Mutated - 04 (36 page)

Authors: Joe McKinney

BOOK: Mutated - 04

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“Nate! Goddamn it, you have to jump. Now!”

A woman climbed over the bodies at the top of the stairs and staggered toward Nate. There were lesions around her eyes, the pupils like black glassy disks in a sea of bloodshot infection. She snapped at him, drawing his attention toward the ulcerated skin around her mouth, the skin there green and crusty around the holes in her cheeks. He raised his weapon to fire at her, but she was too fast. She was on him before he could pull the trigger, raking her fingernails across his face and his hands, and the pistol went flying. He grabbed her wrists and twisted one way and then the other, trying to throw her off balance, but she wouldn’t budge.

Two more zombies hit him from the right and their combined weight was enough to throw all of them to the floor.

Nate twisted away, but he was off balance and his head slammed into the railing. He fell to his knees, bright lights going off behind his eyes as he struggled to regain his feet.

“Nate!” Niki yelled. “You have to jump. Now!”

The woman with the diseased mouth piled onto Nate’s back, biting at his bare flesh. He shook under her, staggered to his feet, and poured himself over the top of the railing.

He tried to hold on, to control his fall, but his head was spinning. His fingers wouldn’t grab at the rail.

And then he was falling, tumbling in space.

He hit the ground on his bad ankle and heard something crack. The pain shot through him like a lightning bolt, and for a moment, that was all there was. Blinding, mind-crippling pain.

Niki’s voice broke through the pain first.

He rolled over, disoriented, trying to spot her. The whole world seemed to be moving like the horizon as seen from a ship at sea.

Images flashed in front of him. The back of the platform, a lacework pattern of crisscrossing metal beams, shaking beneath the weight of so many zombies. Figures lumbering toward him, splashing clumsily through the water. Others falling from the top of the platform, dropping like lemmings from a cliff all around him.

He could feel the water at his back and he pulled himself that way, but it was so hard to keep his head above the pain. It was like a wave threatening to overtake him and pull him down.

Faces were all around him. He heard coughing, and felt hands on his back, gripping at his arms.

Then he blacked out.

C
HAPTER
31

Niki lowered her rifle.

“Help him!” Avery shouted. She was hysterical, screaming in Niki’s ear. “Do something.”

“I can’t get a shot,” Niki said.

She raised her rifle again, squinting through the sights, but there was no way she could squeeze off a shot like this. Not while the little boat was rocking in the current and Nate was up there getting mobbed. She was good, but she wasn’t that good. She knew that.

And she already had one friend’s blood on her hands.

“Nate,” she yelled, “you have to jump. Now!”

Up on the platform Nate was struggling to get back on his feet. The man was a fighter, that was plain. He managed to get his feet under him and pushed up to a crouch. Then he buckled again and pitched forward, hitting his head squarely on one of the railing’s post bars.

But he didn’t go down. He kept pushing, and somehow managed to spill over the top of the railing.

She watched him fumble for a handhold, miss, and tumble to the ground below.

He landed badly. Niki knew he was hurt from the way his leg folded under him. The ankle, she thought, with a strange clinical detachment. Broken, has to be.

Avery had both hands on the gunwale and she was screaming Nate’s name over and over again. Niki stepped forward, raising her rifle as she came. Zombies were coming around both sides of the platform, and more were falling from the top. Too many. Niki fired again and again, dropping at least eight, but it was a losing battle. There were just too many.

“We have to help him!” Avery said.

Niki met her gaze, shocked at the look on Avery’s face. Niki knew well the panicked animal flicker that sometimes darkened Avery’s expression. She had seen it often enough during those terrifying early days when they first found themselves all alone. But this was something new. The look in her eyes wasn’t panic, or fear, but fierce determination; and banked beneath it, defiance. She was daring Niki to stop her.

Niki looked away. Behind them, the black shirts were drawing ever closer. Already the first few boats were rounding the tip of the pier.

“We have to go,” Niki said. “We only have—”

“I am not leaving him,” Avery shouted.

Niki put a hand on her arm but Avery slapped it away. Niki drew her hand back, stunned. “Avery—”

But it was too late. Avery turned away and bounded over the gunwale, landing with a splash in the weed-choked water. The next instant she was rushing toward Nate and the zombies gathering around him, her knees churning, water splashing all around her.

“Avery, no!”

One last glance at the river. The black shirts were coming. The window was closing. A sudden calm dropped over Niki, and her options appeared before her as though laid out on a chart. This was her gift, she knew, the ability to focus when everyone else around her was losing their minds. And in that moment, the pain in her ribs was gone, the pain of Sylvia dead by her hand was gone. There was only the choice: save Avery, or save herself and the cure. She couldn’t do both.

But it really wasn’t a choice at all. It never had been.

She slung the rifle over her shoulder and went over the side. Avery had already reached Nate and she was trying to pull him into the water, but she could barely lift him. Niki stepped in beside her, her hands under Nate’s arms, and quickly pulled him back.

His body was slick with mud and blood but once they got him to deeper water it was easier to hold him up.

“Get in the boat,” she said to Avery. “I’ll hand him up to you.”

Avery grabbed the top of the gunwale and pulled herself up as far as she could.

The zombies were entering the water behind them.

“Come on, Avery.”

“I’m trying.”

Niki eased Nate down onto her knee to keep his head above water. Then she hugged Avery’s legs and pushed her over the edge of the boat. Nate was unconscious now, dead weight, and he was harder to lift. But Niki managed to get her arms around his thighs and hoisted him up.

A woman splashed her way toward them, out ahead of the rest of the zombies. Niki still had her arms around Nate while Avery fumbled with him up above. “You’re gonna have to lift him, Avery. I got company down here.”

“I’m trying. Lift him higher.”

“I can’t.”

Grunting with the effort, fighting against the pain in her ribs, she shoved Nate upward. It was enough. Avery got him by the arms and pulled him over the side, both of them falling to the deck in a heap.

Just in time, too.

The woman was only a few feet away now. Niki shrugged the rifle off her shoulder and swung it butt-first into the woman’s face, her teeth shattering with a sickening crunch. Then she sagged into the water, coughing while she sank beneath the surface.

Niki watched her fall, feeling numb inside. More zombies were coming, but suddenly all the hatred was gone. She didn’t feel fear or rage. The hunger to kill those slavering things was gone. She just felt tired.

Wincing, she clamored into the boat.

Avery had pulled Nate onto one of the forward bench seats, a smear of blood and mud across the white deck marking his path. Niki scrambled past her and got behind the wheel. She fed the throttle and turned the boat into deeper water, but almost immediately came to a stop. The black shirts were in formation all around them, riflemen leaning over the bows of their boats.

They were surrounded.

Niki stared from one man to the next. She watched them adjust their grips on their rifles and sighed.

So close, only to end like this.

She coughed blood again.

The black shirts stared back at her, their faces impassive, unreadable. Niki emerged from behind the wheel and walked forward, into the little open area where Avery was still tending to a groaning, unconscious Nate.

“Niki,” Avery said.

Niki gestured for her to be still. She stared back at the black shirts, aware of every twitch, every nervous cough. Aware too of the moaning and splashing behind her. What were the black shirts waiting for?

Finish it, she thought. I would if I were you.

The rain, she noticed then, had slackened off to a fine mist. When had that happened? Strange that she could be so alive to the minute movements of the black shirts, but fail to notice something like that.

Strange.

“They’re not going to shoot us, are they?” Avery asked.

Niki startled at having the answer supplied for her so unexpectedly. She had been fighting for so long, and so hard, that something vital had ossified inside her. She was blind, she realized, to anything else but the fight. But once Avery put the truth of it into words, she could see the black shirts glancing nervously up at the Red Man’s body, still hanging over the platform’s railing. She could see the questioning glances back and forth between the men. She could see their resolve wavering.

“Tell them to let us go,” Avery said.

Niki opened her mouth to speak, but the words died in her throat.

“Let us go,” Avery shouted. “What are you doing this for? There’s no reason for it. He’s dead.”

Niki flinched, wanting to tell her to be quiet. But she held her tongue. She was too proud. That was always her problem. It was pride that kept her from letting Stoler’s people bring them in all those years ago, and it was pride that made her turn her back on him years later. It was pride too that kept her from admitting that the shivering, bleeding, shell of a man curled up on the boat’s bench seat beside her was the answer to humanity’s greatest blight. And it was pride that kept her from pleading for her life now, even when so much beyond their lives was at stake.

But Avery’s words worked where her pride did not.

The black shirts lowered their weapons. It started slowly at first, one or two here and there, but soon they were all lowering their weapons.

They said nothing. They didn’t have to.

A path between the boats zippered open.

Beyond, the river, shrouded in mist, waited.

Without speaking—she was too afraid to speak, as though her voice might crack and expose the brittle weakness she felt within her—Niki went back to the controls and fed the throttle.

They glided through the black shirt flotilla, and the black shirts all lowered their eyes as they went by.

“It’s another few miles downriver,” Avery said. She was sitting next to Nate—who had finally, and mercifully, passed out—damping a wet rag against his forehead. “It’ll be on the east bank.”

“You’ll recognize the right spot when we come to it?”

Avery just nodded. She went on mopping Nate’s forehead and brushing the sweat from his eyes. Immune or not, Niki thought, he wasn’t doing well. Despite the rain and dragging him through the river, he was filthy with mud, and the parts of him that weren’t muddy were running with blood. There were slashes on his face and deep bruises and bite marks on his chest and arms. The zombies had literally torn him to shreds.

He was shivering, too. Even unconscious he was groaning in pain.

“Shhh,” Avery said.

She was cradling his head against her stomach, and watching her, Niki thought of something that happened a long time before, before the compound, while the two of them were still wandering the ruins of their little town and living off scraps left behind by the rape gangs and the hunters. They had taken shelter for the night in the map room of a library because, even then, Avery loved her maps.

“You need anything?” Niki had said, and waited.

Nothing.

The girl had a map of St. Louis spread out across the floor, and she was rocking back and forth while she quietly chanted the names of streets and parks and railroad lines, burying them deep in the labyrinthine mines of her brain.

“I’ll be back in a sec, okay? I’m just going to scout around a bit.”

Niki waited again, but there was no reply. She turned away, frustrated, angry that she’d been stuck in this world, everything she loved taken from her, and that she’d been left with the custody of this kid who rarely talked and had no interest in anything outside of reading maps. She went out, intending only to look around a bit and come right back. And so she’d wandered the stacks looking for books on killing. As it turned out, there was a bunch. People liked to kill, and people liked to write about it. She opened a book on the tunnel rats of Vietnam and became engrossed, mesmerized by the killing power of men pushed to the limits.

Only then did she hear Avery’s screams.

She drew the pistol and ran for the map room. Crashing through the door she saw Avery on the ground, on her back, struggling weakly against a man kneeling between her legs, trying to pull her pants down. Two more were standing over her, eyes wide with lust and something akin to hunger, mouths open in anticipation of their turn.

They looked up in time to catch a bullet between their eyes.

The man between Avery’s legs lunged to one side for his shotgun, but Niki was faster. Her first kick caught the man in the solar plexus, knocking him onto his back where he gasped for breath like a fish tossed on the shore.

She stomped on his throat.

She rammed her heel into his nose, breaking it.

She threw him on his back and mounted his chest and slammed the pistol butt down on his mouth, sending kernels of teeth skittering across the wooden floor.

Again she hit him. Again and again and again.

The skin of his face split open. Blood flew everywhere. The man’s hands had groped bootlessly against her shoulders, but now, even those efforts ceased.

He was nothing but a meat puppet, jerking and twittering beneath her blows.

There was a thrill, a giddy joy in it. Release. The more she beat on him the more the rage seemed to change into something that was beyond sexual. She snarled and screamed and howled, as though in the act of killing she might actually negate herself and make this horrible world that wasn’t worth a damn go away.

And then it was over.

She stopped hitting, the rage ebbing away from her so slowly its leaving was almost painful, and the only sound was Avery’s sobbing.

The red cloud that had dropped down over her eyes was gone and in its place was responsibility and obligation and a thousand other things that seemed like grown-up jobs. She was twenty years old, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t fair.

It wasn’t.

But the job was hers and she couldn’t—

“—he’ll be okay?”

Niki shook her head, sending the memory into the recesses of her mind.

Avery was looking at her expectantly.

“Will he be okay?”