Mutated - 04 (15 page)
Authors: Joe McKinney
The bullets tore into its head and shoulders and broke open its skull like an egg that was dropped on the floor, its blood and brains oozing into the dirt.
“Fucking right,” Nate said, swaying on his feet. “Now leave me the fuck alone.”
Richardson had thrown himself over the side of the loft and was going down the ladder. Sylvia appeared above him and said, “Ben, wait. What are you doing?”
“I’m going out there, Sylvia.”
“You can’t. Ben, don’t.”
He was at the bottom of the ladder, looking up at her. “Sylvia, this is important. That guy should have turned by now. He hasn’t. We have to find out what’s going on with him.”
She tried to argue, but Richardson didn’t bother listening. He walked out of the barn and into the driveway.
And there he stopped.
He’d thought he had a good view of the fighting from the hayloft, and he had. He’d been able to see the big picture, the ebb and flow of the battle. He’d been the roving camera. But down here, on the ground, the view was something else, more visceral, more immediate. Being the camera was fine, but not like this. He saw body parts everywhere—hands, a part of a leg, a shirt with just a hunk of shoulder left in it. A few zombies were still pulling themselves along as best they could toward the wounded soldiers who blinked at the morning sunlight and reached for Richardson with bloody, trembling fingers, groaning for help. A few zombies had already latched onto the dying men, their diseased faces tearing into the soft parts of the soldiers’ necks with eager, slurping sounds.
“Ben, don’t go out there.”
He looked over his shoulder. Sylvia was standing there, at the entrance to the barn. Her expression was desperate, terrified.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
But when he walked to the middle of the driveway and got a close look at the man from the gas station, he thought that maybe he had made a bad mistake. The man’s eyes shone with fever. It gave him an almost feral intensity. His face was flushed, covered in sweat and grime. There were twigs and leaves and bits of corn silk stuck in his long, shaggy hair and beard. He looked like a man who has reverted to a wild state.
“You’re not infected, are you?” Richardson said.
The man raised the rifle and tried to point it at Richardson, but he was swaying badly, and he looked clumsy with the gun in his hands, like maybe it weighed too much for him.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Richardson said.
The man just stared at him, like the simple act of standing up was almost too much for him.
The barrel of the gun was pointed off at the barn. Every few seconds the scraggly man’s swaying would cause it to drift back toward Richardson, and then it would just as quickly slip off again. Richardson figured he could probably bum-rush the guy and get the gun away before he had a chance to fire off a shot, but an instinct told Richardson that would be the wrong way to play it.
“There are two women with me,” Richardson said, “back over there at the barn. We saw what happened at the gas station yesterday, how the Red Man tried to infect you. Why haven’t you turned yet?”
At the mention of the Red Man, the barrel locked on Richardson and stayed there.
“Stay away,” the scraggly man said.
“Easy,” Richardson answered. “I’m a friend.”
“Bullshit. I ain’t got no friends.”
The gun barrel dipped to the ground. Richardson watched it sink, suddenly alarmed at how badly the other man was swaying.
He’s gonna fall over any second
, Richardson thought.
He’s gonna fall over any second
, Richardson thought.
“Doc, what do I do?”
Richardson looked around. A few zombies were slowly inching their way onto the road, pulling themselves along with ruined fingers at garden slug speed. Behind him, Sylvia and Avery were watching apprehensively. But there was no one else around.
“Who are you talking to?” Richardson asked. “Who’s Doc?”
No answer.
“Hey, can you hear me? Who’s Doc?”
“Zombies can’t hurt me,” the man said. “Nobody can hurt me. Doc said so. I’m immune.”
Richardson wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly. “You’re what? Hey, can you hear me?”
The man’s head lolled on his shoulders and his face blanched. The gun fell from his hand. Richardson rushed forward to grab the man before he too fell to the ground, but he didn’t make it in time.
The man hit the ground like a bag of rocks.
Later that afternoon, Richardson was back in the driveway, this time with a wooden baseball bat in his hands. They had hoped most of the zombies wounded during the fighting that morning would die off within a few minutes, but that hadn’t happened. More than a few had gone on moaning throughout the day, and those moans had attracted other zombies who were not injured. One of those zombies had come crashing through the front door and Richardson had been forced to put it down before it got a chance to take a bite out of Avery.
After that, he’d gone outside with the bat to finish what they should have done as soon as the Red Man and his soldiers left.
“Ben.” It was Sylvia, calling to him from the front porch of the abandoned farmhouse. He looked away from the zombie skull he’d just turned into mush and saw her waving at him. “He’s starting to come out of it a little,” she said.
He nodded, then looked back to the dead zombie at his feet, and his continued existence suddenly seemed so pointless. The wandering, the stories, the fight to survive—why was he bothering with it? Wasn’t he just going to end up like this poor bastard? They all would, in the end; and everything he’d done, all the interviews, all the thinking, all the friends he’d lost since the first zombie rose up from the flooded ruins of Houston eight years ago, all of it would be for nothing. Just wasted effort.
“Ben?”
“Coming,” he said, and with a sigh he turned away from the dead zombie and trotted to the farmhouse porch.
Sylvia was waiting there, leaning against a doorway that had no door. “Are you okay?” she asked. She nodded toward the driveway and the dead zombie he’d just pounded into a bloody puddle. “Did something happen?”
“No,” he said. He was aware of what she was asking, but he didn’t feel like getting into it with her. Not now. “We’re good, I think. I checked to the edge of the corn all the way around. I didn’t see any movement.”
She took a long time to answer. “Okay. Well, that man is starting to come around. He’s still burning up, but I think the fever will break soon. Especially once that Tamiflu kicks in.” She glanced at the sky, the air already turning hazy and golden beyond the farmhouse. “Ben, I think we ought to head out as soon as we can. I’d like to be away from here before it starts getting dark.”
Richardson stepped over to the doorway and glanced inside. Looters had taken most everything that wasn’t nailed down. They’d left trash scattered in with the bits of the ceiling plaster that had fallen to the floor over the years. Avery had cleared away a clean area on the floor. The man was lying in the middle of that clear spot, groaning miserably, with Avery on her knees next to him. But his groaning was an improvement over the tossing and turning and constant fevered babbling he’d been doing most of the day.
“And what about him?” Richardson asked.
“What about him?”
“You’re not seriously suggesting we leave him here, are you?”
“What would you have us do with him, Ben? We need to go. Avery and I, we have to get to Herculaneum and charter a boat to Chester. We don’t have time for strays.”
“But he’s important, Sylvia. You’ve heard him calling out for Doc. He’s got all that Tamiflu, and those antibiotics. He got those from somewhere, from somebody who knew what they were doing.”
“Well, why didn’t those people take care of him?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you think we should take care of him? Ben, how are we going to do that? We can’t even defend ourselves. And somehow we have to find a way to rescue Niki.”
“If we leave him here, he’ll die.”
“You don’t know that. He’s survived since the outbreak. Obviously he can take care of himself.”
He grunted. Shook his head. “You were the one who tried to tell me that the infected were worth all this effort to save. Well, he’s not infected. He’s a human being, a living, disease-free human being. Shouldn’t he be more important than those zombies out there?”
“You’re being overly dramatic, Ben.”
“And you’re being a coldhearted bitch.”
She chewed on her lip while she considered him. “I’d slap your mouth if I thought you meant that,” she said.
Let it go, he thought. Make a bubble. Count to ten.
“Look,” he said, “that guy is immune to the necrosis filovirus. That means something huge. In all the wandering I’ve done, I’ve never met anybody like that. Hell, I’ve never met anybody who even thought that was possible. And then, I meet you and Avery, and you guys tell me you’re looking for somebody who’s immune. Well there he is, Sylvia. He’s right there. All we have to do is take him with us.”
“All you’ve got is his word that he’s immune,” she said.
“And the fact that he’s right there. Sylvia, you saw the Red Man try to turn him into a zombie. He should have changed by now. But he hasn’t. Can you think of any other way to explain that?”
Richardson stopped there, waiting for her to reply. But when she didn’t, he threw up his hands in exasperation.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “You’re as obstinate and bullheaded as you ever were.” He shook his head, turned, and went inside.
“What are you doing?” she said to his back.
“What does it look like? I’m going to talk to him.”
“You can’t talk to him. You heard him raving in there. He’s out of his head.”
Yeah, Richardson thought. He’d heard him raving. He’d heard him talking to Doc, whoever that was. He’d heard him talking to himself, saying not to ever tell anybody anything unless you know more about them than they do about you.
“I’ve got an idea,” Richardson said.
Avery rose from the scraggly man’s side and gave Richardson a wide berth as she made her way back to Sylvia. Richardson, meanwhile, knelt by the man’s side and shook him gently.
“Hey, can you hear me?”
The man’s eyes fluttered open. He took a look at Richardson, and then he crab crawled away from him.
“Easy, easy,” Richardson said. “I don’t want to hurt you. My name’s Ben Richardson. That’s Sylvia Carnes over there, and Avery Harper there.”
The man’s eyes went from Richardson to the women and then back to Richardson, but he said nothing.
“What’s your name?”
The man seemed to consider it, then, with effort, he said, “Nate.”
His voice was soft, barely a whisper. Avery had been giving him water from a plastic bottle, and there were little bubbles of water trapped in his beard.
“Nate,” Richardson said. “Okay. It’s good to meet you, Nate.” Richardson sat down on the floor, grimacing at the stiffness in his joints. “It sucks getting old, Nate,” he said, laughing.
Nate’s expression didn’t change.
“You’ve been feeling sick lately, haven’t you?” Richardson said. “I saw that Tamiflu in your backpack, and those antibiotics. And you were talking to somebody named Doc while you were sleeping.”
Richardson was watching Nate carefully, expecting him to glance over at his backpack. When you lived on the road, as Nate surely did, you guarded your stuff like your life depended on it . . . because it did. But to Richardson’s surprise, Nate never even glanced at it. Instead, he reached to his chest and clutched something under his shirt, like he was checking to make sure it was still there.
“You don’t talk much, do you?”
“No,” Nate said.
“Well, that’s okay. Sometimes, it’s best not to say anything until you know a little bit about who you’re talking to, you know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, of course you do. So I’ll make it easy for you. You know my name, Ben Richardson. Before the outbreak, I was a staff writer for the
Atlantic
. That was a magazine. Ever heard of it?”
Atlantic
. That was a magazine. Ever heard of it?”
“I’m not much of a reader,” Nate said.
“Ah,” Richardson said. “Well, that’s okay. It was a magazine, and I was a reporter. My job was to write a book about the zombie outbreak. As part of my research I went into San Antonio with Sylvia Carnes there. That’s her there.” Sylvia raised her hand and smiled. “San Antonio didn’t work out so well. After that, I went to Houston to interview members of the Quarantine Authority. I was in a helicopter that crashed into the ruins of Houston. I met a couple of survivors and together we slogged our way to the wall. We didn’t know it, but we were right in the middle of the second wave of the outbreak. We got to the wall right as it was coming down.”
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