CHAPTER 27
Amid the wreckage of the Red Man’s lunacy, Nate stood, letting the rain hit him full in the face. The zombies, an ocean of them, stretched out before him. They hadn’t seen him yet—he was still too far behind the rearmost of the crowd for that—but they would notice him soon enough.
Nate smiled grimly.
Somebody was moving through the standing ranks of zombies, coming toward him. It took a moment for Nate to recognize Doc Kellogg, but when he did, his grim smile turned warm.
“I thought you’d stopped coming around,” Nate said.
Kellogg cleared the last of the zombies, then half turned and gestured at the waiting army. “And miss this?”
“You think this is suicide, don’t you?”
“What do you call it, Nate?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”
Kellogg shrugged. “I call it stupidity, but . . .”
“You can do better than that.”
“Okay,” Kellogg said. “I think life is a struggle to test the fragility of man against the rock of the world.”
Kellogg had always talked like that. When they first started having their regular chats at dinner or in the lab, Nate figured the man was making fun of him. But it didn’t take him long to figure out that Kellogg simply wasn’t capable of talking any other way. He was as dense in his education as Nate was in his ignorance. There was a gulf between them, a gulf far wider than that between brilliant doctor and penitent criminal.
“Now you’re starting to sound like the Kellogg I remember, but I still don’t understand. I’m sorry. I don’t. I want to know what I’m supposed to do. I want somebody to draw me a picture. I need answers, not poetry.”
Kellogg nodded. The man was not without pity.
“I’m sorry, Nate, but there are no answers. No pat, easy ones at any rate.”
“So I go through life like one of those things out there?”
“No, not that either.”
“What then?”
“You have to answer for yourself what your life is worth. It’s a journey, Nate. Sometimes it’s an easy one. But sometimes it sucks too. Most of the time it sucks. That’s the kicker. You can be a coward, and never find out what your life is worth, or you can show some moral courage and come up with an answer.”
“And what if I find out my life ain’t worth shit?”
Kellogg had laughed. The rain went right through him. “There’s always that chance, though I suspect the harder you look for an answer, the less likely that that’ll be the case.”
“Thanks a lot, Doc.”
Nate looked past Kellogg for a moment, toward the field where the zombies stood waiting on the Red Man to tell them what to do.
He wasn’t like them at all, Nate realized. They stood and waited. But Nate, he moved.
Kellogg was gone. Nate knew he would be, just like he knew that this was the last time he would probably see the man.
He breathed out slowly, trying to calm the heart pounding in his chest.
“What is my life worth?” he murmured. “Time to find out.”
He took a step forward, and another after that. And soon he found himself closing the distance between himself and the rear guard of the zombie crowd.
Any second now.
Before he knew it the zombies were all around him. He could hear rain drops slapping against their clothes, all tatters and dingy gray. He could hear coughing, too, and that surprised him. In all his travels, and despite all the craziness he’d seen, he’d never seen so many of them all together, and so quiet. It hadn’t occurred to him that they still coughed, that they could be so like a congregation at church, all with their eyes turned to God. Or, at least, what passed for God in this wasted land. He passed a man with his mouth hanging open, rainwater dripping from his cracked and peeling lips. The woman just beyond him was twitching slightly, as though her body were being hit with a weak electric current. When frozen like this, they could almost seem human. Broken, but human.
Except for the smell.
This close, surrounded by them, not even the rain and the rich pungency of the river could mask the smell of their rotting wounds and the sour stench of excrement on their clothes. He had forgotten how bad so many of them together could smell.
Already the zombies around him were starting to stir, alerted to his presence. Their moans rose above the driving rain, and more and more were breaking ranks to follow him.
This is it, he thought, and quickened his pace.
In the distance, a muffled boom rolled across the river. The rain-streaked sky above the brown expanse of the water filled with a black, oily smoke. Nate wondered briefly what it might be, but the thought was gone as quickly as it occurred to him. All around him, zombies turned in his direction. He kept moving, threading his way through their ranks like a man trying to work his way up through a concert crowd to the front row. But his fear was mounting with every step. The energy of the crowd was turning inward, pulsing through the assembly like an electric current. It was always the same when they sensed a meal.
A woman, her legs bent and her face a rotting mess of abscesses and open sores, stumbled into Nate’s path. He huffed in surprise and only just managed to catch her by the shoulders, holding her snapping teeth at bay.
She groaned, her hands slapping at his elbows.
Grunting, struggling against the suddenness of her attack, he had a hard time tossing her away. He was off balance and falling over backward.
A huge man shambled toward him, his arms outstretched. Nate rotated, hoping that his old ankle injury from his high school track days wouldn’t choose this moment to blow out on him, and tossed the snapping woman into the man’s waiting grasp. To Nate’s surprise, the man fell on her and started feeding, pulling her apart with his teeth even as she kept her eyes on Nate and struggled to get back up.
Nate stumbled backward. Another zombie, this one a teenager in jeans and part of a Lakers basketball jersey, bumped him and shuffled past. The teenager fell on the woman. Several others joined them. She made no sound, even as they began to rip strips of flesh from her arms and back. Her head was thrown back, her neck exposed. Teeth found out the soft spot below the chin and a stuttering gurgle escaped her lips.
She stopped struggling after that, though her corpse continued to jerk and twist as the others pulled her apart.
Nate had never seen anything like that. This was something new, zombie attacking zombie. In eight years of wandering, he’d never seen them do that. The zombies continued to surge past him, falling on the corpse, opening her torso like the belly of a canoe.
Soon the tangle of bodies was the color of mud. He couldn’t tell one from the other. Not even the dead woman’s blood was visible in that orgiastic mass of writhing flesh. It was just mud and tangled limbs.
He turned away, back toward the platform.
Hundreds of dead, vacant eyes met his. His gaze darted from side to side. He pivoted in a circle, staring all about him. But the dead eyes were everywhere.
“Ah, shit,” he said.
Zombies surged toward him from every side. Nate swung the metal bar Niki had given him, but hands were already on him, clawing at his shoulder. The metal pipe was pulled away. He was bleeding, his shirtsleeve ripped away. He turned to run, but there were no open lanes through the mass of bodies. They tackled him, slipping on slimy ground. He tried to kick them away but his feet were mired in the mud, and when he went down they came down on top of him in a mass of limbs.
They pulled on his arms and legs, trying to get their mouths on him, but still he kept fighting. He rolled from one side to the other. He jammed his right knee into a man’s chin, knocking him back into the throng. The zombies moaned and surged forward, reaching for him. He pushed his way back to his feet, and for a moment he felt like he was moving with all the speed and confidence he’d possessed as a seventeen-year-old track star racing through the Pennsylvania woods. It was as though he’d never left the thrill of the run or the joy of knowing you still had more reserves deep inside.
A zombie reached for him and he threw it into the mud, stepping on its back as he hurtled through the crowd. The lacerations on his back and arms and face sizzled like splashes of hot grease against his skin, but they didn’t slow him down. He kicked and punched and shoved his way through, pushing the zombies into each other with strength he thought he’d lost long ago.
Four zombies grabbed his shirt and pulled him toward the ground. His swung his elbow, trying to knock their hands away, but one of them had its fingers tangled up in his shirt. The hand wouldn’t come loose. Nate raised his foot to kick the zombie away, but he lost his balance and stumbled. Another zombie slashed his cheek with its fingernails and blood flew into Nate’s eyes. He staggered again. The ground rolled beneath his feet and his arms pinwheeled as he fought to keep moving.
More zombies pulled on his clothes. He could hear them tearing. Nate lashed out with a wild punch, knocking a zombie down, but it wasn’t enough. He knew it wasn’t enough. The press of bodies was overwhelming now and a violent, claustrophobic panic surged through him. His heart was racing. He lurched to one side, throwing a shoulder into a zombie’s chest and bouncing off. Their hands kept reaching for him, pulling on him, turning him around. His foot slipped out from under him and finally his ankle couldn’t take any more.
He sagged to the ground.
Fingernails tore at his shirt, ripping it away, ripping into his skin, his ears, his lips. He screamed, but couldn’t find his legs. Every time he tried to stand, they pushed him down again.
Nate didn’t even feel the last shove, the one that landed him flat on his back.
He looked up, and saw a huddle of torn and snarling faces staring down at him, hands reaching downward.