Resurrection: A Zombie Novel (3 page)

“It’s down,” he said.

“You just hit that man!” Annie said. “You probably killed him. Did you do that on
purpose
?”

Silence in the truck.

“Annie,” Hughes said and shook his head. “He was one of the infected ones.”

“You thought I was infected.”

“He was covered in blood.”

“I’m covered in blood.”

“He was screaming. You heard him.”

“So you killed him?”

Frank and Hughes said nothing.

Something was wrong with her brain. What Frank did seemed wrong but felt right. Why? Her gut knew something her mind couldn’t access. Her short-term amnesia, her denial, her mind blockage—whatever it was—was tenuous. It wouldn’t last. Her memories were just barely below the threshold of consciousness.

She looked at the body in the rearview mirror. It did not appear to be moving or even twitching. The man was already covered in blood and gore before Frank hit him. Aside from the fact that he no longer moved, he looked no worse now than he did when he ran out of the trees.

“Can we stop for a second?” Annie said.

“What for?” Frank said.

“No,” Hughes said.

“I want to go back and get a closer look at that man,” she said.

“He wasn’t a man,” Hughes said. “Not anymore. He was one of those things.”

He wasn’t a
thing
.

“Infected or not,” Annie said, “he was a man.”

Hughes said nothing.

“We can’t stop here, Annie,” Frank said. “The truck’s noise attracts them. We’re damn lucky none of them followed us to the sporting-goods store. And anyway you don’t want to get too close to even the dead ones. Bodily fluids and all that.”

She needed to study that body, but she didn’t know why. Probably just her brain-lock trying to resolve itself. Her memory, her knowledge and understanding of the insanity all around her, was trying to punch its way out through whatever barrier had been put in place. Stopping to think and scrutinizing things might help, but Frank wouldn’t stop, and Hughes wouldn’t let him stop if he wanted to.

They rounded a few more corners and arrived at the outskirts of another town, the kind of outskirts that look exactly like outskirts everywhere in the country. Gas stations, fast-food joints, used-car lots, Jiffy Lubes. The place had been torn to pieces just like the last town they passed through, but here the streets were entirely empty of cars. Everyone had evacuated.

Trash, branches, leaves, debris and broken glass covered the streets, the sidewalks, and the parking lots. A pickup truck had smashed into an electrical pole. What looked like a used-car lot had exploded and burned to the ground. Dead bodies—bones, mostly—were strewn all over the place. The windows of a Burger King were covered with nailed-up boards blackened by fire.

Was the Burger King boarded up to keep people out or to keep people in? Why had the car lot burned down?

Though the details weren’t familiar, the brushstrokes were. She was certain she’d never been there before, but she felt a sense of déjà vu coming over her. Something was banging inside her head and trying to get out. Something of earthshaking significance. She could feel it, like a just-forgotten dream on the other side of the mist.

Why couldn’t she remember? There was a reason she went into brain-lock. Something had happened to her. Something that didn’t happen to Hughes or to Frank.

CHAPTER TWO

Kyle Trager stared while Parker cleaned his guns. Parker had parts from three handguns greased up and spread out before him on the counter of the checkout aisle, the one nearest the grocery store’s door where there was more light.

“We should shove off tomorrow,” Kyle said. “Get a boat and head up to one of the islands.”

Parker set down a pistol and his oil rag. “None of us has seen a better place than where we are right now. It’s secure and our food will last months.”

They were holed up in a well-stocked grocery store in a medium-size suburban-looking town just off the interstate. A nearby lumberyard provided all the wood and nails they needed to board up the windows and fortify the front and back doors. They had no electricity, but plenty to eat.

“We’re only safe here,” Kyle said, “until we get attacked by 200 of those things at the same time. We’ll never be safe on the mainland. We need an island.”

“Those things aren’t going to last,” Parker said. “Winter is coming and they’re running out of food. We stay here, wait for them to start dying off, and then we can go to your little island.”

Kyle’s group of five had only cohered a week or so earlier. He and Frank were traveling together when they ran into Hughes and Carol. Then the four of them found Parker rummaging around in somebody’s van. They all understood there was safety in numbers. They didn’t even discuss whether or not they should stick together. They did it instinctively.

And they were all thrilled when they found an unlooted grocery store. It must have been the only one in all of Washington State. It was a great place to hole up for a while, but it wasn’t home. Surely it wasn’t secure enough to stay there all winter, but Kyle couldn’t get Parker to see that. They’d been butting heads ever since Kyle first suggested sailing north to the islands.

Somebody was bound to emerge as a leader eventually. That’s how these things usually worked, but it hadn’t happened yet. Even if the leader wasn’t a boss issuing orders, somebody would have the most influence. That person was bound to be Kyle or Parker. Theoretically it could be Hughes, but Hughes didn’t seem interested. He didn’t talk much. And silent types can’t be leaders.

Frank wasn’t incompetent, exactly, but he was definitely sidekick material. No one with any sense would want Frank making decisions, including Frank.

Carol was out of the question. She was a nervous wreck, a total disaster. She wanted someone to tell her exactly what she should do and when she should do it.

That left Parker and Kyle, but Parker was bullheaded, difficult, and just … off. It wasn’t only the guns. The man looked like a slob with his cargo pants, army jacket, and big scruffy beard. Hadn’t he heard of razors? There must have been hundreds of disposables in the toiletries aisle. The world was fast running out of just about everything, but Kyle figured he could easily loot a lifetime supply of disposable razors. And Kyle thought it was important to look like a civilized person, now more than ever.

“You want some more light?” Kyle said to Parker as he ran the oil rag through the barrel of one of his pistols. “I could bring some candles over.”

“I’m fine,” Parker said and didn’t look up from his work. He faced the line of windows so he wouldn’t get in the way of the light, though there wasn’t much to get in the way of. Every window in the grocery store was boarded up. Only twelve or so inches were left exposed at the top to let in some sun. They had to be conservative with the candles.

At least the water still worked—for now, anyway. And it came out of the sink with incredible force. Apparently the pressure just kept building up since hardly anyone was left alive to release it, but it too would eventually break like the electricity had.

Kyle didn’t like it when Parker cleaned his guns. Didn’t like it at all. Parker cleaned his guns all the time, every single day, even when he hadn’t fired them since the last cleaning.

He did it to intimidate everyone else. Kyle was sure of it. No one was really in charge, nor had Parker tried to appoint himself boss, but he wanted to make damn certain everyone took his feelings into account. Theatrically cleaning his guns was a big part of it.

Parker also wanted to make Kyle feel inadequate and incompetent. How can you expect to lead this group if you can’t even clean a damn gun?

Kyle was no kind of idiot. He knew how to shoot. His father showed him how when he was a kid. And he had gone shooting dozens of times with his friends on the range and in the forest. He just didn’t own a gun. His home state of Oregon was awash in guns. It had more guns than people. There just weren’t as many guns or gun owners in the city, and Kyle was a city person.

He had worked as a computer programmer in the suburbs of Portland. That’s where he was when the plague struck. He headed north into Washington, but not to Seattle. That would not have been smart. Seattle wasn’t safer than Portland. Seattle was the first American city to be hit with the virus. Kyle aimed straight for Olympia at the southernmost point on Puget Sound, an island-studded inlet extending hundreds of miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. From there he planned to take a boat to the San Juan Islands just shy of the Canadian border. That was a plan that made sense. Those things couldn’t get to him on an island.

Carol stepped out of the walk-in cooler with a broom in her hand. She’d been in there sweeping the floor again. A now-dry meltwater stain spread out from under the door. The walk-in cooler wasn’t cold anymore and would never be cold again, or at least not any colder than the rest of the store once winter set in. They decided they’d use it as their fallback position if those things ever got past their defenses at the windows and doors. There was only one way in and out. As long as they had enough bullets—or cartridges, as Hughes and Parker liked to call them—they could shoot those things one at a time as they came in.

“How you doin’, kiddo?” Kyle said to Carol.

“I’ll feel better when Hughes and Frank get back.”

“They should be back pretty soon. They must have found some good stuff.”

Parker ignored them. He was all-consumed by his guns.

Kyle wasn’t sure what kind of guns they were and he wasn’t going to ask. He knew his own weapon was a Glock 17. That’s what Hughes had called it when he gave it to him. And Kyle knew how to use it. Using a handgun isn’t hard. He always thought it was strange when a character in a movie asks another character if they know how to use one. What’s to know? Flick off the safety, point it at whatever you want to splatter, and squeeze the trigger.

Kyle heard something outside. Carol and Parker heard it too. Parker turned his ears toward the noise and Carol took a step back. Kyle heard it again. It sounded like soft padding footsteps. It wasn’t one of those things, then. A dog, most likely, though it could have been just about anything. Kyle had seen deer and even a bear in urban environments in the past couple of weeks. He figured it was only a matter of time before he saw mountain lions.

“I’m with Kyle,” Carol said, her voice shaking. “It’s not safe here. We should head to the islands. I don’t think I can stay here for three months. Look at us. Even you two get jumpy when it’s only a dog outside the door.”

Kyle felt sorry for Carol. The poor thing would be scared out of her mind whether or not they stayed hunkered down in their fortified grocery store. Carol would be jumpy in an underground government bunker. She dealt with it by keeping herself busy with obsessive-compulsive cleaning. She cleaned everything in the store over and over again. She kept scrubbing down the meat and produce trays even though the meat and produce were long gone, spoiled and reeking and thrown out the back where the stench could waft away. It didn’t entirely waft away, of course. The store still smelled like a garbage can. Everything but the air, though, was as clean as it could possibly be, thanks to Carol’s nervous habit. She even made several rounds down the aisles straightening every cereal box, every bottle of olive oil, and every box of macaroni and cheese, but it was all rather pointless. Once things were straightened, they stayed straightened. You could mop a clean floor, but you couldn’t make straight boxes of macaroni and cheese any straighter.

“How exactly do you two expect to get to a boat from here?” Parker said. “We’re at least fifteen miles away from the water. We’d have to walk. You’ve seen the roads. We sure as hell aren’t getting there in a car.”

“We can take bicycles,” Kyle said. “We can weave around the abandoned cars, and we can ride faster than those things can run.”

“But we can’t carry supplies,” Parker said. “All this food will be wasted.”

“That will be true whether we go now or wait,” Kyle said.

“But if we wait,” Parker said, “we won’t have wasted the food. And there will be fewer of those things running around.”

“Maybe,” Kyle said. “But there will be none of those things on an island.”

“You don’t know that. What if we get all the way up there and the islands are all infested?”

“We’ll be on a boat. Those things can’t get to us if we’re on a boat.”

“You don’t know that either.”

Kyle said nothing. He couldn’t be certain, but he was pretty sure those things couldn’t swim. Or, if they could, they wouldn’t be able to climb onto a boat from down in the water before getting whacked in the head with a crowbar.

The grocery store was a fine place to dig in for a while, but it couldn’t last. And Kyle did not enjoy being there. He couldn’t relax, and neither could anyone else.

They needed more than just food. Hughes and Frank were on a supply run at a sporting-goods store, but they also needed medicine and clean clothes. And they needed warm clothes. The cold rains of November were coming. They’d eventually all get trench foot if they could not keep their socks clean. Kyle also needed a new shirt. His red flannel was comfortable, as were his blue jeans, but they had been ripe for weeks.

It was impressive, though, what they’d done with the place.

An entire grocery store in this little suburban-style town off the interstate hadn’t been looted. There was another store, a bigger, fancier one with vast health-food aisles a half-mile or so away. That one had been stripped practically bare. This store had survived the initial panic and the mass exodus.

It looked like the kind of place customers with money would have avoided back when things were still normal and places like this were still open for business. The floor was made of chipped 1970s tiles. The subflooring was even exposed in some places. The off-white walls couldn’t have been painted once in the past decade. Kyle marveled at the long black smudges at head level. How did those get there? The fluorescent tube lights above had long gone dark, but they must have made the place look like the inside of a meat locker when the power still worked. No matter how many times Carol doused the place with Lysol, the air was infused with the sweet tang of rot. And to top all that off, there was nowhere soft or comfortable to sit or lie down. The place sucked, aside from the fortifications and food.