The Passenger (Surviving the Dead) (18 page)

“Understood. I’ll look into it. Keep your radio handy, Sergeant. I want regular u
pdates. I’ll have someone contact you once your supply drop is inbound.”

“I appreciate that sir. Not just the drop, but all your help.”

“That’s what we’re here for, Staff Sergeant. Talk to you soon.”

“Copy. Echo L
ead out.”

TWENTY

Gideon gnawed on stale beef jerky as he led the swarm onward.

He didn't want the food, didn't even feel like it was a necessity, but the last dregs of self-awareness in him knew his body needed fuel. It would be nightfall soon, and for the first time in twelve hours of constant movement, Gideon questioned the need to move so far off the path.

At first, it
seemed logical. The road was a heavily traveled route for traders and merchants, after all. Even the end of the world wasn't enough to drive a stake through the heart of American capitalism. But after traveling for miles without spotting a single person, he began to wonder if he was on the right path. Had Gideon sobered up long enough to consider the situation clearly, he would have realized the road he walked on ran straight from Broken Bridge. The chances of anyone coming from there were slim to none.

Then
again, had he been thinking clearly, he wouldn't have been killing people.

S
teel City was close. Already, he could almost smell the blood, iron in his nostrils and copper on his tongue. He never
tried
to taste the blood, but there was always so much splattering around. Some always got in his mouth. After a while, he started to like it.

His desire to see the arrogant survivors brought low bordered on a need. There was no room left in him for pity or remorse, no hunger inside but to see bright futures snuffed out. If random chance could do it, why not him?

Another brief moment of lucidity tried to happen, but Gideon snorted a pile of powdered Meth from one dirty fingernail and cut that shit off fast. The muted flash of pleasure did
nothing to obscure the facts: He'd wasted most of a day with his meandering path toward Steel City. The swarm was close—dangerously so—and could hit the place in short order. The only problem was the sun shining overhead. The attack had to be at night, as were the others. Daylight gave the enemy the ability to see and move unhindered. Night created confusion, fear, and bred mistakes.

Below the kinetic rush of twitching muscles and trem
ors in his hands, Gideon was tired. A deeper man might consider it emotional exhaustion as well as physical, a mind tired of the death and destruction. But he wasn't that man. Nothing close to it.

With t
he swarm close behind, Gideon drifted into a nearby stretch of woods. He spotted a craggy wall where a section of forest floor dropped away from the side of a hill. Twenty feet up, a ledge jutted out. He checked to make sure the majority of the swarm was still with him, then pushed up a sleeve and slashed lightly at his forearm.

Blood welled up, a scarlet almost black against his mealy skin. Gideon wasted no time scaling the weathered stone, fingers slipping into cracks with manic surety. Thirty seconds later
, he sat on the ledge, feet dangling as he watched the swarm.

Dead faces gave him their undivided attenti
on. The hungry, vacant stares were like a thousand mirrors converging on him. As much as he hated people for their freedom to live, Gideon still found room in his heart to hate these things as well. Making them his weapon was a small victory, but he took no comfort in it. Watching them pine for his blood as the scent of it wafted down the cliff brought a sneer of contempt to his wasted face.

The sea of bodies below him wa
vered like prairie grass. He rolled onto his side, faced toward them, and tucked his legs onto the shelf. The motion of the crowd was hypnotic, making him drowsy as he watched. Something was off about it though. Some part of the pattern didn't match up. Just as he slid off into disturbed and fruitless slumber, it hit him.

One of them is standing still
.

*****

I watched Gideon sleep, which is actually creepier than it sounds since I'm a dead person. He fell off fast, like a soldier or prisoner would, no warning at all. I'd done my best to get close to him as the night transformed into day. I knew as soon as he showed up with another tank-busting weapon things were going to get bad.

Crazy people with rocket launchers. The math isn't hard.

I wanted to get closer, but the swarm had swollen to the point where even moving among them was nearly impossible. After Gideon climbed his perch and nodded off, I redoubled my efforts to connect with my body. If I wanted to get close to the bastard, I'd need more than the ability to point or turn my head. I already had some gross control over direction, but it needed refinement.

So I started by standing still. It was a lot harder than it sounds.

Living people manage their balance without much thought. The constant flex of muscles and tendons are motions so small we usually don't notice them. Dead people do the same, but with less control. It's messy and awkward, exaggerated and visible.

Bearing down on the endless sway of my body as we stood there, I let the rage out in a controlled release while concentrating on being motionless. To my great surprise, it worked. More than that, I
could feel my feet and legs. My mind tapped into my nervous system, making it possible to balance while standing still almost as if my body knew what was needed.

After a little while
, the effort grew tiring. I held it for as long as I could, finally releasing my hold and taking a breather. There was a certain feeling when I had control, a strange sensation like the rush you get when finally figuring out a tough math problem. After a short rest, I searched for that state of mind again, letting the anger build up and flow out.

There.
There
.

I moved forward. Not just my body, but both of us. The steps were halting at first, buffeted on all sides by the writhing dead. I moved with increasing confiden
ce, even managing to brush a ghoul out of my way as I walked. Such a simple thing to a living person, but so amazing to me.

I stood at the edge of the stone face, the scent of Gideon's blood wrapping around me like a warm blanket. It invaded my senses, the smell so powerful it transitioned into taste. The heady aroma sent waves of hunger through my body. It wanted the blood with a savage power that sent shivers into the reptile part of my brain.

Which was fine. I wanted it too, if for different reasons.

Night turned to day, and the sun was high overhead
when Gideon woke. By that point, I had walked the crowd several times. I watched him stretch, and groan, and strap on his weapons. I watched him fill his body with poison and grin madly as he scampered down. He tossed a fresh dash of blood down the cliff, then disappeared around the side of the hill and stayed gone until the sun was low in the sky, barely an angry red lump peering over the horizon. The horde remained where it was, locked in place by the scent of his blood. When he finally came back, he looked happier than ever.

“Come on you pieces of shit,” he said, smiling and clacking his sticks together.
“It’s showtime!” The horde obeyed, and I was swept along with them.

Dusk wasn't far off, w
hich meant whatever was going down was happening soon.

*****

Like the grand marshal of the world's worst parade, Gideon marched in front. Less than a mile from the gates, he felt the glorious rush of victory, premature but within his reach.

Steel City was an honest
name. The place was built on a trucking depot of some kind, the sort of place lost in a sea of steel shipping containers of every color and shape. Someone had the brilliant idea to build a wall with them, a huge triple-layered circle wide enough to house hundreds.

Casing the place was easy. He just hid
in a distant tree on a tall hill and sighted down the scope of his rifle. The front gate was huge and thick, perhaps too much for his stolen arsenal to handle. The possibility would have bothered him but for the smaller, thinner door cut into the heavier gate. He had watched the larger gate close but the smaller one stay open to accommodate foot traffic. Merchants and traders called on the place right up until dark, when the gates were all shut and sealed.

But even closed, that thin
, man-sized gate would pose no problem for his rocket.

Once through the main gate,
breaching the inner gate behind it would be easy. The bailey between the outer and inner walls was meant to be a killing floor, but the second gate wasn’t meant to stop swarms. During his first observation, the inner gate hadn't been closed at all. A fast enough assault with the element of surprise might net him a straight walk in, his thousand hungry soldiers at his back.

As he approached the town with his horde, the darkening
sky was overcast, blocking even the feeble light of the moon. There were only two lookouts, both perched atop the stacked container walls, lazing in lawn chairs. Gideon saw their outlines against the dark gray nighttime clouds as he approached ahead of the swarm. In his dark coat and clothes, ragged hair down around his face, he was all but invisible.

Two hundred yards. One fifty, then a hundred. The
lounging guards didn't so much as stir.

Gideon slowed from a sprint to a jog, coming within fifty yards. With a practiced motion
, he pulled the rifle around on its strap. Without thought, without hesitance, and utterly without remorse, he raised the weapon and sighted through its scope.

One shot, center mass, then a pivot to the second for a
repeat performance. Two cracks rang out into the night, the sharp slap of sound waves beckoning to the swarm behind. Gideon adjusted his sights, checked the targets again, and chuckled wetly. The angle was better than he thought; neither lookout had moved an inch. Now he had to move quickly; if more guards came, he’d have to stop and shoot them too. The monster inside him purred at the thought, which made him smile.

If it liked that little show, it was going to love what came next.

*****

A thousand bodies followed Gideon as he moved toward the target,
but I was closest. Constant practice had brought me to a marionette level of control, jerky but mostly functional. It took everything I had and I felt the waves of mental exhaustion building up behind the stone wall of my will, but I was committed.

I was starting to feel alive again. By that I mean the normal sensations of having a body of my own were returning, not just
the sensory data. I didn't feel like a helpless passenger any more. My body was beginning to respond on instinct. Little things, but as I stoked the fires of my emotions to maintain control, I felt that same harmony eating away at me. My body reacted to me, took in part of me, but I was experiencing the same. The hunger gnawed at my belly, not at all revolting. The primal urge to tear Gideon apart made my fingers twitch, and bound together with my own desire, it was a force nearly too powerful to control.

Almost.

While it was difficult, the sense of joining with my body was also empowering. Movement came more naturally, I felt stronger, and I was even gaining on Gideon as he slowed down from a full run to a full stop. I stalked closer as I watched him fire his rifle. My enhanced hearing picked up the dark laughter following the kills.

Well … w
hat I thought were kills, anyway.

The noxious scent of burned cordite should have been followed with the rich tang of fresh blood. I couldn't see the victims, but Gideon's reaction could only mean the guards above were dead.

Yet as I approached, I smelled nothing.

The monster ahead of me looked through his sights once more, unaware
that the monster behind him moved faster than his brethren. I was fifty feet away, then thirty, then fifteen. Nearly close enough to leap on him, were I capable of it. Close enough to catch every vagrant smell polluting the air around his body. The stink of his unwashed flesh mixed with old death and the rot inside him, probably from the drugs.

Then he moved, hopping to his feet and darting forward another fifty or sixty feet
. This time he stopped but stayed standing, reached behind his back, and shouldered the rocket launcher. The sense of glee from my body mirrored itself in my brain as I drew closer.

I would get him this time, no question.

Logic stepped in and turned the knob on my self-preservation instinct up to eleven. A brief struggle for control followed, my weary brain wrestling with my own desires and those of my walking corpse. If we kept moving forward, we would likely catch on fire from the belching gas and flames soon to bathe the area behind Gideon.

In my panicked haste
, I defaulted to logic, screaming inside my own head about the danger. My body couldn't have given less of a shit about that. It wanted what I wanted, and didn't understand my frantic sense of alarm.

So I yanked the valve off my fear and blasted the emotion out as loudly as I could, raw and unfiltered. That, combined with the simp
le direction to go left,
now
, was just enough to make it happen. As Gideon settled the weapon in place and aimed, I swerved a few feet to one side and stopped. The rest of the swarm would be on us soon, chewing up the yards even now.