Authors: Joe McKinney

Mutated - 04 (28 page)

BOOK: Mutated - 04

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Nate pulled himself to his feet, only to feel the stairs start to sway beneath him. He turned and caught sight of Niki and Avery and Sylvia just a few steps above him. Avery’s mouth was open in an O shape, her hands outstretched like she was trying to keep her balance. He had just enough time to register the strangeness of her expression when a painful groan of twisting metal drowned out the moaning crowd and the staircase folded beneath them, knocking them all off their feet.

When Nate looked around, he and Niki were on a short platform at the bottom of the dangling remnant of the staircase. Avery and Sylvia were on top of the other half of the platform about fifteen feet away. The space between them was crowded with zombies.

Within seconds the zombies surrounded the platform. They stuck their bloody hands up through the railing and tried to squeeze their fingers up through the little square holes in the metal grid that formed the platform, but Avery and Sylvia were just out of reach. One of the zombies tried to climb over the edge, pulling itself up the railing, but Sylvia kicked it in the chin and sent it tumbling over backward into the swarming crowd that had gathered there.

“Niki!” Avery shouted. “Niki!”

Nate felt strangely suspended in time. There was so much activity swirling around him. Bodies were surging forward, ripped and ghastly faces, snarling at him, hands reaching for him, and Avery over there, her face contorted with fear, reaching for Niki.

A hand grabbed the toe of his boot and Nate kicked it away, a crazy thought racing through his head as he backed away: This is what a rock star must feel like, all those screaming fans reaching over the lip of the stage, hoping for just a touch.

Beside him, Niki was tugging on part of the railing, every muscle in her arms and neck straining. The next instant the bar came loose and Niki pushed past him, the bar raised over her head like a club.

“Hang on, Avery!” she shouted.

She swung the bar down on top of the nearest zombie’s head, smashing it in on one side. Zombies reached for her, groping at the cuffs of her BDU pants. She let them have it, attacking with a ferocity Nate had never seen before. Again and again she swung her metal bar at the crowd, and soon blood and bits of scalp and bone and little kernels of teeth were flying in the air around her.

“Don’t you touch her!” she screamed.

Her metal bar was streaked with gore now and every time she swung it clumps of wet tissue went flying. But still the crowd around them grew larger. For every one that she knocked down, more surged forward to take its place. Their hands were slapping at her knees, her thighs, and to Nate it looked like they might pull her down at any second. And they probably would have, too, if at that moment one of the black pickup trucks hadn’t roared into the bay and plowed its way through the crowd, stopping in line with the platform where Sylvia and Avery were stranded.

Guards jumped over the side, their weapons pointed at the women.

“No!” Niki shouted. “You leave her alone!”

An amplified voice boomed from the truck. “Drop the bar! Put your hands where we can see them.”

Nate caught a glimpse of the driver through the blood streaks covering the windshield. He held a PA microphone in one hand. His eyes were fixed on Niki.

“Niki Booth,” he said. “Put it down. You’re coming with us.”

Beyond the truck, Nate could see Avery struggling with a man who held her arms twisted up behind her back.

“Niki, run!” Avery shouted. “Go, you have to!”

The man twisted Avery violently away from Niki and Nate, bending her over the railing so that her face was just inches out of reach of the zombies clambering to get on the platform.

“Go!” Avery screamed again. “Go!”

Nate saw the fight suddenly drain out of Niki. He was looking at her back, but he could tell the fight was gone. The metal bar she held dipped to the platform.

“I will find you,” Niki said. “You hear me, Avery? I will find you.”

“Niki Booth, drop your weapon. Now!”

She turned away from the zombies and the men holding Avery and Sylvia prisoner, and when she caught Nate’s eye, he could see her heart breaking.

“Come on,” she muttered as she passed him. “We need to go.”

“Stop!” said the amplified voice.

Niki jammed her middle finger into the air, not bothering to turn around.

Nate lumbered up the stairs after her.

C
HAPTER
22

Jimmy and Gabi hadn’t been able to move from under the little wooden bridge where they hid when the Red Man’s zombies came ashore. They were both flat on their backs in a channel of muddy brown water that was rising steadily with the rain. The bridge’s wooden slats were inches above their faces. The rain was falling steadily now, water dripping through the gaps in the planks, churning the runoff water in which they lay into a foam. The steady motion of the rain almost allowed him the illusion of a quiet calm. Except of course the Red Man was still out there, on the lawn. Jimmy had hoped the rain would cause him to move his zombies into the hotel, but instead they seemed to be lining up for review in the lawn not fifty feet away. They weren’t going anywhere, and neither were Jimmy and Gabi.

Gabi said, “Jimmy, tell me again about Mexico. I want to hear you tell it, about the fish so stupid they jump into the boat and the lime trees and the way the ocean smells at night. Tell me about that again.”

But he wasn’t listening. He’d noticed something going on out on the water and he was trying to see through the tall ditch weeds that grew up around it.

“Jimmy?”

He gave her hand a gentle pat, a warning that instantly silenced her. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and she nodded back. She was frowning, but made no attempt to question him about what was going on.

It was amazing to him how fast the dreamer could leave her. In an instant she could revert to the hard, practical woman who had pulled him back from the edge of death so many times. The transformation was so complete, and so instantaneous, it made him wonder if the dreamer wasn’t some kind of act put on only for his benefit. Indeed, she never acted that way except when they were alone. Perhaps the dreamer was just a calculated manifestation of the hard, practical woman who did so much for the man she loved. Did she sense that he needed that illusion of being her security, her provider, much as their daughter had needed a night-light for so many years? Was the fantasy as much for his benefit as hers?

It was certainly possible. For as tough as she was, for as hard as she could be, she was also a woman. And a woman, especially a woman like Gabi, was always so much more complex than men gave her credit for being. He suspected that complexity was the origin of her beauty, the way that even now, overweight and graying, she could shine in his eyes.

He let out a long breath. It had been a month and a few days since he’d run out of his blood pressure pills, and he could feel the closeness in his chest, his pulse uncomfortably fast. Jimmy focused on his breathing, trying to ease down the pounding in his temples.

He turned back to the river.

“Can you see anything?” she whispered.

“A little. There are some boats pulling away from the pier.”

“How many?”

“Looks like nearly all of them.”

Jimmy was looking through a narrow part in the weeds, and as more boats came into view, he could see men in black uniforms, most of them looking vacant and bored, weapons slung casually over their shoulders, waterproof ponchos pulled down over their faces, watching the zombies on the hotel’s lawn.

“What are they doing?” Gabi asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. They’re just sitting there, right offshore. It’s like they’re waiting on something.”

Jimmy thought back to the early days, right after the outbreak. The cops in Gulfport had looked like that when the military was setting up the quarantine wall. At the time, before everybody really understood what the quarantine wall was going to mean to all those refugee families who couldn’t get through fast enough, he had pitied those cops. Eighteen hours of manning a barricade, telling every desperate family that came through the same damn thing would change a man.

But when he looked closer he realized these men were something different. They weren’t like the cops he remembered. These men were disgusted by the army of zombies up on the lawn, but they had also grown numb to it. They weren’t unlike the occasional fakers he’d seen walking among the zombies. Yes, he thought, that was it. That was it exactly. They were another kind of faker. They had lost not only the desire but the ability, to care about what they saw. Disgust passed for compassion. Malaise for empathy. Rather than hating them, Jimmy was disgusted by them. Men like that didn’t deserve their lives. Not when so many good people were dead.

He shook the sudden memory of his daughter and granddaughter away and refocused on the problem at hand.

Through the rain and the gray haze sitting over the water it was difficult to be sure, but he counted at least twenty boats out there, most of them medium-size fishing boats like the kind that had cornered them out on the river just after daybreak. When they were hiding with the others under the main pier, he’d counted a number of smaller boats, too, ski boats and Boston Whalers. He didn’t see them now.

“Did they take the
Sugar Jane
?” Gabi asked.

“No, that’s still at the pier.”

Something about Gabi’s silence made him stop his line of thought. He turned his attention back to her. She was staring at him, her eyes shining in the shadows under the bridge.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I want to take our boat back,” she said.

“What?”

The idea seemed crazy to him. The black shirts, for all their apathy and apparent boredom, were still armed. And as much as it rankled him that they had boarded his boat, he was also a realist. They were the lowest scum he’d ever encountered, but they weren’t blind. Unless he and Gabi were willing to go back underwater, the only way they could get back aboard the
Sugar Jane
was to cross sixty yards of wide-open riverbank. They’d be lucky to make it ten feet before the shooting started.

But then it occurred to him that she meant to take the river. God bless her, she wanted to go underwater.

“We’ll have to swim for it,” he said.

“I don’t want to be stuck down here in this ditch anymore. Staying here, we’re just asking to get munched.”

“Or shot,” he said.

“Yeah, that too.”

“How’s your leg? You gonna be able to crawl?”

“My leg’s fine,” she said. “Quit stalling.”

“Alright,” he agreed. He flashed a smile. “You’re a crazy, beautiful woman, you know that?”

“And you’re a dirty old man.” She gave him a shove. “Now go on, move it.”

He took one last look through the gap in the weeds and pulled himself out from under the bridge. This was suicide, he thought. All it took was one zombie to spot him and the moaning would start. Within seconds they’d have an army of the things hunting them. But Gabi had a point. They were dead if they stayed under that bridge. Better to go down swinging.

So he crawled through the tall weeds toward the humid reek of the river. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Gabi crawling up behind him. There was pain in her eyes, and he knew her hip and knee were bothering her again. At night, she’d frequently get out of their bed to stretch it, unable to sleep because of the pain. Too long in any one position and it happened, and they’d been under that bridge a good long while.

She nodded for him to move.
Don’t wait for me, I’m alright
, the gesture seemed to say.

He nodded back and continued to pull himself toward the verge. A moment later, they reached the edge of the tall weeds, where the water lapped against the muddy, algae-covered bank.

He spotted a pile of ruined lumber that had broken loose from the main part of the pier and that could probably provide some cover as they worked their way into the water.

He motioned at it:
That way
.

She nodded.

The salty dank stench of the algae hit him a moment before he put his hands in it, and his face wrinkled in a grimace. The water here was sluggish and the algae had grown thick. It grew all along the banks of the slower moving parts of the river, but it was usually a vibrant, healthy green. Not gray, like this stuff. Nor did it produce the soap-scummy foam that this stuff did. He could only assume that the Red Man’s compound was responsible for this. Poor sewage management; wasted food; garbage indiscriminately dumped; they all did their part to turn the water into this. It was disgusting.

He tried not to breathe in through his nose as he slipped under the water. He swam around the ruined pile of lumber and over to the little wooden boats that were tied up along the shore on the downriver side of the pier. Here Jimmy popped his head up and waited for Gabi to surface behind him.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, you?”

He nodded.

They still had another thirty feet or so to cover, but most of that was through wrecked and partially submerged boats, leftovers from back before the outbreak, when the hotel was a functioning tourist spot. Most of them were sun-bleached and rusted, squatting deep in the water, hulls turned up to the rain. Jimmy figured they could pick their way through the ruined hulls without having to go back under the water, and that, with luck, they could get all the way to the pier that way.

Getting aboard the
Sugar Jane
would be more difficult, though. There didn’t seem to be any way to do it that didn’t put them in plain sight of the Red Man’s soldiers. Maybe the rain would offer them some cover.

He glanced back to check on Gabi.

She was staring straight ahead at the
Sugar Jane
, and if she was scared, her face didn’t give her away.

But she wouldn’t be, he thought. Not his Gabi. No way.

They moved slowly through the wrecks, and eventually reached the shelter of the pier. The rain was picking up now, making a sizzling roar on the water. That was good, he thought. It’d cover a lot of careless footwork climbing aboard.

“How’s it look?” Gabi asked, gesturing toward the
Sugar Jane
.

Jimmy checked the starboard side first, then the port. It was only tied off in one spot, and she’d been rubbing up against the pier on her port side, but there were no bullet holes down her length. No new ones anyway.

“It looks okay,” he said.

She nodded.

“Any idea on how we’re going to handle this?” he asked.

“You mean getting Sylvia and the others out of there?”

“Looks to me like we’re locked down.”

“Yeah,” she said, and looked back toward the hotel. “I wish we had some way to contact them.”

He could just barely see the first few rows of zombies up on the hotel’s lawn. The rain was getting heavy out there and didn’t show any signs of letting up. Zombies didn’t care about the rain, of course, but the Red Man was no ordinary zombie. Surely he had a plan. Why else would he have ordered his soldiers offshore?

“We ought to get aboard,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll have long to wait. Whatever’s gonna happen is probably gonna happen soon.”

“You think the soldiers will go back ashore?”

“Either that or they’re about to go out on some other mission. But if they dock again there’ll be too many of them crawling around this pier. We’ll never get away at that point.”

“Okay.” She gestured toward the boat. “After you.”

A few rough planks had been nailed across one of the beams holding up the pier, forming a crude ladder. He climbed up it, then threw his legs over the
Sugar Jane
’s gunwale and slid onto the deck. Jimmy leaned back over the railing, extending his hand for Gabi.

“I got it,” she said.

She was at the top of the ladder when they heard one of the soldiers yelling.

Jimmy looked over his shoulder. A young man was leaning over the railing of a nearby boat, pointing at them through the rain.

“Over here!” he yelled. “I got two of them over here.”

Through the blearing rain Jimmy could see soldiers gathering around the younger soldier, squinting into the rain.

“Oh shit,” Jimmy said. “There goes stealth mode.”

Gabi looked up at him. “Okay, I’ll take that hand now.”

“Right.”

He grabbed her hand and pulled her over. Once aboard she quickly unwound the rope that held them fast to the pier, while he slipped into the cabin, pulled the mattress off the bed, and removed two rifles and their last box of the M67 fragmentation grenades.

She took the box and one of the rifles from him.

“Only eight left,” she said, looking into the box.

He forced a smile and shook his head. “I guess we better make ’em count.”

BOOK: Mutated - 04

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