Mutated - 04 (37 page)

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Authors: Joe McKinney

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Niki’s eyes flicked to Nate, taking in his shivers, his foot that was obviously limp, and probably broken.

“We need to get him to Dr. Fisher,” she said. “He’s hurt pretty bad.”

Avery started to speak, then suddenly stood up and pointed toward the shore. “Look!” she said. “You see that?”

Niki squinted through the mist covering the river. Up ahead she saw a piece of river trash, white fiberglass maybe, caught up in the weeds. The humps of what looked like two human bodies were curled up behind it, not moving.

“What is that?” Avery asked.

Niki went back to the captain’s chair and turned the boat toward it.

“What do you see?” she asked Avery.

“Keep going,” Avery said. She was leaning over the edge of the boat, frowning at the bodies. “We’re almost there.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.” She turned back to Niki. “We’re almost there. Just a little closer.”

Niki stood up, trying to see over the windscreen.

“Tell me what you—”

Suddenly, Avery screamed. Niki was beside her in a second, her rifle pointed over the gunwale.

Jimmy Hinton was staring back at her over the sights of his own AR-15.

Niki let out the breath she’d been holding and lowered her weapon.

Jimmy did the same.

That was when she noticed that Gabi was holding what looked like an iPad inside a Ziploc baggie.

Niki nodded toward it. “What do you have there?”

They motored downriver.

Around dusk Avery spotted an access bridge spanning the river and told Niki to pull over. “That’s the main road into town,” she said. “If we climb up here it should take us almost all the way to the cemetery.”

“Okay.”

“Why did Fisher want you to meet him in Chester?” Jimmy asked from the back of the boat. He and Gabi were shivering when she pulled them from the river and had stayed under a blanket most of the way downriver.

Niki shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Seems like a strange choice to me. The place has been a ghost town since the outbreak.”

Niki did her best to disguise her irritation. She had come this far south on a few occasions, on scavenging missions before the free market at Herculaneum got going, and she remembered how the river could take on a cathedral-like stillness if you let it. It could be beautiful, the fog pooling in the gaps between the trees, creeping over the water, the whole world glazed orange and red by the sunset—one of nature’s miracles. Jimmy Hinton and his wife had been quiet enough after Niki pulled them from the river, but the farther they got from the Red Man’s compound, the more he started to chatter. She was tempted to toss him over the side again, let him talk to the alligators.

Instead she guided the boat to the bank and grounded it on the grass. It heaved back and settled and she cut the engine.

“You’re sure he meant this place?” he asked again.

“I’m sure,” Niki said. “We’re in the right place.”

“But why? There’s nothing down here. And I mean nothing. Just empty buildings and empty houses. Seems to me if you were gonna develop some kind of cure you’d wanna go someplace like Cape Girardeau where they got hospitals and stuff.”

“Cape Girardeau is crawling with zombies,” Niki said.

“You know what I mean. At least down there they got facilities to work with. Maybe there ain’t nobody left to work in those hospitals, but they would have left stuff behind. Stuff you could use to work on a cure.”

Niki’s temper was starting to rise, but she forced it back down. “He said to meet him here, in Chester, at sunset.”

“Okay,” he said, and held up his hands in mock surrender. “I’m just sayin’, it’s not the smartest choice there is.”

“Next time perhaps somebody will bother to ask your opinion first.”

“Hey,” Jimmy protested, but she ignored him.

Two zombies were walking along the rail line that ran parallel to the river. A moment later they saw the little boat and started down the grass. Niki grabbed a wooden club she found on the boat and went up to meet them.

“Why don’t you just shoot them?” Jimmy called after her.

Niki kept walking. She reached the zombies and as she bashed their heads in she wondered about what Jimmy had been saying a moment before, about Chester being empty. Why
had
Fisher chosen this place? It really was a ghost town. The people who had lived here had fled as the zombies busted out of the quarantine zone down in Texas years before and no one had bothered to return. It had gone untouched since then, one of the silent towns that stood like haunted memorials of a world long dead and gone.

Though she’d never met Fisher in person she had traded a number of messages with him over the last year. At first their dealings were businesslike, short and to the point. But soon his personality crept in. She realized he had a playful streak, that his brilliant mind had a penchant for metaphor and symbols. Meeting here, in Chester, a place famous for its desolation, would not have been an accidental choice on his part.

Its emptiness would not have gone unnoticed.

Why had she not asked herself that before?

One of the zombies groaned weakly and Niki clubbed it again, this time making sure it was dead, its skull shattered and smashed. She stood over the body, considering the violence that she had carried with her in this world. She had been as empty of mercy as this place was of life. She was—

But she stopped there, coughing, touching her ribs gingerly, and smiled, for she thought she finally understood Fisher’s joke. She shook her head and went down to the boat to help Avery carry Nate to the cemetery.

It wasn’t far to St. Mary’s Cemetery, a few miles, but between carrying Nate and the mounting pain in her sides, it felt like a long walk. Avery was on the other side of Nate, supporting as much of his weight as she could, but Niki was doing most of the work. It was fortunate, Niki thought, that the idiot had nearly starved to death before running into Sylvia and Avery. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to carry a well-fed man in her current condition.

Night had already fallen when they crested a rise in the road and found themselves at the entrance to St. Mary’s Cemetery. Silvered moonlight glinted off the tops of white tombstones poking up above a sea of overgrown grass and tangled shrubs. In the distance, toward the back of the cemetery, was a white barn-like building with a green metal roof, the one Fisher had told her about. Getting back there through the tangled brush that had grown up between the tombstones was going to be hard, especially carrying Nate, but she didn’t see that she had much choice.

“This is the place?” Jimmy asked.

He and Gabi had fallen in behind them on the walk over from the river, and he had been quiet until now.

Niki nodded.

“I don’t see anybody.”

“We’re late,” Niki said. “I was supposed to meet him here at sunset.”

“Yeah, well, it’s past that now.”

Niki fought down the urge to knock the man’s teeth down his throat. And if she hadn’t had Nate’s limp weight resting on her shoulder she might not have been able to resist.

“How do you know he’s even still here?” Jimmy asked.

Niki turned her head enough to give him a hard look, then forced herself back under control.

“He has a family with him,” she said. “They’ll need a place to bed down for the night.”

“And you think they’ll do it in a graveyard?”

Niki’s fingers curled into a fist. She had despised him before, when he dumped all that beef bound for the compound, but now that she’d spent a day in his company, she was ready to punch him in the throat and watch him choke to death on his own broken windpipe. It would be easy to do, the blade of her hand right below his Adam’s apple . . .

Her pulse quickened just thinking about it.

“Jimmy,” Gabi said, resting a warning hand on his arm.

He caught her eye.

“What’d I say?” he asked her.

But to his credit he kept quiet after that.

Niki turned back to the graveyard, and her laughter caught her unexpectedly. Avery looked at her, but Niki just smiled. Unwittingly, Jimmy Hinton had asked just the right question. Fisher had known what he was doing in choosing this place. Here where life ended he was planning to show her a cure that had a chance of a new beginning.

She laughed again, wondering what he would think of the cure she was bringing him.

They entered the graveyard and followed an overgrown trail between leaning headstones.

Suddenly Nate groaned.

“Easy, Nate,” Niki said. “We’re almost there.”

They’d better be, she thought. His skin was a furnace. No telling what kind of infection he’d caught from all those bites and scratches.

He groaned again.

“Something’s wrong with him,” Avery said.

Niki shifted her weight to lay him down, but Nate fought her.

“No,” he said. His voice was weak, still little more than a groan.

“What is it?” Niki asked.

“Over there. Look.”

He could barely lift his hand to point. But Niki could see it now, something moving in the shadows. Something big. At first she couldn’t figure out what it was, but then its head came up, and another one behind it.

“Horses,” Avery said.

Niki smiled at the delight in Avery’s voice. The girl had always loved horses.

The first animal regarded them for a long moment as it chewed its dinner, perhaps pondering if they were zombies or not, and then dipped its head back into the grass between the tombstones.

“They’re so pretty,” Avery said.

“Yeah, they are,” Niki agreed.

She looked around. Nothing but grass waving in the evening breeze.

“Hello,” she called out. “Anybody out there?”

“Hey,” Jimmy said, his voice a harsh whisper. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Relax,” Niki said. “If there were any zombies around here they would have already spooked those horses. And besides, my contacts told me that Fisher is crippled. He uses a horse-drawn cart to get around in. I bet he’s around here somewhere.”

She looked around again, more hopeful now.

“Hello? Dr. Fisher?”

A dark figure rose up from the grass about twenty feet ahead of them. There was enough moonlight for Niki to see it was a young man in his early twenties. He had a shotgun pointed at them.

“Are you Eddie or Jason?” Niki said.

The man lowered the muzzle of his shotgun just a tad. “I’m Eddie,” he said. He nodded off to Niki’s right. “That’s Jason over there.”

A man with a pump-action shotgun rose up from behind a tombstone.

Good tactics, Niki thought. The two men had them in a classic killing funnel, and she hadn’t seen it coming. She must really be tired.

“You Niki Booth?” Eddie said.

“Yep, that’s me.”

“You’re late.”

“It’s been a hell of a trip.”

“What’s wrong with your friend there?”

“He’s sick,” Niki said. “It’s a long story.”

“Wait a minute,” Eddie said. “Hey Jason, that’s the guy from the river, the one with the flu.”

“No kidding?” The one named Jason squinted at him. “Wow, you’re right. God, he looks even worse than the last time we saw him. What happened to him?”

“He got hurt,” Niki said.

“You sure he’s not infected? He looks like he got tore up.”

“He’s not infected,” Niki said. “You mind if I see your dad now? I got a lot to talk to him about.”

Eddie lowered his shotgun and motioned for Jason to do the same.

“Sure,” he said. “You guys come on. It’s this way.”

Fisher was lying on the grass, his useless legs stretched out beside him. His children, the two little girls and the youngest boy, were farther off, with their mother. But when Niki and the others entered the circle of light from their campfire they all inched closer.

“Dr. Fisher?” Niki said.

He nodded. “Are you Niki?”

“In the flesh.”

“Based on your reputation, I was expecting somebody taller.”

Niki laughed, then winced at the pain in her ribs.

“You’re hurt,” Fisher said.

“Yeah, pretty bad, too. I think I broke my ribs.”

“And your friend there, too, it looks like.”

“Hey Dad,” Eddie said from behind them, “that’s the guy from the river. The one that had the flu.”