Authors: Joe McKinney

Mutated - 04 (32 page)

BOOK: Mutated - 04

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C
HAPTER
26

Niki watched Nate slip out the main doors and into the rain with mixed feelings. The man was, she decided, part cockroach. Had to be. There was no other way to explain the fact that he was still alive.

And there was something else, some nagging intuition that told her he was just a little bit off. It was more than his obvious lack of good sense, more even than the veil of contrition he seemed to live behind, as though he were wandering the world looking for somebody to forgive him for some past sin. There was a sin there, somewhere, in his past. She would have to watch that before he got too close to Avery.

Which was another thing.

Assuming they all lived through this, Avery was going to want that man in her life. A relationship like that would go all kinds of places, and most of them were places that Niki knew were bad. Avery, as fragile as she was, would no doubt throw her heart into that man. He was just the sort to draw her out into the open, and then leave her high and dry.

She pushed the thought back down. All of this was pointless. They were neck-deep in a world of crap and here she was worried about Avery’s love life.

She took a deep breath and refocused on Nate.

He was walking through the rain, stepping up onto the curb, the metal rod down at his side. Here at the back of the Red Man’s zombie army the stragglers were spread apart, and Nate walked between them, not bothering to slow down and not wasting his time engaging them.

That was good, Niki thought. Loren had told her that he could sense the morphic fields that the surrounded the zombies, like they were heat shimmers rising off the desert or something. She didn’t know if she believed that or not, but she supposed it didn’t really matter. He had brought all these zombies here just the same. And he was continuing to hold them steady even now, in this pouring rain.

The first few zombies Nate passed didn’t stir, at least not until it was too late. He was coming up from behind them, and even as he passed them, they remained still, caught between their own atavistic impulses to kill and their obedience to the Red Man’s commands that held them in their place.

But once one began to moan, that control wavered, and soon the zombies he passed were stumbling after him.

That was her cue.

She slipped out through the front doors and moved along the walkway next to the building. Red-tipped photinias, now run to riot, lined the walk, giving her a little cover. The rain helped some too. Within minutes she had made it to the edge of the building with nothing but a parking lot and open space beyond that stretching down to the river.

Three zombies were standing out in the middle of the parking lot, all of them swaying in place, staring dumbly toward the Red Man’s platform.

She waited.

Back on the main part of the lawn, Nate was causing quite a stir. Even the zombies on the fringe were advancing toward him, and a momentary twinge of excitement went through her to imagine Loren up on that platform, losing control.

But these three zombies weren’t moving like all the others.

She looked to her right, but there were no more back that way. Just these three, standing still, looking like emaciated wraiths out there in the otherwise empty parking lot.

She heard a muffled crash and at first thought it was thunder. But it was too close. She scanned the river and saw there was something going on over there. Several of the boats were moving, and black smoke was coming up thick from one of them.

And something else, too.

Muzzle flashes.

“What the . . .”

That was the Hintons. Had to be. The ones who brought Avery and Sylvia and Nate down here, and who were supposed to be waiting to ferry them to safety. They’re running off. Niki sucked her teeth in dismay. The cowards. The miserable cowards.

She strained her hearing to pick up the telltale sounds of gunfire, but there was nothing. Watching the little bursts of fire a thought occurred to her. Back at Stoler’s compound, back when she was first starting to come into her own as someone who could teach others to kill zombies, she read Bruce Catton’s account of the battle of Vicksburg, during the American Civil War. The fighting and killing had been atrocious, and yet observers on the fringes of the battlefield reported an eerie silence coming from the heart of the fighting. They were less than a quarter mile away from the worst of it, and they heard none of it. And yet, twenty miles away, farmers reported the noises were so loud, so deafening, that horses scattered in panic and their windows trembled like eggs that hadn’t quite yet set in the pan.

Was that what she was experiencing here? Were the rain and the wind somehow masking the sounds of the fighting out there on the river?

The questions hung unanswered, for at that moment there was another muffled boom, and a third boat started spewing black smoke. It was covering the river now, and the rest of the Red Man’s fleet was going that way.

Her anger and dismay disappeared. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

She looked back to the parking lot. She had been worried that killing these three would leave her little better than she was back at the hotel, her only choice a sprint toward the river where the black shirts waited on their boats.

But now . . .

Time to move, she told herself.

The three zombies were decrepit-looking wrecks, and though a faint warning bell was sounding somewhere in the back of her mind, she ignored it and charged into the open. She was running at a light jog, her metal bar coming up for the strike, when she realized her mistake.

The zombie, a woman in a blue T-shirt and jeans, now hanging off her emaciated frame like a bag, her face oozing pus from open abscesses and unhealed cuts, turned toward her, and as she closed on it, Niki saw for the first time the sudden sureness of footing, the defensive posture, the look of brutal, feral intensity in the woman’s bloodshot eyes.

Stage III zombie, Niki thought. Oh shit.

But it was too late now. She swung for the woman’s head and was stunned when the zombie stepped back to avoid the blow.

Niki recovered quickly, but not quickly enough. The woman was on her before she knew it, the stink of her breath hitting Niki in the face even as her fingernails slashed at the air, trying to catch a piece of Niki.

Niki danced to one side and swept the metal bar across the woman’s knees, sending her tumbling to the cement of the parking lot. The zombie lashed out again, but that time Niki was ready for the quickness of her motions and was well out of reach. She moved around behind the woman before she could stand and brought the bar down on the back of her head, slamming her face into the ground so that it bounced off the cement and came up bloody.

The metal bar came down five more times before the woman stopped moving.

Niki was about to turn around when a tight, cold grip clamped down on her wrist. She let out a bark of surprise to see the other two zombies right on top of her.

But they were so far away, she thought. How did they close the gap so quickly?

They’re both Stage III zombies, she realized all at once. They can
move
.

Whirling around she saw the man who had her by the wrist. His face had rotted around the nose like a leper’s, pulling his upper lip into a clown-like, impossibly huge grin, exposing blackened teeth and a tongue oozing with sores. She couldn’t get the bar up—they were too close in for that—and so she dropped it and spun around, throwing the grinning man off balance.

He lunged for her arm, mouth open for a bite, but she slapped him across the forehead hard enough to cause his brain to skip a gear. For a crazy second he stood there, grinning at her, holding her wrist like she was a struggling child.

That was the opportunity she needed.

She whirled around again, pulling him forward, and at the same time kicking the back of his knees so that his feet disappeared from under him, causing him to land flat on his butt.

The third zombie was a middle-aged woman whose green dress was ripped from the neck to the waist, exposing a pair of heavy dugs laced with the scars of old bite marks. With her hands free, Niki did a skipping side kick that caught the woman in the windpipe, crushing it. The zombie dropped to the ground, gasping, choking on its crushed airway.

Niki turned on the grinning man, who was climbing back to his feet. She picked up the metal bar and advanced on the man. He had his mouth open for another bite, but Niki didn’t give him the chance. She swung hard for his face, connecting with his jaw and snapping his head around. Teeth went skittering across the wet pavement.

She hit him three more times just to be sure, then stood there, looking at the two dead zombies and the third who was still choking on her own throat as the rain fell all around her.

“Alright then,” she said. “To the river.”

Off to her left a crowd of zombies pressed inward, toward the platform. Nate was still moving; that was good. As long as he was moving he stood a chance.

She, on the other hand, had pretty much a straight shot to the river.

No more zombies.

She was almost there when she got a glimpse through the smoke that covered the river. She had only seen Jimmy Hinton once before, and that was at the docks at Herculaneum while she was busy coordinating her squads, but she recognized him at once. And the woman next to him, the one holding his hand, a bloody wound on her arm, had to be Gabi, his wife. The two looked resigned, but content in each other’s company, even as the bulk of the Red Man’s fleet barreled down on them.

Were they giving up?

From the things she’d heard about the Hintons she found that hard to believe. They were dirty business partners, yes, but certainly not the kind to just give up.

And then the gap through the smoke was gone, and once again the river was covered by a churning black fog.

The explosion came a few moments later, and it nearly knocked Niki off her feet. Instinctively she turned her head away, shielding her eyes. When she looked up again, there was nothing left of the Hintons’ boat but a burnt, soap dish–shaped piece of hull floating on the water.

Impressive, she thought.

The black shirts were coming in their boats. Soon, she realized, they would be all over the area. If she was going to find a boat, she needed to do it in a hurry. Otherwise, they could forget about getting away from the Red Man’s compound.

And then she saw it, the little speedboat with the dead black shirts in it.

“Hello,” she said.

She looked around to see if any of the Red Man’s zombies were close by and felt a sharp pain in her right side. Niki touched it gingerly and winced. Up to now she’d convinced herself the ribs there weren’t broken, but it was getting harder and harder to lie to herself, and now that she was standing here, with escape so close at hand, the pain was catching up with her.

She closed her eyes and forced it down one more time. Just one more time, she pleaded with herself. Just once more.

Then she opened her eyes and waded into the river.

C
HAPTER
27

Amid the wreckage of the Red Man’s lunacy, Nate stood, letting the rain hit him full in the face. The zombies, an ocean of them, stretched out before him. They hadn’t seen him yet—he was still too far behind the rearmost of the crowd for that—but they would notice him soon enough.

Nate smiled grimly.

Somebody was moving through the standing ranks of zombies, coming toward him. It took a moment for Nate to recognize Doc Kellogg, but when he did, his grim smile turned warm.

“I thought you’d stopped coming around,” Nate said.

Kellogg cleared the last of the zombies, then half turned and gestured at the waiting army. “And miss this?”

“You think this is suicide, don’t you?”

“What do you call it, Nate?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

Kellogg shrugged. “I call it stupidity, but . . .”

“You can do better than that.”

“Okay,” Kellogg said. “I think life is a struggle to test the fragility of man against the rock of the world.”

Kellogg had always talked like that. When they first started having their regular chats at dinner or in the lab, Nate figured the man was making fun of him. But it didn’t take him long to figure out that Kellogg simply wasn’t capable of talking any other way. He was as dense in his education as Nate was in his ignorance. There was a gulf between them, a gulf far wider than that between brilliant doctor and penitent criminal.

“Now you’re starting to sound like the Kellogg I remember, but I still don’t understand. I’m sorry. I don’t. I want to know what I’m supposed to do. I want somebody to draw me a picture. I need answers, not poetry.”

Kellogg nodded. The man was not without pity.

“I’m sorry, Nate, but there are no answers. No pat, easy ones at any rate.”

“So I go through life like one of those things out there?”

“No, not that either.”

“What then?”

“You have to answer for yourself what your life is worth. It’s a journey, Nate. Sometimes it’s an easy one. But sometimes it sucks too. Most of the time it sucks. That’s the kicker. You can be a coward, and never find out what your life is worth, or you can show some moral courage and come up with an answer.”

“And what if I find out my life ain’t worth shit?”

Kellogg had laughed. The rain went right through him. “There’s always that chance, though I suspect the harder you look for an answer, the less likely that that’ll be the case.”

“Thanks a lot, Doc.”

Nate looked past Kellogg for a moment, toward the field where the zombies stood waiting on the Red Man to tell them what to do.

He wasn’t like them at all, Nate realized. They stood and waited. But Nate, he moved.

Kellogg was gone. Nate knew he would be, just like he knew that this was the last time he would probably see the man.

He breathed out slowly, trying to calm the heart pounding in his chest.

“What is my life worth?” he murmured. “Time to find out.”

He took a step forward, and another after that. And soon he found himself closing the distance between himself and the rear guard of the zombie crowd.

Any second now.

Before he knew it the zombies were all around him. He could hear rain drops slapping against their clothes, all tatters and dingy gray. He could hear coughing, too, and that surprised him. In all his travels, and despite all the craziness he’d seen, he’d never seen so many of them all together, and so quiet. It hadn’t occurred to him that they still coughed, that they could be so like a congregation at church, all with their eyes turned to God. Or, at least, what passed for God in this wasted land. He passed a man with his mouth hanging open, rainwater dripping from his cracked and peeling lips. The woman just beyond him was twitching slightly, as though her body were being hit with a weak electric current. When frozen like this, they could almost seem human. Broken, but human.

Except for the smell.

This close, surrounded by them, not even the rain and the rich pungency of the river could mask the smell of their rotting wounds and the sour stench of excrement on their clothes. He had forgotten how bad so many of them together could smell.

Already the zombies around him were starting to stir, alerted to his presence. Their moans rose above the driving rain, and more and more were breaking ranks to follow him.

This is it, he thought, and quickened his pace.

In the distance, a muffled boom rolled across the river. The rain-streaked sky above the brown expanse of the water filled with a black, oily smoke. Nate wondered briefly what it might be, but the thought was gone as quickly as it occurred to him. All around him, zombies turned in his direction. He kept moving, threading his way through their ranks like a man trying to work his way up through a concert crowd to the front row. But his fear was mounting with every step. The energy of the crowd was turning inward, pulsing through the assembly like an electric current. It was always the same when they sensed a meal.

A woman, her legs bent and her face a rotting mess of abscesses and open sores, stumbled into Nate’s path. He huffed in surprise and only just managed to catch her by the shoulders, holding her snapping teeth at bay.

She groaned, her hands slapping at his elbows.

Grunting, struggling against the suddenness of her attack, he had a hard time tossing her away. He was off balance and falling over backward.

A huge man shambled toward him, his arms outstretched. Nate rotated, hoping that his old ankle injury from his high school track days wouldn’t choose this moment to blow out on him, and tossed the snapping woman into the man’s waiting grasp. To Nate’s surprise, the man fell on her and started feeding, pulling her apart with his teeth even as she kept her eyes on Nate and struggled to get back up.

Nate stumbled backward. Another zombie, this one a teenager in jeans and part of a Lakers basketball jersey, bumped him and shuffled past. The teenager fell on the woman. Several others joined them. She made no sound, even as they began to rip strips of flesh from her arms and back. Her head was thrown back, her neck exposed. Teeth found out the soft spot below the chin and a stuttering gurgle escaped her lips.

She stopped struggling after that, though her corpse continued to jerk and twist as the others pulled her apart.

Nate had never seen anything like that. This was something new, zombie attacking zombie. In eight years of wandering, he’d never seen them do that. The zombies continued to surge past him, falling on the corpse, opening her torso like the belly of a canoe.

Soon the tangle of bodies was the color of mud. He couldn’t tell one from the other. Not even the dead woman’s blood was visible in that orgiastic mass of writhing flesh. It was just mud and tangled limbs.

He turned away, back toward the platform.

Hundreds of dead, vacant eyes met his. His gaze darted from side to side. He pivoted in a circle, staring all about him. But the dead eyes were everywhere.

“Ah, shit,” he said.

Zombies surged toward him from every side. Nate swung the metal bar Niki had given him, but hands were already on him, clawing at his shoulder. The metal pipe was pulled away. He was bleeding, his shirtsleeve ripped away. He turned to run, but there were no open lanes through the mass of bodies. They tackled him, slipping on slimy ground. He tried to kick them away but his feet were mired in the mud, and when he went down they came down on top of him in a mass of limbs.

They pulled on his arms and legs, trying to get their mouths on him, but still he kept fighting. He rolled from one side to the other. He jammed his right knee into a man’s chin, knocking him back into the throng. The zombies moaned and surged forward, reaching for him. He pushed his way back to his feet, and for a moment he felt like he was moving with all the speed and confidence he’d possessed as a seventeen-year-old track star racing through the Pennsylvania woods. It was as though he’d never left the thrill of the run or the joy of knowing you still had more reserves deep inside.

A zombie reached for him and he threw it into the mud, stepping on its back as he hurtled through the crowd. The lacerations on his back and arms and face sizzled like splashes of hot grease against his skin, but they didn’t slow him down. He kicked and punched and shoved his way through, pushing the zombies into each other with strength he thought he’d lost long ago.

Four zombies grabbed his shirt and pulled him toward the ground. His swung his elbow, trying to knock their hands away, but one of them had its fingers tangled up in his shirt. The hand wouldn’t come loose. Nate raised his foot to kick the zombie away, but he lost his balance and stumbled. Another zombie slashed his cheek with its fingernails and blood flew into Nate’s eyes. He staggered again. The ground rolled beneath his feet and his arms pinwheeled as he fought to keep moving.

More zombies pulled on his clothes. He could hear them tearing. Nate lashed out with a wild punch, knocking a zombie down, but it wasn’t enough. He knew it wasn’t enough. The press of bodies was overwhelming now and a violent, claustrophobic panic surged through him. His heart was racing. He lurched to one side, throwing a shoulder into a zombie’s chest and bouncing off. Their hands kept reaching for him, pulling on him, turning him around. His foot slipped out from under him and finally his ankle couldn’t take any more.

He sagged to the ground.

Fingernails tore at his shirt, ripping it away, ripping into his skin, his ears, his lips. He screamed, but couldn’t find his legs. Every time he tried to stand, they pushed him down again.

Nate didn’t even feel the last shove, the one that landed him flat on his back.

He looked up, and saw a huddle of torn and snarling faces staring down at him, hands reaching downward.

BOOK: Mutated - 04

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