The In-Betweener (Between Life and Death) (S) (3 page)

I don’t think it will be long before cats are gone as well. Then the birds will have this part of the world to themselves. Maybe they’ll have the whole thing. I’m long past betting on humans making it to the end of this.

The complex of warehouses and light industrial buildings I live in is bordered by a fence, both strong and tall. That’s why I live here, why we stopped here in the first place. It’s chain link, so it provides no real attraction to the deaders. It’s the wrong kind of metal, or rather, it’s an alloy in which their favorite kind isn’t dominant in the mix. They might attach themselves to it for a while, give it a little taste, but it doesn’t seem to hold their interest for long.

Unlike the fence, some of the buildings are steel, which does attract them if they get within range. For this reason I tend to the fences with care, dragging off the deaders that I send into true death so they don’t pile up against the fence and ruin my sightlines. A walk of the perimeter is always my first task and today is no exception.

A few deaders straggle along the length of my fence. All of them are in bad shape, far beyond sensing in any conventional way. One does lift its head—some dim reflex from a time when it was sighted perhaps—when I stumble on a crumbling bit of concrete and slap my boot down a little harder than I should. Its jaw moves up and down, a slow-motion mastication of air, as the nanites inside it seek to spread to a new host.

They’re not easy to dispatch, but I do have a system. A quick shot with the crossbow, the
thunk
of the bolt hitting home at the base of the skull through the throat, then that stutter-step weirdness as the spinal cord is severed and the nanites try to fix things they can no longer truly fix.

That doesn’t kill the deaders—even though they’re dead anyway—like it does in the movies. That sort of pisses me off. By the time all this became real and fiction fell away, I was under the mistaken belief that any well-struck blow to the head would knock a deader into a less corporeal form of afterlife. I made a good many of them look like freaking porcupines I shot so many bolts into them, but still, they stutter-stepped along.

But it's all bull, and here's why. The nanites that keep the deaders ambulatory do require that the host have a functioning brain and nervous system. But only the barest, teensiest sliver of brain is actually needed. So long as some fraction of the host’s mind remains connected to its body, that host will keep on moving. Even if the head and body are separated, each part will continue to survive and—if I had to guess—at least the head part will continue to suffer, for a long time.

The nanites, in carrying out their simple machine directive, maintain the host in something resembling a living state. But that same directive also requires that the nanites maintain
themselves.
To do this, they must keep building new nanites to replace those that fail or otherwise become inoperative. It's an endless, vicious circle. The nanites keep the host "alive" and craving the materials the little machines use to maintain both host and themselves. But all of it works so poorly that the result is a world gone haywire, swarming with ravenous in-betweeners and decaying deaders.

Every part of the host body teems with nanites. And true to their original designs, they can repair a lot of damage. When the host’s brain or spinal cord takes a hit, the nanites go into overdrive to fix it. I’ve cracked heads on the driest and nastiest deaders and seen a nice, moist brain inside. That’s what the nanites focus on when all else fails—the brain.

Eventually, that fails too if the host doesn’t feed. Preservation of the host is the nanite directive, and just look at the mess that bit of simple computer code has brought us.

While they are busy fixing the spinal cord, it’s a simple matter of walking up to the fence and poking them in enough places that they’re no longer mobile. It’s very messy work. If I were in medical school, I’d ace the test on where the ligaments and muscles that tie a human body together are located. Too bad for me that I wanted to be an architect and build beautiful buildings that would last the ages.

What a joke. I’m laughing. Really.

What I really need to do is smash their heads, which is very efficient and
very
final. Efficiency is good. Poking through the chain link fence is not efficient, so I just feed through a loop of wire, let it pop open, hook each deader around the neck, and tighten the loop. After that, I let the piece of pipe attached to each wire keep them stuck to the fence until I can get to them.

Once I get closer to the gate I hear the soft shuffling sounds of a larger group. It’s an unmistakably creepy sound that I wouldn’t have thought twice about in the past. It’s probably no different from the sound of a bunch of people waiting in line at a movie theater, shuffling their feet and impatient for that weekend’s blockbuster to take away their everyday worries.

The difference is that those shuffling feet always had other human sounds to cover them in the world I grew up in. Amusement-park music drowning out the sounds of the hour-long wait in line. Excited chatter and giggles covering up the pre-movie foot noises. Our crowd sounds muffled the presence of the crowd itself.

Now, it’s just the birds and they are up high, avoiding contact with deaders and in-betweeners alike, exposing the sounds for what they are. And what those sounds are is a danger in a form that only vaguely reminds me of their former human selves.

I’d like to just avoid this area altogether, but so much noise attracts in-betweeners. That means this spot more than any other is one I’ve got to keep clear. The chain link fence that surrounds this industrial complex ends at the front, where the impression needed to be a little less prison-like back when the world was normal. Along the wedge-shaped front of the complex, the chain link shifts to wrought iron fencing, the kind with fancy spikes along the top and brick pillars breaking it up every so often.

It’s actually quite pretty, but unfortunately, it’s also bare metal of the most attractive kind. Iron. Not cheap knock-off aluminum, not alloy, but old-school, painted wrought iron. There must be some sort of coating on it that keeps the rust at bay, but on the gate that’s eroded away, leaving a rusty and attractive span of iron for the deaders to attach themselves to.

There’s a good crowd of them today, at least twenty. That’s a lot these days, two years into the nightmare that is our world. In the beginning, there were thousands—no, tens and hundreds of thousands—of them running around, but deaders don’t last forever and they are truly, finally, dying off in droves.

I can’t handle twenty by myself, but they are on the other side of the gate and most of them are in just as bad a shape as the ones from the perimeter sweep. It’s almost funny, the way they look. Gross, but funny. Whatever is left of their mouths is wrapped around a rung of wrought iron, gumming away at it like teething babies with frozen teething rings.

If they sensed me nearby, they’d switch their attention to me in a heartbeat, but so long as I’m careful—and don’t trip again—I should be fine with deaders this far gone. They don’t speak, groan, or do any of that business. The only sounds that come from them are occasional clangs from something hitting the fence, the gooey sounds of their mouths sliding along the posts, and that ever-present soft shuffling of their feet across the pavement.

I stand there watching them a while, trying to accurately gauge the condition of each deader. Mistakes are deadly so I do try very hard not to make them.

People used to say that nobody is perfect, but I now think of that as an excuse for not being careful. Carefulness breeds perfection. I’m not perfect yet, as demonstrated by my tripping this morning, but I come closer each day. If there were a PhD for carefulness, I would have earned one.

Doctor Careful, thank you very much.

Something at the outer periphery of the little crowd draws my attention. It’s not anything big or obvious, but there’s purpose somewhere there in the movements. An in-betweener? Two steps backward brings me even with the back of a truck. It’s parked neatly along the side of the access road where it has been since that first bad day. Orderly stacks of orange cones meant to alert motorists fill the bed of the truck, still waiting patiently for someone to arrange them on a street somewhere. They make for even better cover.

I duck behind the truck, but slowly and without sudden movements that could attract even the dimmest-sighted deader. Peering from between the pointed barriers of the stacked cones, I examine each head carefully. I can’t see past the deaders particularly well, but I’m patient and eventually I’m rewarded for my patience.

The in-betweener is a newly minted one. The only part of him that I can really see is from the forehead up, but the neat haircut and the general shape of his head tells me he’s a man, one who joined the ranks of in-betweeners very recently.

After a long while listening to their gushy licking noises, the in-betweener finally makes an appearance by moving to the side, away from the gate. He walks toward the area where the brick bottom and pillars make reaching the iron more difficult for the deaders. He’s tall and very close to living, his color only pale and not any of the more colorful shades the deaders progress through over time.

His clothes are dirty, but still recognizable. His hair is still brown and unmatted by time and the environment. The rain may have cleaned him up a bit, but the overall impression I get from him is someone recently made into an in-betweener. There are stains on the pale blue over-shirt he’s wearing that cover the arms from wrist to elbow. I’m thinking blood.

He reaches out with dirty hands toward the bars, stretching a little to get past the substantial brick base. I’ve measured it in the past, and the foundation is three feet thick and three feet high. That’s enough to keep a car from crashing through, but not so high as to be unattractive. The ironwork bars of the fence extend upward from that.

At first, he seems a little confused, like he can’t understand why he wants the iron bars and knows he’s forgetting something—probably the sight of me. Eventually he settles, strokes one of the bars a little, and leans forward awkwardly to wrap his lips around it. His eyes don’t close, but I can tell he’s content. That’s how they get, sort of content, when they satisfy an imperative. Obtaining iron is an imperative. The closest thing to a look of happiness I’ve ever seen on them is when they get hold of a cell phone or some other electronic device, especially if it’s busted up. All those rare metals, you know. Still, he looks content now with his iron bar.

He’s young, probably not much older than me. Maybe he was a college student or recently graduated. The way he’s dressed—the jeans and the T-shirt with a button-up shirt over it as a sort of jacket—speaks student to me. Maybe a grad student?

I look him over and finally see what took him from regular human to in-betweener. There’s a neat hole in his T-shirt, right above a beer logo, and the brown of old blood is now visible against the dark green of the cotton. Someone shot him. I wonder why. Was he trying to steal someone’s food? Or woman? Or was he protecting something—or someone—that another person wanted?

I’ll never know, I don’t guess, but it’s good information nonetheless. It tells me that there are sufficient people and resources nearby to provide regular changes of clothes, haircuts, shaving materials—and the time and safety to be concerned with shaving—and weapons. That’s not good.

Unfortunately, in exchange for that information, I’m now stuck where I am. Between me and the buildings is the access road and he will see me clear as day if I try to cross. There’s no other viable way to go unless I try to crawl backward, keeping the ever-decreasing relative size of the truck between me and him. It’s at least a few hundred feet until I get to the curve in the access road that circles the entire complex. Encumbered as I am, that will take a while. And he’s too far away for me to shoot with the kind of accuracy I would need. And that’s not even taking into account the difficulty of trying to aim through the bars of the fence while the target is moving. I’m good, but not that good.

I decide to wait him out a little. In-betweeners are generally fickle. Their attention is easily diverted because their imperatives are so varied. By the time they become deaders, their goals are reduced to spreading to new hosts and finding stationary sources of metals they can use. Deaders don’t really fight at that point, but they do want to get their mouths on you and break the skin. In groups, their individual weakness is overcome by sheer mass and momentum. It’s easy to get overwhelmed if you wind up surrounded. No one can ever say they aren’t persistent when they have prey nearby, only that they’re fickle when there’s no prey to be found. It’s super-inconvenient, that’s for sure.

And once deaders get their mouths on something with a pulse, sometimes they keep going, reverting to the more aggressive in-betweener behavior. I’ve seen it happen. Not as often anymore because there aren’t that many living things available, but I know the drill.

The most recent such attack, at least that I’ve seen, was on a dog that somehow managed to survive out here on the outskirts of town. I was trying to get to the dog as well, but not for food. I wanted him to keep me company. In truth, I’d been desperate for him, but he was wary and wouldn’t come near me. He’d learned that not everything that looked human was human. But I’m patient in all things, including winning over a wary dog that looked like he could really use a good meal of spam.

A deader surprised me by coming out of the woods surrounding this complex and going straight for the dog. I’d yelled from my place behind my fence, told the dog to shoo, eventually screaming and crying, but all that did was confuse the dog and keep his wary eyes on me instead of behind him, where he might have seen the danger.

I don’t want to see any more dogs.

In-betweeners, on the other hand,
always
crave the material that will rebuild their injuries and keep them going. Their nanites don’t know that their host is really already dead. Nanites aren’t sentient or anything. They just know their program and their program is to repair damage to their hosts and themselves.