Resurrection (Eden Book 3) Read online

  Riley ran a brush through her curly hair, which she wore above her shoulders, shorter than her brother’s. She pulled at it when she encountered a knot. Riley’s hair was dirty brown and her eyes blue. She had a pretty, honest face, and was athletically built from her years at taekwondo. Her t-shirt rode up her arm to the slight curve of her prominent bicep.

  “Now here’s one from the 1970s,” the voice on the radio said, “quite a decade, I’m told…”

  There was no way Riley would have said anything to Alex. He was too nice a guy. It would have broken his heart. Neither he nor Riley had “been careful,” as it was put in her father’s day. They hadn’t taken any precautions. With the birth rate as low as it was, every pregnancy was welcomed in New Harmony. Every live birth was a cause for celebration. Riley was twenty-four years old, and she knew, for the times she lived in, she was middle-aged. Several friends from her school days had already succumbed to cancers.

  A man on the radio was singing about me and you and a dog named Boo.

  “What’s going on with you and Nicki?”

  “Nothing’s going on with me and Nicki,” Anthony answered. “Nothings been going on with me and Nicki for awhile.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “You’re a chick, sis. You tell me.”

  “I’m a chick. You sound like dad.”

  They both knew how successful their father hadn’t been at keeping a woman in his life. Marriage was a relic of the not too distant past. These days, people hooked up and cohabitated, they made babies if they were able to, and then thought nothing of going their separate ways. The government subsidized childcare from the cradle on, even before. Fertility treatments were as common as flu shots. When a couple paired then split, even when there were children involved, there was little animosity involved. Especially among Riley and Anthony’s generation. People, like their dad—people old enough to remember different—some of them still chose to stay with one partner.

  Their dad brought women home, which had never been a cause for embarrassment to him or either of his two children. But none of those women ever stayed in the picture too long. Riley and Anthony often wondered if their father was a lonely man. Sometimes they spoke of it when he was not around. They knew his bachelor status was of his own doing. Though he was the best father he could be, their dad was not the easiest man for a woman to get along with.

  Their uncle was their dad’s only real friend, and even he would stop coming around for weeks at a time when their dad said something out of line and obnoxious to put him off.

  “Well, you never know,” Riley tried to offer hopefully. She’d thought Nicki might have been around awhile. The girl had really seemed to like Anthony. And, as far as Riley could tell, her brother was a pretty steady guy, unlike their dad.

  “It’s all good.” Anthony dismissed her optimism and finished the juice in his glass. He washed it out in the sink before placing it in the strainer to dry.

  Riley pushed the remains of her eggs around on her plate. She wondered if she’d ever have a child. The first time she’d miscarried, it had hurt—physically yes, but mostly emotionally—but she’d expected it. She’d waited until she was twenty to get pregnant. Her friends had been miscarrying and having babies since they were fifteen.

  Last week had taken an emotional toll. She’d thought this time, okay. This time it’d be okay. Riley had lost the one, so now she felt she was somehow guaranteed the second. Wasn’t that how it worked? And he or she would be a healthy baby. The sonograms would come back normal and there would be no reason to end the pregnancy. But who had Riley been kidding, and who had she been bargaining with? She’d taken a few days off from the Do Jang afterwards and gone off for a night alone, camping.

  New Harmony was home to about thirty thousand human beings, give or take. That was it in their society. A portion of all that was left of humanity. That number had edged steadily upwards since Riley and Anthony were little kids, but it never rose fast enough to reassure anyone. Although there were thirty thousand men, women and children who called New Harmony home, their society was several thousand kilometers in area, which meant the population density was relatively low. People were spread out. Riley wouldn’t have to go far in New Harmony to be alone. Fortunately they had excellent mass transportation.

  She’d gone to the wall and sat there and stared out into the Outlands. She’d wondered about who and what was out there and why. The zombies in North America were all but extinct. The only undead Riley had ever lain eyes on up close were those like the one kept on display outside the hospital, kept as a reminder to humans just how close they’d come to extinction.

  Riley had heard there were other continents that still teemed with Zed, and she knew that the hot zones must have their concentrations of the undead. Those areas were baking with radiation that would leave them uninhabitable to human life for thousands upon thousands of years. There were people out there, in the Outlands. People who chose not to live in New Harmony or the other societies that dotted the landscape. They lived in groups and alone, and sometimes they wandered in from the Outlands to New Harmony, where they were treated as objects of curiosity and watched carefully.

  There was a Committee of Public Security, but there were few problems. Most people had dropped the bullshit long ago. Human beings were just happy to be alive. Governments like those in New Harmony allocated resources so everyone lived well. No one grew filthy rich. It was legislated against. Even the owners of private businesses were not allowed to earn more than five times their lowest paid employee. No one seemed too bothered by this arrangement, except for a few greedy individuals who resented their avarice being thwarted.

  Anthony taught his classes that the lack of “economic privation” in New Harmony was part of the reason the crime rate so low. And maybe that was true, Riley thought. But that was here, inside New Harmony. There were still those who wandered in from the wire, from the Outlands, the ones who were out there for a reason. Those were the ones you had to watch.

  Riley had only been outside the wall once, during her two years of compulsory military training. They’d taken her troop out about five clicks, well shy of any hot zones, and spent two weeks learning survival skills in the wilderness and mountains. In those two weeks, Zed had been absent, but there’d always been the wariness among Riley and her fellow trainees that he could be out there somewhere, roaming around, looking for food.

  She’d met Alex on that trip, during her training. The Dire Straits were on the radio.

  When Riley had lost the second baby—the beginning of what would have been her second baby—she and Alex were already kind of not talking. They were on the outs. So Riley had gone to the wall and looked into the Outlands. She’d looked out into the place where she’d first met Alex, a place where a chain of events had been set in motion that resulted in her returning to the very spot to contemplate once again. It was funny, Riley had thought on the wall, how life worked like that. Cyclical almost.

  “How many classes you have today?” Anthony asked his sister. Riley was a Sa Bum Nim-a taekwondo instructor.

  “Three.” At her Do Jang, Riley would have her own work out before her first class showed up. For the last two years she’d contracted out to the Defense Forces, teaching their grunts the intricacies of hand to hand combat. Her specialty: the way of the hand and foot.

  Riley had trained with Lim since she was five. Her father thought it was important for her to be able to defend herself. Lim was an Asian man who spoke little English. He had taught Riley taekwondo using hand motions, chalked stick figures and what limited English he possessed. Lim had possessed several books in English about taekwondo, and when Riley was old enough to read them she had.

  Lim succumbed to the cancer when Riley was fourteen—a year after she’d earned her second degree black belt. She had watched Lim bear the disease stoically, withering away to almost nothing. If he’d complained, he hadn’t done so to his student.

  Riley didn’t thin
k Lim the type to complain. The Hwarang Code that governed their art called for indomitable spirit, and Lim had been the embodiment of that principal. The taekwondo-ist knew the determination to attempt the impossible and bear the unbearable brought its own rewards.

  When Lim died, Riley continued to practice taekwondo every single day. Her dad had seen how important the martial art was to her, and he’d been smart enough and cared enough about her to find someone else she could train with. That was no easy task in a society where the population had been severely reduced. Riley had continued her training with Master Park, who’d taken her from her second degree black belt to her fifth dan. The fifth dan granted her the right to teach the ancient art, and she was content to do so.

  “Because your last days should be pleasant ones….” There was a commercial on the radio for a local hospice.

  “Are you going to have a bunch of papers to grade while we’re away?” Riley asked Anthony. He was a teacher like her, though a different kind. Anthony was a post-secondary instructor. Because the crops would have to be harvested, this would be Anthony’s last day of class for six weeks. She and her brother had made plans with Evan and Troi to go camping for two of those. They were supposed to leave tomorrow, but Riley hadn’t even packed anything yet.

  “No. I’m handing back first drafts today. The kids’ll have the break to revise and get them back to me.”

  Tonight was the 80s party. The four friends were supposed to meet there.

  “Ladies, can we speak frankly?” a voice on the radio was asking. “Is your man a dribbler or a shooter? With my Swedish ropes formula, men, you are guaranteed to shoot bigger, thicker…”

  Riley reached over and shut off the radio. She wondered if anybody thought for one minute that such nonsense products actually had any basis in reality.

  * * *

  As the morning arrived elsewhere, Evan stood atop the wall, peering out into the countryside beyond. The Outlands. It was a place no one went any more.

  The night was always coolest just before dawn, and Evan had his jacket pulled tight around him against the chill. He was tall and muscular, lean to the point he felt the chill more than others. And autumn was here. Another week or so, and there would be frost on the ground in the mornings.

  Evan had joined The Guard right after his compulsory service in the Defense Forces had ended a year earlier. He thought it was ironic, because if you had told him he’d embrace what was shaping up to be a career in The Guard two years before, he would have laughed and said you were out of your mind. Evan hadn’t sought the higher education deferral like his friend Anthony had been granted. When he’d turned sixteen, Evan had enrolled in The Guard, looking to get his service done and get back to life.

  Life. That was what went on behind the wall. The wall, which stretched hundreds of miles in either direction, was the demarcation of their civilization in New Harmony.

  The Guard had taken Evan beyond the wall. Granted, never too deeply into the Outlands. Never more than fifteen or twenty clicks in any one direction. Evan knew—because they taught you this in school and in The Guard—that Zed was still out there. It’d been awhile since Zed had approached the wall. Evan had heard about one stumbling up to it a couple of months back in the summer. Of course, they’d sniped it before it had reached the barrier, then sent a team out to burn it.

  Evan had never actually seen a Zed in the wild. Sure, they were out there, but they were either deep in the hot zones or they were just plain stupid and couldn’t find their way to the wall. He knew, from the history they taught in the schools of New Harmony, that Zed had once been heavy at this wall. Evan knew that tens of thousands of them had fallen here, right around where he stood. But that had been years ago, when Evan was just a little boy, and civilization was getting back on its feet.

  His instructors in The Guard had taught him how to fire weapons and use blunt instruments against live targets. Well, dead targets. The Guard kept a supply of zombies for weapons practice. Evan had a buddy in school who had gone on to work as a tech, conducting experiments on the undead, trying to learn what could be learned from them, anything that might help humans help themselves.

  The Guard was something everyone had to do. It was expected. There were no exceptions, unless you were laid up and dying from the cancers. Sure, you could defer for a few years, do your time when you were twenty-two or three instead of seventeen, but you’d do your time.

  Evan thought that was a good thing.

  Everyone got to see firsthand what they were up against. Everyone got a sense of what this world they had inherited was about. Everyone learned survival skills. Their enemy, though he was fewer in number today than he had been a decade or two back, was nonetheless just as uncompromising as he’d always been. So everyone had to learn how to put Zed down.

  This was Evan’s fifth night on the wall. He’d be returning inland later this morning for his four weeks vacation. Oil his rifle and sidearm every other day instead of every day, catch some decent meals, maybe see a movie. Hit that party Anthony had told him about before they set out camping tomorrow. Anthony, his best friend.

  As Evan stood atop the wall and stared off into the distance, looking for any sign of activity, he thought about his friend and he felt bad. Nicki had broken up with Anthony a couple of weeks back. It was a fact of life, sure, but it sucked. Anthony, Evan knew, had been head over heels for her. And it was easy to see why. Nicki was a nice girl and she was hot. They would have made a good pairing, had some handsome kids if the radiation didn’t spoil them.

  Evan had been in love before. Had his heart broken. Wendy. She’d left him when he was in The Guard. He’d kidded himself that they’d be able to maintain the relationship while he was away. She hadn’t. She sent him a letter. In school he’d learned about these things—what they used to call a Dear John letter. She was paired up with another man now, a man who had returned from his Guard service just as Evan was starting his. Presumably Wendy and the guy had hooked up shortly thereafter.

  Wendy was pregnant. Another month or two, she and her man would have their first baby. Evan hoped it would be okay, be normal. There was a lot of radiation in the atmosphere. He had no time for petty jealousy. Like his friend, Anthony, Evan was twenty-one, healthy, and single.

  Evan was kind of in love now. Okay, he’d have to admit, if pressed, maybe not love—but it could bloom into that. Infatuation, definitely. The object of his attention was Riley, Anthony’s sister. Evan had been attracted to her since he’d known Anthony, which was what? They’d been friends since they were kids. Riley was three years older than Evan. In the past, this had been a deterrent to him. But Evan was a man now. He’d finished his schooling and served his stint in The Guard. He had a job, a career he was growing to really enjoy.

  Evan kept tabs on Riley from a distance. When she’d started dating Alex, Evan hadn’t really been happy. It wasn’t because Alex was a bad guy, because he wasn’t. Alex was a good guy. But Evan suspected, from things Anthony said, from things Troi and Riley said when the four of them were hanging out, that all was not well in Riley and Alex land. And Evan couldn’t say he was sorry to hear that.

  He breathed in the cool air, knowing it would warm up somewhat later in the day, knowing the days of the morning-air warming up would soon be gone. As he breathed it in, he was all too aware of the radiation he was probably inhaling and how this was affecting him, shortening his lifespan.

  He wore his camouflage skullie to keep his shaven head warm.

  “Come in, Zebra-Three. Over.”

  Evan was startled out of his reverie by the crackle of his radio. He blinked his eyes and raised the comm. mic to his face.

  “Zebra-Three here, Rodeo. Over.”

  “Hey, Evan.” It was Diego, stationed a klick down the wall from him. “Take a look at alpha-two-niner. You see movement out there? Over.”

  “Give me a second. Over.”

  Evan raised his Model 7 semi-automatic rifle to shoulder level and fixed his f
ace to the cheek plate of the scope, scanning the terrain beyond the wall. He didn’t see anything unusual. Rolling hills…grasslands…scrub and trees in the distance. The usual.

  He was about to lower the rifle, let it rest on its sling from his shoulder and respond to Diego’s inquiry, when he saw it. Movement beyond the perimeter. Something was out there. In the Outlands.

  Two somethings.

  Evan squinted through the scope, but whatever it was disappeared behind a hill.

  He lowered the rifle and depressed the call button on his radio. “Yeah, I saw something. Looked like two hostiles. Over.”

  “Confirmed. I’m going to call this in. Over.”

  “Do it, Rodeo. I got my eye on them. Thanks for the heads up, over.”

  Evan lowered the radio, letting it rest on the wall, and raised the M7 again, peering into the Outlands through his scope.

  He searched for the hill and thought he found it, but didn’t see a thing until a head poked up over the peak, and then shoulders attached to the head, followed by a second head. Evan watched and waited as two figures came into view, starting down the hill. They were moving slowly, but they were headed for the wall, headed straight for his position.

  Zed. Evan had never fired on one live in the field. During training, yes. But he’d been pulling shifts on this wall for over a year now—not counting the time he spent here during his training—and he’d never seen Zed out here. Still, there was the better part of a continent out there, and probably millions of zombies left.

  In school you learned about the zombie wars, about the millions—some estimated billions—of Zed that were destroyed around the world. You did this from the relative safety of New Harmony, a society whose walls hadn’t been breached in years—a place where people died from cancer but not from zombies. You always knew the zombies were out there, doing whatever zombies did while they were out there. But you didn’t see them much anymore outside the controlled conditions of your Guard training or documentaries.