LZR-1143: Redemption (17 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

The door opens slowly
into a rancid room.

The furniture is overturned, as if in a hasty fight. A table sits on its side, magazines scattered across the floor.

The stuffing from an old leather couch lays across the area rug, dark stains leading away from the living room, toward the kitchen. Brown curtains stretch tightly across the windows, duct tape securing them to the walls so that no movement could be seen from outside the small apartment.

Blood is smeared on the walls. Claw marks on the door.

Food is rotting on the countertop.

A small cat decays in the corner, a bloody mass of fur underneath a jeweled collar.

I walk into the kitchen, following the blood. The smell is strong here.

The door to the bedroom beyond moves slightly, the light flickering as if something has passed before the window.

Still, I follow.

The doorway is silent, the bed beyond filthy and unwashed. Scraps of food litter the hardwood floor. Ten parallel scrapes on the floor trace trails from underneath the bed, pink ruffles at the edges a stark difference from the severity of the room.

The wood is splintered at the lock, and I run my hand over the damage. Handprints near the frame are crimson and congealed.

She is in the corner.

Just standing, still and silent.

She faces the corner, hands at her sides, fingers curling and uncurling reflexively.

I approach, because I know she can’t hurt me.

I approach, because I need to.

Her head moves slightly, cocking to the side. Blood mats her dirty nightgown, specks of gore interspersed with unicorns and fairies on a backdrop of pink cotton.

I pass the pictures on the nightstand. Her and Kate at the mall. At the beach.

In New York City.

I pass the window, and note the billowing curtains.

No need for secrecy here.

Not any more.

I reach out my hand, but she stays still.

Her fingers curl and uncurl. Curl and uncurl.

I touch her shoulder, pulling her around.

Her eyes move, and her head turns.

Everything goes black. Suddenly.

Hopelessly.

Thankfully.

“It doesn’t need to be this way,” she says, and I know her from a different time.

“How are you here?” I ask, knowing that she won’t answer.

“I’ll always be here,” she says simply, and I know it to be true.

“She’s just a girl.”

“You can go to her. It can be different.”

I want to ask how. I want to know why. I want… help.

But she is gone. And I am gone.

Back to darkness.

We both awoke midway through the night, and dressed quietly. I remembered the dream, but I didn’t speak of it. Nothing would be gained from that.

Gaffney was, of course, awake and speaking quietly with his officers. Rhodes had been allowed out of his confinement, and sat at the end of the command car, reading a magazine. He nodded once as we came in, then went back to his reading.

True ebullience, from him. I wonder if he was feeling punchy.

Gaffney dismissed a younger officer as we approached, and he stood up and nodded at Kate. I smiled.

“True chivalry, Major.”

He waved at the darkness that surrounded the cabin, clearly trying to refer to the larger world outside.

“When the world is going to hell on the express train—no pun intended—I suspect that the only thing that separates us from the savages is our manners.”

I grabbed one of the ever-present cookies from a bowl on the table.

Where did he get these things?

“Yeah, that and a few other things,” I said, turning to the dark windows, seeing the outline of several mountains in the near view, a thin river winding away into the darkness. The interstate paralleled the tracks here, and I marveled at it.

It was empty.

No cars.

No bodies.

No debris.

“It’s a big country out west,” said Kate, staring out the window behind me, hand resting on my shoulder.

“I guess so,” I said, staring at the highway.

“That actually brings up an issue,” said Gaffney. “We weren’t going to bother you with it, but since you’re here…” He handed me a printout on photo paper, and I looked down at it.

It looked like an aerial map of a mountain range, with thick lines following the topography—roads and train tracks, I surmised—complete with clouds in the foreground. I found the area he undoubtedly intended for me to see.

“How is this possible?” I asked, looking up and handing the paper to Kate.

“We’re not quite sure why they’re there,” he said. “But we’re not worried about the numbers. That’s why the train is such an asset. The sheer numbers can’t bog us down. We slow down, let the ram on the front and the plating on the sides keep them away from the wheels, and just grit our teeth and get through. It’s not pleasant, but it’s not a threat.”

Kate stared and then looked up at me.

Filling nearly a quarter of the visible map, where the interstate and the train tracks paralleled in a river valley on the western side of the mountain range, was another herd. A massive herd, nearly the size of the one besieging the Pentagon.

“But Major, unless my geography is way off, and it isn’t, this herd is only thirty miles from the Seattle suburbs. What’s going on?”

He shook his head and sat down heavily, filing the paper into a small manila file folder and sticking it into a nylon tactical bag.

“We’re not sure. We’ve got intel on a herd coming north from Portland and another coming south—most likely from Canada and collecting bodies in the towns north of the city. You saw Boise. It was almost empty. You saw the last town. Only one or two. They have to be going somewhere. We can only theorize based on aerial recon, but they are definitely banding together. Fast.”

I stared out the window again, marveling at the untouched beauty and the lonely highway.

They weren’t getting smarter, that was clear.

They weren’t getting faster. Or learning.

They weren’t developing personalities, or exhibiting any basic functions.

But they were clustering together. They were herding together over distances.

Which meant that they somehow knew. They somehow felt or saw or communicated. They somehow had a basic knowledge of their common existence.

We had seen this on smaller scales in Delaware and Washington. We had seen them move together and hunt and kill and flock together. We knew that they were herding.

But this. To see it happen across such great spaces, and in such long distances.

This was wrong.

This was very, very dangerous.

“Thanks for the heads up, Major. What’s the ETA on this herd?”

“About an hour,” he said.

“You gonna watch?” Rhodes’ voice was a gruff thunder from the booth, where he had discarded the magazine.

“Watch?”

“Some folks were gonna go up to the dining car. Watch the herd as we go through.”

I glanced at Kate and she shrugged.

“Sure,” I said, turning back to him. “We’ll see you there.”

Ky was waiting outside our small cabin when we returned. Another small girl was with her, maybe ten years old. Romeo was getting his ears rubbed with a look of pure elation on his face.

“This is Amanda,” she said, jerking a thumb at the girl.

“Hi Amanda,” I said, nodding and smiling. She stared at me as if I had two heads.

“She doesn’t talk. Her mom got eaten.” Ky’s voice was blasé and callous and I heard Kate’s voice catch in her throat.

“Ky, that’s not nice,” Kate said, forcing the smile.

“That’s okay,” she said, patting Romeo on the head as she squeezed into the cabin and plopped on the bed. “She knows she got eaten. She was standing there when it happened.”

“Well, Jesus, kid. That doesn’t make it better,” I said, turning to the girl. Amanda shrugged and followed Ky, probably drawn to her confidence and attitude.

“Where are you from?” asked Kate, sitting down across from the girl. She simply stared at Kate, eyes large.

“I’m going to head up to the dining car,” I said, watching the dynamic. I didn’t need to be part of this. I had done my community service for the week. For the year.

For the damn decade.

Kate nodded, and I closed the door. Outside the windows, the countryside flashed by in the moonlit darkness. The storms had passed, and the sky had taken on that special quality of clarity that only exists after the purifying effects of a rainstorm. I turned suddenly, changing course and finding the small retractable ladder that allowed access to the roof of the car. Each exterior access point had a small keypad next to it with the code written on the wall, intended to defeat only the slow, stupid and dead. Not the humans.

I read the code: 111.

Tricky.

The hatch popped open, and the sudden roar of air blasted into the cabin. An older woman who was passing through the cabin shot me a look of distaste and fear as she walked below me.

“Just checking the cable,” I said jauntily.

She walked faster.

“Humorless old goat,” I muttered, pulling myself up into the night air.

The roof of the car was riveted steel, with a small walkway up the center, interrupted only by the gun turret, complete with galvanized steel, and one-foot high hand holds. Clearly added after the train was converted to zombie apocalypse duty, it was nice to have the help as I crawled forward and sat down, legs crossed and enjoying the cold air on my face.

The river moved by on our left, and the empty highway still wound between the train and the water like a dark sentinel. The enhanced night vision was funny.

It wasn’t like the night vision you got when you slapped on a pair of goggles, with the weird reds and shadows. It was like everything was lit by a very faint light behind you, and no matter how dark it was, you could always make out the details. I put my hand on my side, reminded of my new… qualities.

My hand slipped under my jacket and over the peppered under-layer, passing the small holes and probing gently where the pellets had pierced the jacket’s thick lining between two plates. My fingers detected no wound, and my side didn’t ache. No soreness. No pain.

I sighed, zipping the jacket up against the cold, as the air washed past. Clean and cold, there was a purity to it that couldn’t be matched. Pushed down from the mountains and against the clear, rushing water of the river below, it moved through the ravine, oblivious of the death and destruction that affected mankind in the larger world. Oblivious of the warped creatures it blew past in its journey across the world.

It struck me then, that the new breed of humanity—this new evolution or termination or ultimate state of humankind—might just be us. It might just be what we were destined to be next. From Neanderthal to Mike McKnight, to flesh-eating zombie.

Why not?

Nothing but pure evolution dictated our progression. Nothing but the operation of science on mortal bodies. Why couldn’t this be what we were destined for?

Why couldn’t this be who we were supposed to be, in the end?

We plowed through the world, destroying these creatures, deriding and reviling them for everything they did, everything they wanted. We killed them as if they were nothing. We sought to annihilate them—indeed, precisely because they sought to annihilate us.

But they
were
us.

They were both who we were, and who we had become.

Maybe we were the ones who had been left behind.

We had a vaunted expectation of ourselves, mankind. We expected that our ultimate destination was greatness. That our ultimate right as human beings was perfection or some poetry of co-existence. But what made us so privileged? What gave us the right?

I stared at the rocky sides of the gorge as it passed by, the train grinding against the metal tracks, branches of nearby trees randomly brushing against the sides.

The rocks on the side of that river—rocks that we had blasted away in our search for progress as we built a road to take our scurrying forms back and forth to our important destinations—those rocks had more of a right to dominance of the planet, more of a right to be here. They had been here longer. They had proven they could survive. They were part of the earth.

We were not part of the earth.

We lived on it. And we survived by the grace of nature.

I watched, surprised as a single creature struggled weakly to emerge from a parked car on the shoulder of the interstate below.

We had no such right. We simply were.

And we lived at the pleasure of the earth.

I chuckled briefly, shaking my head. If I were listening to myself, I would zone out. If I were reading what I was thinking, I would skip ahead. It was all too morose. Too real.

It occurred to me that I was somehow processing my actions of the day. I was trying to rationalize my animal nature. My anger, and my terror.

But maybe I just needed to sit. Sometimes, a guy just needed to sit.

Seconds became minutes and minutes became an hour. My eyes were closed, and my mind was blank. In another circumstance, in another place, it might have been considered meditating.

In this time, on this day, it was sorting my shit straight.

It was a glorious reverie until my ear bud squealed loudly, and I plugged it in, eyes popping open.

“You coming to the dining car?” I checked my watch as Kate finished the sentence, cursing as I realized I was going to be late.

“Yeah, I’m coming,” I said quickly, crawling back toward the opening.

“Where are you?” she asked, voice confused as she heard the rushing of the wind in the microphone.

“Uh, the roof?” I said, suddenly ashamed.