Authors: Joe McKinney
Mutated - 04 (23 page)
“Go ahead,” Richardson said, “fire it up.”
Nate turned the device on. Slowly, aware that Richardson was watching him carefully, Nate ran his fingers over the grimy screen, tapping files until he had all the hundreds of interviews that Richardson had collected over the years displayed on the screen. He had seen Avery’s down at the bottom, but he hadn’t looked at it yet. He wanted to, but at the same time he felt kind of creepy because of that want. Somehow, the idea of watching her interview felt improper, sort of like watching her change her clothes when she didn’t know she was being watched.
It was an odd feeling for him.
“I’ve been thinking about these interviews a lot lately,” Richardson said, and there was a solemn tone in his voice that immediately made the hairs on the back of Nate’s neck stand up. “I’ve been thinking about what they mean, what they’re worth.”
Nate didn’t speak. Though he’d never been a particularly sensitive man, he was aware that the conversations he’d been having with Richardson over the past few days had been leading up to something, and whatever that something was, this was it. Richardson was struggling to get something out, and nothing Nate could say would hasten that.
“I want you to have that, Nate. The iPad.”
“You what? But what about your book? All your notes are on here.”
“That’s true. I still want you to have it, Nate.”
“But why?” Nate looked at him, honestly and completely confused. But then it donned on him. “You’re not gonna finish it. You never had any intention of finishing it, did you?”
Richardson smiled. “Maybe in the beginning I did. Certainly not lately. Lately, it’s just been a thing I do, like a condemned man putting hash marks for the passing days on the walls of his cell. Does that make sense? It’s something that you do because your mind won’t let you rest. You do it because your mind has more stamina than your body.”
“What are you saying? Are you . . . you’re not gonna . . . do anything stupid, are you?”
“No, Nate. No, you don’t need to worry about that. But I am being a realist.” He pointed to the iPad. “This is what’s been keeping me afloat for the last few years. I think that’s why I’ve made it a point not to finish it. But you, I think you’re finally coming into your own. I’ve listened to your story about where you came from, all the troubles you had growing up. You’re not that guy anymore, Nate. You may not feel like it, but you’ve grown up. This world, for all its faults, has made you a man. You’re the pony to bet on. That’s why I’m giving this to you. Do what you want with it. Do what you think is right. I have a feeling it’ll be the right thing to do.”
Nate stared at the iPad in his hands. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t, look Richardson in the face. He looked back over the last few days, over all the things he had told Richardson while the two of them followed along behind Sylvia Carnes and Avery Harper. He had told him all about his life, from a high school dropout living in the shack behind his father’s clapboard house, to Air Force medical experiment, to transient searcher for the meaning of life, and finally to nitwit messiah with the fate of mankind coursing through his veins. It had been, like that old Grateful Dead song said, a long, strange trip. And though he hardly grasped the full scope of it, he felt that, somehow, Richardson had. Perhaps he saw in Nate that which he couldn’t himself become. Perhaps he was simply tired. But whatever the reason, he had given Nate the iPad that contained so much, and it felt right that he should have it.
But still, for all the rightness of it, Nate didn’t like the way Richardson was talking. In the short time he’d known him, Nate had come to think of Richardson as a survivor. He was simply too well put together in the brainpan to short circuit. But what he was hearing now sounded like a man teetering on the verge of emotional collapse. Nate was hardly an expert on such things, but he had lived in the wastelands of America for six years. He had done his share of wandering. He had come to learn that, when it came to men and the minds of men, there was broken, and there was broke. He’d met some who were flat-out crazy. He’d met others who’d gone wild, feral. Still others who seemed to be in love with self-destruction. But the really scary ones, the ones you didn’t dare trust, were the ones backsliding into a cocoon of depression and exhaustion. Those were the ones you could never predict. They were truly dangerous.
And Richardson . . . he seemed to be going down that road.
“Hey, you guys need to come up here.”
It was Avery, staring down at them from the top of the stairs. She had a funny way of holding her mouth when something was wrong that Nate had come to like, like she had just taken a big bite of a lemon. He saw the look on her face now.
“What is it?” Richardson said.
She seemed like she was searching for the right words, but they just weren’t coming. All she could manage was a quick shake of her head.
Then she turned and went back up on deck.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Richardson said.
“No, it doesn’t.”
Nate got up to go topside, but Richardson put a hand on his arm.
“Hey Nate . . .”
Richardson had the iPad on his thigh, holding it as though he was about to thrust it into Nate’s hand but wasn’t sure if the younger man would accept it.
“I’ll take it,” Nate said. “If that’s really what you want?”
Richardson nodded.
A moment later, they were both topside, and what they saw made them both stiffen. A thick morning fog drifted over the water, white fingerlike clouds inching over the swampland that made up the country in this part of Southern Illinois. On the shore they saw a winding dirt road leading down to a ferry house, and beyond the ferry house, rising like horrid scarecrows over dead fields, were hundreds of rotting corpses impaled on spikes. Circling above the bodies were thousands of shrieking birds, and when the wind shifted, the assembled crew and passengers of the
Sugar Jane
got the stench of all that death full in the face.
Sugar Jane
got the stench of all that death full in the face.
Jimmy Hinton turned from the scene. “No way,” he said. “Out of the question. You people hired me to take you to Chester, but this ain’t part of our deal.”
“Jimmy,” Gabi said.
“One second,” he said. He turned on Richardson. “You lied to me. You said Chester. This wasn’t part of our deal.”
“Jimmy.” It was Gabi again, her voice more insistent this time. She was trying to grab his shirt, but couldn’t seem to make her fingers work like they were supposed to.
“What is—” The rest of the question broke off in his throat. He was staring straight ahead, into the fog, his mouth hanging open.
Nate followed Jimmy’s gaze, and he too stood speechless.
There were shapes emerging from the fog, hundreds of zombies wading into the shallow water.
And the
Sugar Jane
was drifting into their midst.
Sugar Jane
was drifting into their midst.
C
HAPTER
16
HAPTER
16
One by one the zombies separated from the fog and shadows, their tattered bodies curdling the river water and sending up the deep, fetid odor of mud and dead things as they surrounded the
Sugar Jane
.
Sugar Jane
.
“Get down!” Jimmy shouted.
Nate didn’t move. He couldn’t. He was frozen by the sight of all those zombies wading through the dark water, black silhouettes stirring in the shadows of the overhanging willow trees, their eyes glinting, teeth bared, full of the promise and the emptiness of death. Their moaning was deafening.
They never blinked, never showed any sense of urgency, or fear, or hunger. There was nothing in their expressions but a bottomless, soul-sucking emptiness. For Nate, it was like looking into the mirror during his darkest moments while he was still Dr. Kellogg’s lab rat back at Minot. He was transfixed, not by fear, but by the reptilian emptiness of all those eyes turned up toward him.
“I said, get down!”
Jimmy was pulling on his shoulder, trying to get him away from the railing. Nate turned toward Jimmy. The younger man was confused, and for a moment none of this made sense. It was as though the fog that rolled over the river was creeping into his mind as well. He didn’t understand. Seconds before, everything had been so quiet. But now, it was like he was standing still and the whole world was swirling around him, too fast for him to make any sense of it. Jimmy was yelling at him again. Really yelling. The old hippie had a wild look in his eyes. His hair was standing on end, and with the morning sun behind his head he looked like his head was on fire.
“What the hell, boy? You wanna get shot? Get your head down.”
Shot? What was he talking about?
Only then did Nate see the AR-15 that Jimmy was trying to point over the bow.
“Move!”
Nate took a few steps out of the way and the next few moments went by, not like a smooth, movie-scripted action sequence, but in flashes of horrible violence, disjointed images rushing at him without context.
He saw Jimmy Hinton, the rifle held over his head, flecks of spit flying from his lips, a scream frozen in his throat as he kicked one of the lawn chairs out of the way and leaned over the side, firing as fast as he possibly could.
Zombies were scrambling up the railing, their mangled hands and faces visible in the searing orange light of Jimmy Hinton’s muzzle flashes, mud and sludge oozing from their hair and tattered clothes.
Gabi screamed something at him. Nate was looking right at her, only a few feet away, though he heard nothing but the indistinguishable roar of noise.
From somewhere off to his left, he heard the crash of broken glass.
Nate looked that way and saw Avery Harper and Sylvia Carnes on their knees, Avery’s face buried in Sylvia’s chest. Behind them, a zombie had fallen from the railing into one of the port windows, shattering the glass. It pulled itself loose from the broken window, its right arm a bleeding mass of deep cuts, and staggered forward, reaching for the two women.
But they couldn’t back away from it.
They were trapped by two more zombies climbing over the railing right in front of Nate.
At that moment Avery looked up at him, and the confusion that had clouded his mind was swept violently away. Anger supplanted confusion and he surged forward, his fingers curling into fists. None of these rotting bastards were going to touch her, not while he was around to do something about it.
The two men closest to him were bone skinny, both of them stinking of rotting meat and river mud, their heads lolling on their shoulders. Nate rushed forward, determined to shove them back over the railing and pull the women to safety, but he hadn’t taken more than two steps before somebody threw him sideways into the cabin wall.
“Get your head down!” Gabi Hinton said. She pinned him against the wall with one massive arm. “Stay there.”
She let go of him long enough to bring her rifle to bear on the two zombies, dropping both of them with a single shot to the forehead.
“Don’t move,” she said.
The intensity in her stare held him against the wall as surely as her arm had.
He nodded.
Gabi fired again, this time at the bloody zombie staggering toward Avery and Sylvia.
“Get over there with Nate,” she said to Sylvia. “All of you, inside. Now!”
Nate helped them toward the door. Through the fog he caught a glimpse of Richardson in the back of the boat, burning his way through a magazine as he shot over the sides at anything that moved.
Zombies were pouring over the railing now, all down the length of the boat, rising out of the fog like demons. Gabi kept firing, her brown dress swishing with every move of her vast bulk, but to Nate it seemed like she was fighting against an inexhaustible force. There were just too many of them.
A woman was staggering toward Jimmy, her hands outstretched, the ruins of her dress hanging in strips from her waist. There were leaves and sticks caught in her hair. Her breasts swayed with every step, leaking mud. Her face was a patchwork of oozing sores and her back was covered with leeches. One ankle was almost certainly broken, the foot twisted under so that she hobbled forward on the blade of her foot.
Nate took a step forward, ready to push the woman out of the way, but his foot slipped on the blood and mud and viscera that had pooled on the deck and he went down hard on his butt.
“Jimmy, behind you!” he yelled, but the words were lost beneath the rattling guns.
The woman was almost on him. Her mouth was opening and closing, her fingers clutching instinctively, as though already pulling the meat from Jimmy’s corpse.
Nate looked around and saw Jimmy’s lawn chair folded up on the deck. He scooped it up, pulled himself to his feet like a man struggling to stand on wet ice, and swung it at the woman’s head. The flimsy chair bounced off the zombie’s head with the crunch of cheap metal, but it was enough to send them both sprawling toward the railing.
The next instant Nate found himself leaning over the side, staring down into water that was churning with zombies, all of them reaching for his face, the smell of death and rotting vegetation assaulting him like a slap in the face.
When he pulled himself back from the edge Jimmy was standing over the woman, slamming the butt of his rifle down on her face again and again, caving it in until it was unrecognizable.
Gabi looked back over her shoulder and found her husband. “Get us out of here!” she said. “We can’t do this much longer.”
Another zombie, this one a one-armed woman with half of her face bashed in, rolled over the railing, flopped awkwardly onto the deck, and then slowly climbed to its feet. Gabi shot her right through the damaged part of her face and flipped her backward over the railing.
“Jimmy, get movin’!”
“You got this?” he answered.
“Yeah. Go!”
She didn’t wait for a reply. She spun around to face the surge of hands and faces rising over the gunwale, rifle at the ready. Nate watched in awe and rapt fascination as she calmly flipped the weapon’s selector switch to BURST and went back to firing at a zombie less than an arm’s length away. Her bullets nearly sliced the man in half, causing him to slide back into the water that was rapidly turning to a bloody sludge.
Suddenly, and for no reason that Nate could see, an appalling collective moan rose up from the zombies still in the water, like someone had just turned on a switch. The sound made everyone pause, even Gabi, and in the momentary lull of the guns, Nate could hear countless hands slapping against the hull, searching for purchase to climb over.
“I’m out!” Richardson shouted from the back.
Gabi kicked a loaded magazine toward Nate. “Take that back there.”
Without saying more she brought her weapon up and emptied her magazine into three of the infected who had managed to hook their arms over the side. But there was a fourth behind her that she hadn’t seen, and that one was already over the railing and trying to climb to its feet on the blood-soaked deck. Nate yelled for her to watch out, but Gabi couldn’t hear him over the screams and barking of the guns.
The zombie, a fat man wearing nothing but shorts and the remnants of a tennis shoe on one foot, managed to get to its knees. Its gut swung out in front of it, its hands out of control, flopping around like wounded things on the side of the road. But it didn’t lose any of its momentum. The man’s right hand came down on the back of Gabi’s leg and she jumped.
She pointed the rifle at the thing’s head. It tried to twist toward her calf, but she batted the zombie’s hand away with the barrel and lined up her sights on the back of its head. But before she could pull the trigger the man grabbed the muzzle and pulled it down, using the counterleverage to climb to his feet.
Without thinking Nate rushed forward and kicked the zombie in the ear. It rolled over, emitting a noise that was somewhere between a growl and a feeding moan. It clutched at Nate’s foot, snagging the hem of his jeans. Nate tumbled down to the deck, landing face-first on top of the zombie. It raked its fingernails across his cheeks, cutting his skin deeply, though in the adrenaline rush that came with the fight he didn’t notice the pain. He jammed the heel of his left hand into the zombie’s mouth and pushed its head to one side. There was a brick next to his head, one of the ones Jimmy had used to anchor the lawn chairs in rough currents, and Nate balled his fist around it. The zombie turned its one seeing eye up at Nate and tilted its head to one side, as though questioning him, its mouth open and oozing fluid.
Nate slammed the brick down on the top of its head.
The zombie’s face bounced off Nate’s leg and its stare found him again.
“Fucking die already!” He slammed the brick down again and again, screaming with every blow until the zombie rolled off his legs, its head a caved-in mess.
Nate pulled his legs back. He rose to his feet.
Gabi Hinton was staring at him.
“What?”
She raised her rifle, the business end staring him straight in the eye.
“Whoa!” he said. “Hey, hold on!”
Without lowering the rifle she turned her head and said: “Jimmy, we need to go!”
“I’m working on it.”
Nate turned just enough to see Jimmy pulling himself over the flybridge’s railing. He grabbed the throttle and eased it forward, the engines responding with a sputtering gurgle that surged the boat forward.
Nate swayed with the sudden movement. When he looked back, down the length of the boat, he saw zombies losing their grip on the railing and falling back into the water. He saw Ben Richardson and Sylvia in the back of the boat, punching at hands with the butts of their rifles. They were moving now, pulling away from the cover of the willow trees and into the wider expanse of the river.
The zombies kept coming, but as they reached deeper water, they sank and drowned.
When Nate turned back to Gabi, he was still staring into the business end of her rifle, the hole at the end of her muzzle looking like an open, toothless mouth.
He blinked at her.
“You saved me, Nate,” she said. “But you’re infected. I’m sorry.”
He shook his head at her, held up his injured hand as though he could turn the bullets to one side.
She backed up, keeping her gun on him. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Stop!” It was Avery Harper. She broke loose from Sylvia’s grip and jumped between Nate and Gabi Hinton. “Don’t shoot him. You can’t. He’s immune. He won’t turn!”
Gabi stared at her. The rifle didn’t move.
“Honey,” she said. “Move aside.”
“She’s right,” Richardson said. He was coming forward as he spoke. “She’s telling the truth. He really is immune.”
Gabi looked from Avery to Richardson, then slowly back to Nate, studying him. “No,” she said. “That’s . . . impossible.”
“They ain’t lying to you, Ma’am,” Nate said. “Those zombies, they can’t hurt me. They can’t turn me into one of them, anyway.”
“But . . .” Gabi still couldn’t believe it. “How . . . why?”
Nate stuck his bleeding hand out between them, almost as though he was offering it to her as a gift.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ve been bit plenty over the years. They don’t hurt me.” He pulled the flash drive from his neck with his uninjured hand and held it up for her to see. “All the answers are here.”
“Gabi”—this time it was Sylvia Carnes speaking—“he’s telling the truth. I don’t know the answers, and neither does he. But he’s telling you the truth. Please don’t shoot him. I’m begging you, don’t. Everything counts on this.”
The huge woman shook with indecision, all the while keeping a steady sight picture on Nate.
For a moment, the muzzle of her rifle dipped.
“Impossible,” she said.
“Gabi,” Sylvia said. She took a step forward. Sylvia held out her hand, but pulled it back when the older woman flinched, half turning the gun toward Sylvia. “Gabi, please, you have to listen to me. Around his neck he carries a flash drive. A military doctor used him to find a cure for this. Don’t you see?”
Other books
Darcy & Elizabeth: A Season of Courtship (Darcy Saga Prequel Duo) by Sharon Lathan
Apocalypsis: Book 2 (Warpaint) by Casey, Elle
1001 Dark Nights by Lorelei James
Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) by Evie Manieri
SeducetheFlame by Ella Drake
Angelaeon Circle 2 - Eye of the Sword by Henley, Karyn
True Riders by Catherine Hapka
Nella Larsen by Passing
Wilt on High by Tom Sharpe
Backward by Andrew Grey