Apocalypse Of The Dead (35 page)

Another shot hit the roof next to Jeff’s face.

Colin said, “Go, go, go!”

Jeff took one last look behind him, saw Gaines standing there with the gun in his hand, and stepped on the gas.

Three hours later, Jeff pulled to the side of the road. Colin was still holding Kyra as tightly as ever, and Jeff wasn’t sure who was comforting whom. But he couldn’t drive anymore. The acid was coursing through him stronger than ever, and the road was moving like a living thing. He got out of the truck and went to the back. Robin was still there, holding Katrina in her arms, stroking the corpse’s blood-matted hair. She hadn’t wiped the blood from her own face, and when she rolled her eyes in Jeff’s direction, the whites stood out in stark contrast to the rest of her face.

“We should bury her,” he said.

Robin pulled Katrina closer to her and stared at him.

“I can do it,” he said. “If you want me to.”

“No,” she said. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “No, I’ll help.”

Together, working silently, they lowered Katrina’s body from the truck, took a shovel from behind the driver’s seat, and headed off into the brush. They followed a trail to the top of a small rise and stood, side by side, looking down over a desert landscape silvered with moonlight.

“Do you like this place?” he asked.

She nodded. He could hear her sniffling.

Two hours later, the grave was finished. It wasn’t deep, but it would do.

Jeff took off his shoelaces and used them to lash two sticks together into a cross. Then he hammered it into the ground at the head of the grave and stepped back.

Robin muttered, “I love you, baby,” and knelt forward and kissed the cross.

Then she took Jeff’s hand and together they walked back to the truck.

Colin and Kyra were waiting there, standing outside the truck. Colin turned when he heard them coming down from the trail and he motioned them over.

He was staring up at a green highway sign that announced the Guadalupe Mountains National Park thirty miles ahead. Somebody had written over the sign in white paint.

WE ARE GOING TO THE CEDAR RIVERS

NATIONAL GRASSLANDS NORTH DAKOTA

JOIN US

“What do you think?” Colin said.

He turned to the others. Jeff turned away from the sign. Something about those letters, the strong, confident brushstrokes, tugged at him. Finding them out here in the middle of nowhere, and at a point when he stopped because he couldn’t make himself drive any farther—it felt like some kind of sign. A shot in the arm when they needed it most. Like it was meant to be. He raised an eyebrow at Robin.

She closed her eyes, lowered her head, and nodded.

And just like that, it was decided.

“Let’s find a map,” Jeff said.

Athens, Texas, was just like all the other small towns they’d gone through. Lots of trees. Lots of sun-baked asphalt. Not a hill in sight.

Ben Richardson was tired. His eyes hurt from the sun reflecting off the road. He’d been walking all morning, dragging himself along, keeping a weary eye on the little houses and buildings they passed, and trying not to breathe too deeply whenever they passed the dead rotting in the sun on the side of the road. Ahead of them, about a quarter mile down Garrison Street from where he stood, was a shabby, redbrick building with a sign out front advertising it as Lewis & Sons Mercantile. Garrison Street curved right around the other side of that building, and Barnes, who was walking point as usual, had already turned the corner.

Richardson stopped, cradling his rifle in his arms like a baby, and drank most of a bottled water in one gulp. Every stitch of clothing he owned was crusty from dried sweat, and he was pretty sure he was developing shin splints. There was a pain in his legs that ran from the bottom of his kneecaps all the way to his toes. He put the cap back on the water and found it difficult to muster the will to keep walking.

And then he heard yelling coming from the front of the caravan. He groaned inwardly. He was tired of zombies, tired of fighting. That part inside him that used to hum with fear at the sight of them had gone numb. But he knew his job. As rear guard, it was his responsibility to make sure they had a place to retreat to if they needed it. He spun around and scanned the street, already considering the buildings for the shelter they might offer and the streets for the easy, fast getaway.

But something was different this time. It took him a moment to realize it, but when he did, he looked back over his shoulder and saw people running toward the redbrick building. They were jumping up and down, waving their arms in the air. He saw people laughing.

“What in the hell?” he said.

Sandra Tellez and Clint Siefer were in the bed of a truck up ahead, tending to a woman who had broken her ankle the week before.

Sandra stood up and watched the scene over the cab of the truck, then looked back at Richardson.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

He shrugged.

Tired as he was, he broke into a trot. He rounded the corner next to Lewis & Sons Mercantile and stopped. He lowered his rifle and stood there with his mouth agape.

“Can you believe it?” a man next to him said. He was laughing, and he gave Richardson a playful push.

Richardson smiled.

Ahead of them, five, maybe six hundred feet up the road, was an immense parking lot full of brightly painted recreational vehicles.

“Are those Winnebagos?” a woman asked.

“No way,” said the man who had pushed Richardson. “Those are Fleetwoods, top of the line. Even the cheap ones cost more than our house did.”

Excited people pushed their way past Richardson. He stood there, letting himself get jostled.

He said, “Sweet Jesus. No more walking.”

Then he let out a yell and started running.

Richardson was thumbing through a brochure for the Fleetwood Revolution LE, the stripped-down, no-frills edition starting at $289,600, when he stepped onboard one of the demo models.

The brochure slipped from his fingers.

“Holy hell,” he said.

Sandra Tellez was sitting next to Clint on a white leather couch, giggling like a six-year-old little girl. Barnes was seated in the driver’s seat, checking out the exterior cameras and nodding with grudging admiration.

“Pretty respectable,” he said.

Richardson thought the living room looked like a cross between a luxury private jet and the Playboy mansion. The floors were tiled. The leather furniture looked like fluffy white clouds. Recessed lighting ran the length of the ceiling. The kitchenette, directly across from where Sandra was sitting, was done up with stainless-steel Viking appliances. There was rich mahogany wood trim everywhere.

“You gotta see the shower,” Sandra said.

“There’s a shower?”

She nodded toward the back. Curious, he walked that way, slipped through a doorway, and nearly cried. In front of him was a bedroom the likes of which he had only seen in television shows about the rich and famous. The shower that Sandra had referred to was to his right, and it did bring tears to his eyes. Oh God, how he yearned for a shower.

From the brochure, he knew this thing had a washer and dryer, too. What a joy that would be. Clean clothes, a hot shower, a meal cooked on a real stove.

He dropped down into a chair in the corner and just stared at the room.

“Well,” said Barnes from behind him. “What do you think?”

Richardson looked up at him.

“You want to know what I think?” he said. “I think I can’t wait to brush my teeth.”

From the notebooks of Ben Richardson

Waurika, Oklahoma: August 22nd, 4:38 P.M.

Thank the lord, we finally made it out of Texas. Thank the lord. I could hear the cheering from the other RVs even as we were driving down the road…

Chickasha, Oklahoma: August 23rd, 3:50 A.M.

Drunker than Cooter Brown tonight and feeling pretty damn good about it.

We pulled into Chickasha earlier today and found a liquor store. These RVs have got ice makers on board, so, yeah, I made vodka martinis for everybody on our RV.

I don’t know how many I had. A bunch.

So, something a little lighter for the old notebooks tonight.

We’ve been on the road for a couple of weeks now, and we’ve seen a lot of infected wandering the roadways. One of the things I’ve seen quite a bit of is something I call the walking epitaph, people clipping little signs to their chest to let the rest of us know who they are, and maybe to give us a little glimpse of who they were in their uninfected life.

I suppose the epitaphs were inevitable, really. Nobody wants to be forgotten. We’ve all seen how the necrosis filovirus robs its victims of their sense of self. It only seems natural to want to hold on to a piece of who we are for as long as possible. I can’t blame anybody for that.

The quality of the poetry—and I’ve noticed that it’s almost always poetry of some sort—is fairly uneven. But the humor is consistent, and I think that our need to poke fun at death speaks volumes about us as a species. I guess I’m not the only one who does his best work with a deadline.

Here are just a few of the epitaphs I’ve seen. They’re not the best. Not by any means. But they all struck me as special when I saw them, and that’s why I’m recording them here.

This walking corpse is Marvin Reece’s.Have mercy on my soul, dear Jesus,Just like I’d do if I was you, Jesus,And you was this corpse of Reece’s.Poor Jamie O’Dell, she’s gone away,Got sick and rose that very same day.She had a fever and a hacking cough,But her legs still managed to carry her off.This is the body of Margaret PoundWhose mind went missing and was never found.

And then there is a subset of these epitaphs that almost read like permission slips to the reader to kill the wearer.

Burn me up or cut me down,Either way is fine;Just make it quickAnd make it stick.Fuck you, World,Signing off, Alex Mentick.

This is the body of William Bunn

Who would like to be killed by a gun.

Really, his name was not Bunn, but Hood,

But Hood wouldn’t rhyme with gun, and Bunn would.

I’m the dentist John HannityAnd it seems I’ve met with calamity.Please dispatch me with some gravityAs I’m eager to die and fill my last cavity.Take your best shot at Mrs. Annabelle Bostich.She was my landlady and a mean old witch.Go ahead—I asked around; they won’t miss the bitch.I tried to die in bed.I got up and walked around instead.Kill me or I’ll kill youBefore this mess is through.Love always, Debbie Shue.

Well, that’s it for tonight. God, I’m gonna have a head-splitter in the morning.

Nearly five hundred miles away, just outside Dalhart, Texas, a man on a motorcycle pulled to the side of the road and stared at a pickup parked under the awning of a Valero gas station. The truck’s back windshield had been shot out. There were bullet holes in the tailgate. The Harley burbled noisily in the hot, dusty night air. Randall Gaines killed the motor and stepped from the bike.

There was no other sound save for the echo of his worn boot heels clicking on the asphalt.

He looked into the bed of the truck and saw blood everywhere.

“Hello,” Gaines said.

He walked around the truck to the hood and put his hand on it. It was warmer than the night air, but no longer hot. No more than an hour gone, he guessed.

“But where did you go, Harvard? That’s the question I want answered.”

He opened the driver’s door and looked inside. He saw candy bar wrappers and cigarettes and crumpled pieces of paper.

And something else.

A map.

He opened it and saw the United States. His gaze drifted over the states until he came to a thin penciled circle around the Cedar River National Grasslands in North Dakota.

A straight shot up Highway 83, he realized.

He folded the map and slid it into the back pocket of his jeans. Then, whistling, he slowly made his way back to his bike.

“There’s nothing on the radio.”

Billy Kline hit the radio’s Seek button and watched the numbers speed all the way through the FM band without stopping.

“I can’t believe this. You’d think we’d at least be able to find one of those automated BOB or JACK stations. There’s fucking nothing on.”

Billy caught himself.

“Sorry, Ed.”

Ed shook his head. “You’re not gonna find anything. Except maybe one of those radio preachers on the AM stations, and I don’t want to listen to that. Might do you some good, though.”

“You think so, huh?”

Ed shrugged, smiled.

“You’re a funny guy, you know that?”

“Yeah, I’ve been told that.”

Outside the car, the Kansas prairie went on forever, flat and gray. They’d been driving the entire day, stopping only for bathroom breaks (Randy and Billy both had to go nearly every thirty minutes, it seemed) and to raid the occasional gas station for candy bars and bottled waters. They went through town after town, all of them dead, bodies in the streets, the infected wandering around houses that were empty and ominous in their desolation. But now, after thirty hours of driving across the prairie, the emptiness was starting to give way to farmhouses and outbuildings again. They saw chickens pecking the dirt in machinery-choked yards. They saw swings on rusted jungle gyms dangling listlessly in the breeze. Here and there, they passed faded billboards advertising colas and gas stations.

“We’re gonna need to find a place to rest for the night here pretty soon,” Ed said. He pushed the brim of his cowboy hat up with his thumb and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“You okay to drive?” Billy asked. “I can take over.”

“No, I got it. It’s the road. Straight and flat and monotonous, you know? Gets you exhausted.”

“Yeah. Emporia’s up here another ten miles or so. Maybe we can find a place there.”

They entered Emporia a few minutes later. A 30-mile-per-hour speed limit sign marked the change from highway to Main Street. They crossed Elm Street, then Oaklawn Street, and pulled up on the town square. Houses lined Main Street on either side. They were plain, wooden structures with covered front porches and small lawns that looked untrimmed and shaggy. There were bodies here and there, faceup in the street. They passed an infected man near the corner of Main and Birch wearing nothing but a bloody T-shirt and soiled boxer shorts. He turned on his heel and stumbled toward them, but he was too far away to be a threat and Ed didn’t even bother to accelerate.