Resurrection: A Zombie Novel (7 page)

Annie couldn’t figure out why they had to be so aggressive. Survivors should stick together and not fight each other.

“Kyle,” Lane said. “I need you up here so we can figure out this boat thing. Parker, you too. I want to keep an eye on you. And Annie, you go outside and unload that truck. Hughes tells me you’ve got a bag of fresh clothes out there.”

“I do,” she said. “Thank you.”

Finally, she could clean up properly. She had half washed the blood and mud and muck off her hands and her face, but she still looked and felt like she’d crawled through a charnel house. She twisted the ring on her finger and pulled on it a bit, revealing a clean white band of skin underneath, the only place on her body that wasn’t disgusting.

“What
happened
to you, anyway?” Lane said. “I—” He paused. “Wait.” Squinted at her just slightly. “Don’t I know you?”

She didn’t recognize him at all.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” she said.

He folded his arms over his chest and looked at her harder. “I’m certain we have. You look more than familiar.”

“I don’t know many cops in Seattle. But maybe you pulled me over one time.” She doubted he was really a cop like he’d said, but she had to say something.

“No. I’ve seen you recently. I know you from after all—this—happened. Not from before.”

He could be right. She didn’t remember anything between coffee with her sister in Olympia and Hughes shooting at her on the road. Maybe she
had
met Lane before. During the interval.

“You don’t look familiar,” she said.

Lane didn’t know she’d lost part of her memory. Nobody told him.

He was silent for a couple more moments. He kept staring. Then he said, “This is driving me crazy. How could I not know where I’ve seen you? I’ve hardly seen anyone recently.”

She was getting a little spooked now. Was something blocking
both
their memories, only whatever it was blocked hers more strongly than his?

“I’d better go get the stuff out of the truck now,” she said.

Lane stared at her for another couple of seconds, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Go get the stuff. Bobby, go with her. Make sure none of those things are outside.”

Bobby gingerly went out ahead of her, scanning the lot, then looking left and right before squinting in the distance across the street. She followed him out, hefted the large backpack Hughes had stuffed with supplies over her shoulders, grabbed her bag of clothes, and took everything inside. Bobby followed her in without carrying anything. She made two more trips with Bobby ostensibly covering her in case she was attacked, but she knew his real job was to mind her.

She laid everything against the wall near the front door.

“Parker,” Lane said. “Unload this stuff.”

Parker huffed and took his sweet time.

“I’m going to change my clothes if you don’t mind,” Annie said.

Lane nodded. “Please do.”

She grabbed a flashlight and took her clothes into the women’s restroom in back and shut the door. There were no windows in there, and therefore no light with the door closed. Nor was there a bathtub or shower, of course. Just a toilet, a sink, a mirror, a roll of paper towels, and vulgar scribblings on the wall next to the toilet. She flicked on the flashlight, set it on the back of the sink, and took her nasty clothes off.

She smelled bad. That was especially noticeable now.

She was certain there’d be no hot water, but she twisted the knob anyway and water damn near exploded out of the tap. It roared out with incredible force.

That couldn’t be normal, though she had no idea what would cause it to happen.

The water was cold, of course, but there was liquid soap in a dispenser on the wall. She shivered as she cleaned herself as well as she could, starting with her armpits and working down toward her feet. She felt a wound on the back of her shoulder that had scabbed over. It didn’t hurt. She hadn’t even noticed it until now and had no idea how it got there. But if it was long past hurting, it was most likely long past getting infected, so she didn’t worry. She dried herself off with towels from the roll and spent ten minutes scrubbing the gross mat of God-only-knew-what out of her hair under the faucet with hand soap.

When she put on fresh clothes, she felt like a new human being. She must have been waiting ages for this, but she could only remember waiting the past couple of hours. How much time had passed since she woke up on the forest floor just before Hughes shot at her? Four hours at the most? It felt like four weeks.

She shone the flashlight in her face and studied herself in the mirror. She looked presentable now. Pretty even, not like a ghoul. Her hair was longer. It was down past her shoulders now. She supposed that’s what happens when you lose eight weeks of memory since your last haircut.

Her amnesia was damn peculiar and not what she would have expected. Even though she couldn’t remember anything about the last two months, her sense of confusion was going away. Everything made sense now. She could only explain it one way. Her conscious mind couldn’t access all of her memory, but her subconscious mind did not have that problem.

The plague and its attendant destruction was such a tremendous event that it rewired her brain. So while she couldn’t remember the events, she sure as hell noticed the rewiring. She thought of an axiom from her psych class in college up in Seattle:
neurons that fire together, wire together
. Her professor used smoking as an example. Smokers make all kinds of associations with cigarettes. Drinking coffee, having a beer, getting in the car, stepping outside. That’s why it’s so hard to quit. Coffee, beer, driving, even stepping outside make smokers who are trying to quit think of cigarettes. A person suffering from amnesia who had no idea they were a smoker would
still
think of cigarettes if someone gave them a beer. That’s how powerful brain wiring is.

If epic devastation wasn’t powerful enough to reroute her circuits, nothing was.

She was no longer the same person she used to be. And while she couldn’t remember her transformation, she sure as hell noticed that she was transformed.

Her sense of danger was more pronounced. She understood on a cellular level that required no explanation from Kyle or Hughes or anyone else that the entire planet was hostile, that resources had to be scavenged, that law and order were finished, that she had to fend for herself, that every single thing that humans had ever built anywhere—except perhaps Egypt’s great pyramids—would be ground down. She had internalized these truths and imprinted them into her being. Amnesia couldn’t change that even if she couldn’t remember it happening.

But something
else
had also imprinted itself into her being. Something else had happened to her. Something aside from the plague. Something aside from the probable deaths of everyone she had ever known. Something aside from the fact that she’d never see her Seattle apartment again, never see South Carolina again, never see anybody she recognized ever again, and might not even survive the next twenty minutes. Something in
addition
to the fact that the world was in ashes.

She sensed a secret knowledge buried somewhere inside that was banging on the lid of her subconscious and trying desperately to get out. She knew it as well as she knew her name was Annie Starling. But what
was
it? What was she forgetting? What on earth could it possibly be?

She stared hard at herself in the mirror.

Look, she thought. Look hard. The answer is there.

But she couldn’t remember.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kyle liked and trusted cops, but he wasn’t at all convinced that Lane was a cop. What kind of cop would take people hostage and threaten to kill them for food? At least Lane’s goons weren’t waving their guns around anymore, and Lane contented himself for the time being with just barking orders.

He told Kyle and Parker to unload the supplies Hughes and Frank had picked up at the sporting-goods store.

“I’m sorry,” Kyle whispered to Parker while they unpacked the large backpack, “for taking your gun.”

Kyle didn’t actually think he’d made a mistake when he disarmed Parker. He very well may have saved Parker’s life, along with everyone else’s. Parker didn’t see it that way and was still upset about it, and Kyle was ultimately on his side.

Lane stood near the front door like he was guarding it, with Bobby and Roland armed at his side. Annie was washing up in the bathroom. Carol was hanging back in the walk-in cooler as usual. She seemed to like having a second door between herself and the outside. Hughes and Frank sat on the floor next to the beverage aisle in back.

Parker didn’t respond to Kyle’s apology. He just removed what appeared to be night-vision goggles from the pack and set them down on the floor.

“Well, what do we have here?” Lane said when he saw the night vision. “That is some fine-looking equipment.” He seemed to know what he was looking at.

Kyle pulled the extra socks, gloves, fleece pullovers, and hats out of the bag and held them up. “Where do you want all this stuff?”

“Leave it up here by the door,” Lane said. “All the equipment and guns will be kept here from now on. This area is off-limits to everybody but me, Bobby, and Roland. Got it?”

“Oh, believe me, we got it,” Parker said.

When they finished unloading the gear, Lane said, “Good work, boys.”

Parker grunted and headed back toward the bathrooms. Kyle followed him into the gloom.

“We need to get our guns back,” Parker said. They didn’t have to whisper now. They just had to talk quietly.

“We can’t shoot them,” Kyle said. “It will be noisy. We’ll draw a hundred of those things down on our heads.”

“Lane is our number-one problem right now.”

“We can wait until—”

“No. We’re not going with them on your boat.”

Parker shuffled off farther into the back of the store. Kyle went with him.

They could have just fled out the back, but Roland and Bobby had blockaded that door from the outside with a Dumpster. Supposedly they removed the wheels so it couldn’t be moved again, at least not from inside the store.

“The old rules are off,” Parker said. “These people aren’t civilized. And frankly neither are we. Not anymore. If we don’t kill them—and I mean as soon as fucking possible—they’re going to kill us eventually.”

“Lane says he was a cop.”

“You actually believe that?”

“Not really, no. But disasters change people. Were you like this before?”

Parker said nothing.

Kyle figured Lane would settle down once he realized the others weren’t a threat—as long as he could convince Parker to settle down and stop looking like a threat waiting to happen all over again. And it was
possible
that Lane was a cop. Everyone left alive in this world was wandering around in some kind of trauma. Parker was right that the old rules were off, so why should he expect Lane to abide by them any more than anyone else? So yeah, it was entirely possible that Lane once was a cop. Kyle sure hoped so. If Lane had been a cop, everything would be fine.

*   *   *

Hughes didn’t like or trust cops at all. But Lane was no kind of a cop. Hughes had asked what Lane thought of Chief Berenson, but there was no Chief Berenson. The police chief’s name was Anderson. As a bail bondsman, Hughes knew that.

Lane was a liar. A thief. He took hostages. He’d probably killed people. And he was no kind of cop.

That was for damn sure.

*   *   *

Lane wasn’t a cop, nor was he sure anyone believed he was ever a cop, but he didn’t care because he was charge.

Bobby and Roland did what he told them to do when he told them to do it, but the truth was that Lane would be lost without them. He had a crew of six until a couple of days earlier. They were robbed at gunpoint of everything they had—their food, their water, their gear, their guns, everything. Then they were torn to pieces by a pack of hunters. They were unarmed and defenseless and scavenging for food in an abandoned house when a pack of them swarmed inside the front door and ripped apart four of his companions. The pack would have been no big deal if they still had their guns, but everything but their clothes had been stolen. The only reason Lane, Bobby, and Roland were still alive was because they managed to slip out the back while the shrieking screams of his friends and the hate-filled screams of those hunters faded away in the background.

Not two hours later they came upon a massacre site. A small group of men had been overwhelmed by another pack—no, a
horde
—so large their guns couldn’t save them.

But those guns saved Lane, Bobby, and Roland. They felt no compunction whatever in stealing guns or anything else from the dead. Nor did they feel much compunction about taking guns or anything else from the living. Not anymore. Better to steal than have your stuff stolen.

Never again, Lane swore to himself, would he let anyone take his weapons away. There were new rules afoot. Rob or be robbed. Kill or be killed. Rule or be ruled. And don’t be a sucker.

Lane wasn’t a cop and he wasn’t a sucker.

He summoned Kyle to his place near the front door with a wave of his hand. Annie followed even though he hadn’t summoned her.

“So how are we getting to this fabled boat of yours?” Lane said to Kyle. “We can’t go in a vehicle. The roads heading north are too jammed.”

Kyle opened his mouth to say something, but Annie interjected.

“Can I make a suggestion?” she said.

“I didn’t ask you,” Lane said. “But what? But what’s your suggestion?”

That girl gave Lane the creeps. He still couldn’t remember how he recognized her, but a feeling rose in his gut that told him she was dangerous. The threat-detection radar in the lizard part of his brain wouldn’t shut up about it. She didn’t look dangerous. Not at all. She seemed smart and capable. Maybe that was part of the problem.

“I think we should take bicycles,” she said.

“Bicycles,” Lane said.

“Yes,” she said. “Bicycles. We can weave around abandoned cars and ride faster than anything that tries to chase us.”