The Passenger (Surviving the Dead) (6 page)

“No talking,” Ethan said, cutting him off.

The older man’s face darkened. “Now listen here-”

“Do you want to march the next mile with a fucking gag in your mouth? ‘Cause that can be arranged.”

“There ain’t no call for you to be talking to him like that.” It was the man Zebulon had identified as his nephew, Michael. He stood half a head taller than Ethan, with big, wide shoulders and a deep, booming voice. Ethan called out to Holland to hold up.

“I’m only going to say this one more time.” He stepped in front of the captives and gave them his hardest stare. “No. Fucking. Talking. Open your yaps again and I’ll wrap your faces with duct tape. Now move.”

The men remained silent as they forged on, but their anger was palpable. Ethan felt a twinge of regret at his harsh words, but he couldn’t afford to let sentiment affect his decisions. If these men were who they said they were, he could always
apologize later. If not, well … it wouldn’t much matter what they thought of him.

When they were about a quarter-mile away from where the U-trac had stopped, Ethan’s radio came to life.

“Foxtrot, Echo. Be advised, we have incoming. Repeat, we have incoming, over.”

Ethan
felt his heart lurch. “Copy, Echo. Living or dead? Over.”

“Dead. Very fucking dead, and lots of them. Coming at us from the east. You’d best circle around north and approach from that vector, but do it fast. If you’re not here in ten minutes, stand off and find shelter for the night. Over.”

“That many? Over.”

“More’n enough to moat us in. Over.”

“Copy, Echo. Foxtrot en route. Out.”

“Trouble?” Cole asked.

“Infected. Big horde of them closing in on the U-trac. Holland, come on back here.” Ethan gestured at Hicks. “Think you can get these men back to camp on horseback?”

Hicks
responded by stepping up and swinging easily into the saddle like he’d done it a thousand times. For all Ethan knew, maybe he had. Zebulon frowned; Hicks was sitting on his horse. Ethan let out a breath. “Okay then. Up you go.”

He and Cole helped the captives back into the saddle, two of them ridi
ng double on a big dappled mare and the last on a feisty looking Arabian. Ethan motioned for Holland to hop on behind the third hostage.

“Why me?”

“Because I’m not making Hicks lead the horses
and
watch the prisoners,” Ethan replied. “Your job is the latter.”

Holland frowned and muttered under his breath, but did as ordered. Once seated, he unsheathed his K-Bar and let the captive in front of him see it. “Just so you know, if you try anything…”

The man set his jaw angrily. “Understood.”

“Good.” Holland grinned and patted him
on the shoulder. “You and me are gonna get along just fine.”

Ethan turned to Hicks. “Head northeast to get around the horde, then circle back to the U-trac. We’ll get there as fast as we can.”

Hicks nodded once, then flicked the reins and turned his mount. The horse set off at a slow gallop, the others following behind on their tethers. Soon, they were out of sight, the sound of hooves beating against dirt fading into the darkening forest.

“Looks like it’s just you and me again, Isaac.”

The big man grinned and switched weapons, sliding the M-4 around to his back and giving his SAW a quick, practiced check. “Just like Singletary Lake.”

Ethan grimaced. “Don’t fucking remind me. Let’s get moving.”

The two soldiers set off at a quick jog. They hadn’t gone ten steps when a sudden, staccato cracking sound filled the air. They glanced at each other and quickened their pace.

Gunshots.

Never a good thing.

NINE

After the first few minutes of chasing that car, I couldn't help but feel some solidarity with the many dogs of the world. My body set out after the fleeing vehicle with as much enthusiasm as your average mutt, albeit slower. But much like the endeavors of our canine friends, the pursuit was doomed to failure.

The morning was clear and sunny, the kind of day your average person wouldn't mind taking a walk in. I would have been right there with them if the horde hadn’t come upon a town. For most of my time as a dead guy, I'd been walking in the woods, or at least rural areas. But a few hours after dawn, my swarm came to a little hamlet. Or maybe it was a village. Possibly both.

I joke because thinking about it too seriously only makes the whole thing worse. In the dead of night
, it's easy to forget just how far we've fallen. The cloak of darkness softens all the hard edges and makes the world a place that might have just run down on its own, so long as you don't stare at it for too long. In the harsh light of day, however, the facts were impossible to ignore.

The plague came suddenly, that I remember with perfect clarity. There wasn't a lot of space between the beginning of the violence and the total dissolution of modern society. You'd think it would have been a slower process in the sleepier parts of the world, but that was exactly the problem. When i
t became obvious some major-league shit was tumbling down, everyone had the same thought: Go to the little places. Find somewhere out of the way. Everyone knew of some one-horse town they'd been to as a kid, or where they rented a room at a bed and breakfast.

The thing
about the metropolitan majority is there were a whole fucking lot of us. Between us, we knew of virtually every place most city dwellers only rarely ventured to. The result was the rapid and cataclysmic destruction of small-town America. It happened faster than even the large cities. People had flooded places like the little town I was walking through, a sea of humanity that would have been an impossible burden even in the best of times, which these definitely were not. Everywhere I looked, bodies lay in piles.

Even though I was dead, with little movement of air through my sinuses, the stench still reached me. The image you might get is of neatly heaped corpses, just like living people
, but unmoving.

No. Not that. These were old and decaying, shredded and more rot than good flesh. Bones stuck out where animals and ghouls had worried the skin and muscle away. They were steaming p
iles of putrid meat, liquefying in a stew that only got worse over time. Not just a few of them either. They lay in numbers beyond counting. One particularly towering example had a snowplow parked halfway through it. Some survivor had scraped the dead off the street, leaving what became a dark brown streak of blood and shit and spinal fluid and God knows what else behind.

Cars were everywhere, like old pictures of Woodstock where traffic was backed up for a dozen miles. Many of them were wrecked, the dents and crumpled metal already browning to rust. The buildings were either vandalized or unkempt, not yet as decayed as the people or even the vehicles, but still on their way to a state that could only be thought of as post-civilization.

The grass was high, weeds invading every crack and crevice. I began to realize how much effort it took for human beings to impose their will on the world now that the gears had stopped turning. Nature, the other hand, was equally (if not more) determined to have her way. Green things crept across what appeared to have been a quaint little town, reclaiming it for the earth.

If there was a
ny better proof the world had ended, I couldn't think of it. As my swarm walked through the town, the overwhelming evidence of human suffering and tragedy reached a critical mass, like listening to music so loud that increasing the volume stops making a difference. At a certain point, the saturation reaches its maximum and you arrive at a state of rough balance. My mind couldn't turn away from what I was seeing, and forget about trying to get my body to do it for me. There was no escape.

It hurt, that walk. There is no better way to put it. I've never been the type to cry over ads on television begging me to feed the children, or adopt an abused animal. Like many, I built a careful little wall around myself that insulated me from the terrible facts of the wor
ld. Sad when you think about it, and worse when the practical application becomes clear: I was not in any way prepared for the drastic fall of humanity. There were no emotional calluses to protect me from the heat of experiencing it firsthand.

Then again, what could prepare anyone for what I was seeing? Maybe genocidal wars in far-off places, but short of that
, my mind went blank at finding a comparison. I would have cried if it had been possible, or turned way. But my body, ever focused on its next dining experience, had no soft points. No emotional reaction. Just a vague disdain for the wasted food around it and the implacable urge to feed.

I tried not to think about the loss each of those wasting bodies represented. Which of them might have been the next Einstein or Lincoln? Was the child whose spine my body ste
pped on meant to create great art? Write the quintessential American novel as so many people have tried to do? And even if none of the poor rotting souls close by had high destinies before them, so what? Each of them was a mother, father, brother, sister, son, or daughter. From the brightest practitioner of the most arcane sciences right down to the guy who worked the grill at my local burger joint, they were all human beings. Dreams and hopes and plans all wrapped up in a fragile body with infinite potential before them.

How huge a tragedy was it that so many people died like animals in the street? Pretty fucking enormous, to me at least.

Walking through the dead streets of a dead town that was only a slim fraction of a dead county in a dead state that comprised one fiftieth of a dead country in a dead world, I was hit with the realization that it was well and truly over for civilization.

There was a chance we could come back from this if enough
people survived to start again. I knew that. No matter how slim or weak, the possibility existed. But the fabric of what we'd been was gone. There was no going back, not ever. My generation and maybe that of my children would remember a world that could never exist again. No matter what came after, all of history no longer mattered. It was a clean slate or nothing.

Locked inside my head, I wept. My body did not care.

*****

Long hours later
, my body decided to have a rest. I don't know if it was from a lack of food or due to some other factor I was ignorant of, but I didn't question it. My muscles were no longer my own, my every movement the result of a nervous system not beholden to my whims, and the stillness gave me the illusion of control. If I wasn’t walking somewhere, I could pretend it was my urge to die driving me to stand motionless.

I
know self-delusion is unhealthy, but let’s be real. Long-term considerations no longer applied to me.

For a
while, I just enjoyed the day. Piercing sun, a sky more blue than any other I could recall—though I admit it might have been the idea that this day could be my last giving me that impression—and a breeze strong enough that even my dull senses could appreciate it.

Truth be told, I would have been thankful if a volcano had erupted a hundred yards away. Seeing the dead in t
hat little town and knowing my future wasn't much different created some perspective. Living like this forever was something my mind just wasn't equipped to handle.

Knowing
your days are short is awful, even if those days are spent trapped in the body of a nearly mindless killing machine. But worse, much worse, is the possibility you'll stay stuck that way. Because we humans are hopeless fools, I'm an optimist. Death was my only hope, but my determination to meet it only added to the sweetness of every moment between all the horrors. The town was enough to sour me on the idea of soldiering on, however small the urge had been. Having set my mind on reaching the finish line, I couldn't help squeezing every drop of life and meaning from even the dullest moments.

Hell of a time to become sentimental.

The rest of the swarm stopped with us, which took my illusions and twisted them up nicely before setting them on fire. Daylight was not kind to them, and as we stood in the middle of nowhere for no reason I could fathom, I saw what pitiful things those bodies had become.

Their flesh was withering, the pallor of death too obvious to ignore. Many carried wounds all the worse for being free of blood and gore, dry testaments to our unnatural state. Less poetic, some of those ghouls lacked limbs, faces, and in one case
, most of their midsection. Horrible to see, worse to think about, and ultimately as unavoidable as every other sight was for me.

Distant gunshots sounded again, a rapid double tap splitting the air a good distance away. The spacing of the shots rang a bell somewhere, and after a moment perusing my recent memories
, I realized I'd heard them before. The very first night after the clatter of many guns dwindled down, there were those two shots, exactly those. The memory was crisp for me, solid and clear. They were nearly identical in volume, texture, and timing.

Were we chasing someone?
Dim moments began to creep up on me. Those times when my awareness had been taken up entirely by the horrors around me, but my body went right on recording. I focused, and the recollections cleared enough for me to recognize it again, buried beneath my own remembered screams.

Those same damn shots.

The swarm lurched into action immediately, moving as one. My body’s three-dimensional hearing propelled it toward the sound, stoking the flames of its hunger. Intent as I was on the situation, I noticed for the first time all the strange signals I had taken for background noise. The constant hum of sensory data I'd been taking as interference between my active mind and my body.

Now that
I was looking for it, I knew it was anything but static. I felt my senses sharpen a little and realized they'd done so to a much larger degree the night before. I hadn't understood what was happening then—maybe it was lack of context, or maybe I wasn't wired to interpret it correctly—but my body didn't have that failing. I sifted through the input, analyzing and cataloguing, trying to better understand what my body was doing, but failed to discern anything enlightening. Finally, after hours of frustration, I turned my attention back to the matter at hand.

The repetition of thos
e gunshots seemed odd to me. As the miles passed beneath my feet, I wondered if the whole thing was just me trying to make sense of a senseless situation. Then, around noon, I heard them again. Still far away but clear as a bell, a repeat performance that realigned the swarm in a new direction.

Odd.