Mutated - 04 (5 page)

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Authors: Joe McKinney

BOOK: Mutated - 04
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He glanced back at the dead boy, then lowered himself to the dust-covered floor and slid the straps of his backpack off his shoulders and removed a plastic bottle of water and leaned against the wall while he drank. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he pinched it away. He was so tired. He wanted so badly to rest. But he couldn’t. He could never stop, never rest. He hated living this way.
A large black bird—a crow, judging by the size of it—landed on the window ledge.
Richardson regarded it without moving. The bird squawked at him, a harsh, rude sound. Another landed beside it, and another.
He stared at them; they back at him.
Another flew inside and lit near the dead zombie boy’s feet. It squawked at Richardson, then jumped onto the dead boy’s shoulder and pecked at one of his eyes until it pried the thing loose.
The bird held the boy’s eyeball by its trailed bundle of severed optic nerves, then tossed it up in the air and gulped it down. Another crow was already prying the second eyeball loose.
Richardson turned to the window. The first three crows had become dozens. Beyond them were hundreds more. Thousands. They sat on the telephone poles and wires and in the street and on the roofs of the ruined apartment buildings. All of them stared back at him with dull black eyes, empty as a void, empty as forever.
A crow squawked.
Another answered.
The sound grew large, bird answering unto bird. It became a din, became a living, breathing thing trying to cover him, beat him down, snuff him out. It was a painful thing, that noise, huge, godlike in its aspect.
He clapped his hands over his ears but it did no good. The noise was all around him. It was
inside
him.
He closed his eyes and pulled his knees up to his chest. He hugged them. He pressed his face into his thighs and thought: No! Stop it. No!
Richardson sat there, whimpering, for a long time.
When at last he opened his eyes, the birds were gone. The dead boy was still hanging from the electrical cords, still creaking with his slow pendulum movements in the torpid heat of the darkened building.
Richardson mopped a hand over his face. He was sweating badly. He finished off the last of his water and sat watching the beads run down the inside of the bottle. He was numb. Mentally drained and numb.
He tried to clear his mind so he could figure out what to do next. Over the last eight years he had seen so many messed-up things, so many lives wasted. But he had never seen anything like the Red Man. Sitting there, his head between his knees, Richardson asked himself again how it was possible for a man to control the infected the way the Red Man had, and he didn’t have any answers.
You have to think about this, he told himself. You have to. This is important.
But he couldn’t. His eyes burned. The muscles in his lower back ached. He was unable to concentrate on anything but the stiffness in his body.
From outside he heard the familiar sound of a wooden door getting smashed open. That wasn’t good. The zombies were searching the surrounding buildings—maybe looking for him, maybe looking for Sylvia Carnes and the two younger women she had with her. But it didn’t matter who they were looking for. Whoever they found was as good as dead.
He pulled himself up to one knee and looked out the window. From where he stood he could see row upon row of red brick apartment buildings, with vacant lots between them. So many broken windows. Here and there was a fire-damaged roof. The brown weed-filled yards were starting to encroach through the ground-floor windows.
He was scanning the buildings for the broken wooden door he’d heard when he saw a zombie falling from a second-story window off to his right.
A small crowd of the infected was fighting to get through the front door.
Framed in the window above them was the young, dark-haired woman he’d seen back at the Pizza Hut, the one who had seemed to be in charge of Sylvia Carnes’s group.
Get out of there, he thought.
But she seemed to know already that the zombies were coming for her. She turned from the window and he thought he heard the sounds of a struggle. A moment later she burst out of the front door with a wooden baseball bat in her hands. Sylvia Carnes and the other young woman emerged behind her. The dark-haired woman sidestepped one of the zombies, came up behind it, and swung the bat at the back of the zombie’s head, dropping it with one blow. It was the same practiced move he’d seen Sylvia Carnes do in front of the Pizza Hut, but this woman did it with an athleticism that Sylvia Carnes could only try to mimic.
And I bet this is the one who taught it to you, Sylvia, he said to himself. Not bad.
There weren’t many zombies around them now, maybe twenty, and the women worked quickly to put them down. When the last zombie fell, the women formed up back-to-back-to-back and surveyed the field. They had an easy escape route to the south, lots of wide open ground. The nearest zombies were still a good 150 feet away.
But just as it looked like they were going to make it, Richardson heard the sound of a truck engine racing, tires skidding. He turned to his left, following the noise, and saw one of the Red Man’s trucks coming up the street toward them.
“No,” he said. He looked at the women. “Run. You have to run.”
The women heard the truck, too. The dark-haired woman lowered her bat and turned. She watched the truck approach.
“Come on,” Richardson muttered, “what are you waiting for?”
Then she tossed the bat to the ground.
“No,” Richardson said. “What are you doing? Run!”
 
 
Niki Booth counted the black shirts on the truck racing toward her. Four men in the back, probably two more in the cab. Nothing she couldn’t handle.
“Niki?”
She turned. Sylvia Carnes was looking at the bat on the ground. Beside her, Avery Harper was scared. It was a bad idea bringing her. She looked like she was holding on to her self-control with both hands.
But of course she’d no choice in that. She couldn’t leave Avery behind. Not the way things were back home.
This has gone far enough, Niki realized. She had to do something now or they were all going to be murdered by the black shirts. And that just wasn’t going to happen.
“You two need to run. Go, hurry.”
Sylvia looked at her. “Niki, what are you going to do?”
“Don’t ask me any questions, Sylvia. You and Avery, you need to run. Please. I won’t let you get caught.”
“Niki,” Avery said, “you can’t.”
Niki nearly barked at her, but she caught the words in her throat. This wasn’t a patrol, and Avery and Sylvia sure as hell weren’t soldiers. She breathed out slowly, getting herself back under control.
To Avery, very gently, she said, “Baby, I mean it. Run. If I don’t catch up with you on the road, I’ll meet you in the trade market down in Herculaneum. Now go.”
“They’ll kill you,” Sylvia said.
“These idiots won’t even get to first base. Now look, whatever happens to me, you get to a little town called Chester, you understand?”
“Chester? Is that where we’re going?”
“You need to be there by Wednesday of next week, understand?”
Sylvia shrugged helplessly. “I . . . but, what about you?”
“I’ll be fine.” Niki glanced over at Avery and made sure that Sylvia saw the look in her eyes. “You take care of her, okay?”
“Niki . . .”
“Promise me. That’s all I ask.”
Sylvia nodded.
“Good enough.”
“But Niki . . .” Avery said.
Niki took her younger cousin by the hand. “Listen to me, Avery. It’s like when you were a kid, remember? I’d tell you to lay low while I took care of the bad guys? Remember that?”
Avery nodded.
“It’s like that now. I got bad guys that need takin’ care of. You go with Sylvia. You stay close to her. Understand?”
Avery nodded.
“I need to hear it, Avery.”
“I understand.”
“Alright.” She turned back toward the black truck and pulled both her pistols. Then she looked back over her shoulder at them. “Go,” she said, “both of you.”
 
 
Richardson’s pulse raced. He could feel it pounding at his temples. From where he stood he could see the truck barreling down on the women. He could see the young dark-haired woman with a pistol in each hand, running at the truck. Sylvia Carnes was yelling something. He couldn’t catch all of it, but he heard her call the dark-haired girl Niki, and he figured this was Niki Booth, the name he’d heard the Red Man mention while he was interrogating the two men that had been with them.
Niki fired at the truck, and as soon as she did the driver jumped on the brake and the men bailed out, running for cover behind wrecked cars. The black shirts were armed with shotguns. They got behind cover quickly, moving in a crouch, the muzzles of their weapons pointed down at a low ready, the stocks up against their shoulders.
Richardson had seen pros before, and he knew these men were trained for combat. Not just a couple of thugs from the local gangs.
But for pros, they sure were taking a foolish chance. The truck had been their biggest tactical advantage. If they wanted Niki and her group, why not just run them down? A truck against pistols was no fair match at all.
Niki ran to her right, where three zombies had just come around the far side of a small apartment building, their focus on Sylvia Carnes and the other woman, who had yet to run. Niki fired again—but not, Richardson realized, at the soldiers. She shot at the zombies, and her shots caused the zombies to change direction. They came for her, and as they did, they crossed behind two of the black shirts who had taken up position behind a wrecked car. The black shirts were forced to turn and fire at the zombies, and when they did, Niki Booth charged them.
She ran around the car and fired at the man closest to her, hitting him twice that Richardson could see.
The soldier fell onto his back and didn’t move.
The second soldier managed to squeeze off a shot before Niki shot him, and the deep
whumpf
of the shotgun drowned out Niki’s shots.
A moment later, Niki Booth staggered around the wrecked car and into the street. The blast had knocked her backward a good five feet, but she hadn’t fallen. And there was no visible wound on her either. Her T-shirt was as gray as it had been in front of the Pizza Hut, no blood at all.
But she did look punch-drunk. She weaved noticeably, and it looked like she was having trouble aiming her pistols at the other soldiers, who were coming out from behind their cover.
She turned toward Sylvia Carnes and the other woman, both of whom had only fallen back perhaps twenty yards, and that only because a few of the infected had managed to close on them, and she mouthed the word, “Run!”
The soldiers were closing on her. She fired at one of them and missed.
The man already had his shotgun up. He lined his sights up on her chest and fired, and once again the weapon made an odd, deep
whumpf
that didn’t sound anything like a normal shotgun blast. Richardson wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a flash of something red leave the weapon and bounce off Niki Booth’s chest.
She staggered backward. Her arms dropped to her sides and her chin sagged forward. One of the pistols fell from her fingers and clattered on the pavement.
The soldier racked another shell into the chamber of his shotgun and fired. The same sound. The same flash of something red. And this time the shot laid Niki Booth out flat on her back. Richardson could see her writhing sluggishly on the ground, on her back, a weak moan coming from her; and only then did it occur to him that the black shirts were using rubber donut rounds, the kind of nonlethal ammunition riot police had used on crowds before the outbreak. They were taking her alive. But why?
The black shirts swarmed over her then and handcuffed her hands behind her back. Two of the soldiers scooped her up off the ground and carried her between them to the waiting truck, while the remaining two turned back to the south and looked around for Sylvia Carnes and the other woman.
They weren’t there, Richardson realized.
Quietly, he stepped back from the window and crossed to the opposite side of the room. There he stepped out of the back window and hugged the wall of the building, moving south.
When he got to the corner he stopped and looked around. More windowless red brick apartment buildings. More brown, vacant lots. Gray paved streets with scraggly weeds coming up through the cracks. Sylvia Carnes and the other woman were there, standing out in the open, just waiting to be captured. Or worse.
Roving camera, he thought. You’re safe here. You can just watch. Record. You can keep yourself safe, detached, uninvolved.

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