Resurrection: A Zombie Novel (9 page)

“Help!” she said.

Bobby was on the ground, useless, bleeding, and moaning in pain.

Kyle faced two by himself.

No one could help her.

She backed up. The thing in front of her just stood there, wounded and stunned with its arms broken. But it still had its teeth like the one that had just bitten Bobby.

She wanted to say something. This thing wasn’t a thing. It was a human being. A man. It was a
he
. She instinctively wanted to reason with him, but she could tell by the look on his face and in his eyes that he was beyond understanding or caring, like a cornered, aggressive animal.

He stared at her, hating her, yet looking strangely detached at the same time. He—it—looked at her as if she were food.

It was going to lunge again. She could tell. It bared its teeth.

She went straight for the head and heard a sickening wet
thwack
as she burst its skull like a melon.

It went down like a marionette with its strings cut.

Annie heard three things. Her own rapid breathing, her heartbeat in her ears, and Bobby moaning in agony on the ground.

She looked around. Dead bodies everywhere. Dead people stricken with some awful disease that make them violent. None remained standing, but two were still twitching and one was trying to crawl.

She hugged Kyle. She hugged him hard and couldn’t stop shaking.

“God,” she said and gasped. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. You?”

“I think so.” She could feel her heart slamming inside her chest and against his.

Kyle let her go and turned to Bobby. “He’s bitten.”

Bobby lay on his side now, clutching his wounded arm and whimpering.

“He’ll be okay,” Annie said.

“No, Annie,” Kyle said. “No, he won’t.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Kyle helped Bobby up while Annie stood aside nervously. He no longer felt any hostility whatsoever toward Bobby, nor did Bobby seem to feel any toward him. But he wondered if Bobby would feel the same way if he hadn’t been bitten.

Bobby closed his eyes hard and blinked as if he couldn’t quite focus. Kyle realized the poor man was in shock. Bobby’s face had gone white, his hands clammy and cold. He covered the bite wound with his good hand. Sticky blood seeped between his fingers. The wounded arm was drenched in the stuff, as were his shirt and his pants.

Kyle needed to be damn sure not to get any of Bobby’s infected blood on himself or on Annie.

“Don’t tell Lane,” Bobby said and winced.

“He’ll know, Bobby. Look at yourself.”

Bobby didn’t look at himself. Instead he raised his gun and pointed it in Kyle’s general direction. Kyle knew Bobby’s magazine was empty. He’d heard the dry click of the firing pin just before that thing sank its teeth into Bobby’s arm. Bobby must have remembered because he holstered it and staggered off to the side.

“Why don’t you give me that,” Kyle said.

“No.”

“We might get attacked again. That geyser down the street isn’t getting any quieter. It’s going to attract every one of those things for a mile in every direction.”

“The fuck do I care?”

“Bobby!”

“I mean, here, take it.” Bobby unholstered the weapon and handed it over. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a full magazine and handed that over too. Kyle loaded the weapon and checked the safety.

“I can’t go back there,” Bobby said. His lips trembled. He was more afraid of returning to the grocery store than staying out on the street.

“Why not?”

“Lane.”

“He doesn’t seem like the easiest person,” Annie said.

“He’s fine,” Bobby said. “He’s great. He saved my life. I’d be dead if it weren’t for Lane. But I’ve been bit. I know what he’s going to do.”

“We don’t kill people who have been bitten,” Kyle said.

“Then you’re an idiot,” Bobby said. “You should shoot me right now.”

Kyle motioned them along. They needed to get away from that geyser, which was filling the street with an ever-expanding lake. Soon enough the bodies of those things they’d just killed would be in the water.

“The virus is transmitted through bites!” Annie said as though she had only just now figured it out.

“Well, yeah,” Bobby said. “Where the hell have
you
been, girl?” He grimaced in pain and stopped for a moment. Then he looked at her squarely. “I’m sorry for … you know. For everything.”

“It’s okay,” Annie said. “Let’s go back and get your arm bandaged up.”

“You
really
shouldn’t touch me,” Bobby said and stepped away from her and from Kyle. “Don’t get any of this blood on you or you might turn too. I couldn’t go back in the store like this even if Lane would let me. It wouldn’t be fair to you guys or the others.”

But he kept walking toward the store with them. He wasn’t ready to sit down and die yet. Kyle didn’t know what he should do, because Bobby was right that he shouldn’t go back to the store. He was infected. His blood was contagious. And he’d turn soon. Into one of them.

The sound of the geyser behind them was quieter now, partly because they weren’t as close to it anymore, and also because the pressure seemed to be easing.

Kyle shuddered when he imagined what Bobby would look like after turning. He would be both Bobby and not-Bobby. Mostly not-Bobby.

There was something deeply and terribly wrong with those things, something aside from the obvious, something Kyle couldn’t quite put his finger on, something that made them
things
instead of people with a disease that made them violent. They looked different in ways too subtle to identify consciously but that were somehow obvious all the same.

A friend of Kyle’s from the high-tech industry in Portland worked on computer animation at home on the side. He hoped to eventually land a job making video games. And he once told Kyle about something all advanced computer-animation artists had to beware of, something they called the uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley refers to the instinctive revulsion people feel when they see something that looks almost human but isn’t quite. A robot that looks ninety-nine-percent human will make people far more uneasy than one that only looks seventy-five-percent human. The same applies to animated characters. They need to look 100 percent human or they need to be obvious fakes. Otherwise they’ll be creepy.

The part of the human psyche that feels wary of the almost-but-not-quite human was what recognized the infected as the infected. Their aggression made them obvious too, of course, but Kyle was certain he’d be able to spot an infected even if it was just standing there and not doing anything. He’d seen a few of them briefly standing around before the aggression kicked in, and they stood at weird angles in odd postures that didn’t look comfortable, as if comfort and properly ergonomic body mechanics no longer had any meaning.

Since they were so wrong on the inside, it made sense that they looked wrong on the outside, but they hadn’t been transformed physically in any obvious way. It’s not like their skin turned green or their eyes went red. But they exuded an alien vibe. They seemed to lack language. They didn’t use it at least, nor did they seem to understand it anymore. They obviously didn’t have empathy. They were impervious to reason, and they seemed to be impervious to emotions aside from hunger and rage. Kyle’s cat had been more in tune with Kyle’s emotional state than these things were. The instinctive human revulsion to cannibalism was replaced by an instinctive drive to cannibalism.

Maybe that’s what it was more than anything else. Those things didn’t see themselves as cannibals. They didn’t kill or eat each other. They only killed and ate people who had not been infected. Which meant they recognized each other just as clearly as Kyle recognized them. So perhaps their aversion to cannibalism had
not
been abolished. They just no longer saw uninfected people as people.

The feeling was mutual. Those things were no longer people. Not really, not anymore. Kyle and Hughes and Parker were people. Even Lane and Bobby and Roland were people. But those things had exiled themselves from the species. Kyle had more in common with primitive hunter-gatherers and probably even Neanderthals than he had with them.

He, Annie, and Bobby reached the intersection where they needed to turn. The grocery store was only twenty or so minutes away now. And Kyle had Bobby’s pistol loaded with a full magazine. It occurred to him that he could sneak into the store and shoot Lane and Roland before either of them had a clue what was happening. It’s what Parker would do, for sure, and it’s what Parker would advise Kyle to do if he could. Parker could be a bit unhinged, but he was right about one thing. They really did live in a world with new rules. A world with no rules, in fact.

Bobby was going to die. He couldn’t be saved.

Lane and Roland also needed to die. Kyle could see that now. He’d be content if Lane and Roland just left and went their own way, but that wasn’t going to happen, and if they did go away, they’d no doubt make trouble for whatever other poor survivors they ran across. No, Lane and Roland needed to die. But Kyle didn’t want to pull the trigger. He could be honest with himself about that. He’d rather have Parker or Hughes do it. Or, if he had to do it himself, he’d rather have a plan that involved something a little better thought out than
run into the grocery store blind and shoot them on sight
.

Annie had blood on her shirt all over again. She hadn’t even been clean for two hours. Kyle was drenched in the stuff. Their clothes would have to be burned. She knew that, right? Despite the fact that parts of her memory seemed to be wiped.

But he pointed at a blood-soaked spot on her shirt and said, “Don’t get any of that in your mouth,” just to be sure.

*   *   *

Annie felt surprisingly at ease considering what had just happened. The adrenaline had washed out of her system, and her heart and breathing rates were normal again. Her body seemed to have adjusted to violence and terror during the time she couldn’t remember.

She supposed her partial amnesia was her mind’s way of protecting itself from trauma so she could still function. It seemed to work, because she functioned just fine.

Bobby stopped on the sidewalk. “Sorry. I need to sit down.”

He looked dizzy and about to fall over. Annie didn’t like Bobby one bit, but she instinctively wanted to reach out and help him. He was mortally wounded, after all, and it’s hard to hate a man when he’s dying. Then she remembered she wasn’t supposed to touch him. If he’d contracted the disease, he’d be shedding the virus from the wound in his arm. But she hardly saw the point of such caution since she and Kyle were already drenched with infected blood.

Annie got close enough to Bobby that she noticed something she hadn’t seen before. He had a small knife clipped to his belt in a little sheath, the kind that might be marginally useful while fishing or camping but practically useless for someone being swarmed by the infected. But a three-inch knife was better than no knife. She wanted it.

“We’re almost back to the store,” Kyle said. “We’re not safe out here and the store is only five blocks away. We need to get inside. But you’re right that you can’t come inside with us.”

Bobby eased himself down onto the sidewalk. “Just leave me here. And give me my gun.”

Bobby’s gun. She and Kyle might be able to do something about Lane.

“Either give me my gun back or shoot me,” Bobby said.

Kyle said nothing. He said nothing for a long time.

Bobby pitched forward and had to support his head with his hands. “Whoa,” he said and blinked like he had something in his eyes. “The virus is really coming on fast with me.”

“How long does it usually take?” Annie said.

“Couple of hours usually,” Kyle said. “But sometimes it’s faster.”

“It’s real fast with me, bro,” Bobby said. He blew out his breath and closed his eyes. “Look, I know what you’re thinking. I’m dying, but I know what’s going on. You want to shoot Lane. I get it. But you don’t want to shoot me. I get that too.”

Kyle said nothing.

“I’m going to die anyway. I’ll be a dead man walking if you let me turn. So if you don’t want to shoot me, hand me the gun and I’ll do it myself. Then you can have the gun back.”

“Lane will hear the shot,” Annie said. So will other infected, she thought.

“Those things will hear the shot too,” Kyle said. He paused and looked hard at Bobby. “You asked me not to tell Lane.”

“What?” Bobby said.

“Earlier,” Kyle said. “Right after you were bitten. You told me not to tell Lane because you knew what he’d do if he found out. But if you want me to shoot you, what are you afraid Lane is going to do?”

*   *   *

Sound travels clear and far in a world gone quiet. The patter of a man’s footsteps travels four blocks, the slam of a car door more than a mile. Tipped-over trash cans are even louder. The sound of gunfire seems to encircle the world.

It took Lane but moments to figure out that explosion. The roar of rushing water gave it away. The mains under the streets were bursting from the pressure, and the weakest point blew.

The following sounds were even clearer. A shrieking pack of hunters followed by the report from Bobby’s pistol followed by silence.

All this took place at least a mile away, but sound travels clear and far in a world gone quiet.

What he could not know is whether Bobby, Kyle, and Annie were still alive.

Everyone in the store heard the same things, of course. That hysterical Carol lady had no idea what was happening, but Parker and Hughes eventually figured it out and explained it to her. Hughes gave her a bottle of water to drink so she’d keep quiet.

Lane was beginning to change his mind about Hughes. Hughes might be okay. He was smart and competent. Naturally Lane didn’t trust him, and he felt with dead certainty that the lack of trust was mutual, but he might try giving Hughes an iota of latitude to see how he handled it.

But he’d need Bobby to return in one piece for that. Controlling the group wouldn’t be easy with only Roland on his side. He needed two wingmen. The extra guns were locked in the truck outside and Lane was the only one with a key (as far as he knew), but three armed men were much more intimidating than two. Holding off a potential insurrection with just two would be very difficult indeed when it came time for those two men to sleep.