Mutated - 04 (21 page)
Authors: Joe McKinney
Jimmy was unimpressed. He loosened his belt and untucked his shirt and dropped down onto his bunk. Suddenly he didn’t feel at all tired. He felt angry, but not at Ben Richardson, not at any of them. He was angry at himself, angry at his life, angry at everything that had turned out so god-awful wrong.
“I’ll tell you what’s obvious,” he said. His comment was directed at Richardson, but he was staring up at the ceiling. “Humanity was made to suffer. There is no saving us. You’re preaching a fairy tale. The world was made with more cruelty than kindness, and the scales won’t ever balance.”
“Do you really believe that,” Nate asked.
In the morning light that was quickly spreading through the cabin his face looked far younger than it had when Jimmy first met him.
“Yeah, I do,” said Jimmy. “Now lemme alone. I’m going to bed.”
And with that he turned his face to the wall and pulled the covers up to his ears.
Nate woke to the sound of splashing. He blinked his eyes and listened. The cabin was in darkness. From the couch where he had fallen asleep he could see a light rain falling on the windows. It was dark beyond the windows. The splashing was muffled, but constant, and it sounded like it was getting closer.
Rubbing the sleep from his eyes he climbed the stairs up to the deck and saw Jimmy Hinton, his wife, and Avery Harper near the front of the boat, looking toward the Illinois side of the river. Ben Richardson and Sylvia Carnes were in the back of the boat. Nate couldn’t see them back there, but he could hear them, rummaging through their packs.
The splashing continued. Nate rose to his tiptoes and tried to peer over the edge. All he could see was darkness, and here and there, overlapping rings in the water from the rain.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Shut up,” Jimmy hissed at him.
The old man gave him a hard look that Nate didn’t feel like challenging. Only then did he notice the long, hooked pole that Jimmy Hinton was holding. The hooked end looked dark and wet.
Slowly, quietly, moving in a crouch, Nate crossed the deck and knelt down next to Avery Harper.
“Hey,” he whispered.
“Hi,” she said. “Be quiet, okay?” She pointed toward the Illinois shore with a chubby finger.
Nate followed the line of her finger but couldn’t see anything in the darkness. He shrugged and turned back to her, but before he could speak he saw a shape, a man’s back, bobbing in the dark water below them. The man’s arms were at his side, his face turned down into the depths. As Nate watched, the dead man’s shoulder hit the prow of the boat and turned in a slow pirouette before slipping into the weeds along the bank.
“Zombie?” he asked.
Avery nodded, her lower lip between her teeth. In the darkness, her eyes had a glassy shine. She was actually kind of pretty, Nate thought. There was a softness to her, an innocence, that made him feel strong, like he could be something meaningful for her, and he liked that. He liked the way she looked at him.
“It was close,” she said, still whispering. “That one there climbed up the side of the boat. If Jimmy hadn’t been here, there’s no telling what would have happened.”
“There’s more out there,” Jimmy said. The way he held that long boat hook reminded Nate of the Indians he’d seen in the old Westerns, the way they’d kneel on a ridgeline and watch the cowboys riding through the valley down below. “You can hear ’em splashing.”
“You sure it’s zombies?” Nate asked.
“Course I’m sure, you jackass. Who the fuck you think it is?”
Jimmy stroked his chin with a free hand, his eyes focused on something Nate couldn’t see out there in the dark.
He turned to Nate. “Make yourself useful, kid. Run back there and find out how they’re doing with those rifles. I want two of them back there and two up here. You got that?”
“Yeah,” Nate said. “Yeah, sure.”
“Move. But be quiet about it.”
Nate scrambled aft. He found Ben Richardson and Sylvia Carnes each with a rifle slung over their shoulder. They were digging through their backpacks.
“Jimmy says he needs two rifles up front,” Nate said.
“They’re right there behind you,” Sylvia said. “We’re trying to find magazines.”
Nate turned, but he couldn’t see very well in the dark. He was standing on a large coil of rope and some kind of bag. The boat was rocking with the current. It wasn’t much, but between the darkness and the uneven footing it was enough to make it hard to move, and when he saw the rifles and reached for them, he pitched forward and slipped.
Instinctively he tried to grasp at the wall. His hand hit something solid—it felt like a lamp of some kind—and knocked it to the deck. It hit with a muffled clank, a noise that reminded him of an aluminum bat hitting a baseball, and then shattered.
“Oh shit,” Nate said.
For a long moment, there was no sound. The air around him seemed to go preternaturally quiet. A light breeze touched his face, cool and scented with the heavy, but still pleasant, scent of the river and the overhanging cottonwoods. Nate looked down at the shattered glass and blunt piece of brass at his feet. His mind felt hazy and numb, like he was experiencing déjà vu, though he knew that wasn’t what this was. This was the way he had felt in the time before the outbreak, the way he felt when he fucked up bad when someone else was counting on him. There had been a lot of times like that in the time before, but none recently. Not while he was living and traveling on his own, when he had no one else to blame for his mistakes but himself.
He turned his gaze on Richardson, who was staring at him with rheumy, soul sick eyes. Something was haunting Ben Richardson, a fatigue so complete it seemed to invade his body like a cancer, and it scared the crap out of Nate Royal.
“I . . . I’m sorry,” he said.
Richardson never had the chance to reply. From somewhere out on the water there came a moan, a deep, ululating sound that was full of hunger and pain and blind rage.
Suddenly the water was alive with splashing.
“What the hell?” Jimmy Hinton called out. “We need those rifles. Now!”
“Go,” Richardson said. “Take ’em and go.”
Nate didn’t waste any more time. He grabbed a rifle in each hand and scrambled forward. Jimmy Hinton was already on his feet, the boat hook discarded, and grabbed the rifles from him as soon as he rounded the cabin.
“Gimme those,” he said.
He snatched the rifles from Nate’s hands and tossed one to Gabi. She caught it and spun around toward the water, the rifle already seated in the crotch of her shoulder and cheek.
There was a rustling in the cottonwoods in front of them.
“Right there,” Avery said, pointing.
“I got it,” Gabi said.
And no sooner had she spoken when a zombie stepped into sight, his hands slapping at the screen of branches in front of his face. The zombie was covered in swamp mud. The yellow glow of his eyes stood out against the mud, as did his bloodstained teeth. Raindrops spattered against his face, and Nate had just enough time to realize that the zombie was freshly turned before Gabi opened fire.
The man’s head exploded like a punctured water balloon, clotted chunks of gore splashing into the water behind it. The body dropped a moment later.
“I got movement back here,” Richardson shouted, and the call was followed a second later by the rattle of his AR-15.
“There!” Avery shouted, pointing over the side.
Jimmy Hinton pushed Nate to one side with a hard shoulder shuck. Nate started to protest, but closed his mouth before he spoke. Jimmy and Gabi Hinton knelt down next to each other and started firing at the infected that were coming through the cottonwoods. There were dozens of them, and Jimmy and Gabi laid into them with a steady stream of fire, churning the river to a froth as the bullets tore into the zombies and sent them convulsing into the water.
Watching the husband and wife work, Nate was reminded of the Air Force guards back at Minot when the infected broke into the hospital where he was held captive during the six months or so following the outbreak. For a kid who got his military education watching Arnold Schwarzenegger fight the Predator, the kind of teamwork he’d seen from real soldiers had seemed anticlimactic, like there was almost no drama in it. It was just simple and businesslike and to the point. It was tactics over snappy one-liners, a group effort instead of a one-man show. Jimmy and his wife did it the same way. They covered each other during reloads. They conserved their shots. It was more than just turning the rifle loose and spraying and praying. They were always under absolute control. And when the last shell casing clinked against the fiberglass deck of the boat, and Gabi’s call of “Clear this side,” was answered the same way from Jimmy, the water around the prow of the boat was choked with the dead, the bodies leaking blood into the black water.
Gabi lowered her weapon, then turned to Avery. “Are you okay, sweetie?”
Avery nodded.
“How about you?”
Nate was still looking at the bodies floating in the water. They had killed at least twenty, and it had taken them less than a minute to do it.
“Nate?”
“What?” he said, turning back to Gabi.
“Are you okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
Jimmy rose to his feet. He surveyed the dead bodies down in the water, and when he was satisfied that none of them were still moving, he called aft to Richardson.
“You guys okay back there?”
“We’re clear back here,” Richardson said.
“Okay. One of you stay back there as watch. The other come forward.”
A moment later, Sylvia Carnes appeared. She still had the rifle in her hands. She pushed her way past Nate and went straight to Avery and hugged the girl.
“We’re gonna have to hustle out of here,” Jimmy said.
“But we can’t,” Gabi said. “The river traffic . . .”
“We can’t stay here. What would you have me do?”
“I don’t know, find a place somewhere. Maybe cross to the Missouri side. There’s less cover over there, but . . .”
“But what?”
“We’ve got to stay hidden,” Gabi said. Her voice had taken on a high-pitched, plaintive note that to Nate sounded an awful lot like panic. It was the first time since he woke up that he felt like somebody else was as confused and frightened as he was, and it didn’t make him feel any better.
“I don’t get it,” he blurted out. “What’s going on? Why can’t we just take off? I mean, there’s gonna be more of those things, right?”
“Maybe,” Jimmy said. “Probably, actually. You saw those ones we just dealt with. Those were all Stage I zombies, freshly turned. They wouldn’t get this far into the wetlands unless they were down here already.”
“I don’t get it,” Nate said. “What does that mean?”
“You’re saying there are Stage II or Stage III zombies out there somewhere?” Sylvia said. “What are you thinking, that maybe those zombies got ahold of a boat nearby and turned the crew?”
“That’d be my guess,” Jimmy answered, nodding to himself.
“Well, that’s bad,” Nate said. “What are we waiting for? Let’s shove off.”
“Haven’t you been listening?” Gabi said. “We’ve had northbound traffic all over this river since we left Herculaneum. That’s not normal. All those people, they’re fleeing from something. If we head out onto the river we’re likely to run across that northbound traffic.”
“So?” Nate said.
“Nate,” Sylvia said, and pulled Avery Harper to her chest, “where do you think those people are going? They’re running from something. Who do you think they’ll turn to for protection?”
Not really knowing what to say, Nate shrugged, his gaze wandering over the faces around him and finally settling on Avery.
“Ken Stoler’s troops are that way,” Avery said. “Nate, we can’t let them see us. If they find us, do you have any idea what they’ll do to us? They think we’re traitors. They’ll kill us. If we don’t find Niki, then all of this’ll be for nothing. I can’t let that happen. I just can’t. Do you understand that?”
Nate’s mouth twitched in a gesture that looked something like a smile, but was really the awkwardness and discomfort inside him trying to work its way to the surface. But Avery didn’t look away.
He nodded.
The next instant Jimmy Hinton pushed Nate to one side and charged up to the flybridge. He feed the throttle enough to turn the boat out of the cottonwoods and get them chugging out toward mid river.
In the darkness, the river seemed strange, ominous. In the daylight it was wide open, the far bank, when it was visible at all, a lush tropical green. Staring at it, Nate had the feeling he was part of something vast and slow and ageless. Its power was suggestive, as though he could tap into it if only he could discover the right mystical combination of peace and concentration. But it was a far more sinister and constricting world at night. The darkness had a way of enveloping him, like a large snake slowly tightening its coils around his chest, choking off his air. It frightened him.
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