d hustled away from Ken Stoler’s people up in Herculaneum, they’d seen a trawler much like their own steadily chugging upriver. Jimmy had hailed the pilot, a thin, bald black man, with a friendly wave. But one look at the stark and strangely haunted emptiness in the man’s eyes had caused the smile to shrink from Jimmy’s face and his hand to fall to his side, his fingers curled into his palm as though to pull the hail back from whence it had come. Jimmy had stared after the man as they passed, his face a pale yellow in the guttering candlelight, and the man had stared back at him, never saying a word. The man’s haunted expression never wavered, and it had unnerved Jimmy in a way that he couldn’t quite identify.
Since that disturbing moment he’d seen a steady stream of traffic moving upriver. There had been other encounters that were equally unsettling, and those encounters, coupled with the crowds of infected moving south through the desolate Illinois swamps, had prompted him to take to hiding in the daylight, as they were doing now, moving only when they had the cover of darkness to conceal them. He wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but he had survived a long time by listening to the warning bells in his head, and they had been ringing loudly since that first encounter with the black man with the haunted eyes.
Pausing to look over the screen of tree branches he’d made, his mind wandered as it sometimes did back to the time before the outbreak, and for one glorious moment he could once again sense the intoxicating smell of his infant granddaughter, and hear the infectious burbling of her laughter. Warmth spread through his chest. His world was perfect, inviolate, his spirit soaring on a thermal uplift of a memory so complete it eclipsed everything else around him.
And then the sound of a motor somewhere out on the expanse of the river knifed through the happy shell of his daydream, and his eyes opened to the misery of the present.
“I love you, baby,” he said, fetching a deep sigh. “I miss you.”
And then he went below.
Jimmy Hinton stopped at the bottom of the stairs and surveyed the cabin.
Gabi was sitting on the couch. The fat girl, Avery Harper, was seated on the floor between Gabi’s knees. Gabi was combing the girl’s hair and laughing at something the older woman, the college professor, had just said. He almost asked Gabi to come topside and help square away the deck just in case the mist actually turned into rain, but seeing her with the other women, talking, laughing, he realized it had been too long since she’d shared a little friendly conversation with another woman. Poor thing didn’t have anybody else but him to talk to most of the time, and Jimmy knew he wasn’t that entertaining.
Off to his left, Richardson and Nate Royal were huddled together, talking about something on Richardson’s iPad. The two of them had been thick as thieves since they’d left Herculaneum, Richardson teaching the kid how to use the device.
“I got us hid pretty good,” Jimmy announced to the room. “There’s still a bunch of northbound traffic on the river, but they ain’t gonna be able to see us. Same with the zombies. They’ll probably stick to the road, and it cuts east of here to miss the wetlands.”
Gabi favored him with a smile, but her attention never really left the other two women.
Richardson and Nate didn’t even look up.
“Good to know you people appreciate my efforts,” Jimmy said. He surveyed the room again, waiting for somebody to acknowledge him, but nobody did.
Finally Gabi looked over at him.
“Quit hovering, Jimmy. Why don’t you take a nap? Take your Hush Puppies off and sleep a little. I bet your feet are hurting.” She turned to Sylvia and said, “It’s the gout, you know. We keep looking for Epsom salt for him to soak his feet, but nobody seems to have it.”
“Can’t you improvise something?” Sylvia asked. “Baking soda, maybe?”
“Well, I don’t know. You think that’d work?”
Jimmy opened his mouth to argue, but shut it without saying a word. They had already tuned him out, anyway. And besides, Gabi was right as always. He was exhausted. His feet were killing him, especially his ankles, and the bunk did look inviting.
He slipped off his Hush Puppies, the gentle vibration of the deck soothing the soles of his feet, and walked over to the sink for a cup of water. Richardson and Nate were still murmuring over the iPad. Jimmy caught a flash of a home movie on it, a pretty girl in a simple white cotton dress teaching a group of children.
“I bet you recognize her, don’t you?” Richardson said to Nate. There was a touch of mischief in his expression.
Nate squinted at the dim, grimed-over screen, frowning in concentration.
But then his lips spread open, revealing badly yellowed teeth. “Hey, is that . . . ?”
“Uh huh. Bellamy Blaze.”
“No shit.” Nate let out a whistle. “You’re not shittin’ me, are you? You met her?”
“I thought you’d like that.” For a moment, there was genuine mirth in Richardson’s voice, but it faded quickly. He looked at the screen and his smile turned sad. “Her real name was Robin Tharp. She was one of the ones who escaped the Grasslands with me. Smart lady. A natural when it came to teaching kids.”
Nate laughed. “That girl could swallow a nine-inch cock and smile while she did it. Before the outbreak, I think I had all her movies. Me and her and a case of beer spent a lot of quality time together on my couch, if you get my drift.”
Richardson nodded. He seemed to be looking inwardly now, staring back across years. “She was a good friend,” he said. “A good leader, too.”
“Did you ever—” Nate made that hitching noise again “—you know? Tell me you hit that.”
“No, Nate. Nothing like that. She was devoted to this guy named Jeff Stavers. Jeff was a Harvard grad, but he was working as a video store manager right before the outbreak. You would have liked him, I think.” Richardson turned back to the iPad. “You know what I remember about her?”
Nate shook his head.
“Do you remember me telling you about Ed Moore and how he led us all out of the Grasslands? Well, when Ed died, it was Robin here who took up the reins. Not only was she the schoolteacher for our compound, but she was also our leader. She did a hell of job, too.”
Richardson shook his head. Absently, he ran a finger down the side of the iPad.
“I miss her, Nate. She tried so hard. What happened wasn’t her fault. I remember when we came back and found everybody dead. Those of us who were still alive really leaned on her after that. She was . . . she was just a well of energy. Up before everyone else. Didn’t get to bed until way after everyone else was already in bed, exhausted. But you know what she told me that really impressed me?”
“No. What?”
“She said that the outbreak was the best thing that ever happened to her because it let her start her life all over again. That’s what I wanted to show you, Nate. I think you can probably identify with that, can’t you?”
Jimmy didn’t hear the kid’s reply. He was watching the woman on the iPad’s screen. She was making a dozen little kids laugh over something they’d just read. Jimmy cocked his head to one side, studying the image. He could see it now. She really was Bellamy Blaze, the porn star. A little older, maybe, a little worn down by the weight of leadership . . . but it really was her. He remembered watching her videos on the Internet, the girl bent over the arm of a couch while three guys with huge dicks took turns going at her ass like it was a punching bag.
He felt uncomfortable, sad somehow. It wasn’t her sexual exploits that held his attention. It was the children giggling. The sound filled him with sadness.
“You’re wasting your time with that shit,” Jimmy said.
Both Nate and Richardson looked up at him.
“You said that before,” Nate said. “You don’t like hearing stories about how people came through the outbreak. Why not?”
Jimmy regarded him, amazed once again at the people who managed to live through the apocalypse, and mourning those who didn’t. This guy, he was bland and uninteresting, dumb as the day was long, and yet he was still alive.
There didn’t seem to be any justice in it.
“Ain’t nothing good about what’s gone, kid,” Jimmy said. “It ain’t coming back, so what’s the point?”
“But that is the point,” Richardson said. “So much of everything is gone . . . both the good and the bad.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Jimmy said. “Look at us. Look at what we got here. Ain’t none of us what we used to be. Ain’t none of us got what we used to have. There’s no point in reminding us of how bad things are.”
“You think that’s what I’m doing by saving these stories ?”
“Isn’t it? Tell me. You ever brought back one moment of happiness by saving up all these stories? Have you? Seems to me all you’re doing is dredging up a lot of pointless heartache.”
Richardson put his iPad down on the deck. Nate started to speak, but Richardson put a hand on his shoulder and quieted him with a gentle smile. “It’s okay,” he said to Nate. Then he looked up at Jimmy and said, “Storytelling isn’t about bringing back the past, though you’re right about everything else you said. There’s nothing in these files that will undo what’s been done. The world’s not what it was. There’s no changing that.”
“So what’s the point? Why bother? You’re old enough you should know better than to add cruelty to a world that’s already got too much of it.”
“Yeah—and you’re old enough not to believe that.”
Jimmy let out a huff, unimpressed.
“Do yourself a favor, kid,” he said to Nate, “and get yourself a new teacher. This one ain’t got enough sense to pour piss out of a boot if the directions were written on the heel.”
Richardson laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Jimmy challenged him.
“That was one of my dad’s favorites,” he said. “That, and you’re running off the reservation. I used to love all the shit my dad used to say.”
Jimmy stared at him for a long moment. “Yeah, well, we old folks are great for that.”
“And yet you’ve totally missed my point,” Richardson said. “You’re wrong when you said all I was doing was adding cruelty to the world.” He held up the iPad. “That’s not what this is. This right here, this is how we rebuild. These stories . . . this is how we make the world anew. Storytelling is our therapy. It’s where we go for healing.”
“Spare me the lit lecture, professor.”
“That’s her job,” Richardson said with a grin as he hooked his thumb in Sylvia Carnes’s direction. “I’m a reporter by trade. My job is to find the thread that connects us. And stories do that.”
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