The Passenger (Surviving the Dead) (15 page)

Ethan turned to his men. “Cole, mark this location on GPS, upload it to the tablet, and radio FOB Harkin. Hicks, find us a spot to cache our gear. We’re t
raveling light from here on out—water, weapons, and ammo only. Leave everything else behind except the comms gear. We can come back for it later.”

Zeb nodded his approval and swung down from the saddle. “Mike, Chris, we need to muffle the horses hooves. They’re going to be loud as hell on those rail ties. If that horde comes near, I don’t want them to hear us.” He reached into a saddlebag, pulled out a blanket, and began cutting it into squares. Hedges and Michael did the same until they had four squares each, then they wrapped the material around the horses’ hooves and tied them off at the ankles.

Ethan and his men returned from caching their packs to find the others mounted up and ready to go. They set a brisk pace, the horses plodding ahead at a slow trot and the four soldiers moving double-time. After five miles, Cole—being the biggest of them by far—began to show signs of fatigue. His massive strength, an advantage in almost every other situation, turned out to be a liability now that speed was their primary concern. All that muscle was useful, but required lots of oxygen. He began to lag farther and farther behind until Ethan finally asked Zeb to slow down.

“Y’all go on ahead,
” Cole huffed, sweating profusely. “I’ll catch up.”

“No can do,” Ethan replied. “We go together, or we don’t go at all. Can you keep up a brisk walk?”
Cole ground his teeth and nodded.

They carried on at a slower pace for a few hours. The sun arced through the sky overhead, tracing
its path toward evening. They stopped only once to water the horses and wolf down a quick meal. Zeb was obviously frustrated they weren’t making better time, but as it turned out, slowing down worked to their advantage. Just after crossing a short trestle over a creek, Hicks tapped Ethan on the shoulder. “Hey boss.”

“Yeah?”

“Look over there.”

He craned his head, saw what Hicks was pointing at, and nearly tripped over his own feet.

“Holy shit.”

Hicks grunted.

“Zeb,” he hissed, pitching his voice low. The lawman kept riding.

“
Zeb.”
Sharper this time.

He stopped and
turned around in the saddle, his expression irritated. “What?”

Ethan stabbed a finger to his left three times, and then placed it over his lips. Zeb bent down to peer below a few branche
s obstructing his view, saw what Ethan was gesturing at, and went still. The color drained from his face.

“Dear God,” he whispered.

Parallel to the tracks, maybe two-hundred yards down the gently sloping valley, was the horde.

Ethan guessed there had to be over a thousand of them, weaving, stumbling, and lurching through the forest. Distantly, he heard a faint clacking sound.

“You hear that?” he whispered.

Hicks nodded. “
Yep. Sounds like somebody hittin’ sticks together.”

Realizing what that
meant, Ethan raised an arm and waved to Holland. For once, the diminutive soldier didn’t roll his eyes as he came over.

“You hear that noise?”
Ethan asked when he was close.

“
Yeah. What the hell is it?”

“I think it’s him.”

“Our guy? The fuckin’ pied piper?”

“Yeah.”

Hicks raised his rifle and peered through the optics. “You want me to go kill ‘im?”

He whispered
it casually, as if offering a drink of water. The certainty in his voice, the utter confidence he could do it, sent a shiver up Ethan’s spine.

“No. Not yet,” he said. “If we kill him here, we still have the horde to contend with. We need to get to Steel City first. We can’t handle
all these ghouls by ourselves. We need help.”

“So let us follow him,” Holland said. “
Me and Hicks. We’ll keep eyes on him. You and Cole get to Steel City and warn the people there. We can radio updates as we go.”

Ethan nodded. “Good thinking.
Just be careful, you hear? Stay out of sight. Do not, I repeat,
do not
fucking engage. Just keep me updated on his position. I’ll radio back with a plan once we reach Steel City.”

Holland was skeptical. “You really think they’re gonna help?”

“I can’t be sure, but Zeb seems convinced. He’s been right so far, so that’s what we’re going with.”

“No worries bossman,” Hicks said, checking his rifle and switching out the batteries in his NVGs. “We’ll keep you in the loop. Just do the same for us. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough.”

The woodsman a
nd the sharpshooter split up and headed out after the horde. Hicks turned north while Holland swung around to the south. In less than twenty yards, they melted into the foliage and Ethan lost sight of them.
Glad those two are on our side.

He turned to find the others staring at him.

“You sure about this?” Zeb asked, jerking his head toward the horde. “Seems like your men are taking a hell of a risk.”

“They’ll be fine
,” Ethan replied. “We’re soldiers. This is what we do.”

EIGHTEEN

Now that I knew his name—even though he had no idea I was rattling around in here—Gideon seemed determined to frustrate and enrage me.

After the destruction of the town by the river, he led the horde along all through the night. During that time, it occurred to me I had never seen him sleep. Not once. He was clearly on drugs, probably meth, and must have had enough supplies to stay amped up continuously. But even the most determined fiend needs to rest now and then, so he led us off the main road and ran ahead at top speed. Noises rang through the woods, loud to our sensitive ears, and when we reached them, we were trapped.

Gideon
led us to a shallow gully, the end of which he'd blocked with heavy branches and a few deadfall trees. I watched him skirt around the barrier, scramble up a tree, and climb into a makeshift hammock. By simply dangling there like a meat piñata, he kept the attention of the swarm and ensured none of us would try to leave. The barrier in front of us stopped our forward motion—less through structural integrity than sheer cussed messiness—and the few ghouls to make any progress became hopelessly tangled in the thing, making it that much harder for the rest of us to move forward.

Clever bastard
.

My body tried to reach him, along with the rest of the swarm, and for a while the two of us were in harmony, my anger shining inside my head like a star. It wasn't just the terrible things Gideon
had done that ignited my hatred, it was his disdain for the gift of life. Real life, not the shadow of it I was trapped in. Here he was, a survivor at the end of the world, and still he kills. Still he destroys. The notion fed my rage for the next few hours as he slept above the forest floor.

My body had a seemingly endless supply of energy and a bottomless capacity for hunger, but I didn't. Eventually I ran out of juice and gave into emotional exhaustion. I felt better after a while, which is stupid. But that's how the mind works, you know? You weep
, and rage, and when it's all done, you have a rush of chemicals to boost you up. That--

Wait a minute.

I felt better. That meant my body was still doing something for my mind. There had to be some kind of connection between us, however thin and weak.

Gideon rose and sauntered away from the swarm, leaving us trapped in the blocked-off little gully. My anger rose up again and without thinking about it, I reached for him. My right arm lifted to point in the direction of his dwindling outline.

Holy shit
.

Excitement raced through me like a flash flood in a parched canyon. With the desperation of the truly hopeless
, I tried everything I could think of. I tried to move my hand again, my legs, turn my head, shift my eyes. I forgot about Gideon completely as I ran through the mental checklist of Things I Used To Do All The Time.

I got nothing. Nada. Whatever connected me to my body's functions, it wasn't something I co
uld turn on and off like a switch. I took stock, no longer giddy about the possibilities but not despondent, either. I let my body work away on autopilot for a time and went over it every second, again and again.

After an hour or two
, I came to a conclusion: It was the burst of anger that did it. My mind hummed with the desire to hurt Gideon, and my body's vicious hunger felt it. Responded to it.

For a few seconds
, I laughed like a madman in my own skull. First out of victory for finding a way to interact with the world, and then because a funny thought struck me. Funny, and sort of disturbing.

Was this how crazy people felt? Was my body disturbed by the laughing, crying, screaming voice inside of it?
I was that voice
. The thought led me down a rabbit hole of possibilities, and my internal guffaws cut short when I came to the next logical question:

Was I insane?

It made sense, after all. A world destroyed by reanimated dead people? That's the stuff of bad movies. What if everything I had done, all the people my body killed, were just victims in the sane world seen through the filter of my own madness?

The thought chilled me. I wrestled with it for a long while but eventually decided I was sane. Crazy people rarely question themselves, and the world didn't seem distorted or weird. Aside from the circumstances around me, everything was logical. There were no giant un
icorns or magical beings. Just a lot of death and destruction and sadness.

Only a few minutes after deciding Gideon was a real threat and not just a figment of my diseased mind, he came back. Judging by the grin on his wasted face, I made the right call.

Across his back was another rocket launcher, the tube strapped in an X with his rifle. He stood at the back of the gully, clapping his hands and urging the swarm to turn in his direction. It took a long time, but eventually the horde cleared the rise and followed Gideon down the trail.

It
was slow going. Slower, in fact, than it needed to be. Several times, the madman led us off in a different direction, forgoing the use of his gun only to check the position of the sun and lead us back near the main road. We followed the path of a drunken giant, weaving off the road and back on dozens of times. Some of the detours were only a matter of hundreds of feet, others more than half a mile.

In the early
afternoon, I found myself on the edge of the swarm, far off to the right. We were on another one of our wobbly detours, angling toward a set of railroad tracks in the distance. Gideon wasn't far ahead of the foremost ghoul, perhaps thirty feet. He was banging a pair of sticks together lightly to keep our attention, his eyes locked forward and his body twitching in anticipation of whatever horror he planned to commit.

My body heard a noise, the creak of leather and a faint jingling, too silent for living ears but perfectly audible to my
body’s enhanced hearing. My neck creaked to the right, giving me a long glance at the railroad tracks up the hill about two-hundred yards away.

There were men there, small as mice in the distance. My body tried to react, turning toward them, but Gideon's steady beat drew its attention immediately. I let a surge of anger flow between
us to reinforce the reaction, and once my body was focused again on the evil bastard ahead of us, I did the mental equivalent of sitting back in an armchair to think.

My look at the men
had only lasted a few seconds. We were already drifting back toward the main road, away from the railroad tracks, so chances were slim I'd see any of them again. Several men on horseback, but the hooves silent. Must have muffled them somehow. A few others on foot, dressed in combat fatigues, and none of them looked like pushovers.

I d
idn't know what lay ahead of the swarm. There could be big thriving cities full of dangerous people armed to the teeth. But from what I'd seen of the world, and what I could remember of my old life, I doubted it. The men following the tracks hadn't seemed aimless. It made sense to assume they were heading in the same direction as the swarm.

As the light fell
, I knew the days ahead might be bloody.

*****

Swarms of dead people don't move very fast, and I got bored.

Rather than slip into a mental stupor and let the time speed by, I practiced
focusing my anger and moving my limbs. For hours, from failing light to risen moon, I tried to make my body do things. It was hit and miss at best, once leading to a stumbling fall. Gideon didn't notice, not that I think he'd have cared either way.

My body stood on its own and began to walk again. Slowly I honed the mental needle to a deadly point. It wasn't great shakes; the best I could manage was crude motions. Nothing graceful or subtle. Change of direction, raising a hand, turning my head, sure. Nine times out of ten. But no small finger gestures, no picking up speed or slowing down our walk.
But it was progress. It gave me hope.

The n
ight wore on and grew darker, but my spirits held firm. The predator I lived in moved into hunter mode, senses sharp and ready for the chase, but I didn’t despair. Because the last thing I saw before Gideon caught my attention was those men noticing the swarm.

They saw us
, and two of them slipped silently into the forest, following.

If they managed
to get ahead of us, things could become very interesting, very fast. So I kept on practicing my control, gaining proficiency bit by bit. It might amount to nothing at all, but if a chance to get my hands on Gideon presented itself, I didn’t want to miss it.