Crusade (Eden Book 2) Page 5

  “When we heard you out there, we thought it was an army at first. We felt hope. I can’t imagine the two of you against, against…”

  “This was bad but we’ve faced worse. Philly was a lot worse.”

  Kevin realized he was staring into her dark eyes and felt self-conscious about it, so he broke his gaze and looked down.

  “You’ll—you’ll have to forgive me,” he stammered. “I’m half-starved and out of my mind. You look like some kind of angel sitting there. You’re so beautiful.”

  It was Nadjia’s turn to scoff good naturedly. “Well, thank you. But like you said, you’re half starved and maybe a little out of your mind by this point. Plus I’m probably the first woman you’ve seen in awhile who’s had a bath in the past month and isn’t malnourished.”

  He made eye contact again and smiled.

  “Listen, I was thinking of a couple of things,” he continued. “You know what you guys need?”

  “What would that be?”

  “A monster truck. You know, one of those with the huge wheels. You could drive right over all those…” He tried to think of a word to describe the mounds of undead burning outside but couldn’t. “I mean, that road is going to be impassable.”

  “I like the idea but we haven’t come across many monster trucks lately. Would you happen to know where we could find one?”

  “As a matter of fact, yeah. Obviously no one’s driven it for a long, long time, so the battery’s dead and the tires are probably—”

  “Can you show it to me tomorrow? I know a little about cars and trucks.”

  “No kidding?”

  “My father owned a fleet of taxis and limousines. He did most of the maintenance work himself until he made enough money to pay other people to do it for him. He raised my brothers and me to be comfortable around automobiles.”

  “That’s good. That’s great. I don’t even know how to change my oil. Not that I have a car anymore. I mean, I guess I do, if it’s still there but… Sorry, I’m rambling. You’re the first…you’re one of the first people I’ve talked to in a long time.”

  “Kevin, listen to me. I know it was bad here. I’ve seen this before. But now it’s going to be better. It’s up to you and everyone else here to work together to make it better.”

  “Yeah, I…that’s the other reason I came here. I don’t want to stay here anymore.”

  She nodded. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Well, I…don’t laugh, I mean, I know I’m as thin as a stick right now and look like something the wind could knock over, but…”

  Nadjia waited.

  “…but I wanted to go with you, and with him.” He nodded into the darkness.

  She sat quietly across from him for awhile, then said, “If you come with us, do you understand what you’ll face? If you stay here, you might have a shot at something—I don’t know—something more normal, more like the old life you knew. If you come with us…”

  “They destroyed my life, my wife and my kids.” He looked out the window into the night as he spoke. “They destroyed my family, my friends, everything. And I want to destroy them. I want to destroy them all.”

  She smiled at him. Her beauty in the glow of the kerosene lamp brought him back to the room.

  “Revenge isn’t enough. These things can’t understand your vengeance. They don’t care. They wait and eat and that’s all they do, and they won’t stop until every single one of us is gone. Unless we destroy every single one of them.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Understanding…that isn’t enough. You can’t run on revenge for ever. That fuel will run out. I know.” She looked away. “What we do…this isn’t…I have a few more fights left in me, but that’s it. Then I have to stop or this will kill me. When you do this, it changes you. I can’t explain how, but it saps you of your humanity. Does that make any sense?”

  “What about him?” Kevin chin-nodded into the dark.

  “Bear…” Nadjia considered for a moment. “Bear will never give up.”

  “Then I will fight with him.”

  “Kevin, I do what I do because it seems like the right thing to do. This is a war. You know the term Jihad? Yes? I never understood that word until…But now that’s how I see this. I will fight for as long as I can, but I know my fight can’t continue forever. There are so many of them, Kevin, so many.”

  “Nadjia, I’m not religious. I have no god. But you and him—you kill zombies. So I’ll stand with you.”

  “You need to think this through,” she counseled. “Get a few good meals in you and think it over. We’ll stay through the day after tomorrow, and by then if you still want to accompany us, I’ll brook no dissent.”

  After awhile he rose.

  “I have to go. Earlier tonight, one of the survivors…one of us got bitten.”

  Bear’s voice came from the dark of the room beyond. “What happened?”

  “We were dragging bodies off to the fire…Robert… One of the zombies wasn’t dead. It latched on and bit him on his side before we…before we could destroy it.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Yeah, but he’s bad. He won’t last the night. I have to go and…and be with him.”

  “How well do you know this man?” Bear stood in the room with them, the floor creaking under him. Kevin saw he was correct: Bear rocked the bundle in his arms. The man had removed the armor from his upper body, arms, and head. He was monstrous.

  “Robert? I don’t. I mean, we were locked up in separate buildings during the siege. He’s got no one. All his family are… Well, he’s alone now.”

  “I’ll go to him. Where is he?”

  Kevin looked to Nadjia but her face gave no indication of the course he should choose.

  “There’s a hardware store across the street. Upstairs is an apartment. He’s there.”

  “Nadjia, please, the child sleeps.” Bear passed the form to the woman. He disappeared again into the darkened room and when he returned he hefted the saddle bags, mace in one hand. In the glow from the lamp Kevin noticed he had a tear drop tattooed under one eye.

  “You should get some rest, Kevin,” said Bear. “The days ahead of us are long.”

  He left the apartment, the wild-man trailing behind him silently like a gangling shadow. Kevin and Nadjia sat and listened to them in the hallway, the stairs groaning under their feet.

  “What’s the story with that guy?” Nadjia referred to the wild man.

  “I don’t really know,” admitted Kevin. “He was always a bit off from when I met him. I think someone said he was a college professor. Political Theory or Philosophy. Something like that. I tried to keep an eye out for him, but he was so bizarre. A few months back he went completely off the deep end. They found him playing with his own feces, smearing the walls. They threw him out of where we were holed-up. Somehow he survived. I don’t know how. What’s the story with Bear?”

  Nadjia indicated his iPod on the floor nearby.

  “Pick that up. Listen to it.”

  He hadn’t seen one in awhile. He palmed it and touched the pad with his thumb but nothing happened.

  “It’s dead. No battery.”

  Nadjia nodded. “Bear’s been listening to that thing the whole time I’ve known him. And the whole time I’ve known him, that thing has had no battery.”

  Kevin looked at the blank screen of the iPod.

  “You still sure about what you’re doing?” she asked.

  “I am.”

  “Then you’re with us now,” said Nadjia. “If you wish you can sleep here tonight.”

  “He won’t mind?”

  “That was his blessing, so to speak. In the other room you’ll find some sleeping bags and blankets. I’ll wait here for his return.”

  That night Kevin slept well for the first time in a long, long while.

  When he opened his eyes, Robert was cold and aware that he had shit himself again, but somehow wasn’t as bothered as he would have been at anoth
er time. The room was dark but the dark was not unfriendly. He realized he was not alone in the room. These others bore him no ill will. For this he was glad and felt somewhat comforted.

  “It’s you.”

  In the ambient light cast from the fires outside he recognized the mountain of a man who sat on the room’s only chair.

  “Hello, Robert.”

  “And him.”

  Behind the man in the shadow stood the wild-man.

  “Does his presence here disturb you?”

  “No. Actually, it doesn’t. It never did.”

  Robert remembered his circumstances then: the wound to his side bandaged but incapable of mending, the stained mattress under him, the musty old comforter tucked over his body against the chill night air.

  “I’m glad it’s you,” he said to Bear.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” asked Bear. “Weed I mean.”

  Robert smirked, not sure if the men could see it. “Only if I can have some.”

  Bear retrieved his rolling papers and a zip-lock bag of marijuana from the saddle bags. He flattened a paper on his thigh and crumbled a bud onto it, picking out the stems. He folded the paper in half and tucked one end into the other, rolling tightly with his index fingers, drawing his tongue across the joint when he had it sealed to his satisfaction. He took a book of matches from the saddle bags and lit one. In the sulfur glow Robert watched the man squint his good eye and puff, getting the joint going.

  Bear inhaled deeply and held it, then exhaled with a sigh. He stood and handed the joint to Robert. While he toked Bear moved the chair closer to the mattress and sat back down. Robert felt safer with the man looming above him.

  “I never thought it’d come to this,” Robert said. “I don’t mean, this, me, here, now. I mean, the world, like this. I mean, who could have, right? Then you guys came today, and, well, you know what I felt? Something I haven’t felt in I don’t know how long. Hope.”

  He pulled on the joint and handed it back over to Bear.

  “I think what’s bothered me the most about this whole experience is how it’s brought out the worst in everybody. I mean, Weston, in the street today. Weston is the man who was going to kill…” He looked beyond Bear to the dark where the wild-man stood.

  “What you did to Weston—I get it. It had to be done. What right did he have to try and kill that man? Right? So these last few hours I felt hope. Something I haven’t felt in god knows how long. Thank you for that.”

  “You’re welcome,” Bear said, passing the joint over to Robert. “But I need you to understand. Weston? He didn’t have to die. He died because I chose to kill him. His death is on my hands. I’m accountable. But I can live with that.

  “And you know what, Robert? This world has brought out the worst in many, but it’s also brought out the best in others.”

  “It doesn’t seem that way sometimes.”

  “That’s because the actions of one bad man often seem to outweigh the good deeds of all the rest. The bad is an aberration from the norm. It draws our attention. Similar situation before all this, if you ask me.”

  They passed the joint back and forth between them.

  “Do you think there’s hope for us?” Robert asked. “For humanity, I mean.”

  “There’s always hope. We’re conditioned beings, not determined. I fight to bring about a vision—a dream I guess you’d call it.”

  “Tell me about it, please.”

  “We have to remake the earth. In place of the greed and competition that marked our former lives, we have to celebrate and cherish the ties that bind us one to the other. We have to work together for each other. We have to realize that the individual is nothing without…without the social, without the group. That what makes the individual special and recognizable only comes about—is only possible—through the communal, through the social.” He paused. “I know we’re high, but I’m serious about this.”

  “I know you are.”

  “We have to start to care for each other, Robert, really care for one another. Create institutions and systems, political systems, that reflect this.”

  “I like that vision. Too bad I won’t be around to see it.”

  The pain in his side welled up and Robert gasped, losing his breath. Bear reached over and laid a palm on his forehead. He got off the chair and sat down beside the mattress, his back against the wall.

  “There’s no rhyme or reason is there?” Robert asked when he finally could.

  “We make the rhyme. We provide the reasons.”

  “Will this…” He tapped the joint and sent the blackened ashes floating to the mattress, “…will this be legal in your future society?”

  “Our future society,” corrected Bear. “And I’d think so, yeah.”

  He giggled, forgetting his situation momentarily. Then it came back to him in its entirety.

  “I’m glad…glad it’s you here with me to…to see me through this.”

  Bear didn’t say anything.

  “Could you roll another one of those?”

  “Sure thing.” Bear smiled.

  “You were very quiet outside.”

  “I’m changing,” said Bear. “It’s tough sometimes. I feel different here with you. Calm. Peaceful. I don’t always feel that way around other people. Here you go.”

  Robert inhaled.

  “Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Robert. Start at the beginning. Tell me who you were, where you were born, what your life was like.”

  They sat next to each other and talked well into the night. Robert spoke of his dreams and his person and as he faded his eyes grew too weary to keep open, so he closed them and drifted off. In the middle of the night he passed. When he turned Bear finished it with a hammer, the wild-man standing silent witness throughout.

  Exodus

  The tunnel was dark and damp and echoed as unseen water dripped from pipes overhead. There was something more sinister, some presence in the shadow behind. Something pursuing, closing in on him. He ran, fear gripping him, a panic unlike any other, and as he ran he could hear it coming for him, splashing through the water. The orange lights overhead flickered, dimmed, and disappeared. He stumbled along in the dark with his hands raised in front of his face. Some rational part of him told him to stay near the wall. That if he followed the curvature it would keep him from pitching into the mire and dank of the water channel. When the thing called his name from the blackness he panicked anew, racing headlong through the slippery murk.

  He bounced off a wall and rebounded, landing on his backside in the water, immediately soaked through. He scrambled to his feet and found the wall and moved as fast as he could, open palms skimming its surface for a guide. The wall curved under his hands and as the tunnel turned in the dark he saw shafts of light some distance ahead. He shuddered as the thing behind him spoke his name in a low growl much too close. He made for the motes of dust swirling in the shafts of daylight—the only illumination in this infernal blackness. There was a ladder and if he could only reach it… But he could feel the thing’s hot breath on him, and he knew to turn and fight was useless. That this chase and battle were ones that would pursue him for the remainder of his days.

  Buddy.

  The cold steel of the ladder was under his hands and he rushed up it. Losing his footing he hung for a moment, his lower body swinging like a pendulum in the abyss. His feet scrabbled and found a wrung and he was up, hand over hand and foot over foot, leaving the echoes of the water below, leaving the thing in the dark. He reached the top of the ladder. The streams of light poured down from perforations in a manhole cover. As he put his shoulder to it he looked down and the thing was there, standing just outside the light, beckoning to him, speaking his name, a hideous trophy swinging in its grip while it called him down to his fate.