LZR-1143 (Book 4): Desolation (22 page)

She turned on him and pushed him against a nearby tree, eyes blazing.

“You gonna leave those kids to die? Little Margaret, and Eli, and Dave? The baby? You gonna leave them to be eaten? You aren’t gonna be the one to help them. You can barely piss right, you old codger. You can’t run. You can barely see straight. You gonna get them out safely? We need his help. This is the deal.”
 

He glared at her, eyes bright with anger. But he didn’t speak.
 

He knew that she was right.
 

Without pulling her eyes away from her husband, who she still held forcefully against the tree, she spoke plainly over her shoulder.

“You got a deal. I hope your leg is done mendin’—we’re leaving in five.”

***

“He just cuts ‘em himself, with his eye lasers.” Ethan’s voice was annoyed but serious and committed.
 

“But that’s just it,” I said, wincing in pain as we moved carefully over a massive collection of deadfall and debris. “When he fights other Kryptonians, their eye lasers don’t hurt him. So how could his own eye lasers—the same ones that his enemies use, if they are all in fact drawing their power from the yellow sun of Earth—cut his hair and nails?”

Romeo ranged forward and turned with a single wag of his tail, standing on a large rock near the water’s edge. The spit of land that we were on narrowed as it reached the entrance of only twenty feet or so of land.

“I reckon … That is, well…” His face lit up with an idea. “Maybe his hair don’t grow? Maybe he just … stays all smooth?”
 

I shook my head.

“Nope. In one of the older movies, he gets despondent and depressed, sick in the head. Lets himself go. He has several scenes where he’s got a five o’clock shadow. If we stick with the movies as a pretty accurate portrayal of the character, his hair grows. Plus, if his hair didn’t grow, he’d be totally bald, right? It never would have grown to what it is now.”

Ethan kicked a rock absently into the water as he spat.

“Maybe …”
 

“You two Einsteins wanna cut down on the chatter?” Rhi whispered harshly as we approached the narrow cut. To our left, a large cliff tapered down into the water from where the rock gently approached the river; to our right, the rising river had almost eliminated the narrow pass between mountain and running water. Had we waited several more hours, the strip of land might not have existed any more.

“Just something to think about,” I said to Ethan with an air of superiority.

He didn’t know that Ky had schooled me on this logic only hours before.
 

He glared at me absently, as if continuing to consider the puzzle.
 

I looked up at the rising sun, wondering at how long this task would take. And whether I could rely on the ash to continue to spew into the air above the mountains, blocking the sun and allowing me to move in the daylight. From the orange glow to the east and to the south—indicating at least two of the dormant volcanos in the region had lost their tops—I wagered that the gloom was destined to be a semi-permanent affair. Squinting, I sped up to stay with the group.

“This is where we get back to the real world,” said Rhi, scanning a thickly wooded area with multiple trees near the river, half-submerged by the rising water. To the left, the hills rose steeply into a forest. Half a mile from where we stood, another low bridge had collapsed into the raging river, spars of metal and concrete whipping water to either side in white caps of froth.
 

“We go east for a mile, then follow the smaller roads into town.”

I brought up the picture of the map in my head and thought for a moment.
 

“Can we cut in from the woods? Do you know any trails we could use to come at the town from the west instead of using the main roads? Those things—they take the path of least resistance if they can. We have less likelihood of hitting a group of them if we stay in the trees.”

Ethan nodded once.

“Sure. I used to fish down here with my brother. But it’s gonna cost us time. Maybe a few extra hours. And that’s not accountin’ for downed trees and rocks and the like.”

I nodded, staring at the rising sun, which appeared as pale ball hanging behind a mist of ash. It was almost completely white behind the thick clouds of smoke and char.
 

“I gotcha. But better we stay alive than quick. Besides, I can’t exactly sprint yet anyway. Best to be careful. If I’m gonna help my friends, I’ve gotta be alive to do it.”

Ethan, nodded and pointed to the left.
 

“This way, then. We’ll catch a woodsman’s trail in about five hundred feet.”

He started off as I caught Rhi staring at me.
 

“It’s not nice to stare,” I threw out.

“You look awfully familiar to me now that I see you in daylight. Have we met?”

I chuckled briefly, shaking my head.

“I … used to be on television,” I deferred, not wanting to get into the details. I had left this piece of my biography out of my story before, since it was so damned unbelievable. And technically it was true—my movies had been syndicated on television.
 

“Anything I would know?” she asked, her eyes brightening somewhat.

I glanced at the river to our right, rising as we spoke, then back to the ash-filled sky—a sky that would cause the entire continent to plunge into a deep, dark winter. I thought of my friends. Of all the death around us. Of Kate’s daughter.

“Nothing that matters one bit,” I said honestly.
 

Ahead of us, Ethan’s surprised yell brought our heads forward.

He stood near the water’s edge, his carbine pulled forward and trained professionally toward several fallen trees near the ragged coast.

We moved quickly as he backed up, and I squinted over the distance to try to define the threat.

That’s when one of the logs moved.

A single shot rang out, and the creature dropped down. But nearly a dozen more were gathered there, pale as palominos and naked as the day they were born. Writhing and struggling to move toward the food they senses was near, they were all weighed down by their bloated and water-logged flesh. Massive bags of fat and bloated tissue dragged their turbid limbs down, giving them the appearance of overly ripe fruits being jostled in a small basket.
 

Victims of the flooding—and some other ignominious death before that, no doubt—they had been pushed together by the current and bleached by the sun and the pallor of death, until they looked like a collection of six foot long birch logs.

I drew within fifty feet, and watched as Ethan moved slowly, back to the woods, rifle trained on the stomach-turning threats. But it was clear that these creature posed no current danger. They were too bloated to move, the clumsiness of death only compounded by the awkwardness of the massive bloat afflicting their limbs.

“Ethan, watch your six!” Rhi shouted, as he began to near the tree-line. I cursed, pulling my rifle up and struggling forward. The pile of corpses now a distant memory, I watched as nearly a dozen more—these much more mobile and eager—emerged from the green cover of the thick foliage.
 

They pushed into the clearing, ignoring the fallen limbs and jagged rocks that tripped them and sent them spinning and falling to the ground. It was this single-minded clumsiness that saved Ethan. The first two fell on their torn and bloody faces as they came within arm’s reach of the older man.
 

As they fell, arms nearly touching his worn combat boots, he gathered himself and released two rounds—one to each zombie’s head. Congealed blood spat into the air and he ignored the two bodies as he took a bead on the next row of creatures that had emerged.

Rhi outpaced my pathetic gimp, and reached Ethan as he fired several more rounds from twenty feet, taking one in the head and winging a second in the shoulder, spinning it around and pulling it off its feet. Rhi added her weapon to the line, and downed a third from ten feet away, siting on the next as the first fell.

I was within ten feet of them, and had stopped to raise my weapon and start firing, when Rhi’s carbine jammed, and she pushed into my line of fire as she changed her position. Cursing, she did what any good soldier would have done with the enemy merely ten feet away and closing. She shouldered the rifle and drew her pistol.
 

But Ethan was faster. Stepping in front of his wife, his rifle found its mark three more times before a large stone turned awkwardly under his foot, sending a burst of full automatic fire into a copse of evergreens to their right. Rhi grabbed for his arm, steadying him and keeping him from going to the ground. But that moment gave the zombies an opening. With no bullets separating the two living from the remaining dead, they surged forward.
 

Until I got there.

My rifle was useless at close range—with Ethan and Rhi struggling erratically before me, it was too risky.

Blades it was.

Stepping before both of them, I moved my weight into my healthy leg, and drew my machete.

The first creature to reach for me was an elderly black man wearing a black suit. I noticed that his tied was still neatly bound around his narrow neck, and wondered at how he had perished in such attire. Perhaps a funeral or a wake for an earlier victim?
 

My blade took his head from his neatly starched collar, spitting dark, congealed crimson blood over the dingy white shirt beneath.

The second and third creatures were women—one large and sporting the most unappealing sweat pants and tee shirt combo I had ever seen—the other an impeccably coifed octogenarian, complete with knitting needle jammed through her palsied palm. The larger one’s face was ravaged, an eye missing from a socket that looked like a small bucket of rotten ground beef. Her jaw was visible underneath a flap of fatty skin that sagged from her cheek.
 

I wondered briefly at her life. Did she work? Did she sit at home and watch television, claiming some sort of government-condoned disability? Was she fat because her parents beat her? Because her uncle abused her? Because she liked the taste of ice cream?

My blade came up, through her chin, parting her nose vertically before splitting the skull from the inside. As she fell, I reached a hand forward, leaning on my good leg, and pulled her to her feet again just as the older woman approached. I didn’t need to waste my blade on grandma. I tossed the three hundred pound corpse on the eighty pound blue-haired horror, and focused on the last four creatures.
 

All men.

All large.

All very hungry.

They surged forward again and my concentration was broken by successive gunfire from two carbines. The creatures dropped hard, their corpses falling to the jagged rocks as Ethan and Rhi joined me. A large cut ran up Ethan’s calf, but the bleeding was manageable.

Rhi looked at me and nodded once.
 

“I suppose you were worth savin’ after all, huh?”

I stared at the fallen zombies, wondering at the question.

A final gunshot sounded from my right. Ethan had killed grandma.

“Maybe. Maybe not. Let’s see how I do against the herd that’s got your friends trapped.”

It took us nearly two hours to reach a low overlook that allowed a view down into the small valley that contained the thriving metropolis of Concrete, Washington. Through the thickly falling ash, I could see the modest collection of buildings and narrow roads that made up this settlement on the banks of the swollen river. Several blocks had already been taken by the surging water, and I could see the broken metal spires of the toppled bridge still battling the rising waves.
 

“Before the infection started, we would come here for groceries and church every weekend,” said Rhi, kneeling down at the edge of the pathway. We had gently climbed away from the river, making our way across downed trees, torn earth, and fallen rocks in our approach to this trail that ran along the side of a rocky hillside. In front of us, the trail dropped off precipitously into a wide ravine, the opposite slope of which gently rose to a series of fields and roads on the outskirts of the town.

Several rocks, dislodged by Rhi’s knee as she kneeled, tumbled into the ravine, slowly picking up speed as they rolled to toward the bottom.

“Reckon there were eight hundred people or so here before. When it all started going ass-up, some folks left. Most stayed.” Ethan’s voice was heavy.
 

“And most were still here when we found the dam.”

“How’d you think of it?” I asked, curious as to how they’d think of something so seemingly random.

Rhi nodded to Ethan.

“He was a steam fitter before retirement. Government brought him on for a couple contract gigs for the local power company. Worked there a few times before all this.”

I dug into my pack and found my binoculars, scoping the streets and buildings of the town. I moved the angle up slightly, finding the large dam and the body of water behind it on the cusp of the northeast edge of the town. The dam was a large gray concrete wall that doubled as a narrow, one-lane bridge that stretched from east to west, with a lake to the north being held back from rushing into the river valley that coursed through the town, ultimately emptying into the larger river behind us.
 

A single main street ran perpendicular to the river valley, and a row of one-story, unremarkable stores and offices lined the road. Behind either side of the main street were working class houses and a variety of churches, hotels and parks.
 

And all throughout the small town, the streets were teeming with zombies.
 

We were too far away to make out the entrance to the dam, but I could get an idea of the layout from here. To reach the access point in the side of the large structure on the western side of the dam, we would have to come down into town and take the only roadway up to the large edifice. The trees were thick against the sides of the narrow strip of asphalt that rose up and away from town, with one side allowing only fifty feet of forest between the road and the rocky hill next to it. On the other side of the road, a steep incline dropped into the small river valley.