Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within (28 page)

“You know, I’m really sorry about all this.” I said to the carcass as I cut the para-cord hanging from the post and carried the leg back to its former owner. “You got the shit end of this deal, my friend. But at least you died quickly. You weren’t going to last much longer anyway, with that torn-up leg.”

One of the deer’s empty eyes stared up at me, unseeing. A fly buzzed around it, landed on it, and crawled over its glazed surface. I tossed the leg down and turned to go back to the furniture store. Just as I was opening the door, I heard a sound behind me. Like someone running a hand over a piece of coarse cloth, faint and rasping.

I moved unhurriedly, my hand inching for the M-4 hanging from my back. I gathered it and brought it to my shoulder, careful not to make any sudden movements. Slowly, I turned and
faced the street. Not twenty feet away from me, standing over the dead buck and sniffing at the incision where I had gutted him, was the most terrible, magnificent thing I had ever seen.

A full-grown Bengal tiger.

All six hundred pounds of him.

His paws were the size of dinner plates, his tail was as thick as my forearm, and I had seen boulders that were smaller than his head. The tips of his shoulders came up almost to my chest, and all along his frame, powerful muscles rippled like steel cables under a glossy coat of black-striped, reddish-orange fur.

My knuckles went white on the rifle’s grip. I stood rooted to the spot, listening to my hammering pulse and the quickening rasp of my breathing. Coldness settled in my stomach and began spreading upward into my face, down my arms, and into my hands. Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind, in a place that still remembered fleeing from sharp teeth on some distant, long-ago savanna, a voice began to cry out. It was a voice that knew why people feared the dark, why we find safety in numbers, and why we scream when we’re in danger. The voice began pounding at me, growing insistent, drumming against the rational surface of my mind with a single, urgent command: RUN!

But I didn’t listen. Running would have just provoked the creature, and there was no way I was going to get away from it if it decided to give chase. Not from this distance, anyway. So I did the only thing I could do. I stood perfectly, absolutely still.

The tiger took a half step to his right, pushed his blunted snout under the flap of the buck’s flank, and began licking at the muscles along its ribcage. After a few seconds of this, he began to gnaw at the meat, his massive fangs easily tearing through tendons and sinew. A few bites seemed to excite him, and he began chewing away at the carcass with gusto.

In a rush of thought, as I stood there watching one of the largest apex predators in the world snacking on a deer as big as a full-grown man, several things occurred to me at once. First, if the tiger had wanted to kill me, he could have done so. Easily.

Second, it didn’t take me twenty seconds to walk from the deer’s carcass to the furniture store. But that was enough time for the beast to emerge from his hiding spot, trot across an unknown expanse of street while dancing over a slew of rotting corpses, and approach with such stealth that if he had not stopped to sniff at the deer’s carcass, I never would have known he was there.

Third, I had a decision to make. Stand here and hope he goes away, or take a chance and ease my way into the store. Maybe the fresh meat in front of him would keep his attention and allow me to slip away. Maybe not.

My plan had been to kill the tiger from my perch in the furniture store with the M-4, but standing there looking at him, I realized how foolish that idea had been. The .223 rounds in the M-4 were simply not designed to tackle a big critter like a Bengal tiger. Hell, they were only marginally effective against people. Unless I caught the big cat behind the ear, or managed to split the difference between a couple of ribs and take out his heart, shooting him would have done nothing more than piss him off. And an injured, pain-maddened tiger on my trail was the last thing I needed.

So.

What to do.

I began to ease my weight backward, preparing to shift my feet and reach for the door. My boot made a noise on the ground, and the tiger lifted his head to look at me. I froze.

Bright golden eyes regarded me for a few heart-stopping moments. He licked blood from his chops, lazily and slow, making loud smacking noises. There was a languidness to his movements, a confident ease. His posture was relaxed, and his expression seemed … placid. Calm. Like there wasn’t a thing in the world for him to worry about. There was no distrust, or warning, or hostility in that alien gaze. He was just looking at me like he would look at a tree, or a rock, or some other inconsequential thing. His muscles did not tense, and I sensed no imminent attack coming from him.

“Hi there,” I said.

The tiger tilted his head to the side, an oddly doglike gesture. I kept still, not wanting to startle him.

“You’re a big one, aren’t you? Must be why you’re so hungry.”

The tiger gazed a few seconds longer, then lowered his face and went back to eating. My pulse began to slow down, the coldness that gripped me receded, and I loosened my grip on the rifle. The frantic, panicked voice urging me to flee went silent, and the locked synapses in my brain began to fire again, allowing me to think.

What the hell was an animal native to Southern Asia doing in Western Tennessee? He must have escaped from a zoo, or maybe he was once some wealthy eccentric’s pet.

I remembered a newscast I saw during the Outbreak in which police had gone into a zoo to stop the zookeepers from letting the animals out. It had become clear that the walking dead were too much for the military, and the people responsible for the animals wanted to give them a fighting chance. It started with one zoo, and soon spread to hundreds of others. Maybe this guy’s presence was the result.

When I thought about it, it made sense. It would explain why this tiger had followed me, and why he didn’t seem to think I was a danger to him. If he was a zoo animal, then he would be accustomed to the presence of humans. Maybe he’d even been born in a zoo and raised by people, fed his meals by them. Could be that’s what he thought this was, me dragging out the buck. Feeding time.

I took a few tentative steps forward, making sure the tiger could hear me, and keeping my rifle at the ready. The big cat ignored me.

A few more steps. He kept eating.

My feet seemed to take on a mind of their own, and I got closer, and closer, until I was just a few inches outside of arms reach. I leaned over, muttering nonsense words to avoid startling him, and reached out a hand toward his rear flank, my pulse quickening, amazed at my own audacity.

The tiger’s fur was thick, and surprisingly soft. He stopped eating for just a moment to look back at me, licked his face a few times, and then went back to his meal. I ran a hand along his back and felt the iron-hard muscles beneath his thick skin. The vitality within him was electric, a high-voltage, humming radiance that made my breathing shallow and caused a sweat to break out on my forehead.

The voice in the back of my head started sending out warnings, but I ignored it. Beneath my hand was one of the most highly evolved killing machines that nature had ever created, and I was scratching his back like he was a house kitty.

A few minutes went by, me moving my hand along his flank while he munched on dead deer, until finally he swung his tail and swatted me on the leg. I looked over to see him watching me. He made a chuffing noise and shifted his backside into my hip. It was just a slight motion for him, but it nearly knocked me on
my ass. The message was clear.

Stop bothering me.

I’m eating.

*****

I watched the tiger finish his meal from the window above the furniture store. He ate a hell of a lot of meat. Must have been ravenous. 

As I watched, I sat in the leather chair and pondered the conundrum I had on my hands. I no longer wanted to kill the creature—not after getting up close and petting him—but I didn’t want him following me around either. He wasn’t interested in killing me right now, which was good, but he was still a wild animal. I did not want to spend my last seconds screaming in the jaws of yon massive beast.

So what was I going to do about it?

I took a piece of jerky from my pack and chewed on it, thinking. The tiger stopped gnawing away at the deer, wandered over to a patch of sunshine between the shadows of two buildings, and stretched out on the concrete. He spent a few minutes preening before he laid his massive head down and heaved a deep, satisfied sigh. He napped for a while, then got up and wandered off. Probably thirsty, going out in search of water.

That made me thirsty, so I took a sip from my canteen, and turned my mind to the business of reasoning this problem out.

There was no way I could shake the tiger from my trail without resorting to violence. I did not want to do that, so the only option I had left was to just accept the situation. He could follow me if he wanted to and, if he attacked, I would defend myself. But I wasn’t going to kill him for no reason.

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around and searching through the few buildings that didn’t look like they were about to collapse. I found some interesting things, but nothing that I could carry with me. If I survived the destruction of the Legion, assuming of course that it actually happened and I wasn’t just throwing my life away, I would definitely be coming back to this place.

There were things here that the Legion might not have had much use for—furniture, nice clothes, jewelry, art, scrap metal, dishes, cookware, etc.—but I knew plenty of other people who did. This place was worth a fortune in salvage, even without the weapons cache.

As the sun was disappearing again, I sat on a bench in front of what had once been a police station and thought about what the future might hold for me. Was this to be my next career, places like this? Was this what I would do for a living when I got to Colorado, run a salvage operation? I could just imagine it, written on a big hand-painted sign over a chain-link fence—Eric Riordan: Junkman.

The theme to “Sanford and Son” played through my head, and I laughed until my ribs hurt. Until I almost fell off the bench. Maybe Gabe could go into business with me, and I could exclusively refer to him as You Big Dummy.

I laughed harder.

A crow seated on an awning across from me tilted his head quizzically, decided that being close to an armed man with a few screws loose was not conducive to a long life, and flew away.

*****

Scar and his pack showed up at some point during the night.

I awoke to the sound of them growling and ripping into what was left of the deer carcass. It was cold, so I didn’t bother getting up to go to the window. Even if I had, I doubted I would have been able to see them; it was too dark outside.

From where I lay, I could see the silver light of the moon obscured through a thick bank of clouds that must have rolled in at some point during the night. The space between the furniture store and the building across the street was pitch black. The kind of darkness where you can’t see your hand in front of your face.

I lay still, moderately warm in my layers of clothes and blankets and the sleeping bag. I listened to dogs grunt, and tear, and eat. It was strangely comforting.

I went back to sleep.

*****

It was time to move out.

I had woken up with the dawn, and outside the wind had picked up. It howled over the tops of buildings, blew detritus around on the street, and whistled an eerie refrain through broken windows. It was going to be a cold, blistering day, but there was nothing for it. I had already lost enough time. I had to get moving.

I packed my gear, checked my weapons, and climbed down from the loft for the last time. I left the grill behind, as well as the crossbow. It would have been nice to bring them with me, but when the Legion eventually captured me I didn’t want them to know that I had found their cache. That probably wouldn’t go over too well.

The tiger was back. He sniffed at the remaining scraps of deer meat left on cracked bones and walked away. He sat down on the sidewalk with a disappointed sigh.

“Didn’t leave you much did they, big fella?”

He looked at me blankly, then went back to staring at the remains. Giving him a wide berth—he was hungry, after all—I ducked between two buildings and headed due south. I had gone maybe a hundred yards from town, and just entered the edge of the surrounding woodland, when gunshots rang out behind me.

I stopped and whipped around, rifle at the ready. More gunshots sounded, and with the gunshots, came a scream.

The tiger. Had to be. Nothing else could have made a sound like that. It wasn’t quite a roar, or a growl, but higher in pitch, keening and agonized. Almost like the moans of the infected, but a hundred times more powerful. It tore at me, raking around the inside of my skull and stabbing into my ears. I had to resist the urge to clap my hands to the sides of my head to block it out.

More gunshots. Lots of them, from automatic weapons, and with a distinctive sound. There is only one rifle in the world that sounds like that.