Beyond the Barriers (22 page)

“Lee’s men,” I said.

“Who is Lee?”

“Long story. Let’s just say he’s a bad man. I wouldn’t be sad to see him dead.” I sighed.

“Is that his first name?”

“Come to think of it, I have no idea.”

Lisa studied me, but didn’t pursue the matter. I was sure we would have time to talk about it later. I was on edge, worried about Katherine. I’m sure Lisa was aware of my constant glances toward the room Katherine was in.

Lisa had a new bearing about her. She was no longer the shy housewife that used to giggle at my jokes when she and Devon stopped by, before Allison left. She had come into her own, and I was willing to bet she was the one who yelled at me earlier.

I found an unoccupied La-Z-Boy and took a seat in it. She came around and sat on a beat-up couch that was probably once a fine leather sofa imported from somewhere expensive, if I knew Mark.

I glanced down the hall and wanted to pursue Katherine, wanted to be by her side when they worked on her, wanted to be there in case they had some bad news. One of the men who had helped us out came back and nodded at me.

“Nurse said she is gonna be all right, man. She is lucky that bullet went in and out clean. She’s gonna stitch her up and give her some antibiotics. We don’t have a lot, but we can spare some for a neighbor.”

He was light skinned but had a slight Hispanic accent. He carried a shotgun over his shoulder and was dressed like the others—jumpsuit with a scarf tied around his neck. I liked him right away for reasons I couldn’t pinpoint. Being in Special Forces, I had learned pretty quickly who I could and couldn’t trust. I had a feeling about him as soon as I saw him. I was pretty sure he was also the man I had seen pass the car when they spooked Lee’s men.

“I’m Scott, by the way.” He offered his hand, and I shook it, noticing he also wore gloves.

“The outfits must be protection from the biters.”

“Smart guy. We should keep you around.” He grinned.

“Thanks, I think.” I smiled back.

“Now this is nothing personal, man, but I’m gonna have to ask you to take your clothes off.”

“Excuse me?”

“Gotta check you for bites, man. Like I said, nothing personal. It’s a brave new world, brother. We don’t stand on modesty much.”

“What, here?”

“You want a private room, amigo?”

Lisa had a churlish grin on her face, but tastefully turned her head to the side to give me the illusion of privacy. Stripping down to my skivvies, I shook my head. They were old and torn, and I felt ridiculous in them. Scott gestured, so I held my arms out and spun around.

“Not the tighty whiteys, I hope,” I said.

“If a zombie bit your ass, you got bigger problems. You’re cool.”

I nodded and put my clothes back on, while Lisa fought back a cough.

He wandered back outside, and I was left alone with Lisa, who sat back and studied me.

“Is that how you greet every survivor?”

“If I didn’t go out for you, you would have been stripped and spread eagle on the ground before you were even let into the perimeter.”

I liked how she used words like that, like she was in the military. This was not the sweet but simpering Lisa I had met a few years ago. This was a confident woman who was used to giving orders and having them followed.

I took a seat in the La-Z-Boy again and tried to look relaxed after doing the striptease. She studied me, and I studied her in return. She was still pretty, but she had the same hard look to her eyes that Katherine had. I hoped she was doing well in their care. I couldn’t imagine she would be too happy with their methods of inspecting for bites.

“I thought the bites were fast—like the movies. You get bit, you die and change. Come back as one of those dead things.”

“It used to be that way, but the virus has mutated. In some cases, it can take days to make its presence known. The ghouls have sent in more than one survivor who didn’t even know they were going to change. Those things are too smart by far. We need a plan to kill them all.”

“I think I know what you mean. We had trouble too. It was like they were driving a bunch of the zombies to kill us. They seemed to have a strange power over them. How can a virus do something like that?”

Sighing, she sat back. She put her hands in her lap and looked small all of a sudden. If I had been close to her, I probably would have patted her hand in a familiar gesture, like one friend does for another.

“We don’t know much—just theories and rumors. There was a lot of talk of a bad swine flu vaccine, and then others said it was the regular flu shots. Then there was a rumor about some experimental gas in North Korea that got out of hand. None of it makes sense.”

“Understatement.”

“Yeah. What have you been up to? You look like you’re in good shape.”

I had been hoping for answers, but like the other survivors, these didn’t know anything either. I wanted to pound the chair in frustration, but what good would it do? Would it even matter, knowing how the cursed virus started? It would just be one more thing to file away for a rainy day when we were all old and retired from zombie hunting—if we lived that long.

I had done more thinking along the lines of food and supplies. The stuff in stores wouldn’t last forever. We would need to start farming, raising animals, taking care of crops. How could we do that when the world was overrun by the dead?

“I hid out at a cabin until I ran out of food. Then I came back and hooked up with a bunch of crazies holed up at the Walmart.”

“Oh them. We have been in communication a few times. They wanted us to join them, but we were happy here.”

So there was dissension in the tiny fiefdoms after all.

“You didn’t want to join forces?”

“We worked hard to build this place. We brought in generators, a tanker full of diesel. We have semis full of food lined up. We brought in a truck filled with water bottles, and we’re doing all right. When we need more stuff, we go on recon and get what we need. We didn’t need them trying to bring it all to them.”

“They had a pretty nice setup. Very secure.”

“We have a nice setup.”

I had to agree. They had a defensible position and they were well supplied. If overrun, they could always pile into the trucks and make their escape.

As if to punctuate my thought, a gunshot broke the still air outside. Another followed. From the blasts, I guessed it was an AK-47, which had a very distinctive sound. I would have loved to have gotten my hand on one; they didn’t look as nice as my assault rifle, but they were a lot more reliable.

“Shit,” she said and jumped up. I followed her out, but I glanced back down the hallway through which they had taken Katherine. Lisa saw my look and nodded. “I’ll be out there when you’re done. As soon as you can, ask around about a jumpsuit. They’re pretty good protection, and your clothes are a mess.”

I nodded my thanks and turned to check on Katherine.

The hallway led me to a kitchen, where a respectable triage unit had been set up. A pair of tables draped in white made up the beds. They both appeared to be padded. There were a couple of kitchen chairs in a corner, and a whole counter full of tools and medications. There were syringes and a box of sutures, piles of gauze and bandages. This place was ready for war.

Katherine sighed as the nurse slid a needle out of her arm. She smiled in a goofy way at me, and I wondered what kind of painkillers they had given her.

“You know something, Erik? My life was a lot simpler before you walked into it.”

“If you’re getting romantic, then I’m all ears.”

I went to her side and took her hand. She was still cold, but the woman attending piled a sheet and a quilted blanket on her. Katherine’s shoulder was exposed, and the paper towels had been pushed aside. The woman took the same syringe, wiped it and Katherine’s skin with alcohol, and then administered a couple of shots to the area. Katherine didn’t even seem to notice.

“She’s floating on a sea of morphine right now. She may get sort of loopy.”

“I’m Erik. Thanks for the hard work, Doc.”

“Oh I’m no doctor, but I’m the next best thing. I’m a nurse, used to work in a facial reconstruction office, but I have all the chops.”

She was dressed in the familiar jumpsuit, but she had a white strip tied around one arm, which reminded me of the corpsmen I used to see in old World War II movies. She was tall and thin with strong Asian features.

“I’m Maddy,” she said and gave me a short wave in lieu of a handshake.

“Hi, Maddy.”

“I’m numbing the area. I don’t have a lot of morphine, so I have to use it sparingly, but I do have a few bottles of Lidocaine. Same stuff they use at the dentist.”

I was familiar with the drug. I once had a small procedure to remove a cyst, and they shot the area up while I tried to relax and play it cool.

I looked away when she got out the blades, but she seemed confident with them in hand. I found a chair and sat down so I could see Katherine from the right side but not view the work. The smell of alcohol filled the room.

“You’re not exactly a romantic guy, but you’ll do, I suppose.”

“I have my moments.”

“You do. But you usually have a big knife or gun when they happen.” Katherine smiled.

“Who shot you? Did you see anything?” I asked for the second time that night, wanting answers. I refused to believe that one of those ghouls was capable of picking up a gun, aiming it and firing. In my mind, the ghouls may have been smarter than the zombies, but they barely had motor skills. There was so much I didn’t understand about them.

“I think it was one of those guys with green eyes. I don’t think a regular human would be hanging out with them.”

“Are you sure? Did you or the others ever see one holding a gun or weapon of any sort?”

“Nah, but they always stayed pretty far away from us. They seemed intent on just corralling or directing the dead bastards.”

It didn’t make sense, but who could make sense of any of this? The dead were back, and they ruled the world. We were now the minority, and our existence was a big question mark.

She started to say something else, but drifted off into lala land. I stayed by her side, and, sometime during the night, my mind drifted far enough away for me to fall into a deep slumber.

* * *

I was rocketed out of sleep like a sled down a mountain, or such was the impression my dream left on my mind. In it, I was at the cabin, and it was covered in snow. We were surrounded on every side by the dead. After running out of ammo, Katherine had an idea. She dragged me to the rooftop, where we had a sled like the one Santa used. He was one of them now, a jolly fat man in red. Red the color of blood. He waited for us and he was hungry.

We got into the sled and left the top of the mountain at high speed. We flew over a freeway, skidded onto it, and kept on going until we ran into a swarm of ghouls.

Something loud banged outside, and even in my half-sleep state, I recognized the AK-47 again. I came out of the seat and whipped my head around in search of my shotgun. A shooting pain rocketed down one shoulder. Somehow I had fallen asleep in the wooden chair, and no one woke me. I had been left exhausted as soon as my body stopped running on high-octane adrenaline. The night had been a blur. The escape, the fight, the flight, and then meeting up with Lisa and her crew of holdouts.

I rubbed my eyes, but they were so dry they felt like they were coated in sand as if I was rubbing tiny grains into my pupils. After a minute, I stood up and went to check on Katherine.

Drugged or not, she was used to living on edge, and her eyes popped open, hand moving toward a nonexistent gun, the moment I entered the area . She saw me, and a flash of confusion was washed away by a genuine smile. It touched me, I won’t lie. I had spent a lot of time with her, and I was attached, but she was still very reserved around me. The concern she had brought up about not being able to bear children meant little to me. She could take her common sense and piss on it, because I wanted to be with her no matter what.

“Morning, sunshine,” I said and kissed her lips. She was warm to my touch, as I pushed some hair out of her face then took her hand in mine.

“Hi.”

Her shoulder was bare where the wound was covered in fresh, clean gauze. I had to wonder how long their supply of bandages would last. It couldn’t be easy to have a tiny village like this without renewable supplies. I should feel grateful to them, but I felt anything but. They were in my way. I wanted to get to Portland, join the fight and make a difference. I didn’t want to sit around, bored out of my skull, after already experiencing four months of that.

They didn’t even care to move. They were happy to wait for something to happen or stay until they were overrun. The mob we saw when we left the Walmart had been huge. If a similar army of shambling dead came at this position, they wouldn’t be able to hold them off forever, unless they had a massive supply of ammunition. Were the ghouls willing to sacrifice enough of their army for a few live bodies to feast on?

“How are you feeling?”