Authors: Joe McKinney
Mutated - 04 (12 page)
“Ben,” the older woman said, “what do you think?”
Then the younger woman muttered, “Poor thing,” and broke into a trot down the length of the driveway.
No, Nate thought. What are you doing?
“Avery, no!” the older woman yelled.
The man—the one called Ben, Nate remembered—took off running after the girl. Nate leaned forward, watching them, his hand reaching involuntarily into the empty air in front of him, pantomiming the man’s actions as he tried to stop the girl before she ran right into the zombie’s waiting arms.
Just as he reached her, the girl stopped, turned toward the thicket next to the driveway, and let out a little scream as she staggered away from the two zombie women who had just emerged there. The man pulled the blond girl behind him and drew his pistol and shot one of the zombie women with his pistol.
The zombie crumpled to the ground.
He turned and shot the other zombie, but his aim was bad and he managed to hit the woman in the shoulder, spinning her around without dropping her. The older woman with the wild gray hair yelled, “Get back, both of you.” She grabbed the blond girl and pulled her toward the building.
The child was attacking the man by then. She lunged for his arm and knocked the pistol loose. It went skittering across the driveway, out of reach. The man backed away, then turned and ran for the old rusty car that was just beyond the awning. Nate watched, horrified, as the man barricaded himself inside the wreck. The little girl zombie climbed up onto the hood and started beating on the windshield. Then it caved in with a crash of breaking glass and the little girl fell in with it and landed on top of the man inside the car. She was trying to claw her way through the busted windshield when the woman with the wild gray hair shot her in the back of the head.
And then, everything went still.
The sound of the pistol shot faded away, and seemed to take all the sound in the world with it. The two women pulled the man out of the wrecked car and led him down the driveway, where they studied something on one of the female zombie’s legs.
“What do I do, Doc?” he muttered.
“Wait, Nate,” Kellogg said. “Just wait. And watch.”
He heard a rumbling coming from a long ways off, and it took him a moment to realize that it was the sound of a truck coming toward the service station. Nate thought maybe he was imagining it, but then he saw the man and the two women looking at the road too, and they seemed frightened.
The three of them started talking as one. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the pretty blond girl was gesturing toward the service bay where Nate was hiding. “No,” he said. “Not here. Not here.”
The man was motioning toward the road. He pulled something that looked like a shaggy carpet from his backpack and the three of them took off running.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he said. “Get going. Don’t send their attention my way.”
With a great deal of difficulty he pulled himself to his feet and stumbled to the edge of the service bay, watching them go. Now that the sound was very close, he could tell that it was coming from several trucks. A caravan, he thought. Jesus.
“You think it’s a foraging party, Doc?”
“No way to tell, Nate. Stay out of sight for now.”
“Right—Oh shit! My stuff.”
He ran over to his hammock and started wrestling with the ropes that secured it to the pumps. “Come on, come on,” he said, tugging at the knots. “Please.”
Nate heard the sound of tires moving across the blacktop and he looked to see a line of four trucks trundling into sight. They were Fords and Chevys, big black work trucks with oversize tires and loud exhausts. Black-clad soldiers with rifles rode in the first and last vehicle, while the middle two, with slatted wooden rails around the beds, seemed to be packed with zombies. The trucks rolled to a stop in the street in front of the station and the soldiers jumped down from the beds of the trucks and set up a perimeter.
“What in the . . . ?” Nate said, ducking quickly back into the service bay.
Two of the soldiers ran over to the dead zombies in the driveway while another pair checked out the car where the little girl zombie had died. Nate pressed himself all the way back into the corner, murmuring a prayer that they wouldn’t come inside the bay and find him.
But as he did he saw something odd. A man, painted head to toe in red, stepped from the second truck and walked part of the way up the driveway. He was bald, and his face looked bad, like maybe it’d been scarred by acne when he was a teenager. He walked with a slight limp, and he didn’t carry a weapon, but every black-clad soldier hurried to get out of his way. There was something menacing about the man that chilled Nate to the core, and it didn’t help that the zombies in the trucks watched every move he made with unblinking attention.
One of the soldiers removed the black thing from around the dead zombie’s ankle and brought it to the Red Man. The Red Man took it without a word, turned it over in his hands as he examined it, and then handed it back to the soldier.
Nate was so busy watching the exchange that he failed to notice the two soldiers up near the wrecked car where the little girl’s headless body still protruded from the busted windshield. They had spotted the hammock and the gear on the ground and were silently peering into the service station’s lobby. Nate finally noticed them when they looked around the corner and into the service bay.
“Let me see your hands,” the soldier shouted, swinging his gun up and pointing it directly at Nate’s face.
A flashlight mounted below the gun’s barrel came on, blinding Nate.
He put up his hands and said, “No, wait, dude. I didn’t do—” But the words were cut off mid-sentence as the soldier came forward and planted the butt of the gun’s stock squarely into Nate’s teeth. An explosion of pain went through him, and his legs turned to sand. He sagged forward into the soldier’s arms and a moment later he was being dragged into the daylight and dropped at the Red Man’s feet.
“What the hell is this?” the Red Man said.
Nate looked up at the Red Man. Sunlight glistened off his bare chest and off the dome of his bald head.
“We found him hiding in the service bay,” the soldier said. “Looks like he killed these other three.”
“You idiot,” the Red Man said. “Look at him. He can’t keep his balance. He’s not even wearing a weapon.” The Red Man yelled up toward the station. “Did you find a gun?”
“No, sir,” another soldier answered. “Just a bunch of trash up here. His clothes and stuff.”
“What’s your name?”
“Nate Royal.”
“And the others?” the Red Man said. “Where are they?”
Blood was oozing out of the corner of Nate’s mouth and into his scraggly beard. He blinked a few times, trying to clear his head. Things were getting hazy again.
“Dude, why are you all red?”
“Where are the others?”
Nate blinked at him. “I dunno.”
The Red Man grabbed him by the throat and hauled him to his feet. “I won’t ask you again. A man and two women came this way. Where are they?”
“Ask me all you want,” Nate said. “I didn’t see shit.”
The Red Man glared at him. His nostrils flared with every breath he took. And as Nate struggled to breathe through the Red Man’s iron grip around his throat, the Red Man bit the index finger of his own right hand. When he took it away, it was dripping blood.
“I will own you,” the Red Man said, and jammed the bleeding finger into Nate’s mouth.
At first Nate resisted. He tried to turn his head away, but the Red Man had too tight a grip around his throat. Desperate for air, he spread his clenched teeth apart and bit down on the Red Man’s finger with everything he had—and he went on biting until he heard the sickening crunch of bone and a gout of blood jetted over his tongue as his teeth ripped the finger off at the knuckle.
The Red Man’s howls filled the air. It was an unearthly sound, part rage, part lowing moan, but all of it echoing with pain.
He dropped Nate to the ground and staggered backward, holding his bleeding hand in shock. Nate, for his part, didn’t lose any time. There was a soldier advancing on him from behind. Nate leaped to his feet and spun around, throwing an elbow into the soldier’s face and catching him cleanly on the jaw. The soldier dropped his weapon in surprise and Nate was off, running toward the thicket as fast as he could run.
He heard the Red Man screaming at his back, and a moment later, the soldiers yelling commands.
They started firing as he slipped into the thicket. The next instant, the air around his head filled with the high-pitched whistles of ricocheting bullets.
Nate didn’t stop. He ducked his head and ran with everything he had.
C
HAPTER
9
HAPTER
9
Bullets chewed up the branches around his head. A wall of sound, like a wave, tore at his heels. Nate, breathless and sick, was panting in terror; his vision tunneled; eyes went wide with terror; spittle flecked on his lips; every muscle strained to carry him faster, faster from the Red Man’s soldiers as they bore down upon him with their guns roaring and their screams swelling up behind him like some huge beast, gaining on him with every step.
He found a pig trail. Running blind with his hands in front of him, swatting at the endless tangle of branches in his face, he twisted through the underbrush. The soldiers were on either side of him, closing on him, and above it all he could hear the Red Man roaring in his pain and rage. “Get him back here! I want him now!” And the soldiers, their voices like an echo, yelling, “Get him!” “He’s over there.” “I see him over here.”
The steady roll of the guns slacked off to a series of scattered pops and he turned quickly to look behind him.
The Red Man’s soldiers were entering the woods right behind him. He could see their hunched-over black silhouettes moving through the thicket with terrific speed.
Panting, sticks and leaves caught in his scraggly beard, Nate Royal ran with no idea where he was going. The will to live that had been lacking earlier, when he was caught in his hammock by the zombies, came back to him as a full-blown blind panic adrenaline surge, and though his skin was laced with cuts, he felt none of it. The world was a wolf pack snapping at his heels, driving him deeper into the woods.
He crossed a muddy creek bed and when he came up on the other side, the pig trail had vanished. The air was full of leaves and thick with the smell of rotting vegetation. Ahead of him, the ground rose abruptly to a small ridge, the slope a slick carpet of wet, brown leaves.
Chancing a look behind him, he saw one of the Red Man’s soldiers closing fast. Nate let out a startled yelp and ran up the slope. He lost his footing and had to scramble up to the top of the ridge with his fingertips digging into the damp earth.
The soldier clamped a hand down on Nate’s shoulder as they crested the ridge and Nate screamed. Their momentum carried them over the top and then they were falling down the slope on the other side.
Nate landed in a thick layer of dark mud. The soldier came down next to him, his forehead striking a jagged corner of a large rock with the sickening crunch of broken bone.
Breathing hard, Nate looked at the soldier. The man’s eyes were wide open and frozen in sightless surprise. Part of his skull, thick and jagged and honeycombed inside, jutted up from the wound amid a thick black spreading ooze of blood. He could see the brain inside, grayish-yellow, like old cheese.
Nate drew back in horror, his breath hitching in his throat.
More soldiers were coming. He could hear them just on the other side of the ridge, and Nate was scrambling to his feet when he saw the dead soldier’s AR-15 poking out from under his body.
“Hot damn,” he muttered.
He pulled on the weapon and managed to free it from the soldier’s weight. But it was caught on something. He yanked on the gun again and again until he saw the black nylon strap still securing the gun to the soldier’s shoulder.
“No,” he said, still tugging on the gun. “Come on, please.”
Three more soldiers crested the ridge above him. Without aiming, Nate raised the rifle and emptied the entire magazine into their guts.
All three doubled over and slid face-first into the thick carpet of leaves. The whole thing took less than two seconds, and though Nate saw every detail, it was as though he was outside of himself, looking down. The guns made no sound. All he could hear was the rush of blood in his ears, his heart pounding in his chest. The moment seemed to stretch on forever.
And then, suddenly, the spell was broken. His senses opened up and it was like a wave breaking all around him. Time accelerated to normal speed. More soldiers were yelling, coming closer. And meanwhile Nate, stunned and light-headed, was looking down at two dead soldiers and a third who was groaning like an animal struggling to give birth. He’ll be dead in less than three minutes, Nate thought, surprised by his detachment.
The shouting was growing very loud. “Ah, shit,” he said, and dropped the rifle and turned and ran through the woods.
He ran parallel to the streambed for about a hundred yards, then dropped behind a tree and sank to his knees in a thick blanket of rotten leaves. Nate could hear voices coming toward him. “You see him?” “Clear over here.” “You two cross back over the streambed, see if he doubled back on us.”
They’ve lost me, he thought. But he couldn’t run anymore. Years earlier, long before the outbreak, he’d shattered his ankle running from the police, and now the ankle was starting to pulse. Any more movement and that pulsing would turn to unbearable waves of pain.
The leaves beneath him felt deep. He tested it by jamming a hand down until he touched bottom, maybe six inches.
Good enough, he thought, and hurriedly buried himself.
Two of the soldiers passed inches from his left shoulder and then stopped near his feet.
“He couldn’t walk through that stuff down there without leaving tracks,” one of the men said.
“Yeah,” agreed the other. “Back up that way.”
Please oh please, I need a break.
Flat on his stomach, peering out at a little patch of thicket from the cover of the leaves, Nate listened as the soldiers moved away. He let out a long breath and waited, straining his ears for the sound of voices and breaking twigs.
“What do I do, Doc?” he muttered.
Kellogg knelt beside him. “Shhh. Don’t move. Don’t speak. They’re moving away.”
And from the sounds of their voices, Nate knew it was true. They were a good ways off, and moving farther away with every passing second.
He closed his eyes and laughed, then winced at the sharp pain in his ribs. But it felt good to know he had saved himself. The pain aside, it felt good to know that he was still alive, and he laughed again.
But it was a considerably more subdued Nate Royal who, later that evening, found himself within sight of the Mississippi River without any food or fresh water or blankets under which to sleep. His headache, his aches, his fever chills—they were all returning now in spades, repaying him for the exertions of the morning and the all-day walking. With his vision turning soupy at the edges, he stumbled toward the water, figuring he would drink and take his chances. Rivers that ran through cities had bad water, he had learned, but he was desperate.
Ahead of him, the water was plum-colored in the pale light of the setting sun. It seemed as flat and calm as a sheet of cooled lead. He saw a pair of white birds gliding over the water, and it seemed very peaceful until the quiet was broken by the giggling of a pair of young girls.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
They crossed the trail in front of him, maybe ten feet away, completely unaware of his presence. He only caught a glimpse of them; a young girl of about eight, and an older one, a teenager, about thirteen or fourteen. They were both dressed in simple white dresses, and they were carrying baskets filled with blackberries and wild corn.
“Wait,” he said, stumbling after them, though his mouth and throat were so dry only a gasp of air escaped.
“Nate, no,” Kellogg pleaded with him. “Don’t. Watch them first.”
But Nate wasn’t listening. He hurt everywhere. The ringing in his ears had grown painful beyond the point that he could stand. He just wanted to fall over and drink some water before he passed out.
He turned down a thin side trail and caught a second glimpse of the girls as they entered a clearing. Nate smelled the faint tinge of wood smoke and heard other voices talking, laughing. Crashing down the side trail, he staggered into a clearing and found himself standing in the midst of a camp, half a dozen people staring at him.
It took a moment before anybody could react.
Two young men in their twenties grabbed shotguns and pointed them at Nate. He looked from one barrel to the other, swaying on his feet, and blinked.
“Don’t shoot me,” he muttered, but wasn’t sure if the sound came out or not.
The others just stared at him. Everyone was on their feet now. He saw an older woman in her late fifties put her arms around the two little girls and pull them back. A younger boy, who looked about five and was holding a thick stick blackened at one end, stared at Nate with wide, terrified eyes. There was a pile of fresh tinder smoking and popping in the fire pit in front of him.
Nate looked at one of the men holding a shotgun. The man adjusted his grip on the weapon.
“I’m not infected,” Nate said, and coughed. “Please. Help me.”
“Turn around,” the man said. He raised the shotgun to his shoulder and squinted one eye down the length of the barrel. “Do it now.”
With effort, Nate raised both hands and showed the men his palms. He could barely keep his head up. He turned slowly, clumsily, and stopped with his back to the men.
“Run, Nate,” Kellogg said. “Run while you’ve still got the chance.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“You can’t what?” one of the men said.
Nate lowered his hands slightly. “I can’t run,” he said.
“You just stay right there,” the man said. Then, to the other man, he said, “You see anything?”
“No. Hey, man, you bit anyplace?”
“No,” Nate said.
“What’s that?”
“No,” he said again, straining to be heard. “I’m thirsty.”
The older woman said, “He’s sick, Jason. It looks like he’s got the flu.”
“It looks like he came out of the back end of a goat is what it looks like. Eddie, what do you think?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I can’t see any bite marks on him.”
“I’m not bit,” Nate said.
“I know what you said,” a voice said. It sounded like Eddie’s voice, but Nate was still turned around and couldn’t see them. “Just stay there.” Then Eddie lowered his voice a little and said, “Go down there and tell Dad we got a sick man up here. Ask him what he wants us to do.”
Nate turned slightly and saw the little boy throw down the stick and run off toward the river. He also saw the one named Eddie bring up his shotgun again.
“Just stay there, mister.”
“Can I sit down?” Nate said.
“Nope. Just stay where you’re at.”
A moment later the little boy ran back into the camp. “Daddy said to bring him on down. He wants to look at him.”
“Alright,” Eddie said. “Come on, mister. Turn around real slow.”
Nate did as the man asked and Eddie motioned him down toward the river with the barrel of the shotgun. The path led him down to the bank and around a stand of willows. There was a man there, lying on his side, a fishing pole in his hands. He was a thin man, his high, oddly square-shaped head going bald on top, and the little hair he had left was as soft and white as powder snow. He was smiling when he turned around, but the smile slipped a little as he took in the sight of Nate standing before him.
“Good lord,” he muttered.
The man planted his hands palm down in the witchgrass and struggled up from the bank like an animal that has had its back legs run over by a car and is now pulling itself out of the road. It was an ungainly motion, one that Nate found disgusting. Only then did Nate notice that the man’s legs were tied together with loose, yellowed bandages that seemed to have soaked through from underneath.
“This is wrong, Nate,” Kellogg said. “This is all wrong. Get up and run.”
“What happened to you, son?”
“I was running,” Nate said, “through the woods.”
“What from?”
Kellogg leaned into his ear. “Don’t say a word, Nate. Not a word.”
But the man was waiting, looking him in the eye. Nate found it hard to look at him. The injuries to his legs had an unnatural look that turned Nate’s stomach.
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