Positive (22 page)

 

CHAPTER 60

I
eventually made Caxton understand what bad shape I was in. She seemed distracted and barely aware of me at times. But when she saw I was dehydrated nearly to the point of collapse, she immediately fetched a canteen out of her truck. “Don't worry, it's been purified,” she said, holding it up to my lips. The water tasted of strange chemicals, but I didn't care. I would have drunk creek water then and there if she'd offered it to me, even after I'd seen what it did to Addison.

Before I'd drunk my fill, Caxton was already back to scouring the road, looking for the missing ear.

Eventually I felt strong enough to stand up and help her, as she'd asked. She seemed almost surprised when I offered, as if she'd forgotten the deal we'd made. I spotted an ear after only a few minutes of looking—­I think Caxton was nearsighted, or she would have seen it herself. I held it up proudly, but she took a close look at it, flipping it back and forth in her hands, and then tossed it over her shoulder. “Sorry. I need the left ears. Just the left ears.”

Eventually we did find it. Caxton went to the bed of her pickup with it, and I trailed after her. Sitting in the bed, along with several spare tires and a long row of extra fuel tanks, was a plastic trash bag. She opened it and a terrific stench billowed out of it, as well as a cloud of flies. Caxton didn't even flinch. She put the three ears in the bag and then sealed it up again with a twist of wire.

“You—­collect those?” I asked. I'd seen just enough to know what else was in that bag. More ears. Hundreds of them, I guessed.

“What? Yes. I mean, no! No, that would be morbid. I bring them in as evidence.”

“Evidence of what, exactly?”

“Of how many zombies I've killed. Once a month I take them to an army base near Johnstown and they give me what I need in exchange. Each ear's worth a cup of gasoline or a little food. I don't need much.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Some poor soldier has to count them?”

“No, they do it by weight. They've got a big scale.”

It struck me instantly—­and this is a measure of how I'd changed since I'd entered the wilderness—­how easily one could take advantage of such a system. Fill the bag with old news­papers, say. Or, if the army did occasional checks to make sure the bags were in fact full of ears, you could more easily take ears from slaves, or positives. At the very least, if they had some way of verifying they were real zombie ears, you could mix left and right ears, and get double value for your work. It would take a close inspection to tell the one from the other. I didn't say it, but I thought how trusting the army must be to just take Caxton's word that each ear represented one zombie kill.

That was because I didn't understand her then. The army clearly did—­they knew that she would never, regardless of hunger or want or any kind of human greed—­cheat on her tally.

“Have you been doing this very long?” I asked.

“Just since the crisis,” she replied. “Before that I was in highway patrol. I used to run sobriety checkpoints and speed traps. Now I'm in charge of turnpike clearance.” She shrugged, as if the change in duties were nothing more dramatic than being transferred from one department of the state police to another. “Somebody's got to do it. Hop in the truck and let's get going—­I need to fill up another bag like that if I'm going to make my quota this month.”

She had to help me into the passenger seat. My muscles had frozen up while I was lying in the road, and now every time I moved, a fresh jolt of pain went through me. “It'd be tough to ride a motorcycle in your condition,” she said, frowning.

“I'm not a biker. I'm a positive,” I said, and showed her my left hand. She glanced at it but didn't seem put off by the tattoo. “I was trying to get to Ohio, to the medical camp at Akron, when those pirates kidnapped me.” Truth, all of it, if not the whole truth.

“That's a relief. Just shove all that stuff on the floor,” she told me. The passenger seat was full of boxes of pistol ammunition, empty food cans, and a roll of toilet paper. It looked like it had been a long time since anyone else had sat in that seat. The floor in front of the seat was already full of pallets of canned food and bottles of water, but I was able to squeeze my legs in. Caxton explained that she pretty much lived in the truck. “Except in the winter. I have a place in Harrisburg for when it snows.”

Harrisburg. On Adare's map, the city of Harrisburg was marked with a tiny badge symbol. I wondered if the two of them had ever met, but then I figured that if they had, I was better off not admitting my connection to him. She didn't seem like the kind who would appreciate Adare's rough charms.

She started up the truck and we headed east, not the direction I would have chosen, but I could hardly complain. After a few minutes she stopped again, but only to tell me to buckle my seat belt. “It's the law,” she said.

I complied happily enough, though I said, “I figured that since the crisis nobody worried about things like that anymore.”

She stared at me as if I'd started speaking Chinese. “It's the law,” she said again.

When I was buckled up, we headed out once more. Before we'd driven another mile I was fast asleep.

 

CHAPTER 61

W
hen I awoke, the truck had stopped and Caxton wasn't in the driver's seat. I started to panic, but then I saw her walking back toward the truck, a pair of ears in her hand. She must have seen some zombies while I was asleep and figured she didn't need my help to deal with them.

I saw then why we'd seen so few zombies in Pennsylvania.

When she'd put the ears in the bag and climbed back into the driver's seat, she smiled and asked if I was hungry. I had trouble matching up the ruthless zombie hunter and the maternal old lady, but I put aside such concerns in exchange for a can of creamed corn and some beef jerky. As soon as we were done, she headed out again.

“You do this all day? Every day?” I asked.

“I make my patrols. There's time for sleep, too, and I give myself two fifteen-­minute breaks a day, plus meals.” The look on my face must have told her what I thought of her lifestyle, even if I was too polite to say it. “I got used to long shifts back before the crisis. You do not understand boredom, true boredom, until you've sat all day in a speed trap holding a radar gun out your window. You can't even read or do crossword puzzles or anything, because at a second's notice you're going to have to spin out and flag down a leadfoot.”

“I thought the army was in charge of clearing out zombies,” I said. I remembered listening to the Emergency Broadcast Ser­vice on the radio and hearing the daily tallies of how many zombies they'd destroyed in far-­off, undreamed-­of places like Michigan or Bangor.

“They do what they can, but they've got other things to worry about. Guarding the Washington bunkers or putting down insurrections out west.”

“I heard something about that, about out west—­”

“They don't tell me much,” she said, “but I know that's their first priority right now. They've got every soldier they can scratch up headed out to California.” She shook her head. “It's all right. What I do, chasing down zombies—­it's more of a policing job, anyway. This is what I do, Finn. It's who I am.” She shrugged. “You ever think we were made for a reason? Like we have destinies or something?”

“I think I'd trade destiny for a nice quiet life in a walled city.”

Caxton nodded. “For some, I guess that's the right way. Me . . . well. My father was a lawman. A county sheriff. A good, good man. Had a lot of hardship in his life, but he never let his ­people down. I'm going to tell you a little story, okay? Take this with a grain of salt. I'm a crazy old woman who isn't as sharp as she used to be, so maybe I just dreamed all this. But a ­couple years before the crisis—­back when everything was under control, and my biggest worry was whether some drunk I pulled over was going to try to seduce his way out of a ticket. Back then, I started getting this feeling. Like there was something else I was supposed to be doing with my life. Some great wrong that needed to be set right. Something . . . evil.” She squinted at the road. “That's a weird word. But I could feel it out there. Like a wolf was hiding in the bushes outside my bedroom window, maybe. It used to bug me, quite a bit. Used to keep me up at nights. What was I missing? I figured I was just feeling guilty because I was still just highway patrol, instead of real law like my dad. But then the crisis came, and all these zombies. And it was like a switch just flipped in my head. ‘Okay,' I said to myself. ‘Okay. Here we go.' ”

“You were born to hunt zombies.”

She tilted her head to one side. Then she scratched her shoulder. “Yeah. Or close enough.” She shrugged. “Some ­people can't live safe lives. They've got to be out here, making a difference. Maybe that's you, too.”

God, I hoped not. I'd seen enough of the road while trying to get off it. I had no desire to spend the rest of my life prowling one-­lane blacktops looking for red eyes and stringy hair.

To change the subject I reached over and tapped a photograph that was clipped to Caxton's sunshade. It was old and most of the color had leached away, but I could see it was a picture of a young woman with short black hair. She had Asian features and she was smiling, absolutely grinning at the camera. Her eyes sparkled with mischief.

“Is that you?” I asked. I didn't think Caxton was Asian, but age might have changed her features.

“That,” she said, “is there to keep me sharp. To remind me of something. Something”—­suddenly the temperature in the pickup's cab seemed to drop ten degrees—­“we will not be talking about.”

Her whole body stiffened and grew hard, and I suddenly knew what it was like to be one of the zombies she hunted. As friendly and sweet as she seemed, there was molten steel running in Caxton's veins.

“So we need to figure out where I'm taking you,” Caxton said. “I assume you don't want to reunite with those bikers.”

“Absolutely not.”

“There's Pittsburgh. They won't take you in, not with that tattoo, but I don't think they would shoot you on sight.”

“That doesn't help me much, if they just let me sit outside their wall and maybe throw me some food now and again.”

“Better than starving. I could take you to the army base at Johnstown. They have some civilians there working for them. You might even convince them to take you to Ohio.”

I thought of the soldiers I'd seen at Linden, who had wanted to cripple my arm for the crime of touching their helicopter. “I've had bad luck with the army,” I said, not wanting to tell her the details.

“Well, you can ride with me on patrol for a while. I'll be grateful for the company,” she said.

 

CHAPTER 62

I
spent a week working with Caxton, culling the zombies of Pennsylvania. We fell into an easy routine almost right away—­she seemed almost absurdly grateful to have somebody to talk to, and I was just glad to be away from all the ­people who wanted to kill me.

The hours were long. To put it another way, the hours never stopped. Many times I would beg Caxton to take us somewhere we could go and sleep in safety, and she would tell me we just needed to bag one more zombie before our work was done. We took only short breaks for food and for relieving ourselves during the day—­every other waking second was spent hunting.

Not that the work was constant, or all that physically demanding. A lot of it simply meant driving around, looking for any sign of zombie activity. “I've basically cleared out the region around Harrisburg,” she told me. “At least, I haven't seen one there in a long time. So I have to patrol farther and farther afield.” She didn't seem to take any great satisfaction in this. The work wasn't finished yet—­there were still zombies out there somewhere.

“What happens when you kill all the zombies in Pennsylvania?” I asked.

“Unlikely,” she said, while chewing on a piece of beef jerky. Her eyes focused on something invisible, and her face hardened. “Sometimes I do my work too well. If I clear out an area thoroughly, wild game starts coming back—­deer, raccoons, even coyotes. And that draws in zombies from areas where the animal life is still pretty scarce. They're opportunists. They don't care much about state lines. Besides,” she said, and inhaled deeply as she came back to this world, “I don't think I'm going to live long enough to see that.”

If she took little satisfaction in clearing out the center of the state, she seemed to take little displeasure in the fact her work would never be done, either. She just shrugged at the idea that she would die before all the zombies did. The work was what was important, not any kind of abstract end goal. And the burden wasn't hers alone. “Not like I'm the only one doing this. And maybe I could train up an apprentice, somebody to take over when I'm gone.”

It didn't occur to me at the time who she had in mind. I pointed out to her instead that there was no one like her in New York or New Jersey. “Places like Fort Lee, and the southern part of New Jersey, are still swarming with zombies. The radio claims that they die off over the winter, and that eventually they're all going to freeze to death.”

“Don't believe everything you hear on the radio,” she told me. “Some of 'em definitely die out in the cold. But just because they've got the minds of animals doesn't mean they're helpless. Animals live through the winter just fine, you know that, right? They hibernate, or at least they find caves and places they can hole up. Zombies don't know to come inside when it rains, but when they get too cold, they'll gravitate to warmer places. Maybe they wander south, to where things aren't frozen over. Or maybe they hide away from the snow in old barns and houses. We built them plenty of shelter to squat in. No, what's eventually going to win the war is attrition. There just aren't enough of us left to replenish their numbers.”

It wasn't a terribly comforting thought. But Caxton wasn't interested in offering empty comfort. She was more interested in actions than words.

She taught me a great deal in the short time we spent together. She taught me how to drive, for one thing—­a skill I should have had Adare or Kylie teach me, though we'd never seemed to have the time. Caxton figured if I could drive, she could spend more time looking out the pickup's windows, spotting zombies. Caxton also taught me how to shoot. She was a patient instructor, even though she couldn't really afford to waste the bullets I failed to put into tin cans and old bottles. “I'll just have to get some more ears this time,” she said, shrugging off the waste.

She taught me other things, less tangible things. But her most important lesson was her last.

One day we were hunting around some old farmhouses, way back in the woods. We had to leave the pickup behind and hunt on foot. We'd found a place with a field full of rusting car chassis, their quarter panels and window posts strangled by green vines that glowed in the sun. The ground was jagged with cubes of broken glass, but the plants didn't seem to mind. Neither did the zombies. Caxton and I found half a dozen of them crouched inside the car hulks. She put one finger to her lips and holstered her pistol, then drew a hunting knife from a sheath at her belt. I took my knife out as well.

During the day, the zombies' senses were dull and it was possible to sneak up on them. The sound of a gunshot would have drawn them all out, caused them to rush at us in a mob. With our knives we were able to slit their throats before they could alert the others. It was nasty work and very dangerous—­the chance of being bitten was always there in my mind, a constant fear—­but Caxton excelled at it.

When the field of cars was done and the ears were harvested, we headed toward a rambling farmhouse. Inside the air was cool and smelled of old, dry wood. Roughly woven blankets hung on the walls and were draped over the furniture, as if the owners of this place had planned on returning and had wanted to keep the dust off their things. That saddened me more than seeing their skeletons might have.

Caxton pointed one direction and then another. I nodded and headed through an archway toward what had to be the kitchen, while she headed into a living room. If I ran into trouble, all I had to do was shout and she would come running, I knew. I didn't think there were any zombies in the house, though—­it smelled like it had been uninhabited for a very long time—­so I suppose my guard wasn't up like it should have been. The kitchen was deserted. I poked through some of the cabinets above the counter, resisting my urge to loot the canned food I saw there. Caxton never took anything from the houses she cleared out—­she was no looter. There was a closet in the kitchen, always a good place for a zombie to jump out of. I approached the door carefully, from the side as she had taught me—­this was an adaptation of an old police technique—­and swung the door open. A mop fell out and its handle clattered on the floor tiles.

Caxton rushed in, her eyes scanning the room from side to side, top to bottom before she even looked at me. I grinned sheepishly and pointed at the mop. She nodded and smiled back at me, then she stepped into the kitchen to take her own look around.

That was when the zombie under the sink nearly got her. It had wedged itself in the cabinets down there, probably while chasing after mice. The sound of the mop hitting the floor had stirred it to action, and now it shot out two scratched-­up arms, its withered, mummylike hands grabbing at her ankles. It got one of them, and she was pulled off-­balance, collapsing to the floor in a heap. She struggled wildly to get her gun off her belt and then fired all six shots into the cabinets, but the hands kept pulling her, dragging her feetfirst into the cramped space under the sink.

I moved as fast as I could, dropping to my knees and whipping out my knife. I sawed and hacked at the wrists of the hands holding her. Eventually one and then the other came loose in a shower of blood. Caxton scuttled backward, away from the zombie, which had shoved its head and shoulders out of the cupboard. It was bleeding horribly, but still it kept coming, pushing its red eyes and lank hair farther into the kitchen. In a great panic of revulsion, I struck out at the zombie's forehead with my knife, stabbing again and again at its eyes and brain.

Eventually it stopped moving.

Caxton and I were both covered in its blood. I found a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the closet and splashed it over us as best I could, trying to kill the pathogen in all that blood, just as Kylie had done so long ago. Caxton merely lay on the floor, trying to breathe normally.

“Thanks,” she said eventually. She laughed. “It's been a long time since I got in a spot like that.”

I helped her to her feet.

“I'm getting old,” she said, and the laughter drained from her face. “Slowing down.”

“No, come on,” I said. “Don't talk like that.”

“It's true.” She brushed alcohol off her sleeves and face. “Can't do anything about it. But I guess, if I'm going to find somebody to take my place . . . now's the time.”

She looked at me with questioning eyes. This time I got the hint.

“I don't . . . I mean . . . it's a good job, it's . . . it's important, but—­”

“Just think about it,” she told me. She looked at the gun that was still in her hand. “We need to head back to the truck so I can reload. What a waste—­I knew there was no chance in hell of hitting that thing, but I lost my nerve. Damn. You should have seen me twenty years ago, Finnegan. I was something back then.”

“I don't doubt it,” I told her. I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. Her smile came back, and together we headed out of the farmhouse and back toward the road. Before we got too far, though, we both heard something. The sound of an engine revving. We looked at each other, then we started running.

“If somebody's trying to steal my truck—­” Caxton began. She didn't need to finish the sentence. Up ahead in the clearing, the truck sat exactly where we'd left it, unmolested. But it was surrounded by motorcycles.

Red Kate peered through the trees. “Stones? That you, Stones?”