Mutated - 04 (22 page)

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Authors: Joe McKinney

BOOK: Mutated - 04
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“Keep your ears open,” Gabi said. “Anybody hears anything, say something.”
Nate turned to the darkness and listened. He couldn’t hear anything but the low gurgling rumble of the
Sugar Jane
’s engine. Two minutes slipped away with him leaning over the railing, listening intently, before Jimmy Hinton cut the engine. A sudden silence dropped over all of them as the boat began to drift downstream.
“There,” Avery said. “Do you hear that?”
They all listened.
“I don’t hear anything,” Nate said.
Gabi silenced him with a look. Chastened, Nate turned back to the darkness, and that’s when he heard it. It was another boat, the engines off, the waves lapping against its hull.
“You kids get down,” Gabi said.
She lowered herself down behind the
Sugar Jane
’s gunwale and adjusted the rifle against her cheek. The sound was getting closer. Nate could hear it clearly now, the rhythmic slapping of water against a drifting hull. Staring up at Gabi, he held his breath as he waited for her to shoot.
But she didn’t fire. Instead, Nate saw the weapon sag in her hands. She rose part of the way to her feet, murmuring “Oh my God. Oh my sweet God.”
The boat, a lot smaller than the
Sugar Jane
, was resolving out of the darkness as Nate stood up, and right away he saw what was wrong. The boat was drifting backward with the river current. There were five or six bodies on the deck, all of them dead. Blood dripped off the side of the boat and down its hull toward the water. Scanning the deck, Nate saw a hand with no arm attached, palm up, the fingers curled in on itself. It reminded Nate of a bug on its back.
It took him a moment longer to realize that the body next to the hand was still moving. The zombie was on its knees, its back to them. It was feeding out of the belly of one of the corpses.
Nate groaned. It was a sight he had witnessed hundreds of times since the outbreak, but the sight of it, the smell of a dead man’s bowels opened, was something he never got used to.
At the sound of Nate’s groan the zombie rose to its feet, turned, and stared at them. It let out a stuttering moan as its hands came up, the fingers clutching for them, completely ignorant of the gap between them. It was a freshly turned zombie, like the ones they’d encountered in the cottonwood grove on the Illinois bank, and its glazed-over eyes showed only an empty pit leading straight into nothingness.
Before any of them could react, answering moans rose up from the bank behind them. Nate turned to the sound. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jimmy doing the same thing.
“Shoot him,” Jimmy said. “Stop him before he attracts more.”
“I got him,” Gabi said, and raised her rifle and fired a single round, cutting off the moan in the zombie’s throat.
 
 
The next few hours were tense ones for Nate. Though Jimmy Hinton did his best to avoid Nate, it was a small boat, and they did bump into each other. It couldn’t be helped. And when they did, Nate could see the simmering anger in Jimmy’s eyes. He would squeeze up against the wall of the cabin to let Jimmy pass and mutter, “Sorry, I . . .” and Jimmy would grunt something inaudible in reply and move on. Nothing was said, but the incident with the broken lantern was still very much between them.
And so it was with more than a little trepidation that Nate climbed the stairs to the deck to see how far off the morning was. The mist that had been threatening to turn into rain over the last day and a half had finally succeeded, and the darkness swirled with silvery curtains of rain. Jimmy and Gabi had stretched a blue tarp over the forward section of the deck and the rain sizzled and popped against it.
Nate could see Jimmy and Gabi sitting in lawn chairs next to the railing up near the prow, Gabi with a rifle across her ample thighs. Avery Harper was sitting off to his left watching a coffeepot steam on a camper stove.
“That smells good,” he said. “You got any left?”
She smiled at him, and it was such an innocent, sweet gesture that he couldn’t help but smile back. At least
she
didn’t want to throw him overboard.
“I think maybe I made it a little strong,” she said.
“Don’t apologize. I like my coffee strong.”
She poured him a cup and watched him as he blew the steam from the cup and sipped it. She looked on the verge of wincing at some expected criticism.
“Well?”
He tried to keep on smiling, but the coffee was the worst thing he had ever tasted, and he had put away some pretty nasty attempts at coffee in his time. This was even worse than the shoe leather and chicory root combination he’d had outside of Memphis a few years back. It was thick as sludge and tasted like burned cooking grease. He couldn’t stop his mouth from puckering.
“You don’t like it, do you?”
“No,” he said, coughing, “it’s okay.”
“It’s too strong, isn’t it? I’ve never made it before. Usually, Sylvia or Niki does it. When we can get it, that is.”
Nate set his cup down on the deck.
“You go way back with them, don’t you?”
“With Niki and Sylvia?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re my family, Nate. Niki raised me since I was ten. My own mom died before the outbreak. Niki and Sylvia have been like mothers to me.”
Nodding, Nate picked up his coffee. “Look, um, would you mind if I, uh, poured this out?”
She smiled. “Go ahead. I saw Jimmy pour his over the side when he thought I wasn’t looking.”
“Okay,” he said, chuckling at the image that popped into his head of Jimmy trying to sneak the stuff away without being seen. She was looking at him again with that mixture of innocence and trust and obvious attraction that quickened something inside him. The more time he spent with her, the more he liked her. “You mind if I ask you a question?”
“No,” she said. “Anything.”
“Why are you here, Avery? I get why Sylvia’s here. I even get why I’m here, sort of. But you’re a mystery to me. What are you doing here?”
She didn’t even hesitate. “Because I believe in Niki, Nate. Haven’t you been listening? She is everything to me. Without her, I’d be dead. Oh I might have gone on living, but inside. . . I’d be dead. She did more than take me in.” She smiled, and for a moment, her eyes shone with the light of admiration. “You should hear her talk. How passionate she is about saving what’s left of this world. Every time I hear her speak, I feel this chill. She’s like a battery. Do you know what I mean? When you stand next to her, you can feel the energy coming out of her. It’s impossible to be around her and not feel like the world is worth saving.”
Nate didn’t answer her back. He nodded, but inside he was doubtful that Niki had done Avery any favors. Most of the people who had survived this long had developed a hard inner grain of resiliency. But Avery seemed soft. He liked that about her, but it worried him, too. Was she too much in Niki’s service? Anybody who relied so heavily on another to define them couldn’t be entirely healthy, could they?
“Avery, honey.”
It was Gabi. Both Nate and Avery stared up at her. The woman had a wonderfully comfortable smile when she wanted to, like a friendly grandmother.
At least Nate imagined it as a grandmotherly smile. He had never known his.
“I’m gonna go down to the galley and cook up some eggs. You wanna join me?”
Avery looked at Nate and he smiled and shrugged.
“Okay,” Avery said. “Yeah, sure.”
When the woman went downstairs, Nate turned toward the prow and saw Jimmy Hinton still sitting there, staring off into the darkness.
“Jimmy?”
Jimmy looked up over his shoulder at Nate and grunted.
“You mind if I sit down?”
“I don’t care. Do whatever you’re gonna do.”
Nate sat down in the chair Gabi had just vacated and tried to see what Jimmy saw when he looked out into the predawn darkness that covered the river and its environs, but whatever the man saw there was a mystery to him.
“You don’t like me much, do you?” Nate said.
Jimmy slowly turned to him, his mouth pinched together like a man who keeps getting interrupted every time he sits down to read the morning paper, and said. “Nate, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve flushed turds smarter than you. I think an awful lot of good, intelligent folks have died since the outbreak, and it breaks my heart sometimes looking at the folks God decided was good enough to go on living.”
Nate cleared his throat. He wasn’t mad. He’d never had any illusions about the brains he’d been given, and he actually found it refreshing to hear people talk about his lack of smarts. There was something honest in it.
“I guess that’s fair,” he said. “I’m sorry if I’m not the man that whoever you lost was.”
Jimmy turned to him. He was frowning, at first, but then the frown turned into a slow smile. “It was a woman, actually. My daughter. And my granddaughter.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.” Jimmy didn’t look away. He looked Nate over, then hooked a thumb toward the cabin. “You’re kind of sweet on that girl, aren’t you?”
“A little,” Nate said. “What do you think? You think I got a chance there?”
“A chance? Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe. Women are idiots, you know.”
That made Nate laugh. “I haven’t found that to be true.”
“No, I reckon not. I imagine you’ve met dead dogs with more brains than you got. It’s true, though. Women are idiots. Nate, you ever looked at a man? I mean really looked at him? You ever put yourself in a woman’s mind and wondered why she’d ever wanna fuck something that looked like an anemic pink gorilla? Look at a woman. She’s got all those curves, all those beautiful curves. She’s got breasts. She’s got hips that feel like the steering wheel of a brand-new Buick. She looks like a fucking piece of art in blue jeans. Hell, she even smells nice. Then look at a man. He’s all angles and dangling parts. He looks ridiculous. He farts. He scratches his ass. He’ll live like a billy goat if you let him. I tell you the only real mystery in life is why every woman on this planet isn’t a lesbian.”
Jimmy laughed. He picked at a piece of skin at the corner of his thumbnail and flicked it over the side.
“And don’t even get me started on the actual act of sex,” he said suddenly. “Have you thought about that? For a man, it’s hurry up, hurry up, unh uh, I’m done. But think about what a woman’s got to look forward to. She’s got this big clumsy oaf climbing up on top of her, sticking his pork in her, and then banging away like it’s a sprint to the finish. For a man, an orgasm is kind of like a moment of freefall. But I’ve heard women describe an orgasm like every part of her body is sending up fireworks. I hope that’s true. I hope they get at least that much from us. God knows they need something special to make up for the shit we put ’em through. Don’t seem like nearly enough to me, though.”
From downstairs in the galley they heard a sudden staccato of laughter. In the darkness, Nate could just barely see Gabi and Avery laughing over something.
“I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “Maybe motherhood’s got something to do with it. I loved being a dad. I really loved being a granddad. But I don’t think I got near as much from it as Gabi got from being a mother and a grandmother. Being a dad can sometimes feel like a spectator sport. You’re working most of the time. You get to spend a few hours here and there in the evening, a little more on weekends. You crack jokes and if you’re lucky your kids think you’re cool. At least some of the time. But it’s the mother who does all the real kid raising. When they’re hurt, it’s Mama they’re crying for. When they crawl into bed in the middle of the night, they cling to Mama like barnacles. A man can feel like a man for keeping a roof over his kids’ head, but there ain’t nothing a man can do that can top what Mama does.”
“My dad was an asshole,” Nate said. But there wasn’t any bitterness to it. All of the screaming and the hitting and the bullshit that was life in the Royal household was a long time ago, and if Nate hadn’t yet forgiven the bad times, he had mostly forgotten them. It was just like what that porn star, Bellamy Blaze, had said to Ben Richardson. The end of the world had pretty much given her a new life. It had done the same for him.
“Dads have a way of seeming like assholes,” Jimmy said. “It is their special skill. I know I sure fit that description some of the time. Hell, maybe most of the time.” He shook his head, his gaze still locked on Gabi. “But you know, when I think of all the shit she has to take being married to me, I figure she must be an idiot. There ain’t no other reason why she’d stay with me. My thinking is, if you’re truly sweet on that girl in there, she’s probably dumb enough to find something she likes about you.”
Nate nodded. “You’re an encouraging guy, Jimmy. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
 
 
When the morning finally came, Nate was sitting next to Ben Richardson down in the cabin. After each of them had finished a plate of eggs, Richardson took out his iPad and handed it to Nate.

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