Moriah (28 page)

Riley held on to Dee while Dee held fast to the float, Kevin drawing them to the boat.

* * *

They left the dock burning behind them in the early morning light, the wooden structure partially collapsed and submerged. Great rollicking flames licked up from the exposed surface, its smoke marring the first blush of morning, joining that of the blazing house.

“I hope he burns until there’s nothing left.” Riley’s loathing was apparent from her tone, from the way she nearly spit the words out of her mouth.

“Riley.” Dee’s tone was calmer, his wounded leg and foot throbbing. They’d stripped him of his soggy pants and boots and he sat there in his underwear.

“I hope he lived long enough…” the vindictiveness left her inflection “…to
feel
it.”

“Its okay, Riley.”

“There’s no chance, is there?” Kevin asked from the boat’s controls. “About Bruce?”

Dee considered all they had experienced this morning, what he had seen and what had been said to him by the creature now cremated. They could go back and look for Bruce—for what remained of their friend—and they would not like what they found. They could go back and look for the two little girls, but he doubted they were alive, and if they were, he didn’t think they’d let themselves be found. They could go back and see how many zombies were on the beach, outside the strip mall, under the water tower. They could do all this, but Dee knew they shouldn’t and they wouldn’t, so he simply answered Kevin’s question with a no.

“Fuck.” There were tears in Kevin’s eyes as he turned his full attention to the throttle. “That fucker.”

“Kev, we need you alert on the tiller there.”

“It’s the helm, Dee.” He pushed the throttle wide open. “The fucking helm.”

Riley stared silently back at their wake.

The motorboat glided through the sound, a lagoon prodigious and wide. They could see no sign of land on the other side, though Elmore had told them it was there. The tide subsided with the new day, revealing expansive shoals, gravel bars upon which mis-piloted and abandoned vessels had wrecked themselves. They passed capsized hulls, holed and rusted, vessels half sunken. In the deeper, clearer water a catamaran was plainly visible, submerged beneath their path. Empty life jackets floated on the water, faded from the merciless sun.

The dock and land were lost to them, and as they journeyed east an object loomed on the horizon, a contraption of immense size and voluminous girth. A cruise ship, somehow misplaced here in the sound, its deep draught effectively anchoring it in place. Kevin steered their boat closer for a look at the passenger liner. Its flat transom canted lower in the water than the bow, the retractable dome over an aft pool cracked and vented. A waterslide was visible on the deck, the bridge long abandoned by the living.

“I knew there couldn’t be people on it.” Kevin looked away from the cruise liner. About the wraparound promenade, the undead tottered on their sea legs, motioning towards the passing voyagers. Reaching out to the smaller boat, one after another they crested the deck-side railing and flopped from the cruise liner to the blue waters below, disappearing with splashes. They followed one upon the other, mindless, deadened lemmings.

Riley and Dee stood transfixed, watching them plunge one after the next. “There’s got to be…” Riley thought about it in her head. “The sea floor is probably carpeted with those things.”

Dee looked down into the water and wondered as to the secrets enfolded in its depths.

When he looked back, he saw nothing he recognized. He thought about the thing that had chased him to the dock, the thing that had blasted through walls to get to him, the thing that had killed Bruce.

He mulled over the manner in which Bruce had perished. Alone on a water tower, watching and waiting. Dee envisioned the thing climbing up, rung after rung, its movements stealthy and noiseless, catching Bruce unawares. Bruce had been feverish from his shoulder wound. He would have been easier to dupe than ever before, easier to sneak up on. Could he have been asleep?

Dee wouldn’t countenance that Bruce had nodded off—not up there, not even in the condition he was in. They’d all known they were being followed. And they knew whoever was on their trail was not a friend, that whoever was pursuing them was either related to the little redhead and her troupe, to the munts, or to an unknown and potentially hostile third party. Whoever it was—out here—they wouldn’t have been coming in peace. There was no way Dee could believe Bruce would have slept on such a threat, metaphorically or literally.

He considered Bruce’s last thoughts. Had he seen the thing that called itself Chase? If he had, was Bruce shocked by its appearance? Had it pushed him or had it grabbed him and thrown him from the tower? Images of the beast haunted Dee. The wispy hair sprouting in patches from its head. The curve of its body, its spine warped. The size of its chin, its lower jaw sticking out like that. Dee had seen it clearly on the dock, seen it as the flames licked over its body, consuming it. Maybe it wasn’t as disturbing as its brethren they’d faced on the battlefield—
definitely
not—but it was a sight to behold.

He reflected on the earlier battle, on the way those things had stood there with their father, one of them toting Fred’s stuffed cat. They’d lined up, relishing the task at hand, the carnage they were about to visit on Dee and Riley and Kevin. And then Bruce had stepped up and obliterated them with the grenade launcher.

I should have been up on that tower
, Dee thought, not for the first time.
Not him
. Yes, a part of Dee’s foot was nearly blown off and his leg might be broken, but he could have made it up the ladder. Two arms and a leg, he could have pulled himself up. The thing was, Dee hadn’t wanted to let Riley out of his sight. He hadn’t wanted to be away from the woman. When Bruce had volunteered to man the tower, Dee hadn’t argued too strongly against it. His own selfishness had resulted in his friends’ demise.

As Bruce had fallen, as he’d plummeted to the ground—the image almost sickened Dee—had his last thoughts swirled about the monstrosity that had pitched him towards his end? Or had Bruce thought of his family twenty-five years ago, before the world changed? Were his thoughts with Tris? Dee wondered if Bruce’s concern would have been with them—with himself, with Riley and Kevin—knowing the mutant was upon them. Bruce and Kevin went way back. Bruce and Dee too, but Dee had been a boy when he’d met Bruce, whereas Bruce and Kevin had been men when Bear brought them together in his army.

Yes, Dee berated himself, Bruce would have been thinking about them. And all he’d been able to think about was Riley and his own bullshit romantic stirrings.

Chase had said—

Dee corrected himself.
The munt
had said Bruce screamed all the way down, and Dee believed it. He couldn’t imagine that Bruce’s yell was one of terror. He conceived of Bruce’s final cry as a shout of defiance, the battle cry of a warrior who expected to get up and continue the fight. So while Dee believed the mutant when it said Bruce had been screaming, he refused to accept its connotation. He believed what it said about Bruce because he believed what it said about Moriarity. If Chase had killed the hermit—

If it
had
killed the hermit, it would have tried to rub it in, like it had with Bruce.

All these dark thoughts weighed heavily on Bear’s son. He knew it wasn’t good. He had to get his mind elsewhere. He turned and looked out across the water, turning his back on a dock he could no longer see, on Bruce and Tris, on Fred and Victor and all the others. On Chase.
Chase
. The thing—so inhuman—with a human name. Just a name, a regular name you’d give to anybody. Yet Dee couldn’t think of it as human, and not because of its appearance. He’d encountered deformed men and women before; Tris had been quite a sight for almost all of the time he’d known her.

He couldn’t conceive of the mutant as human because humans didn’t do what Chase and his family had done, what Riley had told them she had seen in the barn. Actually, Dee corrected himself, he knew all too well what human beings could do. He remembered his father. He’d seen his father make
how many
kills? Too many to count, too many to remember. Zed
and
human beings. Dee believed his father had only killed the people that deserved to die, those that had it coming to them. People who had threatened Dee or their own group, those who attacked them first, the ones who refused to come back into the fold of civilization, content in their savagery. A savagery which spelt misfortune for others, a misfortune Dee’s father would never allow.

And yet, Chase—
the mutant
—had spared the hermit.

Would an animal have done that?

When he was a little boy, they’d come to a town. Their army was much smaller then and what there was of it needed to recover after New York City. Bear had thought it prudent to put up for a fortnight in an abandoned house where the injured could begin the process of healing.

His father had come one morning, waking him, walking Dee through the house, around inert forms cast in sleep. He’d taken Dee to what had been a kitchen, the floor covered with loose tiles. Pointing out the window above the sink, Bear indicated a tree immediately outside, its branches pressed against the kitchen. A bird sat in a nest. Dee couldn’t remember what kind of bird it was, what coloring or markings it bore. All he could recall clearly was thinking then that it was small, so small.
She’s going to have her babies in that nest
, his father told him. Dee couldn’t imagine it. If the bird was so small herself, how was she going to have babies?

He watched the nest carefully and closely that first day, there being little else to do inside the house. Fighting sounded throughout the day outdoors and the bird did not leave its nest once.

Each morning, Dee looked out the window, checking on her. And then one morning she was gone. She was gone, but three little orbs swayed within the nest. Their necks impossibly thin, eyes slitted, yellowed triangular beaks opening and closing silently. He’d stood at the window, fascinated, until their mother flew back to the nest, the little blind orbs bobbing up and down as she fed them.

What can I do for them
,
dad
, he’d asked his father.
Nothin’
, his father had told him. Dee wanted to touch them, to hold them in his hand.
You do that
,
your scent will be all over them
,
their mother will abandon them
. Abandon them. As Dee himself had been abandoned. Knowing what it was like to be forsaken in a blighted land, Dee would never wish such on another living creature. He refrained from touching them, opting to observe from the kitchen.

They grew quickly in the two weeks he watched, their eyes opening, down appearing. Their little voices protested in shared hunger whenever their mother disappeared. They fascinated Dee. He noted the way their mother doted on them, sitting with them, keeping them warm. As her babies grew, she spent less time in the nest and more on its lip, until Dee worried she would be pushed off or one of the babies itself pushed out.

There came a morning when Dee stole to the window to find the nest bare. He went outside, to the back of the house. The gun his father had given him was in his hand, because theirs was not a safe world. He rounded the house to the tree beside the kitchen window, searching the ground.

They’re gone
. His father spoke from behind him. He’d followed Dee outside.
Yes
.
The nest is empty
. His father squatted down and studied under the tree with his one good eye.
They flew off
,
with their mother
. Dee remembered how sad he’d felt. He wasn’t going to see the birds again. There were tears in his eyes.

The boy Dee had seen untold zombies and innumerable humans die. His eyes welled up over the departure of the fledglings, over the course of nature. Dee had seen enough in his short life up till then to know that not everyone who left had the chance to say goodbye.
Why?
He looked up into his father’s face, at the teardrop tattoo.
Because they were ready
, Bear wrapped one mighty arm around his bony shoulders and held him for a long time.

Dee remembered being that boy, sitting there outside that house on his father’s leg, wondering what the little birds had felt when it was their turn to fly. Had they been scared? Had they leapt eagerly from the nest, or did their mother have to prod them?

An image of Bruce—hurtling screaming through the void—occurred to him.

A seagull screeched as it passed by the stern of their boat and he jerked his head from his reverie. The bird dropped down towards the water, its wings held steady, floating on a current. Had the others seen it? The others in Bear’s Army, on their way to Africa? The bird flapped its wings and rose gracefully.

“Dee. You okay?”

“I’ll be fine, Riley.”

“Then can I ask you,” her voice turned stern, “what you were thinking?”

“What do you mean?”

“On the dock. Turning around and going after him like that?”

“I was thinking of how scared I was.” That was the truth. The bird flew away from them, getting smaller. “I was thinking of Bruce.” That was also true. He looked at her. “I was thinking of how bad I wanted to mess that thing up.”