Extreme Zombies, page 38
He pushed an eye against the spy hole of the outside door and peered onto the street. It was a rarely needed precaution. And as usual there was nothing there. Just the permanently parked cars, their ti tyres res long since flattened, while rust ate at their bodywork. There were streaks of ice along the road. And the inevitable debris.
With a sigh, Jack unlocked the door and pulled it open. It was heavy, and shut behind him with a resounding thud, before he locked it again. He swung the rifle from his shoulder and took a careful look in every direction.
In the distance three figures were running towards him. The nearest was a girl. He recognized Candice Roe at once, a hard-bitten seventeen year old from the settlement. And a damned good shot with a rifle. Which puzzled him. Why was her gun clenched in one hand when she was being pursued? It wouldn’t be like Candice to have run out of ammo. Like most people these days she would carry at least a dozen rounds, stuffed in bags or in her pockets—anywhere they would fit. Ammo meant survival. Especially against stinkers.
Jack hurried towards her. He could see she was tiring and it looked as if the creatures were gaining on her. They were a man and a woman, their unwrinkled faces gray with years of accumulated dirt, dried food and blood like flaking masks of mud.
Dropping to one knee, Jack aimed his rifle at the nearest, centering the cross-wires of the telescopic lens on one eye. He eased back the trigger. The shot took away most of the upper cranium in a spray of brains, bone and discolored blood. He took out the other a few seconds later. Both lay twitching on the street when Candice reached him, gasping for breath.
“My rifle jammed otherwise I’d have taken them myself,” she panted. “Must have run over a mile before I saw you. Gave me a second wind.”
“Good job you did. Looked to me as if they were gaining ground.”
“Persistent bastards. Comes from not having brains enough to know when you’re exhausted.”
Jack chuckled. “Stands to sense there must be some compensation for being brain dead psychos. That’s just one of ’em.”
Candice scowled. “Glad it amused you, Jack.”
“It’ll amuse you too as soon as you’ve got your breath back.”
“And forgotten how close I came to becoming meat for those bastards.”
“And that,” Jack added, his humor dying a little. It was a danger all of them had to live with, and one that no one took lightly. They’d all seen the aftermath too often for that.
“How come you’re out here by yourself?” Jack asked.
Candice regarded him edgily. “You’re a fine one to ask that.”
“That’s my choice. One I’ve lived with for years. Wouldn’t suit everyone, ’specially these days. But you’re not a sad, dried-up old loner like me.”
“No.” Candice gazed down the empty street, with its stone-clad apartments, shops and offices, all of them derelict. “I just needed some time by myself for a while, that’s all.”
Deducing it was probably something to do with a boy and none of his business, Jack shrugged. “Okay by me. You can hunker down here for a while if you like. Leastways, I can help fix your rifle. And lend you a handgun. You should always have one as backup. Me, I have a Colt automatic. Stops ’em dead in their tracks every time. I’m not much of a shot with it, mind, but at close range I don’t need to be.”
“I usually have something. I just wasn’t thinking today.”
“Not thinking is what gets you killed.” Jack gazed down the street, aware suddenly the cold had begun to sink into his bones. “I’m off after some fresh stores. D’you want to lend a hand?”
“Suppose that’s the least I could do,” she said, an uncertain smile twitching about her lips. “What’s it today? Wal-Mart?”
“As always. Canned section.”
They walked down the street in silence for a while till they turned onto the car park at the nearest store, with its abandoned cars and the skeletal remains of several hundred bodies, a grim reminder of just how turbulent times had been when the aftereffects of OM showed themselves.
“How come you never took OM?” Candice asked as they passed the first of the bodies. “There aren’t many people your age around these days. Almost everyone of your generation took it. Why didn’t you? Religious reasons?”
Jack shook his head. “My wife. We were both in our fifties when OM hit the headlines. She’d already started with Alzheimer’s by then. What good is a drug that’ll retard ageing to someone with that? Putting off old age indefinitely isn’t much of a lure for someone whose brains are turning to mush. Me, I couldn’t take it while Rachel was like she was. Didn’t seem hardly fair somehow. An extra forty or fifty years of life didn’t appeal to me then. Hell, even suicide wasn’t far from my mind when Rachel passed on, that’s how bad I felt.”
“You were lucky.”
“You could say that, though I don’t reckon as I would necessarily agree. This isn’t exactly how I saw my Golden Years.” Jack gazed across the car park. “It was bizarre how greedy folks were for it,” he said a moment later. “It was never licensed by the government, you know. Most of it was sold on the black market—a black market that became huge quickly, the demand was so big. Things went insane. Everyone wanted it, especially those who’d passed their thirties. Made the profits during Prohibition small potatoes, believe you me. Made some criminal empires enormous. For a while, at least.”
“Till its aftereffects destroyed them too.”
“Destroyed everything—almost. There’d been warnings, of course. Some scientists spoke out against OM. But they were ignored. Immortality was too big an incentive for anyone to wait till all the tests had been completed—tests that would take years. Too many years for most folk. Hell, if OM had come along earlier, when Alzheimer’s was something that happened to other people, not to us, I expect that me and Rachel would have taken it too. Why not? We’d have leapt at the chance of putting a stop to ageing and gaining all that extra time.”
“And you’d have ended as stinkers too.”
“Without a doubt. Never heard of anyone who took OM without that kicking in seven, eight years down the line. Made Alzheimer’s look like a dose of flu. You think we’ve got it bad, girl, you should have seen what it was like when there were millions of the bastards going off the rails. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how any of us survived. If’n they hadn’t been such dumb bastards I don’t suppose we would. Luckily, they were more often as interested in tearing each other to pieces as attacking us. Cut their numbers down a lot in the first year till some of them started working together, those that were left. The smart ones.”
“I can’t remember any of that,” Candice said. “I was only a baby then. Lucky for me, Mom was only eighteen when she had me and hadn’t thought about taking OM then. Before she could, it all went to Hell.”
“How is your mom?”
“Okay. Feeling her age these days.”
“If she’s feeling her age, imagine what I’m feeling.” Jack gave her a sideways grimace, then tucked the rifle under his arm, ready to fire. They were only a few yards from the main entrance to the abandoned store. Its doors had long since been reduced to splinters. The dark interior was a vast array of tumbledown shelves and scattered produce, filled with shadows. “I don’t expect to come across any stinkers here. They tend to prefer somewhere less well-trodden to hang out during the day, somewhere less likely to get them shot.”
“They know that well enough,” Candice said sourly.
“Those that’ve survived this long know it. There were a lot in the early days too dumb for that. I suppose it was survival of the fittest. The dumbest were culled early on.”
“So we’ve the brightest, eh?” Candice laughed. It was a sound that helped to lighten Jack’s spirit somehow. He hated scavenging through derelict stores for the few undamaged cans of food still left in them. It depressed him. Candice’s presence helped take away some of his gloominess. Perhaps he’d made too much of his preference for solitude. Now he was getting older perhaps it was time to enjoy some company for a change; maybe even join the settlement. They’d asked him often enough over the years.
You can’t do penance for having outlived her forever, he told himself as he looked back on the last few days of Rachel’s life. Ironically, her passing had coincided with the first of the stinkers. Romero’s children.
If only they’d known how widespread it was going to be, all those politicians and scientists who had appeared on television, discussing the first cases of violence wreaked by the stinkers. The irony was that most of these people became stinkers too in the next few months.
Romero’s children had sounded like a joke at first. Except these creatures weren’t movie zombies. Not the shambling, ugly, walking corpses the great director had portrayed them as. They were neither shambling nor ugly. Nor dead. Far from it, Jack thought. But they were deadly all right. Just as deadly as anything ever dreamt up in Hollywood.
“Careful,” Jack cautioned as they stepped inside the store. He eased some of the tension from his trigger finger as he scanned the poorly lit interior. He had been here often in the past. Knew almost every untidy pile of moldering food that had been spilled onto the floor from burst bags and ruptured packets. In a few years there’d be nothing left worth scavenging. The alcohol went long ago. Fortunately he had another source for that. One no one else had stumbled on yet.
Something scuffled deep inside the store, and Jack swore softly as he automatically fell into a crouch, gun at the ready, his eyes scanning the gloom.
“What was it? A rat?” Beside him, Candice held a knife in one hand.
Jack shook his head. “I don’t know. There are enough vermin about. But that didn’t sound like a rat to me.” He passed her his Colt, then crept along the aisle, his head twitching from side to side. If there were stinkers present, he was confident of taking two or three of them easily enough. But there was always the chance a nest of them had decided to camp here. He had on occasion come across a dozen or more—though that was rare. The sensible thing would have been to get help. But that wasn’t Jack’s way. He’d been a loner too long to break old habits easily. And with Candice as back up, he felt sure they could handle up to four, maybe five between them without breaking into a sweat.
“Over there,” Candice whispered. She jerked two fingers leftwards. “Behind the freezers. I saw something there. It’s watching us.”
Which was damnably odd behavior for a stinker, Jack thought.
“You sure it’s watching us?”
“Looked like it to me,” Candice whispered back. He could tell she was disturbed. She had been brought up dealing with creatures like this and probably knew their behavior as well as him. “Perhaps it isn’t a stinker.”
Jack didn’t know. Could be someone else scavenging for supplies. But why hide? It would have been obvious who Candice and he were the moment they stepped inside the store. For a start off Stinkers didn’t carry guns. Stinkers didn’t talk either.
Coming to a decision, Jack stood up and advanced towards where Candice had pointed.
“If’n you’re one of us step out,” he said. “I’ll hold my fire. We only shoot stinkers.”
Even though the face had recently been washed, Jack could not mistake what hesitantly stepped out of the shadows in front, its hands above its head in an awkward gesture of surrender. It would take more than a few wipes with a wet rag to remove the years of ingrained grime from the creature’s face.
For a moment Jack faltered. He knew he should aim and fire. He could have done that in a split second. Instinct tugged at nerve endings, urging him on. But he didn’t. He couldn’t.
He waved Candice’s weapon down when she stepped up beside him.
“Why?” Her question was half bewilderment, half accusation.
Jack shook his head, uncertain. “Something odd about this thing,” was all he could think to say as he stepped towards it, his finger still hooked about the trigger of his gun, aimed at waist level ahead of him.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Her clothes were tatters, held together by grease and dirt, which clung like a grimy, obscene skin to her scrawny body. The woman took a cautious step from where she had been hiding. Her fingers were black with crusts of blood and grease, the accumulated debris of a thousand meals eaten raw. She was a stinker all right. Jack was certain of that. But her face, especially her eyes, was wrong. There was fear in her eyes. And confusion.
“You hold it right there,” he told her. “One more step and, like it or not, I’ll fire.”
The woman came to an unsteady halt. She was trying to speak. Jack was certain about that. But her tongue and jaw muscles moved awkwardly as if from lack of practice.
“What the fuck is it doing?” Candice asked.
“Damned if I know.” Jack squinted through the gloom. Like every stinker he had ever seen she looked youthful. However old she may have been when she first took OM it had stopped the years from gaining on her, even though nearly two decades had passed since she took it. The drug may have messed up her brain, but beneath all the accumulated filth her body was as perfect as the day she took it.
“Awake . . . ” The woman spoke in a stutter, her voice thick, as if her tongue was too large—or unaccustomed to the motions it was being forced to make. “Night . . . mares . . . gone . . . ”
“You’re the fucking nightmare,” Candice grumbled, her eyes venomous as she stared at the woman. “We should cap that thing.”
Gently, Jack touched the girl’s arm. “Easy now,” he said. “Stinkers don’t talk.”
“Then what is she if she isn’t a fucking stinker?”
“That I don’t know,” he said. “But stinkers don’t talk. I know that, if I know nothing else.”
The woman swayed. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten in days.
“Awake . . . ” she repeated.
While Jack heaved a sack of canned goods onto his shoulder, most of their labels unreadable, Candice led the woman back to his place. The stinker’s hands had been tied together in front of her. Jack had relented on this precaution. If he hadn’t he suspected Candice would have used the slightest excuse—an unsteady step or an odd movement—to open fire and kill the thing.
“You’re taking one hell of a risk taking this thing back to your place,” Candice grumbled.
“We’ll see,” Jack said, unsure why he trusted the woman. But somehow, though, he did. Perhaps it was the pain, the confusion and the look of horror in her eyes that convinced him. He didn’t know. Less than an hour after discovering her, though, she was sitting in a bath of warm water in Jack’s apartment. Apathetically, she let Jack, and then Candice set to work scrubbing decades of grime from her thin body. For the most part the woman was placid, either through exhaustion or fear or both. After a short time she looked almost human again. Or would have except for the fact she was unnaturally youthful and too mature at the same time despite the tiredness and fear on her face. The woman’s hands, especially her fingers, had blackened lines of grease and blood that would take more than soap to remove. Like Lady Macbeth, Jack thought to himself, her sins would haunt her in her hands for years to come.
He gave her a pair of trousers and a jumper to replace the shreds of clothing they had peeled like layers of diseased flesh from her body. The mess had reeked so much Jack had been forced to open one of the windows and toss them out into the street, though the apartment still had the unmistakable stench of Romero’s children. They weren’t called stinkers for nothing, he thought.
“What next?” Candice asked after the woman had been led into one of the bedrooms to rest.
Jack shrugged. “See if she’ll eat some of our food. That’s the ultimate test. Stinkers aren’t interested in normal food.”
“Just off the bone with the pulse still pumping,” Candice said, more than a trace of bitterness in her voice.
“Never seen one eat cooked food, even when it was available.”
“So if she does, she’s cured? Is that what you think?”
“Maybe.”
“Would you trust her then?” Candice glanced at the closed door to the bedroom the woman was in.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to hear her talk. Hear her story. See what she’s got to say for herself. Weigh it up.”
It was dark by the time they were sat about the table. Jack had prepared a thick stew from some tinned potatoes, beans, and meat they’d brought back from the store. He placed a bowl of it before the woman, along with a spoon. There was a feeling of tension as she stared at it for several moments, and Jack saw Candice’s hand stray towards the Colt still tucked inside the belt of her jeans. Uncertain, the woman grasped the spoon. It shook in her fingers as she awkwardly held it between her fingers, then dipped it in the bowl, before slowly lifting it towards her mouth, spilling half its contents. She stopped as the edge of the spoon touched her lips, as if she was struggling to remember what came next. Then she pushed the spoon into her mouth. Some of the stew spilled down her chin but she barely seemed to notice that. For a moment what was left of the food rested inside her mouth, and it looked to Jack as if she was tasting—or testing—the oddity of it. Or trying to recall when she last had food like this. Cooked food. Seventeen, maybe eighteen years was a long time to remember. Could he remember what the food he ate back then was like?
After gulping what remained on her spoon, the woman surprised him by going on to clear her bowl with an appetite that made Jack wonder how long it was since the last time she ate, though he tried not to think what that meal might have been. That was her past. This was her present. Her different present, he hoped.
When they’d finished eating, Jack eased his chair back from the table and regarded the woman. Her complexion looked better now—more normal, he thought. Almost.
“Do you recall your name?” he said.
