Resurrection (Eden Book 3) (30 page)

“You think you’ll ever be a parent, sis?”

Riley wanted to tell Anthony about her miscarriage, about how this trip had been a way for her to get her mind off things.

“Well,” she said. “I guess this is as good a time as any.”

“What’s that?”

“Something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

“Oh, okay. Hope it’s good. You know, I—”

Riley watched her brother’s body snap forward, his back arching, his arms outstretched. Blood spray misted the air where he had stood, and then the crack of the rifle reverberated across the distance as Anthony landed face down in the dirt.

Anthony!
She screamed his name in her mind. Riley ducked down over her brother.

“Anthony—”

“Oh….” Her little brother groaned. There was a small hole in his back. “They shot me, didn’t they?” Riley turned him over without thinking about being gentle, and as Anthony cried out she saw the large hole under his chest.

She snapped her head back the way they had come, as her hands applied pressure to her brother’s chest.

“Can you move your hands?” Riley asked him, still scanning the horizon. Her own hands were wet and warm from her brother’s blood. Where were they, damn them?
There
. She saw them. A group of figures on the crest they had descended some time before. One had what looked like a stick aiming straight up into the air. It was the old man and his much-vaunted rifle, and Riley hated him more in that moment than she had ever hated anyone.

“Yeah, yeah, my feet too…”

Riley worked at tearing a sleeve off her shirt and then pressed it into her brother.

“Rye, I’m—oh, this isn’t good.”

“Shut up, Anthony. You shut up.”

“Maybe we should—”

“Maybe you should shut up, brother? Huh? What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m shot.”

Riley snorted through her tears. She worked frantically to staunch the blood which seeped from the entrance and exit wounds in her little brother. She had taken her shirt off and torn it in half, tying it around Anthony’s torso to hold the sleeves she’d packed in place into his wounds.

“Wow…now I’m really going to slow you down.”

“No you’re not,” Riley told him, knowing that
yes
, he would. It did not matter anymore. The game was over for them. “When I tell you I need you to try to stand, try and stand, okay? Do you think you can stand?” Riley looked back where the old man and his friends had been, but the crest was deserted now. They were coming.

“I can stand…”

“Okay, on three…”

“On three.”

“One…” Riley thought about her brother, shot like this, lying on the ground. That wound. That terrible wound.

“Two…” Anthony felt light headed. Jermaine flashed in his mind. Jermaine was dying and he showed up for class day in and day out. Jermaine was dying and he still flirted with Tricia.

“
Three
!” Riley heaved her brother up, putting the arm on the side of his body that wasn’t wounded around her shoulders. He gasped as he stood, and the pain was visible on his face, but he shook it off and looked at her. “Three.”

Anthony suspected that, much like Jermaine, he was now dying also.

“Okay. Let’s go, okay? Nice and slow…”

“Not too slow, Rye. They’re coming.”

Troi knew she’d had no other choice than leaving Evan. There was nothing she would have been able to do for him. She wouldn’t have been able to move him. The most she could have done would have been to drag him some way, probably causing him a great deal more pain than whatever he had already been in. She thought Evan was probably dead by now. She couldn’t imagine he’d be alive when the men and the woman chasing them found him.

If they had found Evan alive, they hadn’t fired a shot. Or maybe she was far enough from them that she couldn’t have heard it. She’d been listening for it. Listening for it as she ran, deathly afraid she’d run into a zombie staked somewhere, waiting for her to do just that. If Troi was going to die out here in the wilderness, alone without her friends, she didn’t want to die by a zombie’s hands. In its mouth. Evan had died saving her life. Evan hadn’t been killed by Zed. Evan hadn’t been killed by the lunatics stalking them.

For that, she was somehow glad. It didn’t seem right. They had all come so far, survived so much. Troi had stood in that barn while that munt-thing stared right at her, with its dick bigger than her arm. She’d beaten the crap out of it with the hammer, and then she and her friends had burned its house down. And here they were, she and her friends, being hunted to the ground, like game. Like animals. By animals.

In the three hours between the time she had left Evan behind and encountered the snare, Troi only came across one other trap. The filament wire was clear and stretched across the trail at knee height. Maybe it was the position of the sun in the sky behind the trees, maybe her fear had heightened her senses. Somehow, Troi saw the wire well before she got to it. She stopped and looked at the trigger, looked to where it disappeared in the bushes next to the trail. Something metal glinted there. She figured it was a mine or some other device that would blow her legs out from under her—something that would leave her writhing there on the trail until the hunters could get to her.

Because, Troi knew, these sick people didn’t intend their traps to kill any of them. They wanted to wound and disable her and her friends, leave them debilitated and vulnerable, leave them waiting. Even the boulder that had crushed Evan…If he hadn’t pushed her out of the way, Troi would more than likely have been wounded by it, not killed outright. She would have lain there and listened to the sounds of the forest, waiting to hear those behind them.

Just like she had left Evan.

But Evan was dead by now. Troi was convinced. She worked in the hospital. She had seen people come in, gravely injured from accidents. You knew when someone wasn’t going to make it. When they didn’t stand a chance…

Troi had stepped over the wire delicately, and then resumed her escape, alert more than ever. She had gone a distance without encountering another trip wire, without walking past a green wall of fir to have a zombie burst from it, without sight or sound of the people behind her.

And then she stepped into the snare and it snatched her up off her feet, dumping her on her back on the trail before whisking her into the air. Suspended there, Troi dangled, swinging above the path. She cursed herself and her luck out loud, and then silently.

Then Troi listened. What if there were any Zeds around? What if they came out of the trees now as she hung there defenseless? What if they came up behind her? She’d be done. It was that simple, that terrifying.

She tried to jack her body at the waist, tried to reach her ankle and the cable that had tightened mercilessly around her foot. But she couldn’t.

So she waited and got her breath back, then waited until she’d stopped twisting in the air. When she was close to motionless, she tried again, twisting her body, reaching up, trying to pull herself up by her pants-leg. But she couldn’t get a hand hold. Troi corkscrewed in the air, her hoodie coming unraveled from her waist and falling onto the dirt beneath her.

She forced herself to wait it out. When the circular motions had ceased again, and she hung more or less in place, she tried once more. This time, when she couldn’t get to her ankle, when the blood was rushing to her head and out of her foot and she felt pins and needles in her toes, Troi knew she was in very serious trouble.

And she cried.

“Well, I’m pretty sure you hit one of ‘em,” Gammon remarked to Thomas.

“Yeah.” Thomas drummed his hand on the side of his Winchester. They had stopped for the night, but the old man was anxious and his friend could tell. “I don’t like leaving one of them out there wounded though.”

“Fuck ‘em dad,” said Tommy, pitching his tent with Merv’s help. “Let him bleed.”

“Aw, Tommy,” Gammon said, “your daddy was always like that. We’d go out deer hunting, and it would just about kill your daddy if he found a blood trail when he bagged a buck. He’d always make us follow it until we found the thing and finished it off. No matter where it was, no matter what time it was. Your daddy is humane like that is what it is.”

Thomas had made no move to slip out of his pack. Gammon had a feeling he knew what the man was considering without having to be told.

“You’re thinking of keepin’ goin’, aren’t ya, Thomas?”

“I am, Ed.”

“Dad, that’s crazy. It’s dark.”

“I can get a ways. Maybe not find them tonight, but get closer. Find them real fast tomorrow.”

“We’re already split up…” Gammon didn’t want to continue for the night. He knew Thomas well enough to know that the man had made his mind up and there would be no changing it. Still…“Red and the others and all…”

“Ed’s right, pop,” said Tommy. “We split up into threes, the next thing you know we’ll be shooting each other up in the dark.”

“Yeah, dah,” Merv interjected helpfully.

“Nah, that won’t happen.”

“I’ll go with you, Thomas.” Dalton gripped a chain-leashed zombie.

Thomas cocked his head back to Dalton, meaning
come on
. “Ed, Tommy, sleep tight, and don’t worry. We’ll see you in the morning. Merv, you be a good boy and get you some sleep tonight.”

“I will, dah. Luv you, dah.”

“Daddy loves you too, Merv.”

“Pop. How are we going to find you if Red ain’t back?”

“Just listen for the gunshots.” Thomas raised the Winchester and smiled at his son. “Tommy, see that Merv gets fed.”

“Will do, pop. Hey Merv, you hungry?”

Troi hung in place for hours, well into the night. Her arms dangled beneath her and one leg was stretched out to a foot she could no longer feel. The other leg was bent at the knee. She’d watched as the shadow she cast on the trail beneath her lengthened to the point it merged with the shadows of the trees and the trail.

And then she waited, because there was nothing else to do.

When she heard the voices on the path behind her, Troi swore to herself that these men would not see her cry. Still, when Keith reached out and grasped her wrist, turning her around, Troi gasped involuntarily. Then she steeled herself.

Her hair had come undone and fallen in front of her eyes. She had to shake her head to get it out of the way so she could see. There were four men—the two who were brothers and two others. The two others stood there hauling back on chains, at the end of which were zombies. The undead were muzzled, but Troi could hear them grunting and moaning clearly enough.

Keith had to steady Troi with two hands or she would have spun all the way around.

“Well,” Keith said to his brother. “What do we have here?”

“See,” said David. “It is the one with—you know.”

“Can we see them?” Rodriguez asked hopefully. MacKenzie gave him a look.

“Please—please—” Troi felt her resolve melting.

“What’s that? She’s trying to ask us something, David.” Keith looked from his brother back to Troi. “What is it you want to say to us, lady?”

“Please don’t let them get me.” Troi meant the zombies. She could not bear to think she would die that way.

“What’d she say?” David asked. “Couldn’t really hear her.”

Keith looked at Troi hanging there in the air and took a step back, away from her. “She said please don’t let the zombies get her.”

“You hear that?” David called back to MacKenzie and Rodriguez.

“What kind of people does she think we are?” Rodriguez asked. “To go and hang some poor defenseless sorry-assed somebody up like that and then let Zed at ‘em? We’re not animals.” He whispered to MacKenzie, “Can we maybe get a look at her knockers?”

Troi did not hear this, because Red had come up behind her where she could not see the girl. Red reached around and sliced Troi’s exposed throat open with the curved blade of her karambit. As Troi jerked ineffectually at the end of the cable, jets of red squirted out of her in a torrent.

Keith stepped back to avoid the arterial spray as the woman’s body spasmed on the snare, her blood pooling beneath her in the soil. She hung there limply, her hair drenched red.

“Well, that’s two,” he said.

“Your little remark about hanging people from trees and leaving them for Zed,” Red asked Rodriguez, “was that for me?”

“Who, you Red?
Nah
.” It was the way he said it, Red thought. It
had
been for her, and she and he both knew it.

“It’s getting real dark,” said David. “Maybe we should wait until tomorrow morning?”

“What do you think, Red?” Keith asked.

Red didn’t like spending the night away from Thomas and Tommy. There were still the two left out here. She didn’t expect any real trouble from them, but still…better to be together. That said, she knew it was too late, and they’d never find the others before sunrise. Still, if they left now, they could cover some of the distance they’d otherwise have to make up in the morning.

“Let’s walk for another hour if we can,” Red answered.

“Can we look at her tits?” Rodriguez referred to Troi’s dead body. “Come on, it won’t hurt anybody.”

Red looked at him and put her tongue in the side of her mouth, digging it in there and choosing not to say whatever it was she might have been thinking of saying.

“Just a quick peek? No?”

“Come on then,” said MacKenzie. “And let’s switch.” He nodded to the zombie at the end of the chain he held tight. “This thing is going to pull my arms out of the sockets.”

“I never thought I’d actually die, not out here, Rye.” Anthony’s voice was weak. They had stumbled and walked several more kilometers, Anthony’s breathing growing more ragged the whole way. Each step had been a world of hurt for him.

Dark had stolen over the land. Shade gave to shadows and the shadows gave to black. Carrying her brother had added to her own exhaustion, and Riley found herself sapped of strength.

She’d grown so weary that they had both nearly plunged into the hole in the earth that welled up before them. It had been covered once, but now gaped naked in the ground. If it had been camouflaged, Riley knew they would have both fallen into it.