LZR-1143: Evolution (24 page)

“Ky,” she said warily, tone slightly mollified by Kate’s soft voice and calm demeanor.

“Nice to meet you Ky, I’m Kate, and this is Mike.” She extended her hand slowly, and Ky stared at it before tentatively reaching forward and shaking briefly.

I stepped forward, offering my hand. She frowned and stared at it.

I frowned back and, as Kate turned to Ky and started to speak, I stuck my tongue out at her, crossing my eyes as I did so.

Once a fool, always a fool, my mom used to say. Of course, she was always talking about me, so that may have had something to do with it.

Ky’s eyes widened in surprise, and Kate’s head turned, just in time to see me adding the final flourish of my hands next to my ears. She simply stared, as if she expected nothing less.

I froze, and retracted my idiot-flaps, affecting a serious glare and asking, “So how’d you get out here? What happened to you? Where’s your family?”

Kate shook her head slightly and turned to Ky to hear her response.

The girl slowly turned her head from me to Kate.

“What the hell’s with that guy,” she asked, shooting me a sidelong glance. “He slow or something?”

“Yes,” Kate said, seriously as Ky nodded as if in understanding.

“So? Where’s your family, Ky? What are you doing out here?”

She looked away, staring at the corn and then saying simply, “I don’t have any. I wasn’t here with family. It was just some guy who was giving me a ride.”

“What happened to him?”

She looked back to Kate.

“We were driving through here last night, and there were a couple of those things in the road. They wouldn’t move, so Dave pulled over and took his pistol to get rid of ‘em.”

She squinted as she looked into the field again, then back to us.

“He walked right up to them and went to shoot ‘em. He got one, but then he kinda flinched, and then shouted. Before he could shoot the other one, this whole damn herd of ‘em comes walking out of the corn. If he’d just run he mighta made it, but he tried to kill some of them first.”

She sighed. “He wasn’t a bad guy, but he wasn’t too bright.” She smiled in a smart assed way that I knew fairly well.

“Kinda like him,” she said, jerking her thumb toward me.

Kate smiled and asked, “What then?”

She shrugged. “They tore his ass apart. There were at least fifty of those things, and they cut him off from the car. He stopped shooting soon after they got to him.”

“After that, I hit the auto-lock, jumped into the backseat and pulled through the seat back into the trunk. They never saw me.” She said to Kate, as if lecturing. “They don’t see well, you know? If they can’t hear you, or smell you when they’re closer, they’re probbly not gonna find you.”

“Yeah, we know,” I said.

She looked at me and smiled big, mouth forming the words in exaggerated gestures, voice taking on a mock indulgent tone. “Good for you! I know, you’re so smart!”

I glared at her, asking in a haughty voice, “Who’s the one that got stuck in the trunk?”

She shrugged again.
“I didn’t know that the damn backseat locked when the rest of the car does, so I got stuck.”

She turned
back to Kate.

“And that’s it. That’s what happened.” She looked defensive and scared as she backed up slightly. “So you guys gonna take my car now, or what?”

Kate glanced behind her and shook her head.

“Not unless you’ve got keys, we aren’t. I don’t know how to hot-wire a car, and neither does Mike here.”

Ky shot me a glance that implied ‘Yeah, no shit’ and I made another face at her.

She shook her head.

“Nope. If I did, I coulda gotten back into the back seat and left when they did, but he took ‘em with him when he got out of the car.”

She looked to the bloody smear on the roadway.

“I’m guessin’ he’s long gone with the rest of those crap-bags,” she said.

I leaned forward, past Ky, and stared at the supplies in the back. There was an ample supply of decent canned goods and, thankfully, some bottled water. At least we could lay in a supply and keep moving until we found something else.

“So we keep walking,” I said, taking my pack off and resting it on the bumper next to Ky.

“Where you headed?” she asked, watching as I started to carefully choose the food that would be the best nutritional bang for our buck. I got excited when I saw cocktail franks and chili, and Kate answered for me.

“D.C.”

Ky whistled and shook her head. “Man, I heard stories about D.C. Totally overrun with those things. Why not head to the countryside instead?”

I turned my head and cautioned Kate with a look. No need to tell too many people about our condition. She nodded and answered easily.

“We have business there. We need to find someone in the government there and give them some information.”

Kate asked Ky, “Do you want to come with us? It’d be safer than by yourself, and we’d appreciate you sharing your food.”

She looked at Kate, then back to me. As she did so, I was happily eating an open can of cocktail franks, dipping them into a can of chili.

We couldn’t take it all with us, so I was just being efficient.

“You mean safer with you,” she said, staring at my spectacle.

“He has his uses sometimes,” Kate said, shouldering her rifle and unslinging her pack.

“We’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” I said, between mouthfuls of processed canned meat, and continued to pack my bag.

Chapter 26

Ky wasn’t very talkative with me, but to Kate she poured out her story as we walked. At the beginning of the outbreak, she was on a camping trip with her family in Assateague Island, a national park on the Southern end of the peninsula. She and her parents had come out from Baltimore for a week’s vacation, and had only been there for two days before they heard the news.

They stayed in their tent for a week, as other campers fled the area, until they were the only ones left. Her mom and dad were convinced that they were safer in the wild than they were in the cities.

They were probably right, I thought, as I listened to the retelling.

But nowhere is totally safe.

Late one night, Ky woke up to the sound of something rustling in the bushes. Since they hadn’t yet seen any zombies, and didn’t expect to, they assumed it was a raccoon or squirrel. Her dad left the tent to make sure, and her mom stayed with her. They heard him call out in the night, and they saw his shadow on the wall of the tent, cast against the fluorescent lantern he was carrying.

They also heard his surprised scream as he was dragged to the ground from behind, unaware of the three zombies that had wandered into the park to their site, drawn by the sounds of voices and the smell of cook fires. Despite Ky’s protests, her mom had gone out to help at the sound of the screams.

Ky heard them both die from inside her feeble, thin-walled, nylon tent. She stayed silent and still, listening to her parents die and then rise again, crying silently. Alone, and in the dark, she listened to them move slowly into the woods, never to be seen again.

After that, she scavenged what she could from the campsite, and slowly made her way out of the park to some more populated areas. Staying to the trees and the shadows, she made her way through the trees and rural areas until she reached main roads and more populated areas. She waited until she saw evidence of life in the form of a passing car, and flagged down a family of three traveling North. After that, she caught rides from survivors’ camp to survivors’ camp, never for more than a few days at each one, always looking to keep moving.

For weeks, she had been running from constant attacks and infestations, and now we were all running together.

I asked her about the crossbow, which on further covert inspection seemed to be a serious rig. She even had a holster of arrows jammed into her backpack, with the fletchings protruding from the halfway zippered top for easy access.

She shrugged, hefting the weapon and keeping her eyes ahead as we walked.

“It’s kick-ass when it comes to icing one or two of those things nice and quietly,” she said proudly.

“Yeah, but how does a kid like you end up with a crossbow? Seems a little out of place.”

She gave me a look of indulgence, as only twelve year old girls can do, before explaining,

“My dad was big in to me taking up a hobby or a sport at school. But since I was at this high-class preppy school, they had all these weird clubs and shit. Nothing like I was used to before we moved from the old neighborhood.”

“So you took up medieval weaponry as a hobby?”

She smirked, and waited several seconds before responding.

“There was an archery club at the school. Bows, arrows, crossbows. I thought it looked kinda fun, so I joined up. Dad was so happy to have me in a club that he bought me the best stuff he could. I was pretty good too; I took second place in a contest a few months ago. I had it all with me on the trip ‘cause he and I were shooting in the woods a few days before ....” She faded off and pursed her lips.

“I shoulda done something when they came that night, ya know? My stuff was in the car. I could have run to get it. Tried to help.” She shook her head, a tear escaping her eye as she roughly rubbed her face.

“There was nothing you could have done,” I said softly, watching Kate as she stooped low over something in the road. In the distance, a faint wisp of smoke or steam was drifting in the air. On both sides of the road, we were still surrounded by tall, dead stalks of corn. Their rasping shuffle was a fitting serenade as we walked in silence.

Ky grimaced, but said nothing, clearly not convinced.

You always believe you could have done something, I thought. I believed it, Kate believes it. It’s unfair to expect anything different from a twelve year old kid.

Kate was staring at a reddish-brown object on the road in front of us, and as we approached, I quickly recognized a partially eaten forearm. Mostly because it still had a watch attached to it.

Beside me, Ky exclaimed, “Oh, gross!”

Despite the weeks of seeing shit like this, I swallowed back the vomit that wanted to fill my mouth, and simply nodded.

Kate looked up and around clinically, as if curious. On the right side of the road, another wide swath of corn was depressed, and the earth was kicked up near the ditch that separated the road from the fields.

“After you hid in the trunk, did you hear any of those things moving around outside?” Kate asked Ky, walking forward slightly to peer into the pathway of what appeared to be a passing herd of creatures.

Ky shook her head, looking nervously around as if catching the drift of the question. I had wondered about the same problem when she had explained how her friend had died; clearly these things were now banding together in packs—hopefully out of some brutish impulse and not out of communication—and we now knew that there was at least one pack in our area, possibly touring around in the corn as we stood here.

“If we move away from the road, we stand less of a chance of finding a functioning car or shelter at night,” I said, heading off Kate’s next statement. “I know it’s risky, but if they don’t know we’re here, the odds of them coming into the road within eyesight or earshot of us seems fairly slim.”

She pursed her lips and nodded once, standing up. I walked up next to her and looked into the opening in the corn. Some of the stalks were smeared in dried blood, and I optimistically took that as a signal that their passage had been hours ago, placing them far from the road by now.

Kate was looking at the map.

“We have about two more miles, and then we reach an intersection. We start heading southwest at that point, and can hook back up with the road that takes us to the bridge.”

I started forward to take the point and heard Ky grunt. “You talking about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge? You know that’s screwed, right?”

I had suspected as much, but clearly she had some more specific information.

“You heard anything about it?” I asked.

“Just that it was jammed with cars and trucks and stuff, and that those things ate everyone on the bridge—everyone that didn’t jump into the bay that is.”

“Where’d you hear that?” asked Kate as she started to follow me, Ky jogging to take a place next to her before answering.

“Radio. Dad had it going in the car for short periods in the morning and night to catch news. Before the news died.”

I shrugged, knowing that it was likely true—we had seen similar reports in New York—but that it was necessary. Maybe they had some access walkways below the main deck, or maybe we could find a boat. Either way, we had to try. There was only one way to D.C., and it was over the Bay.

Her eyes were troubled as I spoke, glancing down as we trudged forward.

“No other way to D.C. from here, though. Unless we went north through Wilmington, and we don’t have the time.”

Ky’s voice was resigned, and gave her credit for the courage. “Okay. Just thought you should know.”

We walked for another hour until the crossroads came into view. We had emerged from the cornfields and fallow farmland ten minutes prior, and were fairly exposed to view as we continued to follow the road through a deserted cluster of homes and stores gathered around the crossing of the two-lane roads.

We passed two homes and a small garage, door open to the air and revealing no hidden vehicle. We didn’t slow, as we collectively seemed to recognize a sense of unspoken urgency. The thought of roving bands of creatures near us was daunting, and we were growing desperate to find transportation.

The intersection was marked by a simple signpost and a single traffic light. Remarkably, the light still blinked slowly. The flashing red light was ominous, as it seemed to scream out that something was unusual here.

Slowing at the crossroads, we gathered at the street sign, staring down the roadway in the direction we were heading. It disappeared over a slight rise in the earth, the narrowing black strip of highway empty and forlorn. Ky was looking nervously around, grip on her crossbow tight and unrelenting, knuckles pale under rapidly shifting eyes. Kate’s face was still worried and she squinted as she stared down the road.