James Robert Smith, page 13
“Did you guys hear the one about the guy who didn’t wear armor on his shin?”
“No,” the boy at his left answered. “What about him?”
“He got bit on the shin,” Nate said. That got a nervous chuckle out of the four boys and two girls who were out on perimeter patrol with him. Well, they were in their early 20s, but to Nate they were just kids.
Don’t go out and about without covering yourself as well as you can. That was rule number one when you weren’t sure what to expect. No matter how hot it was, wear your armor. It just wasn’t worth the risk. Even a nip would be fatal, given a few days. And not just fatal, but indescribably painful on the way down into a feverish oblivion, aware all the way to the end of what was waiting on the other side. Not a proper death, and certainly not eternal rest. That would come only if someone else was around to administer the final rite, as it had come to be known: a blow to the head that was of sufficient power to destroy the brain.
Nate Stockman and his crew of six had the chore of scouting the quadrant just northeast of Sparta. Things didn’t seem right since the diplomatic mission had traveled in from City of Ruth with their dictates concerning road construction. Who the hell were they to command the Spartans to rebuild roads when there were far more important matters that commanded almost daily attention? Well, he knew what they were getting at, but the audacity of the orders was not just out of line—they were more than a little frightening.
It didn’t take a genius to understand just what the City of Ruth folk were up to. Roads meant ease of travel, and that ease extended to soldiers as well as to civilians. On the one hand, he had to agree that trade and the reestablishment of normal governance was a good thing. On the other hand, he knew that it had been Sparta’s isolation that had enabled them to achieve the good things they’d been able to build thus far. No roads meant no organized raiders. No open thoroughfares meant no large groups of wandering zombies marching into their towns. The lack of easy access had meant that they had an extra layer of protection. And nicest of all, it was a layer of natural armor that they didn’t have to worry over or work on for it to be effective.
“At attention,” Nate ordered. His six charges stood just so. They were well trained. Everyone had to take part in what amounted to military service, with the only exceptions being youth, infirmity, or a declaration of exemption by the community. There were men teaching medicine and various engineering who rarely took part in such exercises. But these were anomalies. Everyone else spent at least one week a year being either a soldier or a policeman. There seemed no other way around it, unless you wanted to try living in the wilderness on your own. And Nate well knew how that generally ended: either as doggie chow, or zombie food, or spending your days as one of the living dead. No, thanks.
He went from youth to youth, checking the various makeshift armor each kid was wearing. His fingers examined buckles and tugged at knots, making sure each of his charges was as well protected as possible. Another good fortune of living in Sparta was the elevation. The temperatures rarely cracked the upper 80s, so they didn’t have to deal with wearing this kind of protection in sweltering weather. Yes, it got hot, but rarely was the weather unbearable. He smiled at the kids, one at a time, and concluded that they were all as well prepared as they should be.
“Okay,” he told them. “We’re going to break up into two groups. Janet and Marilyn will be with me. Jason, Dan, Nick, and Wallace…you guys move to the north. You have your maps and your coordinates. Check your watches.” He waited while everyone’s eyes locked on their wristwatches. “I have 11:34. Check?”
The kids all nodded at him, with only Nick making a quick adjustment to his watch.
“We meet back here at 1400 hours. Is that clear? If you encounter anything out of the ordinary, ascertain the nature of the threat. If the threat level is high, fire shots, quick succession. A single shot will be interpreted as some kind of enemy engagement. In the event of such, neutralize the threat with as little noise as possible and meet back at this point as quickly as possible. As you know, we’ve had visitors from outside lately. Some of them might be hanging around.”
“You mean ‘spying’, don’t you?” It was Jason, the natural leader of the younger men who’d been assigned to him. A typical alpha male type, but a good fellow, all around.
“Well, let’s just say they’re curious. I don’t want any accidents. Don’t shoot the living. You know that. It’s just not done. Not anymore. If we do find anyone spying, it’s certainly not a killing offense.
“Understood?”
His soldiers all nodded at him. “Let’s move out, then.” He pointed to the north, and the four young men headed out in that direction, each shouldering his rifle, backpack, and water. Nate and the girls headed south; quickly vanishing into the forest until very soon, neither group could see or hear the other.
He figured the young ladies were curious as to why he’d split the group up just so, but he kept his reasoning to himself, unless they pressed the matter. It wasn’t that he worried about the young women being alone with any of the males, or anything concerning a distraction—youngsters being what youngsters were. It was only that he felt a responsibility to take care of them, and he figured he was in the best position to counsel on the side of caution if anything should happen. For now, he surmised that the ladies knew that and so were keeping silent on the matter.
Quietly, they moved through the forest. In the two years since Nate had arrived in Sparta, the forest had changed considerably. For one thing, the fields and open spaces that had been left to Nature had closed in with tall grasses, shrubs, and even young trees. It still amazed him how quickly Mother Earth stepped in to heal the wounds carved into Her body by Mankind. Houses fell quickly to ruin, concrete buildings filled up with water, roads washed away and were closed by every imaginable growing thing. The main highways into the town were now barely recognizable as roads. He thought again of the edict that had been communicated to the town from City of Ruth. As if they would comply. He knew what they were up to.
Slowly, but deliberately they eased down slope, moving in a slightly southerly direction. Early on, there had been an inhabited cabin near this spot. An older guy named Tuttle who had been able to fight his way up from Charlotte had manned it. He was classic shell shock, and Doctor Wein had tried everything to keep him living in town, in a barracks situation. But the fellow wanted no part of it, and refused to talk about how he’d ended up in Sparta or what had happened to his family and friends, if indeed he’d had any. When he was in the cabin, Tuttle had done a good job of policing this sector and had kept the area cleared of dogs and even the odd zombie that wandered through these forests in those days. But, after an absence of forty-eight hours, they’d come out to check on him. He’d shot himself through the head with his pistol. Tired of reliving whatever nightmares produced in his journey to Sparta, everyone figured. They’d buried him in town and now used patrols for this quad rather than asking anyone to station themselves this far out.
Thinking of the sad man, Nate decided that they should track past the remains of the cabin where he’d lived. The last time he’d seen it, the structure was still in relatively good shape and it wouldn’t have taken much work then to bring it up to livable standards. Wordlessly, he motioned for the other two to follow him in a more easterly direction, and climbing upslope mildly as they traveled along.
The forest floor through this area was very leafy and spongy from the recent heavy rains. It made for excellent footing and quiet stalking. There were no pesky dry leaves or brittle sticks underfoot to give away one’s position or pace. All three of them moved intermittently, going from point to point, with frequent stopping to scan the area.
Another reason he liked this part of the forest was that it had not been logged in over 100 years, and the trees were getting on toward maturity. In a century or so, he knew, it would begin once more to take on the appearance of an old-growth forest. But even now it was fun to walk through and to observe. The trees were about 75% hardwoods, and the trunks reached high and created a canopy some 60 to 100 feet above. Everything below that canopy and roughly four feet over the ground was relatively visible. It was only right at ground level that it was difficult to scan the immediate surroundings. Some shrubs like dog hobble and rhododendron obscured the line of sight here and there. But mainly it was easy to scan and easy to travel.
Within a few minutes they came to a point where someone who knew where to look could make out the small cabin. It was only about 600 square feet. Apparently it had been someone’s vacation or hunting retreat until The Event. When Tuttle had seen it, he’d asked immediately if he could move in, and things being the way they were, no one could have denied him. Even now it was in decent condition. The roof was solid, if covered with a few layers of leaves and storm debris. Nate crouched down low and his charges followed suit. Good soldiers.
His eyes flicked right to left, left to right. He peered into the trees. Something was bothering him, and had been for some time. It was just far, far too quiet. Nate looked up. The girls did the same, although they also checked to make sure nothing was moving toward them from behind or trying to flank them. Peering into the trees, he noticed that there was no movement at all up there. He was unable to spot a single bird or a single squirrel. And the squirrel population had been pretty good this year. He’d gotten a fair portion of his protein from squirrel meat lately.
One of the girls, Janet Nuri, made a quick motion with her left arm. Nate looked to where she indicated and he was startled to see a lone zombie. It was about twenty meters to their left and seemed intent on the abandoned cabin. The strangest thing to Nate, and to Janet and Marilyn, was that it was moving deliberately uphill. In fact, since they were basically on a ridgeline near the top, there really was no way the thing could have been headed down from a higher point. This was an older zombie and certainly was not someone who’d gone missing or died recently in Sparta.
It had come uphill! It had climbed the mountain.
Shit.
Nate signaled for the women to hold their positions, and then he moved forward as stealthily as possible, in an attempt to sneak up on the zombie. He hoped that he could do it, and to that end he quietly unhitched the white oak truncheon on his left hip, wielding it in his right hand. He’d carved it himself and it was heavy and almost rock hard. If he’d carved his kills into its handles, he’d have sawn through it by now. It was effective. But sneaking up on the living dead wasn’t as easy as all that. There was something about them. Whatever it was that allowed them to separate the living from the their own also made it difficult to surprise them. Nate had read any number of ideas, but like most ideas concerning the zombies…well, they were just ideas. No one really knew.
Another difficulty that could arise with these shambling things was the hidden ones. He’d witnessed scores of people taken down by undead who’d stood patiently, in complete silence, while the living blundered right up to them without seeing until it was far too late to do more than either struggle or scream. He’d seen bits of corpses reanimated and able to pack themselves into surprisingly small hiding places, reaching out with wrecked limbs to grasp and bite.
That was the other thing about them. Their strength was undeniable. Take away a person’s access to pain and it seemed to add threefold to the ability to grasp and tear. Once one had you solidly in its arms, it was very difficult to break free. Knowing all of this, he peered at every possible place where another zombie could be waiting to lumber into him. But he could see nothing, and could make out no spot where a human body might be standing or lying or in temporary repose. Nate decided to make his move.
There was only the slight sound of a rhododendron branch against his left leg as he strode forward, and he doubted that the zombie would have detected the very small noise. Even he was barely aware of it. However, from behind him there was the sudden barking of a dog. From the pitch of the bark, he knew it wasn’t a large dog, but the damage had been done.
Before Nate could set himself to strike his partially rotted target, it turned to face him.
What remained of its face weren’t the features of anyone he knew. This one had trekked from somewhere far outside of Sparta. He wouldn’t be able to check its pockets for any form of identification, for it had waded through so much brush and debris that all of the pockets on both its pants and its tattered blue shirt were torn completely away from the rags that still clung to its legs and torso. All he could say for certain was that it had been a man of middle age, with sandy blonde hair, and a stocky build. He steeled himself as the thing shambled toward him, drew back his truncheon and prepared to land what he sincerely hoped would be a single killing blow.
Of course the last thing in the world he expected was to find a dog slamming into the back of his knee, causing his right leg to buckle under him so that it took everything he had not to fall on his back. Instead, he lashed out at the dog—a solid brown terrier of some sort, but it danced easily beyond the blow and it vanished into the green all around him before he could try again. At any rate, by that time the zombie was on him.
The last thing you wanted to happen in a scuffle with the undead was for one to get a good grip on you. Even a fist wrapped around a forearm or wrist was an extremely difficult thing from which to escape. Sometimes the best thing to do was to just go with the dance and start bashing away at the head until something positive happened. Even worse was a bear hug, which almost always ended in getting bitten, unless you were well armored.
Just now, the zombie had pretty much succeeded in grasping Nate by the shoulders. Not quite an unbreakable hug, but very nearly. He rolled to his left and tried to get his shoulder free of those iron fingers. But they held and the dead thing merely got its face in closer to Nate’s. He could smell its breath. The only time a zombie breathed was when it was in close proximity to living human. Either to moan its apparent triumph, or to bellow in frustration. This one was groaning as it brought its teeth down on Nate’s shoulder, trying to bite through the leather and bamboo to no good effect.
Suddenly, as Nate was debating his next move, he felt the zombie’s weight go off of him. Janet and Marilyn, acting as a team, had used their own batons as a wedge to pry the zombie away from him. Seeing the women for the first time, it almost seemed eager to relinquish its grip on Nate as it fell to its back, a kind of staring grin splitting its bruised and shattered face. Nate was just coming to a standing position as Janet brought her baton—made up of fused sections of rebar—like a steel battering ram into the dead thing’s forehead. There was a solid cracking sound, a silent expulsion of gray matter, and it fell quietly back without benefit of a secondary death rattle.
Nate looked down at the dead thing, and at the two women who stood away from it.
“Thanks,” he told them. “Damned good work.”
“No problem,’ Marilyn told him. All three of them were scanning the forest, looking up at the tiny cabin, ready for surprises.
“What the fuck was that all about?” Janet asked. “I mean, with the dog and all. I’ve never seen that before.”
“Where’d it go? Did you make out where it went?” Nate looked at both of his companions, and saw that they both indicated down the slope. Toward the religious outposts.
Now what?
Clues:
Nate and his crew had ended up hauling the corpse back to Sparta. While he could tell right away that there was nothing on the thing to tell him where the man it had once been might have originated, there was just something about it that bothered him. It was more than just the fact that it had obviously climbed a very long way. There was also the issue with the dog.
Janet and Marilyn had gotten a better look at the animal than Nate had, even though he’d been much closer, of course. But his attention had been on the zombie and his struggle with it. All he could have told anyone was that the dog wasn’t a large one and he thought that it was light brown in color. It was only after they’d returned to Sparta that Janet had informed them, after reviewing a reference book on dog breeds, that she was pretty sure it had been some kind of Scottish terrier.
But that was just secondary. What he really wanted was for Doc Wein to look the body over and come to some conclusions. Stockman had some really strange suspicions and he wanted someone to back him up.
Part of the hospital was, of course, a pretty decent morgue. It wasn’t a big space, but with less than 4,000 people in the town and no marauding undead shambling through these days, they didn’t need a lot of cubic footage relegated as a morgue. This single room had served perfectly well for several months. The young men had helped Nate and Doctor Wein haul the corpse to a waiting gurney and at that point Stockman and Wein had rolled it into the cool, brightly lit room, just the pair of them.
Once inside, Wein had commenced to make a cursory examination of the body. Occasionally he would look around, absent-mindedly, searching for a recording device that he just didn’t have anymore—luxuries of the past. He had a notebook on a stainless steel desktop that he went to from time to time, jotting notes and mumbling his findings and conclusions to Stockman.
“Guy’s been on the march for some time, I’d say. Looks like he might have even been one of the early ones. First weeks, even.”
“No shit?” Stockman stared at the blue-black flesh exposed through the tattered shirt and threadbare pants. One foot had on the remains of a bargain-basement boot; the other one was bare, missing a couple of toes.
“I’d say so, yes. He was in good shape when he was alive. Still some bulk to him. He probably had good muscle tone when he was among the living. Likely pumped iron a bit, or had a very tough job as a laborer. Something like that.”
