The Living Dead 2

Thin Them Out by Kim Paffenroth, R. J. Sevin, & Julia Sevin

Kim Paffenroth is the author of the zombie novels Dying to Live and Dying to Live: Life Sentence. A third volume in the series is due out later this year. Paffenroth is also the editor of the anthologies History Is Dead and The World Is Dead. A new novel, Valley of the Dead is due to come out around the same time as this anthology.

Julia and R. J. Sevin are the proprietors of Creeping Hemlock Press, which launched its own line of zombie novels this summer with Kealan Patrick Burke’s The Living. Together, they are the editors of the Stoker-nominated anthology Corpse Blossoms, and individually they have each published fiction in Fishnet, Postcards from Hell, War of the Worlds: Frontlines, Cemetery Dance, and the anthology Bits of the Dead.

All of George Romero’s zombie films-Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, etc.-feature at least one character who spends the entire movie being shrill and obnoxious and totally impervious to reason. In Night it’s Harry Cooper, who is crassly possessive of the presumed safety of the cellar. In Day it’s Captain Rhodes, the unreasoningly aggressive military commander.

When author Carrie Ryan-whose story you just read if you’re reading the book in order-saw Night of the Living Dead for the first time, she thought it was stupid: The characters are in so much danger, but rather than working together they spend the whole movie bickering with each other in a pointless way. But then someone explained to her that that was the whole point: Romero was saying that this is what humanity is-that we’re doomed by our inability to just get along with each other even in the face of life-or-death challenges. After that, she completely changed her mind about the movie. “This made the film absolutely brilliant to me,” she said.

In the face of current calamities-global warming, economic collapse, AIDS, overpopulation-to which humanity’s response has been mostly just a lot of pointless political sniping, Romero’s warning seems more pressing than ever, and our next story is another that plays with the idea that interpersonal drama can be an even bigger problem than zombies.

He was on his back, looking up at the sky.

He felt a little cold, but overall not too bad. Hearing sounds to his left, he turned his head. Another person stood nearby, eyeing him. Her face, hands, and arms glistened red, and she held something pink in her hands, which she raised to her mouth. Slurping sounds followed, then she wiped her hands on her dress.

He sat up and examined himself. He too was covered with red. He tried to say something, but all that came out was something between a roar and a moan. The red lady returned the greeting, so he thought she might be friendly after all.

He pulled aside the tatters of his shirt, and found a large hole in the middle of him. That must be where the cold was coming from. He reached into the hole and felt around. Mostly it was squishy, but nearer the back, there were hard parts, too. He thought the hole looked nice, all colorful and mysterious, and he thought it might be useful, as a place to put things. But he couldn’t think of anything he had to put there.

He stood up and took a step toward the red lady. The stuff on her neck wasn’t shiny and wet, like the stuff on her mouth and hands, but all caked and dark. Even so, she looked very pretty. The sun made her blond hair shine, where it wasn’t matted with the red stuff. He tried to touch her hair, but she growled and pulled away.

After a while, they both sat down on the pavement. She still wouldn’t let him touch her hair, but she did let him hold her hand. There was a big, shiny metal band around her wrist. That looked nice, too.

He looked around. A large blue sign nearby read WELCOME TO LOUISIANA. Another sign, not far from that one read, simply, I-55. He didn’t know what either sign meant, but somehow he did.

There was a roar, and a metal thing on wheels stopped near them. The people who got out of the wheeled thing didn’t have red stains on them. They weren’t missing any parts. They were whole, but he didn’t like the way they looked. They looked ugly and plain. They also had ugly, dull metal things in their hands. The ugly people smiled and laughed and pointed, then the dull metal things roared louder than the wheeled thing had. He fell on top of the red lady, laying there till he heard the wheeled thing roar off.

Sitting up, he found she no longer pushed his hand away, but she also didn’t move. This made him sad. He took the metal band off her wrist. Now he had something to keep in the hole in him.

The other people had seemed much happier and more satisfied by what they did, and he wondered if he could ever be whole like they were. He doubted it. But sitting there in the fading light, running his dead fingers through such luminous blond hair, he didn’t feel completely empty, either.

“Okay.” Zach brought the Jeep to a halt. “We’re on foot from here.”

To his right, Ted grunted something and the two men hopped out. In the back seat, Wayne looked at his gun and wondered if he should have shot them both as soon as Zach threw the vehicle into park.

The opportunity passed, Wayne stepped from the Jeep and into the early morning light. Not even nine o’clock, and already the Louisiana air was cloying. The interstate sliced through a dense pine forest. They’d stick to the shade for as long as they could.

At the rear of the Jeep, they suited up: backpacks stuffed with supplies (in case they got separated and were unable to return to the Jeep), gloves, hinged face-shields, filtered dust masks, and wooden baseball bats. There was also a furniture dolly, for boxes. Wayne grabbed it.

“Cars are tight here,” Zach said, real low. “Keep quiet and watch your asses. If you get bit, I’m calling the Doctor.” He patted the.357 Magnum on his right hip. The bastard had actually painted it white. There was a small red cross on the grip. A.40 Taurus rested beneath each arm.

“What if you get bit?” Wayne asked, grabbing a bat.

“Then I’ll see the Doctor.”

“That one is mine,” Ted said, pulling the bat from Wayne’s hand. His dark eyes, darting leftrightleftright, resembled empty zoetropes. There was more than a little crazy there.

“Oh-kay.”

“It’s the marks right here.” Ted pointed at some deep gouges in the business end of the bat. “That’s how I can tell. This is the one I always use, it has the marks.” He turned and trotted off.

Wayne looked at Zach, who nodded once and walked away. Wayne grabbed another bat, slipped it through a loop on his belt and, pushing the dolly, followed them onto the interstate. Since their little community of survivors had come together four months ago outside of Baton Rouge, they’d searched over forty miles of I-12. They now moved along the choked northbound lanes of I-55, and were less than fifty miles away from the Mississippi border.

Zach and Ted walked shoulder-to-shoulder two paces ahead of him, chuckling over stories they’d told each other several times before. They’d been buddies before the outbreaks, and it didn’t seem fair.

Wayne didn’t have any real friends among the three-dozen men in the warehouse. Ian was trustworthy enough but pretty unpleasant to be around, always talking about needing pussy, always picking at his ears and nose and fingernails and scalp. You’d think with a perpetual hygiene jones like that, he’d smell a little better than he did. Then there was Sue, who he hardly knew, really. It was hard to talk about things now in any normal way, but he guessed he wasn’t really interested in her religion or her favorite music, anyway.

But goddamn Ted and Zach went on chatting about the Saints and the niggers and the fucking Waffle House like any of it still mattered. Scanning the area for dead folks, Wayne wondered again if he should just pull his piece and pop each of them in the back of the head. He wondered if he could.

“That one there,” Zach said, indicating an 18-wheeler a few hundred feet away.

“What about those?” Ted was talking about the four smaller delivery trucks between them and the semi. “Could be some good shit in there.”

“Could be. Probably is,” Zach said. “But we try the big truck first. Find what we need and get the hell out of here.”

Wayne looked around. No movement anywhere, only cars and trucks bumper to bumper for all-time, some of them unscathed, some blackened and twisted, others glass and steel tombs whose misshapen and sun-baked occupants watched soundlessly as the three men strode between them.

It would be so damn easy now. A little later, and he’d lose his chance to get the drop on them. The whole thing could fall apart. And if his suspicions were true-if the last five guys to die on supply runs with Zach and Ted had been popped to keep rations fat back at the warehouse, couldn’t they already have the drop on him? Could he be walking toward his execution?

“Slow day,” Wayne said. Ted grunted again.

“The fuck you talking about?” Zach asked. Wayne could hear the disdain in his voice.

“None of them around yet.”

“Yeah,” Zach said. “So far so good, I guess.”

About twenty feet from the semi, Zach cursed. The loading door was partially open, and the ground around the truck was littered with rusted and broken kitchen appliances-toasters, blenders, indoor grills-sitting among the faded and disintegrating remains of cardboard boxes. They lifted the door and peered into the trailer. The boxes near the door were weathered and rippled. Toward the back, they were intact, their contents as useless as the trailer in which they sat.

“Okay,” Zach said. None of them were surprised. “We’ll go back and check the smaller trucks, and then we’ll-damn.”

“What?”

“Here we go.” Zach nodded in the direction from which they’d come. A few hundred feet away, a lone form shuffled toward them.

“Ah, jeeze,” Ted said. He scampered onto the cab of the semi, shielding his eyes and scanning the area. “Three more. Half a mile or so north.”

“No problem,” Zach said.

“Just stumbling around-they don’t know we’re here yet.”

“Good. Now get down before you fall and break your fucking leg. I’ll leave your ass, I swear.”

“I got this one,” Wayne said, leaving the dolly and walking toward the slowly moving corpse. Fifteen feet away from the thing, he stopped. He smelled it through the dust mask. In a van to his right, what had once been a small boy of no more than three years watched him from its car seat. Desiccated hands pawed at the restraints. There was no one else in the van.

The other thing was closer, but not by much. It was a slow one. Its flesh was purplish-black and swollen, and its massive, rigid stomach was split down the middle like a tomato rotting on the vine. Its gaze rarely rose from the ground, and it seemed unable to lift its head. Its eyes lifted in its sockets and found Wayne. It tried to grunt, hands twitching at its sides and trembling upward. Wayne pushed down his face-shield and lifted the bat.

Three blows, and the corpse went down, its head a lumpish black sack. Wayne walked to the van and opened the door. A dry yelp escaped the dead kid’s drawn lips. He placed the blunt end of the bat to the side of the child’s head and pushed. It didn’t take long.

There was a Batman action figure on the floor of the vehicle. He picked it up and placed it in the child’s lap. Saying nothing felt wrong, but nothing he could think of sounded appropriate. As he shut the door, he noticed two cases of water in the back of the van along with several unmarked boxes. He went around back and checked them. Each contained various canned goods, as well as several packs of pasta and ramen. Whoever had left the kid had been in a hurry.

He looked around. No walking corpses, no sign of Zach or Ted. They’d moved on, taking the dolly with them.

Wayne removed the face-shield and wiped sweat from his brow. He plucked a bottle of water from the van and, pulling the dust mask beneath his chin, downed it. His heart raced, and just like that, the silence and the heat were almost too much. He felt alone and small, and he wanted to be with Zach and Ted, even if they were maybe going to try and kill him today.

Wayne tucked three bottles of water under his arm and walked until he saw Zach and Ted. They were standing at the rear of an unmarked truck that had stalled in the wildly overgrown grass beside the freeway.

Ted looked back and smiled. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said.

Wayne handed them each a bottle of water and let what he was seeing sink in: pallet upon pallet of military rations, the kind he and his family had lived off of in the weeks following Katrina.

Wayne said, “Damn.”

“Yeah,” Zach said. “Damn.”

There were hundreds of boxes, each containing sixteen complete meals. From what he could see, several pallets toward the back were piled with cases of bottled water. The same stuff as in the van.

“See that,” Ted said. “FEMA is good for something after all.”

“Okay,” Zach said, all business. He hopped into the truck, ripped away the thick plastic wrap securing the boxes to the pallets, and began tossing boxes down to Ted and Wayne.

The dolly held five boxes. Wayne pushed it back to the Jeep, walking behind Ted and Zach, who each carried one box.

The first trip was without incident.

On their second run, Ted got a chance to use his bat. The thing that clambered like a lizard out of the forest was naked, creeping around on the ragged stumps of its arms and legs. No ears, lidless eyes, lipless mouth. Ted enjoyed putting it down.

“Damn,” Ted said on their third trip to the truck. He knocked back a water bottle and belched. “Can we start the truck? Maybe move it or something?”

Zach stared at him for a moment, blinking, his face glistening with sweat. Dark stains seemed to emanate from the guns beneath his armpits. “Yeah, Ted,” he said, half-grinning and nodding. “Sure. But first we have to clear out all these pine trees, maybe cut a path all the way to 190.”

“I don’t know,” Ted said, shrugging. “I was just saying.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay. Moving on. We need to load up what we can for now and come back tomorrow with the truck. We’ll get Seth to-”

Somewhere nearby, a dead thing howled, long and mournful.

“Aw, crap.” Ted said. “Where the hell is that coming from?”

“There,” Wayne said. Not far from where he’d encountered the first corpse of the day, another form stood. It howled again, louder and longer. There was urgency in the thing’s voice.

“Oh, shit,” Zach said. Here and there, the creature’s call was answered. “Not good. Run.”

They ran, their bats raised and ready. On either side of the interstate, the walking dead emerged from within the cool confines of the forest. Soon there was a chorus.

They overtook the howler. Not slowing, Ted took a swing at it. He missed, staggered, and almost fell, dropping the bat, and then the Jeep was in sight. Zach leaned against a tree, winded. Ted bent over, his hands on his knees, panting.

“You not going back for your bat?” Wayne asked, his back to the Jeep.

“Why the fuck would I do that? There’s like six more in the back of the Jeep,” Ted said, and Wayne shot him in the face, blowing away most of his jaw. Ted dropped, mewling and clutching at where his chin used to be. Blood poured between his fingers.

He should have shot Zach first-Zach was always more on the ball and now he was just gone, dropped from sight. “Shit,” Wayne said, and Zach appeared from behind a tree and started firing the Tauruses.

Wayne got the Jeep between himself and Zach. From all sides, the dead closed in.

You knew it was a real shit day when killing the class cat was the high point.

That was the first thing Sue did in the morning, and her mood had not improved. Mr. Stripestuff had been pretty sickly for a while, was probably fifteen years old and going blind, and there was no way anybody in the warehouse would take adequate care of him after she left. She hoped they’d have a little more compassion for the kids she’d be leaving behind, but deep down she doubted it.

She let him lick the scraps from a can of tuna mixed with a packet of old government-issue powdered creamer and a couple of crushed Tylenol PMs. Then she laid him in her lap and petted his head for a while, then she put a towel over his face, and a plastic bag over that. She thought not about how she should just set him free, but how slim his odds were out there. She was doing him a favor, but it wasn’t easy for either of them. She was gentle, gentle as she could be while getting the job done, and she laid him in his bed for the class to find.

They were on lockdown and Sue couldn’t get downstairs to the trash in the night. She had no place to stash Stripestuff in the couple of upstairs offices where the orphans lived every minute. In the daytime, the kids-the non-orphans at least-got into everything, even downstairs where they were supposedly not allowed. Might as well make the discovery foreseeable and respectful. Educational, too, she thought, wondering if maybe she was getting a little teacher in her after all. Then again, each and every one of these kids had already seen death firsthand in unimaginable manners and quantities. What could they learn from a cat? Her smile evaporated.

The class-such as it was, twenty kids spread over ages three to ten, being overseen by a clerk and a dental assistant, whose only qualifications were that they looked like teachers, both being middle-aged females-found him in his bed, having passed peacefully in the night when they assembled at eight. After a little death-lesson-cum-ceremony by Sue, they interred him by wrapping him in plastic sheeting and throwing him out one of the second-story windows into the piles of red earth of the unfinished construction site next door. The plastic came partly unraveled and the cat fell a little short of the dirt, landing on the warehouse’s own blacktop. What could you do but pull the shades? The kids mostly cried or moped, but not Jayson, which just confirmed everything Sue felt about him.

He was just lucky he wasn’t an orphan.

“I’m hungry!” the little animal yelled, and Sue nearly lost it right there. Everyone in the warehouse had eaten carefully meted crackers and peanuts for lunch, for Christ, and this little fatty was the only one bitching about it. One of the oldest kids in the group but stupider than the youngest by half.

Sue took a breath and, clutching it inside her, strode past the other children to grab Jayson by his filthy collar and hiss in his face, “You. Are. Not. A good. Child.” That made her smile a little bit, and she set him down.

“I hate you!” he shrieked, with his horrible little nubby teeth and his filthy face. “I’m telling my dad!”

That made her smile even more. She reached down and pinched his cheek hard, harder, keeping in the thing that she wanted to growl, that Jayson’s father was part of the reason Jayson was hungry. Every time that asshole went out on runs, the truck came back half-stuffed with liquor, and all the guys cheered, not considering that a few cases of saltines and applesauce only went so far.

Another child said it. “I’m hungry.”

Sue turned, feeling revived. “I told you, Leticia, there’s no food yet. We’re waiting for the supply run to come back.”

“When are they gonna be here?”

Sue looked to Patty, the dental assistant, the other woman who passed for an elementary-grade teacher in the upper-level conference room of this welding and steam-fitting warehouse. In truth they were babysitters at best. Patty was at least slightly more experienced, having had a daughter until the outbreak. She had a dozen new lines on her face this week and seemed a little stoned, with her eyelids not quite reaching the tops of her broad pupils.

“Well,” Sue said, leaving Patty staring at the wall, “they were supposed to have been back a little while ago. For lunch.” It was quarter past one. “My guess is, they found a really nice grocery store or something, and they took their time, and they’re almost back now with a truck full of cookies and spaghetti and tuna. How does that sound?”

Some of the younger kids gave out a little “yay” chorus. Then they were all back to doodling on their math sheets or punching at their board games.

Sue hated them. Most of them. Wayne said there was only room for eight people on the Jeep, a couple more if the kids were little.

Sue had eight orphans in her class and eleven children of other adults holed up in the warehouse. She didn’t have to worry about the eleven, but with her and Patty not minding them during the day or sleeping on pissy mattresses with them in the classroom at night, the orphans were as good as dead.

Pushing it, pushing it, she and Patty could maybe bring five kids. That meant she had to eliminate three.

Obviously, she should have done this before noon but her hangover was still wearing off then.

She scanned the pitiful crowd. It was easy enough to gravitate toward the younger students, the kindergarteners whom life hadn’t yet broken, but that just made them a liability. It meant Sue would have to be the one to watch or assist the breaking.

Devon, a four-year-old black kid, gave out a horrible snorking cough, the apparent culmination of some symptoms that had been dribbling out of him all day and a validation ticket for some thoughts Sue had been having on the subject. She sighed thanks. Goodbye, Devon.

Sue sidled over to Patty and whispered. “I’m thinking we take Leticia, Morgan, Shawn, and Greg. They’re all over six…for the last one, it’s between Sophia, Sarah, and Avery. What do you think? Sarah’s youngest but she’s got it together, listens well.”

Patty grunted.

“That’s all we can take. Five is a lot even for two of us to wrangle, out…on the road. Christ, Patty, say something, we have to-”

“Wha?”

“You have to pick: Do you want Sophia, Sarah, or Avery? Devon’s got that horrible cough. It seems serious. All we need is for the kids to all get sick.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Yes, you can, Wayne and Ian have it all planned out. We can’t stay here forever.”

“I can’t pick them, I’m not going.”

“You’re not making sense. We’ve been talking about it for a week. Christ, we’ve all been thinking about it for a month, ever since Ian said Seth wanted to quit doing rescue runs and stick to supplies. You can do this. We have to do it. The warehouse is a dead-end situation. Picking the kids-that’s all hypothetical anyway, if Wayne can come back with hard proof that Zach and Ted are murderers, then maybe Seth will see that we all have to go.”

“Of course I’ll go if we all go. But if he doesn’t, if Seth wants to stay, I’m not just…I’m not just going to leave, it’s too dangerous. I’ll stay here with the kids. There’s food-”

“No there isn’t!”

“Usually, usually there is. There’s protection…” Patty said. “Seth keeps things running here pretty well.”

Sue rubbed her face. “Ohhh, my god. You really believe that, you’d really rather stay.”

“It doesn’t matter, I can’t leave any kids. None of them… none of them deserve that.”

“Shhh!” So that was it. It was a goddamned mother thing. Sue stole a look out the window; no Jeep yet. “Sweetie, Brandy’s gone, you can’t help her. Let me put it to you this way: What would Brandy want you to do? She’d want you to do the thing that was best for everyone, right? Well, staying isn’t good for anyone. This is a place for dying. Think about Plaquemines Parish. Did you ever take Brandy down to Port Sulphur? Did she like it? Well, it’s great, that area, you can grow just about anything, fish, shrimp, it’s breezy… Think about the kids that are here.”

“I am.”

“Think about them growing up here, in this building. They’re not even going to last long enough to grow up. They’re going to starve here.”

“No…they’re exploring I-55, there’ll be something up there.”

“Bullshit. There’s fewer men practically every week to do that, and you know why. You want to do something good for these kids, pick which ones we can take and let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Now Patty was weeping. Jesus, what a drama queen. “You don’t have to take any, if you want. I know you don’t really-”

“All right, all right.” She squeezed Patty’s shoulder and peeked out the window again. “I’m taking the four I said I’d take, and then Sarah, with or without your sorry ass.” She smiled as she said this, realizing that some kids’ eyes were on her.

That woke Patty up. “You can’t. You can’t possibly manage five kids…”

“I can and I will.” Her face was getting warm but she anchored the smile. “Watch me. I’m making this shit happen. I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna stay here and rot-”

“Sarah’s too little, leave her-” and then Sue stopped hearing. She must have been hyperventilating, because her head felt hot but her mouth felt cold. She ran her fingers through her hair and left the room, went for the stairs. She looked down into the main warehouse area, fully lit now by the afternoon sun through the skylights.

Wayne was downstairs. How did he get here so quietly? She didn’t see a Jeep. He was already talking with Seth, who had on his stained pink shirt and striped tie, like he was still middle management.

Sue ran down the rattling iron stairs.

“…both of them,” Wayne was saying.

Seth nodded gravely and looked up at Sue. She had her mouth open but something in Wayne’s eyes told her to shut it.

“Bad news, Sue: Zach and Ted are dead. Call everyone around.”

The manager’s office bathroom was the only real private room in the warehouse. That’s where Sue waited for Wayne after the meeting, drinking a long-hoarded Abita beer, playing with the candles on the rust-stained toilet that could no longer be used, fixing herself up as best she could in the mirror. Finally, he came in.

“What happened out there? Where’s the Jeep?”

“Shh,” he said.

“They tried to kill you, didn’t they? Why didn’t you tell Seth?”

“I…not really. Maybe they were going to.”

“Maybe? What did Seth say? Will they come?”

“I didn’t put it to them, I don’t think that’s wise.” Wayne put his hand on the wall behind Sue.

“What, we’re just going? Just us, no caravan?”

He dropped his arm. “Seth can’t be trusted.”

She stamped her foot. “How are we going to make it anywhere without that kind of backup, Wayne?”

“Do you hear me? I don’t trust Seth anymore. I don’t think Zach and Ted were acting alone. I think it came from higher up.”

Sue leaned back against the wall. “They did try to kill you.”

“Well, they didn’t get a chance.”

“The dead got them first.”

“I got…you know, I went ahead and shot them.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“I was scared, I kept thinking about the plan, I don’t even know if we were right anymore. I panicked.”

“Shh, it’s okay.” She put a hand on his chest. “You were right, you were right, just like we planned, just a little different. And it’s good you told Seth and all that they were killed by the dead, that’s fine cover, you did good.”

“I don’t know…I worry that they, that Ted or Zach, might…”

“What?”

“Might wander back here, I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“You didn’t finish them?”

“I don’t know!”

“Christ, Wayne. You’re unbelievable, that could really be-”

“Shut…just, be quiet. Listen.” He held her wrists to her chest but she didn’t like the maneuver and pushed back away from him. “Go talk to Patty, get the kids’ stuff ready so we can go. I’ll talk to Ian.”

“Ugh. Where’s the Jeep, anyway? How are we leaving?”

“It’s four blocks from here, loaded up with MREs and water.” Her eyes went wide. “Don’t freak out, just get the shit ready, tell Patty so we can go.”

“We’ll have to walk?”

“A little ways, yes. It’s no real problem.”

She swallowed then, leaned against his chest and whispered, “Can we just go now, forget the kids?”

“No. The kids.” Now he pushed her away. “The kids are half the damn point, Sue.”

“What do you care. You don’t even know their names,” she said. “Patty’s not coming.”

He sighed. “Whatever. Just get everything together, keep it quiet, don’t spook anyone. Give me that beer. We’re leaving at daybreak. Get some sleep.”

She left the bathroom and headed upstairs, shaking and wondering if she could sleep: tomorrow would start no better than today had. In the classroom/orphan bedroom, she stepped over the mattresses in the dark and just grabbed clothes from unwashed piles as she passed, stuffing them into a backpack, trying to get things for the ones she’d decided on but just not entirely sure, in the dark, with this pitiful flashlight. Children slept like the dead. Patty was asleep on the floor. Devon breathed and it sounded like a greasy drain gurgling. The shoes: she had to be sure of the shoes. She put the correct pair next to each child’s head. Morgan, Leticia, Greg, Shawn, Sarah. These were the ones; she could help these ones.

Sue had just fallen asleep when Wayne woke her up to say the dead had found the warehouse.

The sun vanished, and others like him emerged from the forest. They shambled by, paying him little mind, some marred and broken and beautiful beyond expression, others as plain and dull and ugly as the laughing ones with the roaring metal things and the wheels.

The night was cool and damp. When he tried to breathe, the air felt empty and used up. It had nothing to give him. Fortunately, he needed nothing right then-nothing physical, at least. He could just sit there, oblivious and unknowing.

Unknowing, but not unthinking. His mind was a blur of images and feelings-people and places and things, and all the emotions they evoked in him. Several times in the long night, he clutched at his head and rocked back and forth, moaning, because the thoughts hurt him.

It wasn’t that they were all images of violence or terror-very few of them were, in fact. The pain was from the cacophony of his mind, for all the images and feelings came at him without order, logic, or connection. He could not choose what he would think, or even pick from among a certain set: he could not call forth thoughts-he was only assailed and bombarded by them, and the assault seemed as painful as any kind of physical torture.

He lacked words for most everything that passed through his mind, and that contributed more to his mental anguish. Without labels or categories, even pleasant feelings seemed disorienting and disappointing, for he could not understand or explain his pleasure. And this pain was increased by his inability to hold on to anything, or to anticipate what thought or feeling might come next. Instead, he was constantly subject to the whim of some unknown force inside or outside himself.

When he could calm himself enough to observe and not be tormented by his mind, he noted that one person appeared repeatedly in his thoughts: a young girl with blond hair and fair skin. Her age and looks varied in his different thoughts of her, but he recognized her as the same girl. She was surrounded by different people, in various clothes, often outside among trees and flowers; in many thoughts she was making a happy sound with her mouth that he tried to duplicate, but could not, but the memory of it still gave him joy and contentment. But his contentment was disturbed, because he could not understand her connection to him or why he should think so much of her. He did not know her name. His inability to articulate or specify who she was increasingly oppressed and confounded him, till he let out his second loudest and longest moan of what seemed an endless night.

The longest and loudest wail came from him a couple hours later, when an even more fundamental deficiency tore at what was left of his mind and soul. He realized shortly before dawn that he could not name or understand his feelings for her. Seeing her with his mind’s eye was a pleasant experience: it was not fear or pain or anger, for example-feelings of which he seemed to have retained a better, fuller conception. It was not a need or hunger, exactly, even though he intensely wanted to see and hear the girl again. But his wanting her was not the same as the physical thirst and hunger that wrenched his insides from his throat to his abdomen and twisted them into a knot of burning pain and grasping desire. If anything, thinking of her made him forget about his broken, torn body. It made him forget himself entirely and think only of her, and what she might need or feel or want.

It seemed all the more imperative to know what such a self-annihilating feeling might be called, and what might be expected of one who felt such a thing so intensely. As any understanding of this feeling seemed completely beyond the grasp of his damaged mind, he loosed a cry to the uncaring stars as long and piercing as any sent forth from a living man as he died, forsaken and alone. The fact that he was already dead only seemed to increase his loneliness and separation from anyone or anything that might ease his pain.

As the orange orb of the sun pushed up above the tops of the cool forest around him, the light soothed him somewhat, and he could let the feelings and thoughts of the girl occupy him, rather than hurt him. He would simply have to go on with them as his mental landscape. Looking at the stiffened female body across his lap, the smears of his blood and hers on the pavement around him, he realized these did not frighten or hurt him; and if they did not, then he would ignore the pain of his thoughts, perhaps even let their beauty distract him from the ugliness and destruction all around.

He laid the woman gently on the ground and folded her hands across her chest. Smoothing her beautiful hair one last time, he pulled himself up to his full height and shuffled away from the body. He had no plan, but something in the words on the sign-WELCOME TO LOUISIANA-made him think of her, the girl in his mind.

His shoes crunched on broken glass. He didn’t like the sound.

Wayne watched from the darkness at the foot of the stairs. His flashlight hung from his belt. His right hand rested on his holstered gun.

The skylights were just useless blue rectangles now. All the lower-level windows were long-since boarded up. You couldn’t see the dead amassing outside, but you could hear them, shuffling and grunting in the primeval twilight. Occasionally they banged on the aluminum walls and it echoed through the building to sound like a stage storm, making it hard to hear the living as they scuttled in between points of artificial light. Wayne held his watch to his face and pressed the light button. The sun would be down in half an hour. Five minutes and they were out of here, ready or not. Where the hell was Ian?

“Keep your voices down,” Seth said, hissing, trying to rally the troops and failing miserably. Several men clustered around him, voices raised in the darkness, their wan faces washed in the cold light cast by various battery-powered fluorescent lanterns. Outside, the dead moaned.

“Listen, listen,” Seth said, and someone shouted him down. They needed to get out of here, and now.

“No,” someone else said. It may have been Hank, but Wayne wasn’t really sure.

“How did they find us? How did so many…”

“…gotta get to the trucks and…”

“…to shut up. They can hear…”

“…already know we’re in here…”

“…how many are there…”

Gunshots from above brought silence, then the hollow thump of the aluminum roof sheets shifting beneath the weight of the gunmen.

“If you’d just listen for a minute,” Seth said, no longer bothering to keep his voice down. “I was trying to-” Another shot interrupted him. He raised his voice: “Steve and Brian are on the roof. We’re safe here. That’s why we-”

Static, and then a voice: “Seth. It’s Brian. Over.”

Motioning for those around him to stay silent, Seth plucked the walkie-talkie from his hip and held it to his face. “Talk to me. Over.”

“There’s gotta be fifty or sixty out here right now. Over.”

“We can handle that.”

A few seconds of silence. Wayne looked at his watch again. He could hear one of the kids upstairs, crying. Somewhere, a walking corpse pounded on the side of the warehouse with what sounded like a pipe. More gunshots.

“Brian? Over.”

“Yeah, we can, but we’re making a hell of a lot of noise. They might just keep coming. You know how-”

The shouts from those around Seth drowned out the rest. The large group splintered into smaller groups, the familiar cliques coming together at last.

“…it’s Wayne’s fault…”

“…finish the job!”

“…followed his trail…”

“…that’s not how it works. They’re not that smart…”

“…led them right to us…”

“…where is he…”

Crouching in the darkness, Wayne pulled his gun, killed the safety. Almost. Almost.

Seth’s small group pulled together, shouted for everyone to listen, said that they had to work together, that they’d survive if they could just-

“The trucks,” one of Zach’s pals said, his own group advancing on Seth’s. Everywhere, people scurried, vanishing into the offices that served as their living quarters. Above, the gunfire continued. Outside, the dead howled and pressed in. “Give us the keys. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”

“I’m not giving you the keys, Tevin. Just take a minute and think about what you’re-”

Someone shot Seth, and then the air was buzzing with lead.

Wayne dropped low and let the whole thing play itself out. A second of silence, followed by the cries of the wounded. On the roof, the men continued to fire their guns. The dead hammered the building. Someone ran by, their flashlight beam bobbing.

Wayne leapt to his feet and took the stairs two at a time.

“Here they are,” someone said. Wayne heard keys jingling, and then he was in the classroom. He closed the door behind him.

Sue held the small black boy to her chest. He pressed his face to her neck, weeping. Some of the kids were standing, tears in their eyes. Others still sat amid their sheets and pillows, stuffed animals held to their chests. Patty sat at the back of the class, just out of the glow cast by Sue’s lantern. She held two children close to her.

“What’s happening?” Barely holding it together. “Who’s shooting?”

“Some guys are on the roof picking them-”

“No. Someone in the warehouse fired a gun.”

“Seth. Someone-”

“Seth shot somebody?”

“No. Somebody shot Seth. We have to-”

“Oh, God. Is he-”

“Are you ready? Wayne said.

“Now?” Sue asked, looking around, jittery. “Wait, where’s Morgan?”

“Bathroom,” Patty said.

“Jesus.” Sue bit her lip and stood. “Kids, get up, we’re going.”

“Not you, hearts,” Patty said to the kids in the back, and closed her eyes.

Leticia, Greg, and Shawn gathered by Wayne’s side. Sue looked around. “Where’s Sarah? Sarah?”

“She’s staying with me,” Patty said, pulling one of the shadows closer, her voice slurred.

Wayne said, “We can come back. You can fit. We all can fit. We can-”

“Goddamn it.” Sue made fists at Patty and screamed, “You idiot!”

“You’re going on foot?” Patty said.

“The Jeep is just four blocks away,” Wayne answered. “We can-”

“You told Seth that you left it behind,” Patty said. “You’re going to get them killed.”

“Do you have your gun?” Wayne asked, staring at Patty’s shadowed form.

“I have three.”

“Okay. Let’s move.” More gunshots. Shouting from downstairs. The drone of the gathering dead. The kids wailed. They closed Patty in the back room and stopped in the hall to the stairs.

Wayne looked at Sue and whispered, “I didn’t know you wanted that one.”

“He won’t let go of me,” she sighed. “I don’t know where…he couldn’t tell me where his shoes were, I just have to fucking carry him.”

“We can make it.” Wayne said, fighting back the urge to yell and curse. “We just need to be fast. Just-wait…”

“What is it?” Sue asked.

“I think I heard the motor pool loading door rolling up.”

“Damn it. They’re gonna get in.”

An eruption of gunfire. Sue switched the small boy-Devon, Wayne remembered-to her left arm and pulled her gun. She nodded.

Wayne pulled Leticia, the smallest of the three standing around them, onto his right hip. She wrapped her arms around his neck. “Now hold on tight, okay?”

“Don’t let them get me.”

“Okay,” Wayne said, sucking in a deep breath. “Sue, behind me. You cover our right. I have the left. Get them between us.”

Sue nudged the two crying boys between them. Wayne winced. There were seven or eight in all, but damn it, they were so small.

“Hold onto my belt,” he told Shawn. “Now.” He looked at Sue. “Just like we planned. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He opened the door and led them out. The vast expanse of the warehouse was lost to darkness. Their flashlight beams seemed to die on black air.

A row of offices separated one warehouse from the other. The dead may have been packed shoulder to shoulder in the motor pool, but there were none to be seen on this side of the facility.

They took the stairs slowly. Somewhere, voices raised in anger. More popping gunshots from outside. Heavy footsteps on the roof.

At the bottom of the stairs, Wayne stopped. The kid’s head bumped into his back. Feet shuffled somewhere nearby. Ian stepped from the darkness and sank his teeth into the soft flesh of Leticia’s shoulder. She screamed.

Wayne’s gun thundered. Ian dropped. Sue and the kids screamed, retreating, falling over one another. She opened fire, shooting at nothing. Leticia’s hot blood doused Wayne’s hand. Her grip on his neck tightened. She screamed and screamed, and then there were more of them shambling through the darkness toward them.

Wayne screamed, “Go back!” and trailed Sue and the kids to the top of the stairs. “I’ll take care of these. I’ll get the Jeep. Wait in here.” He pried the screaming and wounded child from his neck and passed her to Sue.

“Take care of her,” he said, and with the click of the door shutting, was gone. At the bottom of the stairs, two more dead things bumped into one another. Trace and Mark, killed in the shootout over the keys. He took them down and moved toward the loading door, his flashlight beam passing over Seth’s body. In the direction of the motor pool, someone yelled. An engine revved.

There would only be a few of them milling around outside-most of them would have flocked toward the motor pool loading door, some forty feet to his right. He could get through with ease. Probably.

Holstering his gun and still gripping the flashlight, he grabbed the chain with both hands, hoisted the massive door some five feet from the ground, and dashed into the night. Cold hands groped for him, and he stumbled over a fallen corpse-they were everywhere, thanks to the snipers, now long since gone. The walking ones closed in, grunting and eager. He rolled, kicking and thrashing and fumbling for his gun.

“Fuck.” His holster was empty. One of them threw itself onto him. His chin hit the concrete. Blood flowed.

Rolling from beneath its thrashing dead weight, he scrambled to his feet and ran into Zach. The dead man gasped, its breath rank.

Wayne jerked back, pulled the Doctor from the holster on Zach’s right hip, and blew the thing’s head into pulp.

A pickup truck burst from within the motor pool, tires screeching and bouncing over the parking lot dividers. Screaming and flailing, several people flew from the truck-bed and slammed against the concrete.

Wayne ran. The further he got from the warehouse, the less activity he found. Within five minutes he found himself sliding behind the wheel of the Jeep, panting. Two minutes later, the headlights passed across the nightmare taking place outside of the warehouse.

Sue walked toward him, clutching Devon to her chest, her gun held high. There was no sign of Shawn or Greg, save the glistening red tangle over which the things fought just inside the loading door. Its ragged jaw twitching and useless, Ted’s corpse dragged its baseball bat through the blood pooled around the feast. On the roof, someone waved and yelled for help.

Wayne brought the Jeep to a halt.

“Are either of you bit?”

Sue shook her head.

“Good. Get in.”

She did.

They drove away.

He walked for days, thinking of the girl and of her hair, though not entirely sure which hair or which girl. Sometimes he wondered where she was, what had happened to her or if the signs around him had anything to do with her. NEW ORLEANS 65, one of them said, but that wasn’t quite right. Almost right, maybe, but not quite. It was and it wasn’t.

His wandering carried him from the highway and into a town. HAMMOND, the sign said, and that meant something to him, or had. The town was shattered and wrecked and broken, like the stumbling forms who were so like him and not at all like him.

One storefront was more thoroughly destroyed than the others he had seen. The front doors were lying on the ground, ripped from their frames. He looked past them and saw a small machine, about the size of a man, lying further from the store, as though it had somehow been yanked through the doors, tearing them out along with it. The small machine had three letters across the top-“ATM.” He didn’t recall what it was used for, but it looked sad lying there.

He looked back to the devastated store. To the left of the entrance, a dead woman stood raking her head back and forth across the wall. Little pieces of her face clung to the bricks. As he stepped into the store, she pulled her forehead away from the smeared rainbow of filth to watch with listless eyes as he passed. Because so much damage had been done to the front of the store, it wasn’t as dark inside as the others. Boxes and trash were everywhere. The floor was slick with dirty water. The broken doors let the rain in, and this reminded him of something else, something that came to him only in images: the interior of the place he shared with the girl sodden and ruined, black stuff growing on the walls. He moaned once, and a dead boy sitting in the middle of the candy aisle moaned in return. He peeled the crinkly and shiny paper away from something colorful. Dropping the paper, he placed the colorful thing into his mouth, retched, and spat.

He made his way slowly to the back, where there were hundreds of little plastic bottles all over the floor; a few were also on metal shelves. He picked one up. It rattled.

Unlike his random thoughts in the night, one now came to him with some logical connection, though it was as unbidden and unpredictable as any of the others. He remembered the girl needed what was inside these little bottles. He remembered opening them for her and very carefully counting out two of the little white disks into her palm. He fumbled with one bottle now, but there was no chance of him opening it. He raised it up to look at the label, but the print was too small for him to read. When he noticed this problem, he instinctively reached for his shirt pocket: he remembered there was always something in that pocket that would help him read things that were too small, though he couldn’t remember what the device was called or what it looked like. But his pocket was now empty.

He began going through all the bottles, arranging many of them on a counter there in the back of the store. He couldn’t read any of the labels, but he tried different ways of arranging the bottles-from biggest to smallest, or in an undulating “wave” of descending and then ascending sizes, or separating the round bottles from those with squared corners. Then came combinations of the various organizational methods he’d tried. He was very careful and spent most of the day on this project. He didn’t know why he did this, or what exactly guided his hand, but he knew when he had the bottles arranged in the “right” way, the way that formed the perfect pattern on the counter. He stepped back to admire it. Then he stepped forward and counted the seventh bottle and removed it. Stepping back, the pattern still looked “right.” Counting another seven, he removed a bottle, and still the pattern looked to him unmarred by this removal. He repeated this process five more times, and, when he was satisfied the remaining pattern was still the correct one, he looked at the seven bottles he had chosen. He nodded. These too were correct, he thought, and put them in the hole in his stomach, next to the metal band he had taken from the woman. He walked from the store and continued down the street, feeling somewhat more full and satisfied than before.

Eventually he worked his way back to another highway. I-10, the signs said. NEW ORLEANS 50. His mind buzzed and he walked and walked. The sun sank and rose, and he walked and sometimes he sat down and closed his eyes or pulled the round thing out of his stomach and held it. When the sun got too hot on his skin, he sought peace in the shade of the forest or beneath one of the large wheeled things or sometimes even inside one of the smaller ones.

He walked and walked, and sometimes those like him walked with him, side by side, as if he had someplace to go and they wanted to be there with him. Other times they ignored him, busy with their own broken journeys.

Once he came across a dead man being pursued by four others. The man crawled and gasped and tried to stand, but the four grunted and pushed and would not let him rise, battering him with loose fists and rocks, bashing away his nose and shattering his teeth. He moved toward them, wondering in some way if he could help the man, but the others pushed him away and lashed at him with sticks. One of them tried to take the things in his stomach. He slapped them back and, as they turned their attention to the pitiful shape writhing on the ground, crept away.

He walked and walked. NEW ORLEANS 35 and 20 and 10, and though he didn’t know what that meant, he nonetheless knew it when he saw it, silent and dark and still.

The sun was again going down as he ambled across a large bridge. All over the roadway were large machines of metal and glass, all of them smashed, many of them burned. There were motionless bodies inside most of them, with many more on the pavement. Many were not whole, but were just limbs or torsos in dried-up pools of blood. There were swarms of loud, ugly flies all over. He shook his head and kept walking, looking up at the beautiful angles of the bridge’s proud steel frame. There was another bridge next to the one on which he walked, and this meant something to him, too, though it made little sense: CCC. And: GNO.

Halfway across the bridge, he saw a yellow metal box attached to it at eye level. The box was open and a plastic thing hung from it by a cord. The plastic thing was grasped by a right hand, severed sloppily just below the elbow. He looked above the metal box and read the sign there: “Call Now. Life is Worth Living. There Is Hope.”

He stared at the words for some time. He tried mouthing them, but his lips and tongue felt like cloth flaps attached to his body without really being a part of it. The words were simple, but he couldn’t quite grasp them, or why those ones in particular would be written on a bridge. More and more, he concentrated on the first word of the second sentence. He tried to breathe out as he mouthed it, but he couldn’t control the vowel sound properly, or how to press his lower teeth against his upper lip to make the “f” sound, so it kept coming out differently as “Laf… lav… laf… lof… lov…”

The effort taxed him mentally, but he nodded. He had made the right sound.

He continued to the middle of the bridge. Here the wind whipped across him, driving off the flies. One vehicle in the center of the bridge was undamaged. He ran his hand along the smooth, warm metal. It remained a beautiful thing-a most pleasing combination of curved and straight, glass and metal, all of it governed by symmetry and grace. He balanced the little plastic bottles on the roof of the vehicle, stacking them in two little pyramids of three each. He put the circular, metal band between the two pyramids, and placed the last bottle inside the circle. As he knew they would be, the pyramids were precisely the same height, and they were spaced perfectly. The band and bottle in the middle were also formed and spaced to complete the whole. It was good how they combined, with each other and with the lines of the vehicle. If there were any people left, perhaps they would see it and admire or enjoy it.

He turned from this creation to the guardrail. Behind him, the city was motionless, dead, and silent in the day’s dying light. Beneath the bridge, the water seemed to sit bloated and unmoving, a thing dead and stagnant, but if he concentrated, he knew he could hear its whispering rush, full of power, mystery, and promise-qualities he heard more and more distinctly as he spun toward the water’s black surface and his uncertain rebirth.

Wayne had been counting on the path still being there, and it was. One of the very last efforts in the city during the outbreaks had been the National Guard attempting to organize things, forbidding unauthorized vehicle use. For their own travel, they had to clear two lanes of the Crescent City Connection. It was the only job they finished. Wayne drove them over the city.

“I always found that amazing,” Sue said, “that you could pass through the center of New Orleans, right over the St. Charles cable car line, French Quarter to the north, Garden District to the south, and never even touch down, never even have to get your tires dirty.”

“Mm.”

“Just float thirty feet above it like a bird on a wire.” She sighed. “You can’t even see it now.” Wayne slowed as they went up the CCC ramp. The Guard had cleared it, yeah, but there were still bits of junk everywhere. Devon coughed. He looked like he was trying to sleep, or cry. Sue was holding him in the front seat, starting to cry herself, and Wayne was turned to look at them, like an idiot, when the Jeep went ba-KUNK. There was a huffing sound and Wayne knew they’d busted a tire. Devon was awake now, and definitely crying. He sounded worse than he had even an hour ago.

Wayne pulled over, then got out and paced around the Jeep. He’d wedged the right front tire over a rusted bumper. It had sliced clean through the rubber. The tire was already empty. There was a spare on the back, but Christ was it dark. Sue said, “What is it?”

“Just the tire, I’m fixing it.”

“What?”

“Stay there, Sue.” He heard her door open. Shit. “Get back in the car, I’ll be done in five minutes.”

He had the spare and the jack already. This was ridiculous. “Where are you going?” He heard her blubbering further up the bridge. She’d grabbed Devon and was carrying him on her chest with his arms wrapped around her neck.

“Christ, Christ,” she panted, as Devon’s green snot wet her shoulder. There were bodies all over. She jogged up the lane as fast as she could, thinking, There might be a car up there. Something with the keys in it, and some juice. She was hyperventilating again. She had no plan. Her face was hot with tears.

Mosquitoes and flies fluttered in the headlight’s beams. She could only hear her sneakers thumping the asphalt and her own sticky breathing. She held Devon tighter.

She reached the crest of the bridge to look down into Gretna on the other side. It was dark over there. She turned. Wayne crouched next to the car. There were no dead in sight, not walking, anyway. Maybe she should go back.

She spun around again, and saw the pill bottle pyramids. Cefdinir. Citalopram. Prazepam. Tramadol. Amoxicillin, more. They were pasty-flaky with dark blood, but Sue could read the labels, and she recognized some of the names. Peggy had once told her the names of some medicines she gave to Brandy after she was attacked, the ones that should’ve helped but didn’t. Which were they?

Devon whimpered into her neck, “I don’t like the dark.”

“I know, baby.” Sue grabbed all of the bottles, stuffed them between her body and Devon’s and turned back toward the Jeep.