Resurrection (Eden Book 3) (16 page)

Later that afternoon, they lay next to one another on their stomachs on a verdant hilltop, passing the two pairs of binoculars they possessed between the five of them. Off in the distance, they’d spied a house with a barn. The house, like the clouds above it, was blue-grey in color and weathered. The barn bore a similar appearance. The property upon which the buildings were set was mowed and set off with large coils of concertina wire. A path led from the wire and branched off to the house and the barn. A lake took up much of the property behind the buildings.

There was a man and a woman and three little children on the property, going about their business.

“Strange place for a house like this,” said Anthony.

“Those gables are terrible in a hurricane,” said Krieger.

“Should we go down and say hello?” asked Troi.

“And what?” Evan asked. “Introduce ourselves?”

“Okay, you don’t have to be a jerk about it.”

“I think we’d just be scaring them if we went down there,” said Riley. “Who knows how long they’ve been out here by themselves.”

“Rye’s right,” agreed Anthony. “They’re out here because they want to be alone.”

“There’s not many people left out here,” Krieger said. “And the people’s that are left, aren’t people you want much to meet. Usually.”

“You’d know, right Krieg?”

The man’s grunt was his sole acknowledgement of Evan’s comment.

“My face itches.” Anthony touched the stubble on his cheeks.

Shortly before they stopped for the third night, Evan made what he considered a breakthrough. Over the last few days, they’d passed several human artifacts that had given them pause. They’d passed a lake where the tail end of an airplane jutted straight up out of the middle of the water. They passed road signs—
trucks use right lane
;
two lanes ahead
—where a road was no longer apparent. They’d passed more derelict cell phone towers.

There had been several vehicles, mostly long rusted cars. Whatever surface area wasn’t corroded was bleached out by the sun. Several of these automobiles had their license plates intact. The license plates struck Evan as curious. They struck him as curious, in part, because private cars did not exist in New Harmony. More than that, the license plates bore numbers. Most said
North Carolina
. And there was something else about the license plates, something Evan couldn’t quite figure out.

They passed a truck in the middle of their path. It rested flat, its tires long since rotted away. The truck bed was filled with dirt and soil and grown out with plant life. Its windows were blackened from soot and mud and the dirt of dozens of years.

Its license plate was faded but still discernible. North Carolina.
TMM-8296

Evan thought about ways he might be able to shave his head out here in the field without his usual kit, when he stopped walking. He scrambled to get out of his pack, nearly dropping it on the ground because he was so eager to get something out of it.

“What’s up with Ev?” Troi called attention to their friend.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute…” Evan found his note pad and flipped through it, rushing through pages with his thumb until he found what he was looking for. “Uh-huh, uh-huh—” He stopped on one page and jabbed with his finger at something written there “
Yes
!”

“What?” asked Riley.

They all gathered around Evan and the truck. Krieger waited impatiently several meters away, leaning against his Bo.

“Look at this. Look at these numbers.” Evan read the numbers he had written in his pad.

“Yeah?” Anthony prompted.

“Well, look at this license plate.” They did.
8296
. The numbers in Evan’s book matched up with the numbers on the license plate. “Ain’t that something?”

“Where did you get those numbers?” Troi asked.

“That autistic guy in the hospital. Him and the other guy must have come this way.”

“You just figured that out?” Krieger called back, unimpressed.

“Yeah—why? You knew?”

“Course I knew.”

“What do you mean
you knew
?” Evan demanded.

“I passed by this way with them two nitwits. Had to listen to them the whole time too. Gave me a goddamn headache.”

“You’ve been here before?” asked Anthony.

“Yeah. Sure I have.”

“Why didn’t you say anything then?” asked Riley.

“What’d you want me to say?”

“So you
do
know where we’re going?” Troi sounded more assured.

“Course I know where we’re going.”

“Son of a…” Evan muttered. Then, louder, “Hey, Krieg, maybe you can do us a favor? When we get to a place you don’t know—”

“When we get somewhere I don’t know, I’ll tell ya. Now come on.”

As his friends moved forward, following the guide, Evan looked down into his note pad. Somewhat dispirited, he shut it and stowed it back in his pack.

The next afternoon they entered a city’s limits.

The first houses they passed were dark and empty. Entire sections of them had rotted and collapsed. Several had fallen in on themselves. Others were burnt to their foundations, and the only hint of their previous existence were the lone chimneys that still stood. Weeds and grasses and trees grew up through the asphalt and concrete, merging seamlessly with the oranges and browns of the turning trees that surrounded the homes. These outgrowths, in many cases, sprouted from the homes themselves.

An occasional bird darted by overhead.

In places the streets were cratered, and they stepped gingerly around the gaping chasms filled with water.

“I don’t like this,” muttered Evan. He looked suspiciously from one house to the next. “There’s no telling what’s in any of these…”

“Just relax,” said Krieger. “There’s no cause for worry here.”

“How do you know that?”

“No wildlife where there’s Zed.”

As if to verify the guide’s words, three deer bolted from a hole in the side of a house and darted across their path before disappearing into the trees.

“Did you see that?” Riley asked in wonder.

“They were gorgeous.” Troi looked off into the trees where the deer had gone, the leaves and boughs they’d brushed swaying in their wake.

“We have to go around,” said Anthony. The street ahead of them was gone. Sewers that had long ago been clogged with debris had birthed puddles, and the puddles had grown to the size of a small lake. Krieger was already circling a house, leading them around into what would have been the backyard.

“What was that?” asked Riley. An indentation in the ground behind the home was filled with soil and plants.

“Swimming pool,” said the guide.

Evan winced when some faded, fallen vinyl siding cracked under his foot.

“Don’t worry, Ev,” said Troi.

“I’m not worried,” he said too quickly.

Anthony stepped around a discarded frying pan. The handle was split, but the pan itself was intact.

“What’s that thing?” Troi asked about a squat, white appliance sitting out in the grass.

“Washing machine,” replied Krieger.

“It didn’t rot?”

“It’s aluminum.”

Riley guessed that meant it would not.

“Why do the houses have numbers on them?” Anthony asked. The homes they’d passed that were more or less intact had numerals spray-painted on them. The house they moved by now had a giant
2
on it.

“The number of bodies inside.”

“The number of bodies inside?” Troi was shocked.

Their guide did not reply.

The suburbs gave way to the first city blocks—streets of blackened super-structural steel that jutted up into the sky amid vast piles of burnt bricks and debris.

“What happened here?” Riley asked.

“Probably a gas line went up,” said Krieger. “That or it was bombed.”

“Did you see that cat?” Troi asked, but no one else had.

“They’re feral. They won’t come near you. Better look out for dogs, though.”

“Dogs?” Evan looked around suspiciously.

“Wild dogs. I wouldn’t try and pet ‘em.”

Evan gripped his Model 7 a little tighter.

Click
……….
click
……….
click

“Radiation seems okay here,” said Riley.

The suburbs behind them, they moved into the city proper, passing stalled and burnt-out vehicles. The streets were cratered and filled-in with stagnant water, upon which splotches of green growth set. The ruins of high-rises towered over them. They didn’t get too close to most of the apartments and buildings, but the few they did had what the four friends thought were outrageously high numbers—
237
,
412
—painted on their facades. The air was growing cooler than it had been, and the sun was sinking in the western sky.

“It’s going to rain,” predicted Krieger.

“It’s been overcast the whole time we’ve been out here.” Evan sounded unconvinced.

“No bodies out in the street,” said Anthony. “No skeletons.”

“The dogs and wolves would have carted them off,” replied the guide. “Coyotes too.”

“Wolves?” Troi was concerned.

Riley felt something touch her hair. She looked up. A raindrop speckled her cheek. Then another.

“It’s raining.”

Krieger grunted. Evan looked dissatisfied. The guide waited while the four friends donned their ponchos. Krieger looked at the rain slickers. Unimpressed, he hunkered down in his furs.

The rain fell in a steady drizzle.

“We should find someplace to stop for the night,” Krieger announced sometime later.

The building they chose appeared intact. Some of the windows still had glass in them. Another reason they settled on it—one the four friends did not voice to each other—was that the number painted on it was relatively low compared to other buildings they’d passed.
23
.

A stairwell in remarkably good condition led upstairs to a second floor where they spread their sleeping bags and gear. Krieger, Evan, and Anthony walked off to find wood or anything suitable for a fire.

“Let’s not split up,” Anthony said to Evan as Krieger walked off on his own.

“Agreed. Hope he knows what he’s doing.”

They scouted the area, collecting various branches and combustible, non-toxic debris. The rain had not been falling long enough to render these sodden.

Troi and Riley explored the various rooms on the first and second floors of the building. They found half a dozen skeletons on the first floor and none on the second.

“The rest must be up above,” guessed Riley. Not all of the skeletons were in one piece and not all of the pieces were accounted for.

“Think the wolves got these, Rye?”

“Maybe. That or the platypuses.”

“You’re funny.”

“Gallows humor is what I think it’s called.”

When Anthony and Evan returned to the building, the guide had not yet returned. They got a fire going out in the street, afraid they’d burn the building down if they did it indoors. They built it under an overhang produced by an advertising billboard that had collapsed, wedged at an angle between the street and the building. It kept them out of the rain.

“Should we wait for him?” Troi asked when the others began eating.

“You can wait for him if you want.” Evan shoved a spoonful of beans into his mouth.

Troi waited a moment then, famished, began eating.

When they had finished their meal, the rain fell more heavily than before. Krieger returned, carting an armful of chopped wood.

“Where you been?” Evan asked him.

By way of an answer, he made a noise that sounded like a growl.

“Okay.”

The guide sat down by the fire, leaning against his bodypack, the multi-barreled grenade launcher propped up on one side of him, his Bo on the other.

“See any sign of Zed?” Riley asked him.

“No.” At least he answered her. “Saw some wild dogs.”

“Is it safe to sleep inside tonight?” asked Troi.

“Long as the building don’t fall on you.”

As the night gave way to shadow and their eyes grew heavy, first Evan then Anthony and Riley made their way into the building and up to the second floor by flashlight. Troi opted to spend the night on the street, huddled in her sleeping bag, close to the fire.

She was just about to go under when a maniacal yipping in the distance startled her alert.

“What’s that?” She looked nervously up and down the darkened street about them, into the shadows beyond their overhang, outside the fire.

“Coyotes.” Krieger wasn’t asleep either. The liquid in his bottle sloshed. “They won’t bother us though.”

“I’ve never actually seen a coyote.”

“And you won’t, ‘less they want you to see them.”

“That sounds scary.” Troi meant it.

“You’re okay. We used to get them in the suburbs, back…long before all this. Some idiot would leave their poodle out, and the coyotes would come and take it at night.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Shouldn’t leave your dog out overnight.”

“Did you live around here?”

“No, nowhere near here.”

The guide wasn’t volunteering any information, so Troi spoke up. “You knew Bear?”

“I saw him once, up close.”

“Where?”

“I fought in his army. That’s what they called it.
Bear’s Army
. Funny, huh?”

“We grew up with stories about him. But you can never tell which were true and which were made up. A lot of them were pretty hard to believe.”

“Believe them.” Krieger started to cough.

When he’d quieted down, Troi spoke. “What was he like?”

“He was a big man, a great big man.”

“Yeah. That’s what they said in school.”

“They still teach you guys about that in your schools?” Krieger sounded pleasantly surprised. “Bear’s reputation proceeded him. He understood what no one else wanted to. What no one else was ready to. You know what that was?”

“What was that?”

“The
stakes
.”

“The
stakes
?”

“The stakes. No matter how futile it seemed, no matter how overwhelming the odds, Bear wouldn’t quit.”

“Fighting zombies?”