Bits & Pieces (15 page)

That morning John Kellogg had argued with his wife
about it. He told her that he just couldn't do it anymore, that whatever spiritual reservoir he'd once possessed was now used up. Molly had a simpler faith, one whose unshakable nature Kellogg had always envied.

“Give it another year,” she said. “Go talk to the bishop. Get some help before you throw away everything you've worked for.”

It had been a troubling conversation. Their son, Matthew, did not believe in anything. Or said that he didn't. He'd sat at the breakfast table, head bowed over his Cheerios, and took no sides. Matthew thought it was all silly. Religion, spirituality, the whole works. On the other hand, he was too smart to risk siding with his father on this one. Not against Mom's iron will.

That was this morning.

Now Pastor John Kellogg sat in his office behind the church and watched the falling rain through the open window. Behind the noise of the storm, threaded through the steady hum of the downpour and the detonations of thunder, he could hear the gunfire.

And the screams.

Kellogg looked out at the rain, silver droplets flickering downward against the purple-black sky, and as the heavens wept he continued to slowly, methodically, and carefully sharpen his knives. They were kitchen knives, but they were all he had. Kellogg did not own a gun and had never even handled one. He loved to cook, though, so knives were more comfortable in his hands. Or . . . had been more comfortable. Comfort of every kind, he judged, was over. He took his time, even as time melted away in the storm.

He tried not to listen to the sounds coming from inside the church. There were no more screams. Those had faded a long time ago. Now it was just moans. Low and constant and hungry. And the slow shuffle of clumsy feet.

He ran the edges of the knives along the whetstone. Kellogg was not really sure if the knives would work. He'd had to use a golf club earlier. That was terrible. Loud and messy and awful. Maybe the knives would be quicker and cleaner—for everyone.

Kellogg was careful with the whetstone, needing to get it right.

Because it was almost time to start the killing.

The moans were constant. And there was a dull, slack pounding on the door. Limp hands beating on the wood.

Whose hands?

Mrs. Kulp, the choir director?

Molly?

Matthew?

“God help me,” whispered Pastor Kellogg.

The only answer he heard, though, were the moans.

(Six months after First Night)

He wasn't who he'd been.

He was certain of that.

The person he'd been, he was absolutely certain, had died back there in San Francisco.

That person had been too weak to survive.

That person would never have made the kinds of choices or done the kinds of things he'd done.

No.

When the dead rose, Ferdinand McTeague was still a good man. He was a good husband to Alex; a good father to their adopted sons, Quinn and Taye; a good manager at the hotel; a good employee of the corporation that owned the hotel; a good member of the community, the PTA, the condominium homeowners' association; a good supporter of human rights, animal rights, and sustainable energy; a good son to his parents; a good brother to his sister, Claire.

That's what he had been.

Good.

As he stood in the road and watched San Francisco burn, he wondered what “good” meant.

The fires reached upward with fingers of yellow and orange and red and clawed at the ceiling of clouds. Those clouds glowed as if they were about to burst into flame too.

From here, from this vantage point, Ferdinand could not hear the screams. Or the moans. All he could hear was a long, loud, sustained roar as tens of thousands of buildings and homes burned. He could not see the dead—or the living, if there had been any left before he began setting his fires. But he could imagine those souls flickering upward inside the flames, escaping through the clouds into heaven.

He leaned against the fender of an abandoned car. Electromagnetic pulses from the nukes that had wiped out most of the big cities had killed all the cars. Somehow San Francisco hadn't been nuked, but the EMPs still turned off all the power.

That had made it harder to escape. The lack of power, of lights, of vehicles had probably killed more people than the plague itself. One of the last official statements had been some nonsense about using nuclear weapons to wipe out the main areas of infection. That hadn't worked, and any bloody fool could have told the bozos in Washington it was a stupid plan. All it did was make sure the people had no way to flee. It turned off every light but the one that more or less said “Open Buffet—All You Can Eat.”

The smoke from the fire was being pushed around by the wind, and some of it was beginning to come in his direction.

He moved away, allowing himself to be chased into the darkness by the sooty evidence of his crime.

He was sure that there had to be some living people down there.

Had to be. Surviving, as he had survived for so long.

Now . . .

No.

Now San Francisco was going to burn to the ground. No engines would come, no burly firefighters would douse the conflagration. It would all burn.

Maybe it would spread, too.

Ferdinand had left trails of gasoline across the Golden Gate to coax the fires.

He wanted it all to burn.

That was the point.

Nukes didn't kill the infection.

Fire always did.

It was just that there hadn't been enough fire.

Now maybe there would be.

Fire purifies. They even set controlled fires on farm fields to restore and refresh the land.

Maybe it would do that here, too.

He hoped so.

He wiped at the tears in his eyes. Ferdinand was not in the habit of lying to himself. He never had. He didn't try to convince himself that those tears were from the smoke.

No.

Down there, somewhere within those towering walls of flame, were Alex, and the boys, and his parents.

His sister, too.

All of them.

Or . . . the versions of them that had been left to haunt him once they'd contracted the plague. The versions of them that had attacked one another. The versions that had tried to kill him before he'd overpowered them and locked them in rooms.

Now they were burning.

Burning.

Fire purifies.

It ends.

It releases.

As he walked away, he wept.

He walked all night and well into the morning. He outwalked the smoke. He wondered how far he would have to go to outwalk the memories.

He was sure that there was no number for it.

As he walked—that day and over the many days that followed—he wondered who he was now. He was no longer the quiet, gentle, mildly funny and always agreeable hotel manager
he had been for eleven years. He was no longer that good man. He was no longer a husband, son, father, or brother.

He had burned everyone he ever loved.

A good man did not do that kind of thing.

A good man does not slaughter his way out of town and then light a blaze that threatens to burn down heaven itself.

No.

He was not that good man anymore.

So who was he?

It was a question he could not answer.

Not yet.

He walked on, heading south and east. Toward the center of the state, toward the mountains. Maybe he could find somewhere where he could be a good man again.

Maybe.

But where?

(Five months after First Night)

Tom heard the sounds of killing long before he smelled the blood.

He knew that this was killing and not just fighting. The screams told him that much. Men didn't scream like that unless they were dying.

The woods were dark, and he knew how to move through them without making a sound. His older brother, Sam, had taught him that. Sam, who was almost twenty years older than
Tom, had been a top special forces soldier, and he'd taught Tom a lot of useful skills. Tom, a change-of-life baby for their mother, had idolized Sam and hung on every word, paid close attention to every lesson. He wanted to
be
Sam.

As he crept through the forest toward the fight, Tom wondered for the millionth time where Sam was. There had been one desperate phone call from his brother on the night it all fell apart. Sam had warned him to take care of the family.

After that, nothing.

Not a word.

Tom was sure that if Sam were alive, he would have found a way to make it home. But First Night was five months ago. The world had ended. Sam had never come home.

The sounds were close now, and Tom slowed as he approached the wall of trees, beyond which was a clearing. He left his sword sheathed and his gun holstered. He wasn't coming to join the fight. Not yet. Tom had already learned hard lessons about assuming that every fight was a human defending against the living dead.

Most of the fights he'd seen over the last few weeks had been a lot different from that. Worse, in some ways.

He eased down into the black shadows beneath a twisted willow and watched with amazed eyes at what was happening.

The clearing was actually the backyard of a substantial house. There was a jungle-gym play set and an inground pool. The play set looked brand-new, like it had never been shared by laughing children. The pool, though, was a soup of polluted water, decaying leaves, and corpses.

Some of the corpses looked like they'd been floating in that muck for weeks.

Three of them, however, were horribly fresh.

There were five other corpses—two zombie and three human—sprawled on the grass. One of the humans was missing most of his head. The other two had multiple cuts to their faces, throats, and bodies. One of these was already twitching, a sure sign that he was about to reanimate.

On the grassy, overgrown back lawn, a fight was raging among six living people.

Five of the men were dressed in biker leather. They were filthy, bearded, and brutal-looking. They had a variety of weapons in their hands—pipe clubs, lengths of chain, and various deadly hunting knives.

The sixth was a big man dressed in loose black military pants, a black tank top, and combat boots. His hair was short and blond and shot through with gray. He looked to be north of forty, but he moved with the oiled grace of a much younger man. He had a short-bladed folding knife in his right hand, the blade barely three and a half inches long.

That blade, though, and the hand that held it, were covered in blood.

The man grinned as he moved, shifting constantly to keep the five men from closing around him. Tom approved. It was a solid martial arts tactic.

One of the bikers faked left and rushed right with a sweep of his chain to try to knock the knife out of the man's hand.

It was a very fast attack.

Tom, who was fast himself, and who was a trained observer, did not see what happened. There was a blur of movement, a flash of silver, and the biker was sagging to his knees, his chain forgotten, clamping hands to his throat.

It had happened so
fast
.

Impossibly fast. No one could move like that.

But he was wrong.

The big man with the knife lunged at the man on the outside of the remaining four, knocked aside a gloved fist holding a butcher knife, and delivered four cuts that were too quick to follow. The biker howled in agony and fell, propelled by a palm-strike to his temple. He crashed into a third man and dragged him down.

The other bikers rushed the man, and as he danced backward, his heel skidded on a patch of blood-soaked grass. He fell, and they piled on him.

Tom found himself moving. It wasn't a planned thing, because he really didn't know who the good guy was in this fight. It could as easily have been two groups of cannibal scavengers as a bunch of survivors trying to punish someone who'd stolen their supplies.

His instincts wrote a different scenario, though.

There was something about the big blond man that spoke of courage and maybe even nobility. He didn't have the cannibal craziness in his eyes. Nor did he look underfed and desperate enough to try to rob a gang.

No. These bikers had probably targeted him.

Bad move for most of them.

Tom broke from the cover of the trees and launched himself into a jumping kick that smashed into one of the two men. He flopped over sideways and Tom landed next to him, stumbled, caught his balance, and whipped out his sword. The biker had time for one word.

“Don't—!”

Then sword moved through the air and through flesh and the biker's voice was still forever.

The shock of the cut trembled up Tom's arm. The shock of having killed someone shuddered inside his chest. It was not the first time he'd had to do it, but it was not something that got easier. If anything, it was getting harder. Requiring more of him. Or perhaps cutting more of him away.

He wheeled around in time to see the big man toss the corpse of the fifth biker aside. The man's neck was twisted in an ugly way.

The man got up with fluid grace and stared at Tom for one long second, and in that moment Tom was sure this man was taking full and accurate stock of him, his weapons, and maybe even his level of skill.

The man reversed the knife in his hand and cocked his arm. “Better duck,” he said.

Tom heard a soft sound behind him and he ducked, pivoted, and slashed, knowing that it was the third man, the one who'd been knocked down by the second man who'd been killed. He flicked his sword out, and it struck in the same instant as the knife thrown by the big blond man.

The last of the bikers stared at them in disbelief. He dropped the big meat cleaver he held, tried to speak past the steel stricture in his throat, failed, and fell face-forward onto the grass.

Tom got to his feet and backed a few paces away. He kept his sword in his hands, wary of the blond man now that it was just the two of them.