Crusade (Eden Book 2) (6 page)

“We’ll rest two or three days here,” said Nadjia, “then we will leave. Any of you who wish are free to join us, but you need to know the only thing on the road ahead of us is more of…this.” She gestured with an open palm to the carpet of corpses littered in varying displays of grotesquery.

“…and Emmanuel Santana left the monster in the sky, sitting on top of the world, the general alone…”

The evening crept into the sky and the night was lit by tremendous pyres. Dozens of fires ate the dead. Thick black smoking coils of cremated meat merged with the dark above and around. Everywhere the stink of singed dead flesh loomed. The men and women strong enough worked through the afternoon and night, their faces covered with rags against the noxious fumes as they disposed of the pestilential corpses.

Kevin crossed the street, stepping clear of the puddles of gore and rain that had pooled, his path lit by the flames. He pulled the jacket he wore closer about him, shivering in the cool autumn night. He entered a darkened building and walked up two flights of stairs to the door of an apartment of rooms Bear and Nadjia had selected. He stood in front of the door and paused, considering, then knocked, not too loud. Perhaps they were asleep. He did not want to waken them, nor was he completely sure he wanted to discuss what he had come to talk about.

Nadjia opened the door, backlit from a glow somewhere within the suite of rooms. She had the riot suit off and her hair down and she was the most beautiful woman Kevin had ever seen. The curves of her physique through the jeans and sweater she wore stirred something within him that he had not felt in a long time, something he’d given up on ever feeling again. Then he noticed the pistol in her left hand down at her side.

She stepped aside and let him into the apartment. A kerosene lamp burned in one corner where her sleeping bag was laid out. He noted what looked like a prayer mat rolled up next to the sleeping bag.

“Sit down.” She nodded to the floor. The apartment was bare. It had been stripped of furniture and anything that might burn long ago by people desperate for fuel in the winter. Most of the windows lacked glass and the cool night air whispered in. The sounds of men and women laboring outside on the street were faint.

They were quiet for awhile. In the silence his eyes adjusted to the dark enough to discern the immense form of Bear in the room beyond, seated as he was against a wall. It looked like he was cradling something in his arms. Kevin thought he knew what it was. He became aware of the presence of another in the apartment with them and guessed it would be the wild-man, somewhere near Bear, oddly quiet in the presence of the giant.

“Nadjia” He liked the sound of her name as it left her mouth. “Well, first,
thank you
. Thank you both. I don’t know how much longer we could have held out.”

“We were too late for too many. I looked around this town earlier. There are several too weak to move. They probably will not survive, even now.”

“You’ll—you’ll have to forgive me,” he stammered. “I’m half-starved and out of my mind. You look like some kind of angel sitting there. You’re so beautiful.”

It was Nadjia’s turn to scoff good naturedly. “Well, thank you. But like you said, you’re half starved and maybe a little out of your mind by this point. Plus I’m probably the first woman you’ve seen in awhile who’s had a bath in the past month and
isn’t
malnourished.”

“A monster truck. You know, one of those with the huge wheels. You could drive right over all those…” He tried to think of a word to describe the mounds of undead burning outside but couldn’t. “I mean, that road is going to be impassable.”

“I like the idea but we haven’t come across many monster trucks lately. Would you happen to know where we could find one?”

“As a matter of fact,
yeah
. Obviously no one’s driven it for a long, long time, so the battery’s dead and the tires are probably—”

“Can you show it to me tomorrow? I know a little about cars and trucks.”

“No kidding?”

“My father owned a fleet of taxis and limousines. He did most of the maintenance work himself until he made enough money to pay other people to do it for him. He raised my brothers and me to be comfortable around automobiles.”

“That’s good. That’s
great
. I don’t even know how to change my oil. Not that I have a car anymore. I mean, I guess I do, if it’s still there but… Sorry, I’m rambling. You’re the first…you’re one of the first people I’ve talked to in a long time.”

“Kevin, listen to me. I know it was bad here. I’ve seen this before. But now it’s going to be better. It’s up to you and everyone else here to work together to make it better.”

She sat quietly across from him for awhile, then said, “If you come with us, do you understand what you’ll face? If you stay here, you might have a shot at something—I don’t know—something more
normal
, more like the old life you knew. If you come with us…”

“They destroyed my life, my wife and my kids.” He looked out the window into the night as he spoke. “They destroyed my family, my friends, everything. And I want to destroy them. I want to destroy them all.”

She smiled at him. Her beauty in the glow of the kerosene lamp brought him back to the room.

“Revenge isn’t enough. These things can’t understand your vengeance. They don’t care. They wait and eat and that’s all they do, and they won’t stop until every single one of us is gone. Unless we destroy every single one of them.”

“I understand that.”

“Understanding…that isn’t enough. You can’t run on revenge for ever. That fuel will run out. I know.” She looked away. “What we do…this isn’t…I have a few more fights left in me, but that’s it. Then I have to stop or this will kill me. When you do this, it changes you. I can’t explain how, but it saps you of your humanity. Does that make any sense?”

“Kevin, I do what I do because it seems like the right thing to do. This is a war. You know the term
Jihad
? Yes? I never understood that word until…But now that’s how I see this. I will fight for as long as I can, but I know my fight can’t continue forever. There are so many of them, Kevin, so many.”

“Nadjia, I’m not religious. I have no god. But you and him—you kill zombies. So I’ll stand with you.”

“You need to think this through,” she counseled. “Get a few good meals in you and think it over. We’ll stay through the day after tomorrow, and by then if you still want to accompany us, I’ll brook no dissent.”

“We were dragging bodies off to the fire…Robert… One of the zombies wasn’t dead. It latched on and bit him on his side before we…before we could destroy it.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Yeah, but he’s bad. He won’t last the night. I have to go and…and be with him.”

“How well do you know this man?” Bear stood in the room with them, the floor creaking under him. Kevin saw he was correct: Bear rocked the bundle in his arms. The man had removed the armor from his upper body, arms, and head. He was monstrous.

“Robert? I don’t. I mean, we were locked up in separate buildings during the siege. He’s got no one. All his family are… Well, he’s alone now.”

“Nadjia, please, the child sleeps.” Bear passed the form to the woman. He disappeared again into the darkened room and when he returned he hefted the saddle bags, mace in one hand. In the glow from the lamp Kevin noticed he had a tear drop tattooed under one eye.

“You should get some rest, Kevin,” said Bear. “The days ahead of us are long.”

He left the apartment, the wild-man trailing behind him silently like a gangling shadow. Kevin and Nadjia sat and listened to them in the hallway, the stairs groaning under their feet.

“What’s the story with that guy?” Nadjia referred to the wild man.

“I don’t really know,” admitted Kevin. “He was always a bit
off
from when I met him. I think someone said he was a college professor. Political Theory or Philosophy. Something like that. I tried to keep an eye out for him, but he was so bizarre. A few months back he went completely off the deep end. They found him playing with his own feces, smearing the walls. They threw him out of where we were holed-up. Somehow he survived. I don’t know how. What’s the story with Bear?”

Nadjia nodded. “Bear’s been listening to that thing the whole time I’ve known him. And the whole time I’ve known him, that thing has had no battery.”