Resurrection (Eden Book 3) (3 page)

“No. I’m handing back first drafts today. The kids’ll have the break to revise and get them back to me.”

Tonight was the 80s party. The four friends were supposed to meet there.

“Ladies, can we speak frankly?” a voice on the radio was asking. “Is your man a dribbler or a shooter? With my Swedish ropes formula, men, you are guaranteed to shoot bigger, thicker…”

Riley reached over and shut off the radio. She wondered if anybody thought for one minute that such nonsense products actually had any basis in reality.

As the morning arrived elsewhere, Evan stood atop the wall, peering out into the countryside beyond. The Outlands. It was a place no one went any more.

The night was always coolest just before dawn, and Evan had his jacket pulled tight around him against the chill. He was tall and muscular, lean to the point he felt the chill more than others. And autumn was here. Another week or so, and there would be frost on the ground in the mornings.

Evan had joined The Guard right after his compulsory service in the Defense Forces had ended a year earlier. He thought it was ironic, because if you had told him he’d embrace what was shaping up to be a career in The Guard two years before, he would have laughed and said you were out of your mind. Evan hadn’t sought the higher education deferral like his friend Anthony had been granted. When he’d turned sixteen, Evan had enrolled in The Guard, looking to get his service done and get back to life.

Life
. That was what went on behind the wall. The wall, which stretched hundreds of miles in either direction, was the demarcation of their civilization in New Harmony.

The Guard had taken Evan beyond the wall. Granted, never too deeply into the Outlands. Never more than fifteen or twenty clicks in any one direction. Evan knew—because they taught you this in school and in The Guard—that Zed was still out there. It’d been awhile since Zed had approached the wall. Evan had heard about one stumbling up to it a couple of months back in the summer. Of course, they’d sniped it before it had reached the barrier, then sent a team out to burn it.

Evan had never actually seen a Zed in the wild. Sure, they were out there, but they were either deep in the hot zones or they were just plain stupid and couldn’t find their way to the wall. He knew, from the history they taught in the schools of New Harmony, that Zed had once been heavy at this wall. Evan knew that tens of thousands of them had fallen here, right around where he stood. But that had been years ago, when Evan was just a little boy, and civilization was getting back on its feet.

His instructors in The Guard had taught him how to fire weapons and use blunt instruments against live targets. Well,
dead
targets. The Guard kept a supply of zombies for weapons practice. Evan had a buddy in school who had gone on to work as a tech, conducting experiments on the undead, trying to learn what could be learned from them, anything that might help humans help themselves.

The Guard was something everyone had to do. It was expected. There were no exceptions, unless you were laid up and dying from the cancers. Sure, you could defer for a few years, do your time when you were twenty-two or three instead of seventeen, but you’d do your time.

Evan thought that was a good thing.

Everyone got to see firsthand what they were up against. Everyone got a sense of what this world they had inherited was about. Everyone learned survival skills. Their enemy, though he was fewer in number today than he had been a decade or two back, was nonetheless just as uncompromising as he’d always been. So everyone had to learn how to put Zed down.

This was Evan’s fifth night on the wall. He’d be returning inland later this morning for his four weeks vacation. Oil his rifle and sidearm every
other
day instead of every day, catch some decent meals, maybe see a movie. Hit that party Anthony had told him about before they set out camping tomorrow. Anthony, his best friend.

As Evan stood atop the wall and stared off into the distance, looking for any sign of activity, he thought about his friend and he felt bad. Nicki had broken up with Anthony a couple of weeks back. It was a fact of life, sure, but it sucked. Anthony, Evan knew, had been head over heels for her. And it was easy to see why. Nicki was a nice girl and she was hot. They would have made a good pairing, had some handsome kids if the radiation didn’t spoil them.

Evan had been in love before. Had his heart broken. Wendy. She’d left him when he was in The Guard. He’d kidded himself that they’d be able to maintain the relationship while he was away. She hadn’t. She sent him a letter. In school he’d learned about these things—what they used to call a
Dear John
letter. She was paired up with another man now, a man who had returned from his Guard service just as Evan was starting his. Presumably Wendy and the guy had hooked up shortly thereafter.

Wendy was pregnant. Another month or two, she and her man would have their first baby. Evan hoped it would be okay, be normal. There was a lot of radiation in the atmosphere. He had no time for petty jealousy. Like his friend, Anthony, Evan was twenty-one, healthy, and single.

Evan was kind of in love now. Okay, he’d have to admit, if pressed, maybe not love—but it could bloom into that. Infatuation,
definitely
. The object of his attention was Riley, Anthony’s sister. Evan had been attracted to her since he’d known Anthony, which was what? They’d been friends since they were kids. Riley was three years older than Evan. In the past, this had been a deterrent to him. But Evan was a man now. He’d finished his schooling and served his stint in The Guard. He had a job, a career he was growing to really enjoy.

Evan kept tabs on Riley from a distance. When she’d started dating Alex, Evan hadn’t really been happy. It wasn’t because Alex was a bad guy, because he wasn’t. Alex was a good guy. But Evan suspected, from things Anthony said, from things Troi and Riley said when the four of them were hanging out, that all was not well in Riley and Alex land. And Evan couldn’t say he was sorry to hear that.

He breathed in the cool air, knowing it would warm up somewhat later in the day, knowing the days of the morning-air warming up would soon be gone. As he breathed it in, he was all too aware of the radiation he was probably inhaling and how this was affecting him, shortening his lifespan.

He wore his camouflage skullie to keep his shaven head warm.

“Come in, Zebra-Three. Over.”

Evan was startled out of his reverie by the crackle of his radio. He blinked his eyes and raised the comm. mic to his face.

“Zebra-Three here, Rodeo. Over.”

“Hey, Evan.” It was Diego, stationed a klick down the wall from him. “Take a look at alpha-two-niner. You see movement out there? Over.”

“Give me a second. Over.”

Evan raised his Model 7 semi-automatic rifle to shoulder level and fixed his face to the cheek plate of the scope, scanning the terrain beyond the wall. He didn’t see anything unusual. Rolling hills…grasslands…scrub and trees in the distance. The usual.

He was about to lower the rifle, let it rest on its sling from his shoulder and respond to Diego’s inquiry, when he saw it. Movement beyond the perimeter. Something was out there. In the Outlands.

Two
somethings.

Evan squinted through the scope, but whatever it was disappeared behind a hill.

He lowered the rifle and depressed the call button on his radio. “Yeah, I saw something. Looked like two hostiles. Over.”

“Confirmed. I’m going to call this in. Over.”

“Do it, Rodeo. I got my eye on them. Thanks for the heads up, over.”

Evan lowered the radio, letting it rest on the wall, and raised the M7 again, peering into the Outlands through his scope.

He searched for the hill and thought he found it, but didn’t see a thing until a head poked up over the peak, and then shoulders attached to the head, followed by a second head. Evan watched and waited as two figures came into view, starting down the hill. They were moving slowly, but they were headed for the wall, headed straight for his position.

Zed
. Evan had never fired on one live in the field. During training, yes. But he’d been pulling shifts on this wall for over a year now—not counting the time he spent here during his training—and he’d
never
seen Zed out here. Still, there was the better part of a continent out there, and probably millions of zombies left.

In school you learned about the zombie wars, about the millions—some estimated billions—of Zed that were destroyed around the world. You did this from the relative safety of New Harmony, a society whose walls hadn’t been breached in years—a place where people died from cancer but not from zombies. You always knew the zombies were out there, doing whatever zombies did while they were out there. But you didn’t see them much anymore outside the controlled conditions of your Guard training or documentaries.

To see one of them in the wild like this…
Two
, Evan corrected himself. There were
two
of them headed in his general direction. He suppressed a shiver, knowing it was natural, knowing also that he was safe. The wall kept him three meters off the ground. Zed couldn’t climb it. Zed would walk right up to the wall and start slapping, and a week later Zed would still be there pat-a-caking the concrete. Zed wasn’t so swift.

Evan sighted through his scope and watched them come. He was sure half a dozen other sets of eyes within range—including Diego’s—were fixed on the strolling pair too. But courtesy dictated they’d allow
him
to fire the shots. It would have been rude and a breech of protocol for someone else to take them down. Evan would let Zed get within range, and then he’d hit them up. It would be a fitting finish to an otherwise uneventful five nights on the wall. Give him something to talk about tonight with Anthony and Troi, with Riley.

Evan waited, eyeing the two things through the scope atop his Model 7, and the closer they got, the greater was his realization that something was amiss.

With the dawn of the third day of his imprisonment, MacKenzie lost hope. He gave up any notions of escape or release, of being allowed to walk free from this infernal bondage. Rodriguez would not be coming for him, nor would Red. He had sinned, he knew, and now he enjoyed the punishment for his transgression. If there was a god or gods in heaven judging him, he would meet them soon enough. No deity imposed this penance on his person.

“I’m sorry,” he cried aloud, his voice hoarse from days of shouting and lack of water. “I’m so damned sorry…so damned sorry…”

Little Red had put him here.

The diminutive redhead had requested that he and two others—Tommy and Dalton—accompany her into the wilderness. MacKenzie had dutifully piled into the bed of Dalton’s truck and the big, burly man with the beard and the knit cap had driven it along the rutted, worn path that had once been a road. MacKenzie had laughed nervously in the bed of the truck, and Tommy had smiled politely, as they were jolted back and forth. Red had just sat there, her back to the cab, the Noveske Diplomat N4 on her lap.

Of course now MacKenzie realized that Tommy had known. Dalton had known too. They’d understood what was to become of him.

MacKenzie had sinned. He had stolen. In their camp, that was the ultimate transgression. Greater even than murder. Murder was a form of theft in that it stole a life; yet murder could be and had been justified.

When he’d done the deed, MacKenize had known he was committing a punishable offense. He hadn’t expected to get caught, but he had been caught. And now, the old man, Thomas, having decided his fate, left him snared in the net.

The net was made of barbed wire. They had bundled him in it and dragged him, cursing and bleeding, from the truck to this spot beneath some southern sugar maples. Red slung a rope over a branch twenty feet above the ground. Together, she and Tommy and Dalton yanked MacKenzie kicking and screaming up off the ground. His bodyweight against the barbs caused them to cut deeper into the bottoms of his thighs, into his arms and shoulders, his face. MacKenzie swung there, not daring to move, because each motion resulted in new cuts and the deeper penetration of extant wounds.

“Consider what you’ve done, Mac,” Red told him, and MacKenzie listened as she and the other two walked off, back the way they’d come. He heard the truck’s engine turn over, heard Dalton put it into drive, and knew they were never coming back.

They left him bound here, in the air, with neither food nor water. With no weapons. No chance of freeing himself. MacKenzie tried, struggling to loose himself, which only resulted in fresh gashes. A strand of the barbed wire was way too close to his groin. He’d had to watch how he moved, less he worked it up farther under his manhood. None of the wounds were bad enough to kill him. The barbs stung like hell, but the wounds they inflicted were superficial. MacKenzie would not bleed to death here.

But the fact he bled was bad enough.

His blood, dripping from many wounds, had pooled beneath him amid the pine needles. His blood, in the dirt and leaf litter, was as dark as the lower trunks of the sugar maples, stained black from mold growing out of the sap sucker’s holes. MacKenzie’s blood would bring Zed, he knew.

A few hours after Red left him, MacKenzie heard the first of the zombies arriving. It stumbled through the bushes and trees, never attempting to mask its presence.

The sun was going down when it spotted him and walked herky-jerky to the spot where he was bound. It had been female, but wore a button-down men’s dress shirt, which it had either worn untucked or it had come untucked somewhere along the way. The zombie wore a man’s black tie, which matched the circles around its eyes and the color of its hair. Its head was bent to the side, and one of its arms hung useless. It had been short in life, and reached up for him with its one good arm futilely.

MacKenzie knew, no matter how long the thing spent grasping for him without success, it would not leave. It would never relinquish its task, even if the task was one the zombie could not fulfill.