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We headed west, going out of the small town and through farmland. According to the map, Happy Valley was not actually in a valley, which was one of the reasons it had been hard for me to locate. It was on a hill that backed up against a pretty steep mountain. There was a small river that came down from the mountain bringing snow melt, and the gated community was surrounded by a very dense and very deep section of protected land. No public roads passed it, and the only ways into it were two small private roads. One was a service road that wound around to the back corner and might as well have had “tradesman’s entrance” painted on it. The other was a crushed shell road that was probably quite lovely once upon a time. Pink shells, lined with decorative stones. But it was not easy to find because someone had gone to great lengths to plant a bunch of fast-growing weeds and shrubs in front of the entrance, and over the last six months it had all grown wild. The decorative rocks had all been pushed aside and the shell gravel raked away. I found traces of it, enough to know what it had been.
“Someone’s being very careful,” I said aloud. A squirrel dropped an acorn on me. Not sure how to interpret that.
Baskerville sniffed around and seemed content that all was kosher, but then a breeze rolled our way from deep within the trees. The dog lifted his big head and sniffed it and immediately went into his aggressive fighting stance—wide-legged, head lowered, ears pivoting to hear everything, nose sniffing out the complexities of odor. I smelled it, too. A sickly-sweet stink I knew too well. Rotting flesh. But there was something else mixed in, an underlying strangeness or something.
The dead rot for a bit, but they don’t completely decay. The genetically-altered parasites prevent that, keeping the infected in a state near death but not actually dead. You see, that’s the thing. There are the living, the actual dead, and the living dead. It’s a third state of existence. The body is in a semi-hibernative state, with all nonessential organs and tissues shut down so that the essential systems can stay online. There is actually some respiration and blood flow, though it is almost impossible to detect. Otherwise the zombies would have rotted to piles of goo within a week or two after the outbreak.
The upshot of this is that the stench of decay for them is different than that of an ordinary human body left to rot. It isn’t as sweet because the parasites need the energy of those sugars.
The smell riding the forest breeze was very sweet. Which meant that it was not infected flesh. It could be an animal, although most animals have their own aromatic signature if you have the experience to discern one from the other. This smelled like human flesh.
I touched Baskerville’s shoulder and bent low to whisper to him. “Find. No hit.”
He was off like a shot. In the months we’d traveled together, I’d spent hundreds of hours teaching the mutt a lot of tricks. Verbal commands, finger snaps, and silent hand signals. He didn’t yet have the vocabulary that my first combat dog, Ghost, used to have, but Baskerville was learning. He was a damn smart dog, and we were a pack now. As he vanished into the woods I took a moment to look around and let my own—admittedly less acute—human senses do their jobs. There were a lot of birds singing in the trees, including two noisy crows. There were no moans that I could hear; no voices or cries for help, either.
I left the cart where it was, loosened my sword in its sheath, and followed Baskerville.
The smell was too strong to have traveled far, and within a couple of minutes I came upon the big dog standing just inside the shadowy woods on the edge of a clearing. His ears twitched as I came up behind, but his eyes were set and fixed on what was inside the clearing. The smell was much stronger here, and now I could tell that there was more than one kind of rot troubling the air. The sweetness of human rot and the stranger, muskier stink of zombies undergoing their ultra-slow process of decay. The closer I got the more of that I smelled.
As I crept up behind Baskerville, I could hear sounds, too. Moans, but oddly muffled, and some creaking
, rasping sounds. And the buzz of flies. Hundreds of them. Thousands.
Baskerville and I peered through a break in the leaves and stared into the mouth of hell itself.
— 17 —
DAHLIA AND THE PACK
Dahlia stood at the edge of the big clearing. Neeko stood facing her across the open space, and several of the others were there as well. A skinny black girl named Bailey; Pepe, a squat, broad-shouldered Chicano; and one of the last kids from Dahlia’s old school, Skye. The interior space of the clearing was filled with all kinds of devices rigged by Mr. Church. Pieces of logs balanced by ropes, camouflaged pits, trip wires, and dozens of small targets made from paper plates dripping with fresh white paint. Control wires snaked out in all directions, each of them held by other members of the Pack. Scattered throughout the clearing were bundles wrapped in cloth or old newspaper. Weapons or other tools.
The exercise was a bitch. Dahlia and the others had taken a real beating during it several times over the last few weeks. She could still feel the bruises. And it was never the same way twice. So far none of them had gotten all the way through. There were no set rules except Church’s expectation that everyone did it and anyone participating in the exercise try to get all the way through. No quitting.
Church did not give his combat or survival exercises names, but Neeko always did. He called the drill with blindfolds and Sharpies “Ghosting.” This was the Arena.
“On deck,” called Church. He stood just inside the wall of shadowy trees.
Dahlia eased forward into a crouch, exactly the way she’d been taught—knees bent, weight shifted to the balls of her feet and equally balanced, hands loose and ready, eyes focused on the whole clearing instead on any one object. A phrase hung in her consciousness. Mushin no shin. A Japanese word for “mind of no mind.” It was a concept Church had been teaching them all. To be ready for anything while being without expectations or preconceptions. A pure, reactive state that allowed a warrior to fight the actual fight rather than what he or she expected. It was Zen, not Jedi, but it amounted to much the same to Dahlia. A mind trick.
She waited for the moment to tell her what was happening so that the long weeks of training could allow her reflexes and muscle memory to dictate how to move. It was even harder than it sounded.
“Go,” said Church. He did not shout it. He said it quietly, almost conversationally.
Neeko and Dahlia moved into the clearing first, breaking right and left as they entered. The goal was to find a small bundle, the contents of which were different every time, and then escape the Arena with it intact.
There was a sound—a faint whisper of something—and Dahlia shifted, turned, ducked, then flattened completely as a branch was released from a tether and snapped through the air where her stomach had been. The painted plate missed her back by half an inch, and she immediately rolled sideways and came up fast, following the branch, grabbing it above and below the plate and giving it a savage wrench. The green wood cracked, and she spun off it to see Neeko twist himself nearly in half avoiding a bunch of small stones that fell from a net bag released by one of the Pack. One stone struck his forearm and he cried out but kept moving. The stones weren’t soaked in paint, and therefore indicated injury but not an infected bite.
Pepe, Skye, and Bailey moved in now, treading carefully, looking for traps.
Skye made it three steps before stepping on something hidden under leaves. A pint of paint dropped from the “ceiling” onto her head with a heavy splat.
“Shit,” she cried. Immediately the three Pack members closest to her side of the clearing began counting out loud. Infection was quick, and quicker still when someone was moving fast and pumping blood. Increased heartrate spread the parasites throughout the body too fast for amputation or any other preventative method. Church allowed them fifteen seconds in the drill, after which they would have to play zombie and try to attack the others. Before the world ended that would be a fun, if weird, game of tag; now it usually resulted in heavy bruising and the occasional broken bone.
Pepe grabbed her and shoved her toward a pair of paint-soaked plates hung on wires. Skye set her jaw, leaped at them and tore them down, bearing both to the ground so Pepe could run past her and get clear.
Dying are either a burden or an ally to the living. One of Church’s many combat sayings. If a soldier was injured during a really intense firefight, then helping him would draw resources from the battle. A medic and stretcher bearers. Two to three soldiers. If the team was badly outnumbered and the injured person could somehow fight, then Church said they were obliged by honor to do so. The concept was horrific and made Dahlia sick to her stomach, but she knew that Church was right. Anyone bitten would become a zombie, sooner or later. There was no cure and no hope, so what was actually the most humane choice? To endanger others or save them?
She recited another of the sayings in her head as she moved deeper into the circle. The war is the war.
