The Passenger (Surviving the Dead) (5 page)

Holding the image in his mind, Ethan gritted his teeth and seized upon his fear, mastering it, making it his own. With hammer blows of
determination, he melted it down, beat it into shape, and turned it into something else. Something his wife would not have recognized in the laughing, boisterous man she had married. It was something sharp. Something ugly.

Something deadly.

SEVEN

One advantage of being dead is that discomfort no longer applies, at least physically. The long, dark hours that night would have been unbearable for me as a living person, soaked to the skin and chilly as the air had to be. I say that without certainty because another of the important functions no longer in service was sensitivity to hot and cold.

It was there. It was just...well, shitty.

I could feel the wet bodies of the other ghouls rubbing up against mine, and though I could see the moisture and hear the wind dancing through the trees, I didn't get cold. I couldn't even feel the wind, which told me just how desensitized my body was.

D
eath was still a new ordeal for me, a gem with so many facets that it took time to even count them all much less examine each one. For example, it took me until that wet shamble up the other side of the creek to realize I no longer felt pain of any kind. While doing barrel rolls down the stony incline, I felt the pressure of the fall and the impacts all across my body, but it didn’t hurt in the slightest. I would have chalked it up to luck had my hand not risen in front of my face after we left the creek, blindly feeling out for obstacles in the dense woods.

My right pinky was broken, and n
ot in an 'oh, we're just going to set this and splint it' kind of way. Think industrial accident and you're getting warmer. Maybe my mind was just acclimating to the new way of things, but seeing my mangled finger flopping from my hand like a clown shoe didn't bother me at all. I found it rather fascinating, to tell the truth. I only wished I could fiddle with it, or at least move it closer.

I was caught completely of
f guard when the hand
did
move closer to my face. Not all the way in, but perhaps a few inches more toward my eyes.

Had I done that? I bent my will to the task of try
ing to move the hand closer, focusing everything I had on the image of my right hand arcing toward my face. If I could have controlled the necessary muscles, my face would have screwed up in concentration, teeth clenched, eyes narrowed.

Fucking hand didn't go anywhere
, though. Probably just a coincidence. My body was prone to doing odd things, after all. Like dying and then going for a stroll. Mom always said my priorities were wrong.

My body stumbled onward, weighed down and off b
alance thanks to a gallon or two of creek water in its stomach and chest cavity. Though our tumble had been chaotic, I remembered the water going down my throat and into my lungs. Maybe a minnow or something went with it. The idea of a little life swimming around in there amused me until a few seconds later when I realized it would be certain death for the poor little fishy.

The wet slog that followed w
as boring but not terribly long. Soon enough, a pinprick of light appeared in the distance. It didn't have the steady burn of an electric bulb. It danced, flickering dim to bright in a wavering cycle. A campfire, maybe, if it was far away. A candle if it was closer. A single point of brightness in the night.

One part of me yearned for it, to be sitting near a warm fire. Another recognized the hard truth in front of me: a single fire or candle probably meant a single person or a small family. Undoubtedly not enough to stop even the few dozen ghouls I could see as my body stared straight ahead, much less the seventy or so others out of my line of sight. Interestingly, as w
e walked, I got the feeling my body, as well as the other ghouls’, didn’t care so much about the fire ahead of us as they did about the faint, distant sounds coming from the people around it. Sounds that, until a short time ago, would have been far below my range of hearing from this far away.

Another interesting fact about victims of whatever plague reanimated me: our bodies have enough remnant human instinct to take the path of least resistance. There was a wide path, maybe six or seven feet across, going straight through the woods. Most of us were on it, the packed dirt offering little in the way of brush or twigs. The trees surrounding us were old growth, tall and widel
y spaced. Not much debris from those ancient fellows.

We weren't moving silently, but close
enough to it that the people around the fire were in for a bad night.

*****

The walking dead, as it happens,
can
breathe, they just don't need to.

The day before, w
hen I first woke up to my body tearing its victim apart, the fight was almost over. I was seeing it from the other side now, and even knowing I was one of the attackers, part of the overwhelming force and not a potential meal, I was scared.

The sounds coming from the oth
er dead people were what did it. Most of them stayed quiet, but a few began to huff, working their chests like bellows. It looked like a lot of work, and the handful that did it were fresh, only dead for maybe a few months. Then they hissed and moaned, a thin and reedy sound you never hear outside of a person dying.

Hearing a death rattle in an emergency room is one thing. Being surrounded by it in the middle of the night is quite another. I didn't bother suppressing the urge to run; it would have just been a waste of energy anyway. I let the fear run its course, then took the mental equivalent of a deep breath and waited for bad things to happen.

It wasn't a long delay. Shouts went up almost as soon as the dead people around me began making their shrill little noises. That strange sense of triangulated sound washed through me again, pointing exactly to where my eyes knew the source to be. I could see them there—a group, but small—flickering in and out of view between the press of corpses between us. I heard a woman scream for someone to get in a car and a faint whimper from what I assumed was a child.

The woman's voice wasn't filled with panic, which put her above me. My own early experiences
with the infected, back when I was still alive, were filled with shame.

My family and I ran at
every opportunity. I shouldn’t have felt bad about that—everyone else was running too—but I did. When measured against catastrophe, I came up short. There was no fight in me. I spent my life behind a desk, avoiding trouble. Nothing in it had prepared me for life-and-death struggles.

The man in the group didn't have that problem. He and his wife must have been a damned good match, because as I heard her barking orders to the rest of the group and the accompanying sound of car doors slamming, the husband (I assumed) raised an animal howl of protest. There w
as no trace of fear in his voice, not a shred of self-preservation. His war cry filled the night like a rock concert, shattering the silence, punctuated by a drumbeat of steel against flesh.

I saw the husband rise up against the front of the swarm, and the sight of him left me agape. He was huge, towering over the
ranks of undead. The long crowbar in his hands was tiny in comparison. His swings were fast enough that the stiffened muscles in my body's neck couldn't twitch fast enough to follow them.

Fearless, the husband waded into the crowd. Strike after strike, merciless, and every one thumping into—and sometimes through—a skull. Head trauma. The only kn
own killing blow for the thing I had become.

The sheer ferocity of the husband's attack took the swarm by surprise. It's easy to get the wrong idea when you're running away from a horde of dead people, but they're really more complex than first impressions led me to believe. As I wa
tched, I saw subtlety in them. Rather than behaving like mindless cannibals, many of them reacted to the obvious danger by stepping back, bodies tense and cautious. Not the reaction of purely instinct-driven automatons. Closer to a predatory animal, albeit a very stupid one.

Still, the hunger burned inside me—rather, inside my bod
y—and I was getting some of it, like a smoldering coal that could only be quenched in blood. My body didn't rush into the fray. It was clever enough to bide its time.

But it didn't run away, either.

The space between us opened for a moment, my view of the husband unobstructed. In that snapshot of time I saw his thick arms extended on the backside of a swing that took one of my cohorts off his feet, nearly decapitating him. That frozen instant showed a giant of a man with a face full of rage, teeth bared against the impossible odds. Bits of his enemy arced through the air around him, splinters of broken teeth and shards of rent flesh.

Five hundred years
ago, that man could have been a Viking, a berserker unafraid as he faced an opposing force. The image of him as a barbarian from some fantasy series was only slightly marred by the jeans he wore, the polo shirt. They seemed like unimportant details, the camouflage used to hide in a modern age long since departed.

They say tragedy
shows you who you really are. If I was a coward, and in fairness I have to say I was, then the husband was a hero. Laying into the swarm with nothing but rage and a length of metal to buy his family time—is there anything more deserving of the word?

The
moment passed, and the swarm began to surge forward. At the same time, the car behind the man came to life, although with very little noise. If not for my body’s unnaturally altered hearing, I would never have picked it up. I was confused for a moment, wondering why the engine didn’t belt out the usual guttural roar, and then it dawned on me: electric car. Nearby, in the dim light, I caught the outline of a hodge-podge solar array on a crudely slapped together scaffolding. I realized I was looking at a carefully crafted and well-orchestrated escape plan.

The giant, crowbar-wielding warrior must have sensed the change in the swarm, then, because he went from reckless abandon one second to retreat in the next. The car was already moving as he turned from the dead in front of him and sprinted toward it, leaping onto the roof with enough force that I could hear his belly slap the metal. A few ghouls snatched at his feet, but the man's tree trunk legs shot like pistons into the faces of his enemies.

And then they were gone, taillights dwindling into the night.

The swarm followed them, of course. The corpses around me might not have been totally without guile, but they were far from smart. Distance didn't matter to them. Speed didn't enter into the equation. My own body was feeling such crippli
ng waves of hunger I had a hard time remembering that eating people was a bad idea.

There was only the need, and the ability to move. That ceaseless drive forward.

The destruction left behind by the husband was impressive. A full dozen bodies lay on the ground, a few of them still twitching as their not-quite-destroyed brains attempted to operate their bodies like a child behind the wheel of a car. It was somehow sad, even having seen them attack an innocent person only a few minutes before.

The sun rose as we carried on.

EIGHT

Ethan may have had a nose for trouble, but it was Hicks who had the sharpest eyes. Walking out on point, the stringy young man held up a fist, signaling everyone to stop. He turned and motioned Ethan forward.

“What have you got?” he asked when he reached him.

“Sign,” Hicks whispered, pointing. His finger indicated a tree trunk and small cluster of leafy, sickly-looking plants. Ethan didn’t see anything wrong, the plants just looked like plants, but Hicks sounded convinced. “Somebody done been through here. Maybe a day or two ago, if that.”

“How can you tell?”

Hicks motioned him closer to the tree and pointed at a section of bark about chest high. “You see that there light spot? Looks like a little scrape. Like somebody braced a hand on it steppin’ over that poison ivy.”

“That’s what this
shit is?”

“Yep. Don’t go wipin’ ya’ ass with it. Look here.” He squatted down and pointed at a few stalks near the edge of the cluster. “These is broke. Like somebody stepped
on ‘em. And there’s tracks goin’ off thataway. They’s faint, but I can see ‘em. Regular tracks though, don’t look like infected. Too even.”

Ethan looked, bu
t saw only a featureless carpet of dead leaves stretching off into the gloom.

“You
want me to follow ‘em, boss?”

Ethan pondered it for a moment, thinking that Hicks had just spoken more in the last thirty seconds than in the last six months, and then nodded. “Might be survivors nearby. If so, we need to know their disposition.”

“Right y’are.” Hicks hunched down and moved off through the woods. Ethan signaled the change of direction, and motioned for the others to maintain five-yard intervals.

The four men moved cautiously, minding where they put their feet and doing their best not to make noise. Hicks was practically a ghost, sliding easily between trees while dodging low hanging branches and sparse foliage.
Give that man a ghillie suit, and we’ve got ourselves a sniper.
Ethan resolved to mention it to Lieutenant Jonas the next time he got a chance.

Holland was only slightly less adept, moving with calm, practiced ease, eyes constantly alert. He might have been an insufferable shit at tim
es, but Ethan couldn’t deny he was a good man to have on his side in a fight. As was Cole, for that matter.

Ethan swiveled his gaze to look at the powerful gunner. He carried an M-4 loosely in his hands, his heavy SAW dangling across his back on a makeshift sling. If the weight of the big weapon bothered him at all, he didn’t show it. He carried it as effortlessly as he might carry an empty backpack. Ethan
was a strong man, but doubted he could have done the same quite so easily.

Less than half a mile from where Hicks had first spotted the trail, he stopped short again, holding up a fist. He leaned forward, peering at something in the distance, then abruptly motioned for the team to take cover. Ethan ducked to his right and slid on his belly beneath the boughs of a cedar tree
. Once hidden, he crawled slowly forward and peered through his ACOG sights, making sure to stay well hidden beneath the thick, spiny branches. The modest 4x magnification on his optics allowed him to see movement topping a rise about a hundred yards ahead. As he watched, the shifting shadows resolved into a horse and rider.

The rider held a lever action rifle casually in one hand, stock resting on his thigh and the barrel
pointed in the air. He was moving at a slow canter, evidently concerned with not making any unnecessary noise. A sensible precaution, considering how many infected there might be in the area. Behind him, the figures of two more riders emerged, similarly armed and moving at the same pace.

With no time to lose, Ethan belly crawled to where he’d seen Holland duck down behind a moss-covered boulder. When he reached it, he spotted Holland’s boots sticking out from the far side. He whispered the sharpshooter’s name and saw his face appear over the top. Ethan kept his head down and crawled over

“Think you can move up that slope and find an elevated firing position before they reach us?” he whispered.

Holland looked up the low hill to his right, gauging. “Yeah, I think so. If Cole stays where he is, he can lay down cover fire if I’m spotted. Make sure he knows where I’m going.”

“Can do.”

“What about Hicks?” Holland asked.

“Not sure. He disappeared, but if I had to guess, I’d say he’s doing the same thing you’re about to do, but on the other side. I sure as hell hope so, anyway.”

Holland nodded and moved off without another word,
silently winding through the press of foliage. Ethan was glad he and his men had taken the time to apply face paint and put on digi-cam headscarves. The additional camouflage would increase their chances of avoiding detection. Full body armor and ballistic shields would have been nice as well, but all the extra weight would have slowed them down. They hadn’t even bothered with helmets.

He checked the riders every few feet as he worked his way over to Cole, but they didn’t give any indication of having spotted him or his men. Ethan could hear the soft
clomp of hooves on the spongy ground and the creak of leather from the saddles. In just a few minutes, the riders would be in range.

“What’s the plan?” Cole asked.

“Hold position here, and keep those riders covered. I’m going to go out there and get their attention. If they break bad, Holland and Hicks will light ‘em up. You stay in reserve, and don’t open fire unless I tell you to. Okay?”

Cole frowned, not liking being left out of the action. “All right, man. But just so you know, if you get in trouble I’m a’ bust these motherfuckers up. Orders or not.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Remember, you open up with that SAW and you’re going to bring every infected within five miles down on our heads. Just stay cool, all right? Don’t forget, we’re in the fucking red out here.” Ethan patted him on the arm and began working his way forward to intercept the lead rider.

Once he was in position, he was less than forty yards away from the horsemen. Keying his radio was a risk at this range, but he had to do it. “Echo, Foxtrot, how copy? Over.”

Jonas’ rough voice crackled in his ear. “Copy loud and clear, Foxtrot. What’s your sitrep, over.”

“Three possible hostiles in sight, on horseback, armed, headed toward the U-trac. They’re less than forty meters in front of me, and we’ve got ‘em surrounded, over.”

“Any chance you can take them alive? Find out who they are and where they’re headed? Over.”

“Affirmative. Just so you know LT, if there’s three, there’s bound to be more. No way they’d come after the U-trac unless t
hey brought friends with them. You might want to send out a few more patrols. Over.”

“Acknowledged. Le
t me know how things work out. Over.”

“If it goes bad, you’ll know soon enough. We’re less than a mile away. Over.”

The radio went silent for a few seconds. Ethan could just picture Jonas’ face pinching down and the colorful expletives spewing forth. If there were riders less than a mile away, then the whole platoon was probably in for a fight. “Copy, Foxtrot. Watch yourself, and get those raiders back here in one piece, over.”

“Wilco. Foxtrot out.”

He could see the riders clearly now. The one in front was older with gray hair, a grey beard, and a lean, craggy face. He carried a big revolver on one hip and a hunting knife on the other. The edge of a black wide-brimmed Stetson concealed his eyes as he searched the ground along the same path that Hicks had been taking.
Following the same tracks, maybe? But why in the other direction?

The other two men were younger, but not boys by any stretch. Like most men since the Outbreak, they sported long, bushy beards and tied their shaggy hair back under headscarves. They both carried repeating rifles similar to their leader’s. Their clothes looked in good repair, if stained and filthy, and they stared around searchingly, clearly on the lookout for trouble.

Something about them struck Ethan as not quite right, at least not for marauders. For starters, most raiders armed themselves with scavenged assault weapons. Why would they go after a military transport with lever action repeaters? They had to know that their weapons’ slower rate of fire would be a huge disadvantage against trained soldiers armed with automatic rifles. If that was the best they could do, it was going to be a short fight indeed. Then there was the question of why they were following the tracks. If they were after the transport, why the hell were they taking the time to follow a random trail out in the middle of nowhere? It didn’t make sense.

When they were finally close enough, Ethan eased his rifle around a tree and called out, “Stop right there.”

The riders sat up straight and went still, nervous hands tugging at the reins. “Don’t even think about trying to ride away. You’re surrounded. Two snipers have you in their crosshairs, and there’s a machine gun pointed at your horses. Drop your weapons, and keep your hands where I can see them.”

The one in the lead lifted his head and pushed back the brim of his hat. Unlike his two companions, his face was stoic and unconcerned. “And just who the hell might you be?” he asked.

“Staff Sergeant Ethan Thompson, United States Army. And from here on out, I’ll be the one asking the questions. I told you to drop your weapons. Do it now. I won’t ask you again.”

The old man st
ared hard, glaring at Ethan with an unsettling, intelligent gaze. For a few tense heartbeats, Ethan thought he might try to level his weapon or spur his horse away. The men behind him looked on, clearly waiting for their leader to decide what to do. Ethan controlled his breathing, kept his aim fixed, and felt his finger begin to tighten on the trigger.

“Do as he says.”

Ethan let out a breath.

The old man tossed his rifle to the ground, then his pistol and his knife. The other riders hesitated for a moment before following suit.

“Get down from your horses, slowly. Keep your hands up. Try anything stupid and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”

The men did as Ethan ordered, dismounting carefully and advancing with their hands over their heads. The leader’s stony, glacial expression never wavered.

“That’s far enough. Get down on your knees, put hands on your head, cross your feet, and don’t fucking move.”

Ethan gathered his legs beneath him to stand up, but before he could, Hick
s emerged from the trees like an apparition. He approached the horses, let them smell his hands and nuzzle him, and then took their reins while whispering in low, comforting tones. He tethered them to a low branch, then stepped up behind the three prisoners.

“Now listen here,” he said
. “I don’t wanna kill you, and y’all don’t wanna die. So let’s do this nice and friendly-like.” Quickly and efficiently, the wiry soldier bound the riders’ hands with zip ties, lashed them together with para-cord, and motioned for Holland and Cole to exit cover.

“You spot anybody else out ther
e, Hicks?” Ethan asked.

“Nope. Just these three. Don’t worry, anybody else comes around, the horses’ll let us know.”

Ethan opened his mouth to ask him what he was talking about, hesitated, and decided to let it go. Hicks was a strange one, but he seemed to know his business. He turned his attention back to the captives.

“Who are you
, and what are you doing out here?” he asked, addressing the leader.

“My name’s Zebulon Austin. Formerly of the US Marshals service, now sheriff of Fort Unity. The big fella here is my nephew Michael, and this man is Christopher Hedges, one of my deputies. We’re on our way to a little trading village not far from here. Folks call it Broke
n Bridge. Maybe you heard of it?”

Ethan exchanged a glance with Cole and Holland. Both men shrugged, keeping their weapons pointed at the captives.

“I’m afraid not. But then again, I haven’t been out this way in a long time.”

“I’ll tell you a town I
have
heard of,” Holland chimed in. “It’s called Hamlet. Don’t suppose you know anything about that place, do you? We ran into some of its fine citizens on the way out here. On horseback, just like you guys. Seems like a hell of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“There’s lots of folks
around here got horses,” Zebulon responded defensively. “And we ain’t from Hamlet. Place is full o’ slavers and cutthroats. Folks like us don’t go there. Not unless we want to end up dead or in chains.”

“All right, tha
t’s enough.” Ethan cut in. “We’re wasting time. If these guys are legit, there should be some record of their town back at Bragg. LT can radio for confirmation. If they’re lying, he’ll know what to do about it. Hicks, think you can handle those horses?”

“Yep.”

“Good. Holland, take point. Cole, you’re with me. Let’s get moving.” After helping Zebulon and his men to their feet, the group moved off north toward the U-trac and the rest of First Platoon. Along the way, Ethan radioed an update to Lieutenant Jonas. The old soldier acknowledged, and told him to get back as quickly as he could.

Zebulon turned to Ethan. “Don’t suppose you’d mind telling me what the Army-”