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We hadn’t yet gone west to Nevada. I knew I’d get around to it, but I was stalling. We’d been back to my uncle’s farm a dozen times, trying to pick up the scent of Junie or the baby. Or anything. But Baskerville only sat and howled. I did that sometimes, too.
There were travelers,
refugees, wanderers out in the storm. We met a bunch of those. Most were deep inside a bubble of their own PTSD. Gone mad or gone feral, or just . . . gone. Some were cool, though. I met a guy named Billy Trout, a reporter from Stebbins, the little town where the plague started. He was stuck with a bunch of school buses that had been killed by the EMPS. The buses were filled with kids, and Trout was taking care of them while waiting for his girlfriend, a local cop named Dez Fox, to find him. Her bus had gotten separated from a convoy before the power was blown out. The plan had been to take the kids to the post-apocalyptic version of the Promised Land, Asheville. Rumors were that people had made a successful stand there and were trying to build something. A community.
I helped Trout fortify his place and then moved on.
Then I ran into Dez Fox, who was in real trouble. She was something. A fiery redneck blonde badass who took no prisoners and cut no one any slack. I liked her in about the same way you can like a pit bull. We fell in together because she was protecting her bus of kids against a bunch of assholes who—and I’m not joking here—called themselves the NKK, the Nu Klux Klan. No, it doesn’t make any sense no matter hard you stare at it.
They were exactly what you’d expect them to be, and there were a whole lot of the bastards. They were ranging through the woods and farms, gathering up women and children. Rape and every other kind of vile abuse you can imagine. Women and kids.
Naturally Dez and I took some umbrage at this and sternly disabused them of the notion that they had permission to act like total parasites. We had some help from a young woman, early twenties, who was dressed like some kind of Viking or Asgardian or something. A cosplayer who used to do the comic convention circuit and after the dead rose decided to embrace the characters she played. A little crazy, sure, but tough as fuck. The three of us, and my armored mutt, stood up to the whole NKK army.
We walked away. They did not.
The warrior woman, Rachael Elle, went east. Dez went off to find Trout, using a map I gave her. And I kept wandering. Kept looking for the family I knew I’d never find.
Days lost their meaning after a while. Most things did.
I found some pockets of the NKK and vented on them in very bad ways. Found some wanderers and helped them out of some scrapes and sent them on toward Asheville. Stayed alone, for the most part. Me and Baskerville.
One cold spring morning, though, I heard people. I heard screams and yells. And moans. It was a mélange of sounds I’d heard so often that even before I got there I could paint the picture—one or more of the living caught by a group of the dead. In a field or farmhouse, in a forest or on the banks of a stream. That kind of drama was probably playing out all over the country. Probably all of the world, in cities and in the woods, maybe even in the arctic and on remote islands. Wherever the disease was, and last I heard it was everywhere.
The screams were male. Two or three voices. And a lot of moans. Baskerville froze and stared. His armor prevented me from seeing the hairs rise along his spine, but his body language told me.
We broke into a run.
Even though we are a formidable team—big SpecOps guy with guns and a damn samurai sword and a hundred-fifty pounds of armored killer dog—we never acted like we could just blunder in and solve everything. Caution kept us alive, so we only ran as fast as safety allowed.
We stopped on the near side of a gully about a mile into some overgrown woods. All around us the birds had fallen silent. Never a good sign. The sounds of some kind of fight were coming from the other side of a thick stand of maple trees, with the gully in between. Baskerville wanted to run, his body quivered with that kind of excitement, but he wasn’t running yet. Not because I’d given him the command to stay, but because his instincts were at war with his desire to fight. This was a combination I’d seen in him time and again. It meant that there were living and dead threats.
Before the run-in with the NKK goon squad, I’d go running in any time I thought a living person was fighting for his or her life. That’s when I naively thought that the worst things out here were the zombies. The sad truth is that the living dead have no choice in what they do; they’re driven by parasites and there is no human control left at all. No will, no choice, no animus. It’s totally different with the living. When they bring hurt and harm, when they rape and steal and beat and torture, it’s because they want to. People have always scared me more than any of the monsters I’ve ever fought.
I clicked my tongue for him and we moved forward more slowly, going down one slope, stepping across the narrow trickle of runoff from yesterday’s rain, and then climbing the far side. An old oak climbed precariously to the edge with too many of its roots exposed by erosion. Worked for me, though, and I used the thickest ones as handholds. Baskerville ran slantwise up the slope and met me at the top, looking pleased with himself.
I scrambled over the edge and we went off around the copse of trees, but we didn’t get far before the shape of things began to emerge. Bodies lay tangled in the tall grass and weeds. Some of them were pale and withered, gray-skinned and bearing the marks of the bites that had killed them the first time and the blunt-force trauma that had stilled them forever. Mixed in among them were bodies painted in blood, with throats torn out or such traumatic injuries that blood loss killed them. These bodies twitched and jerked as the parasites transferred into them from the bites sought to rewire the central nervous system. Soon all of them would rise and join the fight, changing sides from defenders to relentless attackers.
That’s how we lost. Every one of us that died became one of them.
There were no gunshots. Ammunition was rare. In the old monster movies, the heroes never seemed to run out unless it was for dramatic effect. In the real world, you could burn through three or four full mags in a minute or two.
I heard grunts of desperation and whimpers of pain. I heard the moans. And I heard the heavy thud of something hitting flesh—crushing it, breaking bone. Hitting again.
Baskerville moved into line-of-eyesight with me and I gave him two hand signals—a loose hand and then a cutting motion. The loose indicated that he was allowed to attack the zombies, and the cut was to remind him to use his body armor. We’d spent thousands of hours over the last six months on that. He was smart and experienced and he wanted to fight.
He ran, and I ran.
On the far side of the copse there were three living people and nine zombies. All three of the living were bleeding. All three had already been bitten.
They were dying; they were lost. I saw one of them, a medium-sized guy with brown skin and an Arab face. He saw me and hope flared for one terrible moment before it was replaced by a clear awareness that we weren’t going to be able to save him.
Baskerville and I attacked anyway.
— 5 —
DAHLIA AND THE PACK
Dahlia liked being the queen. She deserved to be the queen. Not that she called herself that, or required any of the members of the Pack to call her that, but it’s how she thought of herself. Queen of the Apocalypse.
