Mutated - 04 (13 page)

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Authors: Joe McKinney

BOOK: Mutated - 04
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“What were you running from, son? Was it zombies?”
“I dunno,” Nate said. “Could have been. Could have been wild hogs, I dunno. I hid in some leaves.”
“Well, hopefully you didn’t pick up any ticks. Last thing you want is to get sick with Lyme disease. You probably wouldn’t survive it.”
Nate said nothing.
“What other symptoms do you have?” the man said.
“Huh?”
“You running a fever? I heard you coughing just a bit ago. You feel congested—sneezing at all—achy?”
“Yeah, all that.”
“How long you been sick?”
“Couple of days. I’m real thirty, mister.”
“I bet. It’s alright, son. My name’s Don Fisher. I’m a doctor. You already met the rest of my family, I guess.”
Nate just looked at him. His head was swimming so badly he wasn’t catching but every other word. “Could I have some water?” he said.
The man nodded. “Eddie, can you do that for me, please? Get him some water—and bring me a package of Tamiflu.” Eddie nodded and started to walk off, but Fisher called out to him. “And Eddie, better bring me a package of Zithromax, too. Just in case.” Nate was feeling like he needed to throw up. It was getting harder and harder to stand. Fisher, recognizing the look, said, “Go ahead and sit down, son. Sit down before you fall down.”
“You’re not gonna hurt me, are you?”
Fisher gave him a curious look. “No, son. I’m a doctor. Sit down. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
Nate tried to sit, but what he actually did was closer to falling. He looked over at Fisher, and the man nodded. Then he planted his palms in the grass again and pulled himself over to where Nate sat.
Nate, for his part, tried unsuccessfully not to flinch. It was like watching a poisonous snake inch closer and closer.
Fisher pulled himself up alongside Nate and felt his forehead. “Yeah, you’re burning up. We need to get that fever down. Ah, good—here’s Eddie.”
Eddie handed Nate a Mason jar full of water. The water looked clear and clean, but Nate would have drunk it all down even if it had come straight up from the river. Nate took a sip of the water. His cracked lips hurt on the rim of the jar, and his throat felt like it had broken glass stuffed down it, but he went on drinking.
“When was the last time you ate, son?”
“I dunno.”
The man nodded to himself. “Well, this won’t hurt your stomach even without food.” He had two shiny tinfoil cards with blister packs of pills on them. “These white and yellow pills—these are Tamiflu—take one in the morning and one at night. These pink ones are Zithromax—an antibiotic—you take this once a day. You understand?”
Nate didn’t, but he nodded like he did.
“Let’s get you started right away.” Fisher popped the pills from the blister pack and handed them to Nate. Nate swallowed both with the remainder of the water in the jar. “You want some more water?” Fisher said, watching him closely.
Nate nodded, his eyes closed. His throat was killing him.
Eddie brought another jar of water, and Nate took it gratefully, but he passed out before he had a chance to finish it.
 
 
When he woke it was dark. The river was an immense sheet of black stretching far off into the distance. Nate could hear a soft murmur of mosquitoes in the tall weeds at the water’s edge, and somewhere, out on the water, the muffled plunk of a fish breaking the surface.
He rolled over and saw the campfire had worked itself down to a flickering bed of embers, glowing softly in the darkness, its orange light casting a faint glow over the sleeping faces of Fisher’s wife and her two youngest children.
He couldn’t see the two younger men or the teenage girl.
“Are you awake?”
Fisher’s voice, coming from behind him, startled Nate. He rolled over and looked at the man.
“How you feeling?”
Nate coughed. “Still hurting.”
“It’ll take you a while to get better—a few days at least. You’re gonna need to get yourself cleaned up before you head off again—it’ll do your morale some good to cut your hair and get rid of that beard. You could stand a new set of clothes while you’re at it.”
Nate closed his eyes and tried to make the world stop spinning. “How am I gonna do all that?” he said.
“You’re about Eddie’s size—we’ll give you what you need.”
Nate opened his eyes, then narrowed them at Fisher, trying to see the man’s motives in his face. “Why?”
Fisher just smiled. “Why not?”
“You don’t know me. Why are you doing this?”
“That’s true—I don’t know you—what’s your name?”
Warning lights flashed in Nate’s brain. This was exactly the thing Kellogg had warned him about. We can learn to like other people, Kellogg had said, even love them, but we can’t ever truly know them, and so we remain isolated. The words played through his head like they’d been spoken only yesterday, though in reality it had been, what, six years ago? Seven?
“Don’t want to tell me, huh?”
Nate shook his head slightly.
“That’s okay. But listen, son, there is going to come a day when you will have to trust somebody. You can’t survive in this world without trust. Look at how hard it is—look at all the things you have to do for yourself if you’re the only one you trust. You’ll probably be dead before you’re forty if you don’t learn to spread some of the labor around. It’s the helping each other that gives the world meaning, son—gives us a sense that we belong to something.”
But that’s a lie, Nate thought, once again remembering the words Kellogg had spoken to him all those years ago. We’re not allowed to know why life has meaning, not for sure anyway, and yet we feel compelled to create some sort of answer. It’s an absurd downward spiral of impossible things, and yet it is our lives.
“I’m okay for now,” Nate said.
Fisher looked him over with a doubtful expression on his face. “Well, at least one of us is. Excuse me for a second.”
“Huh?” Nate turned at a sound behind him. One of Fisher’s sons—not Eddie, but the other one, whose name Nate had forgotten—was coming down the path with a large syringe in his hand. He walked right past Nate and handed the syringe over to his father.
“Thanks, Jason.”
The young man leaned down and kissed Fisher on the top of his bald head. “Susan’s on the way. She’s getting the water.”
Fisher nodded. Nate sat there, watching the syringe closely.
“Don’t worry,” Fisher said, smiling warmly. “It’s not for you.”
Nate didn’t reply. Fisher’s oldest daughter was coming down the path carrying a white tray. On the tray Nate saw a glass measuring cup with a little bit of water in the bottom, some kind of stove burner, a couple of red and white packets of Fleischmann’s yeast, and a single slice of bread.
The girl put the tray down next to her father. “Good night, Daddy. I’m going to turn in.”
“Okay, sweetheart. I’ll come check on you later.”
She bent down and kissed Fisher, just as her brother had done, and then went back up to the campsite.
“Do you see what I mean?” Fisher said. He was setting up the stove, turning on the gas and lighting it with a match he struck on the side of his shoe. “Being with other people—Sartre was wrong—it’s anything but hell. It’s our connection to them that makes us strong. That’s what gives our lives meaning.”
Nate kept his silence. Perhaps Fisher hadn’t intended for him to respond, because he went immediately to work setting the glass measuring cup on a small metal rack over the burner’s low flame. Both men watched it work in silence, and after a few minutes Fisher reached into his pocket and removed a thermometer from his shirt pocket. “The yeast needs the water at a hundred and five degrees.” He dunked the thermometer into the measuring cup and watched the mercury rise. “Takes a few minutes,” he said.
He looked at Nate and smiled.
Nate listened to the mosquitoes buzzing a short distance off. Somewhere out in the woods an owl hooted.
“There it is,” Fisher said. He removed the thermometer and poured in the yeast and swirled the measuring cup around to distribute the mixture. Then he took the syringe and squirted the thick, reddish liquid inside into the yeast mixture. “Stuff tastes horrible without the yeast,” he said. Then he poured the liquid onto the slice of bread and ate it, wincing at the taste. “Of course, it tastes horrible with it, too—but it won’t work without it.”
Then Fisher pushed the plate away and rolled over on his back, staring up at the stars. Nate did the same. There were no clouds, and very little breeze; a pleasant night. It had been a long time since Nate had looked at the stars, really looked at them, and he was amazed at how many there were. They filled the sky, and for the first time in his life he realized how people could see patterns up there.
“You don’t talk much, do you, Nate?”
Nate turned his head. Fisher was still looking at the stars, his hands laced together behind his head.
“Not really, no,” Nate said.
“How about a family? Mom? Dad?”
“My mom died when I was little. My dad was going with his girlfriend to pick up her parents when the outbreak hit Martindale. I don’t know what happened to him. I guess he’s dead.”
“So it’s just you?”
Nate rubbed the flash drive through his shirt. “Yeah, just me.”
There was a flash of movement as Fisher flipped over onto his belly and pushed himself up with his hands. He dragged himself toward the path that led up to the rest of the campsite, then stopped and turned around.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for, son—and I hope you find it soon. It’s a big lonely world out there without other people.”
Nate watched him go in silence; and when he was out of sight, Nate rolled over onto his back again and watched the stars until he fell asleep.
 
 
He woke the next morning with sunlight on his face. Nate listened for the sound of voices, and heard nothing but birds squawking at each other. Slowly, he rose to his feet. He was still stiff in his shoulders and in his lower back, but his head was clearer. He touched his forehead and it was cool. And, he realized, last night had been the first time in two or three days where he hadn’t woken in the middle of the night trembling from head to foot. Had the fever broken?
“Hello?” he called out.
No answer came back to him. He turned up the path and climbed to the campsite, but no one was there. There wasn’t a single piece of trash anywhere. The stones that had ringed the fire were still in place, but the embers had been buried in dirt. Here and there he saw faint footprints and the impressions of bedrolls where the individual members of the family had slept. The only thing they’d left behind was a cardboard box, tucked just out of sight of the side path that led back to the main path between the road and the river.
Nate pulled the box out and looked inside. He found a bar of soap sitting on top of a change of clothes, a blue backpack, a bedroll, a pair of scissors, some razors, a Mason jar, a small cast-iron pan, a can of Wolf Chili, and the rest of the medicine Fisher had given him the night before. The blister packs were stashed inside a plastic zip-top Baggie with a handwritten note under the baggie.
It read:
Hope this helps. Cut your hair and beard and take a long bath in the river with the soap. You’ll feel better, I promise. Also, don’t forget to take one of the yellow and white pills in the morning and at night, and one of the pink in the morning. Take them all, even when you start to feel better. Good luck to you, son, and remember: the sooner you learn to trust others, the sooner you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Best,
Don Fisher
Nate took a long time working his way through the note. Even back in high school, when they were putting him through those special classes and working with him every day, he had a lot of trouble deciphering something that was more than four or five words long. But eventually he got the sense pulled out of it and put the note aside.
Then he picked up the scissors and the soap and headed down to the river.
C
HAPTER
10
Richardson awoke to the muffled
pop pop pop
of automatic weapons fire.
At first he didn’t recognize it for what it was. He lay still, his eyes open wide, listening, trying to zero in on the sound and identify it. His eyes were itchy, watery, his sinuses congested. The hay and dust in the barn’s loft were playing havoc with his allergies, and his senses seemed wrapped in a fog that wouldn’t dispel.
Pop pop. Pop pop pop pop.
The second time there was no mistaking the sound. Guns, lots of them. And he could hear men yelling, too. Richardson sat up and looked around.
“What was that?” Sylvia said. Like him, she was sitting up, a startled expression on her face. There was hay on her clothes and in her shaggy mass of gray hair.
Avery Harper had slept next to her, curled up like a child. All the walking they’d done the day before had left her exhausted, and she’d been the first to fall asleep. But now even Avery was coming around. “What’s going on?” she said groggily, rubbing the side of her head.
“Gunfire,” he said.
Richardson scrambled to the wall on his hands and knees and peered through the slats. He could see a corner of a farmhouse and a large, overgrown field on the other side of the house. Before the outbreak, the field had been used for corn, and he could still see remnants of that crop out there, though now the ordered rows were rangy and crowded with spindly shrubs and weeds. Looking closely, he saw a dozen or so men crouched in the field, using the tall weeds for cover. They were firing in every direction, pinned down by a squad of black shirts.
“That’s Jude McHenry,” Sylvia said. “Damn it. How did they find us?”
Richardson let out a sigh. Looking back on it, it wasn’t much of a mystery. The scraggly looking man the soldiers pulled from the gas station’s service bay had saved their lives. He’d led the Red Man’s soldiers away on a wild chase, and when the soldiers returned empty handed, the Red Man and his caravan moved out, leaving Richardson, Sylvia, and Avery a little confused by what had just happened, but still conscious of the fact that they had dodged a mighty big bullet. Foolishly, he realized now, Richardson had let himself think they were in the clear. They’d walked the remainder of the day, eating fruit they found growing along the road and chatting happily, eventually coming to this farmhouse, where Richardson managed to shoot a small turkey hen with his pistol while the women gathered wild corn and oranges. They roasted the turkey over an open fire on the driveway that led up to the farmhouse. The oranges were small and full of seeds and almost as tart as a lemon, but they were very good, and very juicy. They ate until they were bloated and tired, then they crawled up here to this hayloft to sleep.
But it was the smoke from the fire that had given them away. That’s where they had screwed up, he realized. The evening had been a clear one, and the white column of smoke from their campfire must have been visible for miles. They might as well have put up a neon sign. Stupid, he thought. He knew better.
“We’ve got bigger problems than that,” Richardson said. “Look over there.” He nodded toward the road. The Red Man’s caravan of trucks was parked there, and a few of his soldiers were offloading the zombies.
“What are they doing?” Avery asked.
The answer seemed obvious to Richardson. If the Red Man could control zombies, he’d obviously use them to fill the front lines of an attack on McHenry’s squad. He was more worried about how they were going to escape.
Richardson crawled over to the far side of the hayloft and peered out of the west side of the barn. The cornfield stretched into the distance some four or five hundred yards, terminating at a line of trees, the edge of which was thick with early morning fog. He saw the zombies right away, forty or fifty of them at least, stumbling their way through the rows.
“Damn,” he muttered.
“What is it?” Sylvia asked.
“No go,” he said. “They’ve got us surrounded.”
He moved back to his previous position next to Sylvia and squeezed the hay and dust from his eyes.
“You okay?” Sylvia asked.
“Allergies,” he said.
“Yeah, well, do us all a favor and don’t sneeze, okay?”
He gave her a halfhearted smile and then went back to watching the battle develop down below. Roving camera, he thought. Don’t get involved. The mantra that had carried him through so many dangerous situations over the last few years seemed ridiculous now. He was in this up to his eyeballs.
He leaned forward through shafts of sunlight and put his face up against one of the gaps in the barn’s wall. They were in a unique position to see the battle develop, like a high school marching band director up on a ladder stand. A group of black shirts ran forward, firing their guns into the weeds, sending up a spray of exploded corn in the process. McHenry’s squad just hunkered down on their bellies, letting the shots tear up the corn over their heads. They didn’t return fire until the black shirts broke through the corn rows right in front of them, and then they started shooting back.
It was, Richardson saw, a deliberate feint on the part of the black shirts. As soon as McHenry’s squad started shooting, the black shirts fell back. One of them popped a canister of orange smoke and threw it at McHenry’s location. Immediately, a column of smoke rose into the air. A moan went up from the west side of the barn, and the zombies moved forward, converging on the smoke.
Beside him, Avery groaned. “They’ll be slaughtered,” she said.
Richardson was thinking the same thing. This wasn’t going to be pretty. There were even more zombies in the corn than Richardson had at first thought. They were everywhere. The corn rows were writhing.
McHenry’s men had already spotted the first few zombies coming at them and were forming themselves into a defensive circle. The men were keeping their cool, firing in controlled bursts at the zombies as they appeared, perhaps because they didn’t know exactly how outnumbered they were. But from his position in the hayloft, Richardson could see that the end was a foregone conclusion. It was just a matter of time.
“Where did all those zombies come from?” Richardson asked. “There’s way more down there than what he brought in those trucks of his.”
“He collects them as he goes,” Sylvia said. “That’s why he’s so strong. No matter where he goes, his army comes to him.”
Her voice seemed strangely flat, and Richardson turned to look at her. Sunshine was slanting down into the shadows of the loft through the gaps in the slats. Dust and bits of hay floated around her hair. Her beauty surprised him for the second time, and it was all the more striking for the somber expression on her face.
From the cornfield down below, a man let out a sudden, terrible scream, and Sylvia flinched. And in that moment, the tone of her voice and the sadness in her eyes made sense to him.
“You know those men down there, don’t you?”
She nodded. Then she closed her eyes and ducked her chin to her chest as she tried to shut out the noise of the screams and the constant roll of the gunfire.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“They came here because of us.” She rubbed her knuckles into her forehead, as though trying to scrub away a mounting headache. “Why do so many people have to die because of what I believe, Ben?”
Her question was spoken so faintly he had trouble hearing it. He started to tell her it was going to be okay, that what was going on down there was not her fault, but the end result of a course of action those men had chosen themselves, but then he realized that she wasn’t talking about those men down there.
He had driven the bus out of San Antonio eight years ago, when she lost all the students that came with her as part of the People for an Ethical Solution expedition, and he had stolen a few glances at her as they trundled through the ruins. She hadn’t spoken a word, and that had bothered Richardson at the time. It more than bothered him. He’d been offended to the core by what he perceived as her icy indifference to the deaths she had just caused. Forty college kids were dead because they had placed blind faith in her. Richardson knew she hadn’t planned on their dying. If anything, their deaths would be a mortal blow to her cause. So no, he didn’t believe she had intentionally caused their deaths. But she had used her position as a professor, as an intellectual authority in their lives, to lead them into a meat grinder, and wasn’t that just as bad?
At the time he thought so. And a part of him hated her because she sat there on that bus refusing to utter a word. She simply sat there, her chin in her hand, watching the ruins of San Antonio slip away outside the bus.
At the quarantine wall, they’d been stopped by the military. Soldiers had led them off the bus and checked their papers and stripped them and checked them for injuries and then sprayed them down with antivirals and disinfectant. Right before they were separated, he had asked her, “What are you going to tell them?”
She wouldn’t look at him, even then. “Tell them whatever you want,” she said. “I don’t care what you say.”
And then the soldiers led her away for her debriefing, and he watched her go, feeling angry and, for some reason that he couldn’t quite fathom, betrayed. He had no idea what he had expected her to say, but it hadn’t been that.
Sylvia turned from the slats in the wall and looked at him. She looked ill, and it occurred to him that he had forced the old wound open by coming back into her life like this.
Good
, he thought, surprised at how fresh the anger still seemed,
I hope it hurts
.
She said, “I told myself I would go to the parents of each of those kids on that bus, Ben. That was the promise I made myself. I figured those kids deserved it for believing the way they did. I knew none of those parents would understand but I told myself I would do it anyway.”
“But you never went,” he said. He intended the words to have more heat than they did. She was tearing herself up inside, he realized. She was doing more damage to herself with her memories than he ever could with his harsh words.
“No,” she said. “I never went. I had all their names, all their addresses. The university fired me, of course, so I had nothing but time. But then the weeks slipped by, and I hadn’t visited a single one. All I did was stay in bed and cry. I told myself I’d at least write a letter, but . . .”
She trailed off there, shaking her head at the memory of her failure.
A bullet struck the slats down at the other end of the loft and a laser of light lanced into the darkness. The yelling was getting louder now, the fight spilling into the driveway in front of the farmhouse. Just a quick glance was enough for Richardson to see that McHenry’s squad had completely broken ranks. They were fighting hand to hand now, totally unorganized.
“Sylvia,” he said, “you two come over here with me. We need to stay—”
There was a crack and something sliced the air in front of his face. He felt a tingling spread across his cheek that suddenly turned into a burn. His first thought was, I’ve been shot: and then, as shock gave way to denial, he touched his fingers to his face and felt small bits of wood splinters stuck in his skin. Only splinters, he thought. Oh thank God.
He turned to the wood slats and saw the jagged hole left by the bullet that had narrowly missed his head. Looking through it, he could see one of the last of McHenry’s squad down there on the road, swinging his rifle like a club at a zombie.
The zombie went down, but there were more pouring out of the corn every second.
Richardson heard men yelling orders off to his right and turned to see several of the Red Man’s soldiers running toward the farmhouse. One of the black shirts raised his rifle as he ran and fired at the last of McHenry’s squad.
The man who had been using his rifle as a club was struck in the chest and was flung backward, with bloody bits of flesh and fabric spraying up from the wound. One of the zombies behind him twisted suddenly and stumbled to his knees. The zombie’s hands were swatting at the air like he was being attacked by bees, bright gouts of blood oozing down his chest from the wound where his face had been.
When the zombie fell over dead, Richardson turned back to Sylvia. She and Avery were still holding each other.
“Get down,” he hissed. “Both of you get down.”
Avery looked at him from beneath Sylvia’s mass of hair. Her eyes were shining with tears.
He motioned to her to lie down in the hay, and after a moment, she and Sylvia both lowered themselves down on their bellies.
A pair of trucks pulled up to the driveway below them and Richardson crawled back to the wall and looked through the bullet hole. The Red Man was standing next to one of the trucks, surveying the destruction. There were bodies all around him. Most were zombies, but here and there Richardson could see a few of McHenry’s squad and even one or two of the black shirts. He could also see a lot of wounded zombies, some of them so badly shot up they couldn’t even crawl, while others, dragging dead legs or waving armless stumps, staggered toward the trucks.
The Red Man let out a low, rattling moan, and all the zombies stopped. None of them blinked. They just stared at him, swaying on their feet as though drunk. Then he motioned toward the truck and two of his soldiers pulled Niki Booth from the cab.

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