Beyond the Barriers (18 page)

There was a small clearing ahead, and I stopped to look around, turning in a full circle. I listened when I didn’t see anything, just stood in place with my eyes closed, but nothing … wait. Was that a keening sound?

It reminded me of a dog or something, maybe caught in a trap. As much as I had traipsed over this area, it was still possible that I missed a snare left by a hunter. If it was a raccoon, I wasn’t sure what I would do. I’d probably have to kill it rather than face getting bitten trying to set it free.

I moved toward the sound, which came from the direction of the sinking sun. The bright light blinded me, so I shaded my eyes with one hand as I crept up on the location.

I came upon a man who seemed to be stuck on a tree. A branch had snagged his jacket, and he wasn’t able to get loose. He was dressed in rags, like he had lived in the woods for a long time. His hair was disheveled and full of twigs and pine needles. How long had he been out here? His jacket was green, which explained why it had been so hard to see him. It wasn’t camouflage, but the color was just the sort of green to make a person’s eyes slip past it in the woods.

“You okay?” I asked in a low tone that was meant to make him aware of my presence. I was carrying an axe, after all, and having someone creep up and scare the shit out of me was a good excuse to turn around and attack first, then ask questions while cleaning up the wounds. He did turn around, but I wasn’t expecting the vacant look on his face that proclaimed him to be dead.

I backed up as the zombie turned. He moved slowly and moaned at me. His face was a nightmare of wounds, I guessed from walking through the woods and getting his face scratched. I supposed when you didn’t feel pain, you didn’t really care about twigs whipping against your face and body.

I shuddered at the thought, then I got a look at his mouth, which was dry and covered in old blood. This contrasted against the blue lips and jagged, yellow teeth. He continued to turn and shuffle at the same time. He keened in that tone I had heard earlier, taking it for an animal. The analytical part of my brain pondered how the thing could make noise like that when he clearly wasn’t breathing. His jacket was open, and his shirt was in shreds. He even had a gaping wound in his gut, and out of that horror fell a mass of maggots and things that would haunt my sleep that night. He tried to stagger forward but remained caught. I backed up and wanted to run. I wanted to go back to the cabin and forget about what I had seen. I wanted to run screaming, then come back with one of the assault rifles and blow this horror away.

Instead, I unlimbered the axe, as if suddenly remembering it was there. I held it in two hands and regarded my opponent. Though it offered no real fight, I had to kill the thing on principle alone. When I was back in Vesper Lake, I had been fighting for my life. Now I was just doing preventive maintenance. It had to be done for our safety; I would put a rabid dog down the same way.

I lifted the axe high above my head. The back of it was flat, and I hoped it would splatter less if I hit him on the temple, and then crushed his skull while he was on the ground. I lowered the haft in a horizontal plane to the ground, watching him raise one arm toward me like an automaton. Then he tugged forward, and with a rip, the man’s jacket tore as he staggered toward me.

I swung too late and hit him in the shoulder, which pushed him to the side. He spun nearly around with the impact, but turned again to come at me. I backed up, stepped on a fallen branch, and stumbled backward. Reaching out with one hand, I found nothing to catch me, so I had to take a few steps to recover. He came at me, eyes livid and teeth bared. He moaned, and the remains of his jagged teeth and torn lips were the only things I managed to focus on.

If he touched me with those teeth, I would be dead before I could curse him. Just a bite—that was all it took. I would have enough time to fall over before he was tearing into my flesh, and in the event I managed to fight him off, I would still have the wound to contend with.

Giving in to gravity, I fell back, landing on my ass in a heap. I rolled to the left as quickly as I could, dropping the axe in the process. Before his hands came up to grab me, I was back on my feet. I pushed his arms down then thrust him away. As he spun to the right, I planted my boot in the small of his back and kicked him back the way he had come.

I was panting hard from the rush of adrenaline, from the sudden exertion, and from the fear that was ripping at my brain like a bird of prey. I looked for the axe, but it was lying in the brush, and I was frightened of going for it. I didn’t want to take my eyes off him for even a second. I kicked him again, harder this time. He was driven into the tree, and, as he staggered away, he went down. He made no attempt to break his fall; he just flopped over like a rag doll.

Staring up at me, he cocked his head to the side and went for one leg. His teeth were bared in a rictus that looked plastered there. This thing wore one expression, and that was anger.

I lifted my boot and smashed his face before I could think about what I was doing. Oh Jesus, it crunched under my heel, nose compacting and blood spurting. I lifted my heel again, and this time thrust down so hard that I felt his face cave in under the blow. He still flopped his hands around and kicked at the ground like a struggling animal. The third kick cracked his skull like a giant egg, and soft brain matter flowed around my foot, so that I slipped and almost fell down for the second time that morning.

I staggered back and rubbed the bottom of my shoe on the soft vegetation, as if I could wipe away the guilt of what I had just done to the man. I wanted to throw up my breakfast. I wanted to run back to the cabin and hide in the bedroom for the rest of the day.

I backed away from the corpse. He didn’t move one bit, no final shake or shiver. Limbs didn’t twitch; he was just dead. Again.

Feeling sick, I turned away and went back to the hole I had dug and finished the job. Pushed dirt over the remains of the deer, stared at the ground for a few minutes, looked back at the place where I had crushed a man’s skull.

How in the hell had the guy found this place? Was there another cabin nearby? Were there more of them? I should have taken a moment to walk the area and check for them, but I needed a gun for that. I wasn’t eager to be faced with hand to hand combat again anytime soon.

I returned to the cabin, and Katherine was herself once more—composed, cool, and relaxed, except for the tightness around her eyes. When I kissed her, she hugged me tight, but it felt mechanical. How I wanted to ask her about the sadness that had come over her, about the pain that made her hold back, but I was too afraid of the answers to those questions. I wanted her to be mine. The selfish part of my brain wanted her to belong to me, and not to her family from before the event. I wanted her to love me, not the memory of the things she had lost.

Sighing, I went to collect a gun and some ammo. I told her what had happened in the wood, and she agreed that we should sweep the immediate area. I took one of the handguns, a .40-caliber pistol, and checked the load. The magazine was full, so I tucked it into my belt and loaded my shotgun with as many shells as I could shove in there. Then I tucked a few into my pockets.

She took a 9 mm to cover me, slinging the hunting rifle over her shoulder. I wished we had another shotgun, for up-close work if we needed to fight. The spread would be devastating with both of us shooting. She held the pistol at her side as we left the cabin. I wished I could lock it, but we had never found a key. It was silly. The thing that had attacked me in the woods was surely a lone incident, a lone man—zombie—lost in the woods, and I just happened to stumble upon him. Maybe he had lived somewhere nearby, another cabin or lodge, perhaps. Maybe he had some vague recollection of the area and was just lost. He was probably the same shape I had seen the night before.

We walked outside the cabin, establishing a perimeter a hundred feet in every direction. The day was cool, which suited me just fine. I was too amped up to deal with heat today.

We found—nothing, and I was more than a bit relieved. We went back to the cabin, both exhausted after stomping over the vegetation, through bushes, over piles of needles, around large copses. She kept a compass out and was good with the device, keeping us on the perimeter at all times. She would point back in the direction of the cabin with a grin every time I looked worried about how far we had gone.

We passed the car, looked it over, and then walked to the road as the last part of our reconnoiter. I hugged the bushes while Katherine stood back and covered me. Unmoving, I kept an eye on the entry for a few minutes. My focus roving around, I listened and watched, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. With a heavy sigh, I turned and smiled at her, so she joined me at the gate.

“I hope he was the only one.”

“Me too. I don’t want to go through that again.”

“You’ve killed them before. What’s the big deal?” Her voice was as dead as the thing in the woods I had smashed into the dirt. I regretted the killing, but she seemed blasé, as if taking a human life was the norm.

“I did, but that doesn’t mean I liked it.”

“You get used to it.”

She spun on her heel and walked up the road toward the cabin.

That night was much as the last, except we talked about where we should go next. They had put some gas in the Honda at the fort, but it wouldn’t last long enough to get us around the mountain from this side. We would probably have to head back to Vesper Lake and try to get through the city. I was hoping that if we could keep up enough speed, we would be able to just zip through the tiny town, and then get on the freeway and follow the caravan before a horde figured out where we were going. They should be in Portland now, enjoying the good life. I bet it was all smiles, flowing beer, and plates of hot food.
Or at least something to eat,
I thought as I chewed on a hunk of dried deer meat that had a strong smoke flavor and nothing else.

We lay in bed, side by side, my head near her ear. Her hair frizzed out, probably from not having any sort of conditioner. I tried to imagine what she had been like before the event, but I had trouble picturing her as a classic soccer mom with a minivan and kids in the back.

“When we reach a place with people, I’ll understand if you want to leave me and find someone else.” She spoke softly into her pillow, barely above a whisper.

“I don’t want to be with anyone else,” I assured her, tugging her naked body closer to me under the sheets. She was so soft and warm under the blanket that I wanted to stay this way for a week.

“I can’t have children,” she reminded me after a long, quiet moment.

“I don’t care. I don’t have any, and never put much thought into the idea of having them anyway.”

“But it would be irresponsible, Erik. How many people are dead out there? We need everyone to help repopulate the world. I don’t have a place in that world. I can’t contribute a child.”

“Katherine, you aren’t a breeding machine. No one is. Life will return no matter what and no matter who I want to be with. I don’t want to run around and bang rows of girls in the hopes of making one pregnant. There will be plenty of horn dogs up for that job.” I tried to make a joke of it, but she didn’t laugh.

“It’s not funny. All the children are dead, so many are just … gone. We need to have more, and I can’t help. I had cervical cancer, but Frank didn’t care. He and I had two already, and we were happy.” She sobbed into the pillow, and I held her close. It was the first time she had mentioned the name of one of her family.

I didn’t know what to say. I was going to tell her I loved her, and I think I did. I certainly had strong feelings for her, but was it enough to overcome this ... this insecurity? Her body shook, and she pressed her head deeper into the down pillow and tried to stifle the sobs. I wanted to tell her everything would be okay, but there was no way to know that with certainty.

“Kat, I …”

A pair of green eyes stared into the window from less than twenty feet away.

“Oh fuck!” I stifled the exclamation at the last second. I was out of bed in another second, and into my pants before the glow disappeared. Snatching up the shotgun from where it rested near the bed, I checked the load while I was getting into my boots.

Katherine came to her feet, and the blankets piled around the middle of the bed, while she stared at me like I had seen a ghost. I
had
seen a ghost, or a ghoul, to be precise. And the son of a bitch was right outside the cabin.

“Ghoul,” I whispered, and she dropped down to find her clothes. I tossed the gun on the bed, shrugged into a shirt, and buttoned up the top. I glanced outside as I moved, watching for the green thing in the bushes, but it was gone.

I went to the front of the cabin with Katherine close behind. She didn’t even question; she just grabbed the handgun, popped the magazine and double-checked the load, slammed it into the piece, and then slid the top back to load a round. She followed as she performed the movements, all smooth, all by the book. I was impressed once again with the way she went about this. She was a seasoned pro, and I, the former military guy, was left looking a little frazzled.

I checked the windows, ducking low as I did so, but I sucked in a breath and stood up. Those things didn’t use guns; they attacked en masse and didn’t care for the consequences or losses. They were one step above mindless zombies—the monsters that had started the whole event. I hoped it was just one of the damn ghouls. I didn’t know how we would defend against a hundred of them. It had to be one, just like the zombie I killed in the woods earlier. It had to be a single ghoul, lost and alone in the woods.