Crusade (Eden Book 2) Page 6

Buddy.

  He pushed with his shoulder and the side of his neck. A mighty heave and the manhole cover was clear, but they were on him in their dozens—little arms and hands grasping him, muted faces staring at him, and perhaps most horrifying of all there was no emotion on the faces of these children who sought to drag him up onto the street. He shrugged them off and pulled back and lost his footing, slipping from the ladder, plunging backwards into the dark, falling, reaching for the shafts of light. The thing below scoffed and shuffled in anticipation, and it was laughing. It was waiting—

  “Buddy—”

  He woke to arms shaking him violently and he reacted. Instinct. His large hands wrapped around the neck of the man crouched over him, pushing him back and squeezing, crushing—

  “Buddy!”

  Another man latched onto his wrists, trying to pry them from the first man’s neck. In that instant Buddy realized he was choking Mickey and it was Bear who loomed above him in the wintry night, forcing open his hands. The fight went out of him. Mickey fell back gasping and coughing.

  “Oh Christ—oh Christ—oh Christ.”

  He scrambled back away from his sleeping bag and away from the fire around which the five rested that night. Julie and Gwen had been roused from their sleep by the struggle and sat staring wide-eyed in their sleeping bags, not comprehending. Julie had one hand wrapped around the out-sized .357, the other around her .380.

  Bear crouched next to Mickey, speaking to him and rubbing his back, and Mickey coughed a few more times, shaking his head.

  “Mickey, Mickey, listen, oh Christ man, I’m sorry, I—” He didn’t know what to say but he needed to say something.

  The moon was full in the sky and their camp in the clearing was well lit. Around them was snow and pine trees and off to the left the train tracks and the sluggish, icy river.

  “I’m okay, I’m alright.” Mickey said to Bear. Bear looked up from him to Buddy and stared at the latter, thinking.

  “What happened?” asked Julie.

  “Nothing, it’s okay.” Gwen assured the pregnant woman, closing one of her hands over the hand Julie gripped the Colt Python in, pushing it down, then doing the same thing for the Taurus .380 she held in the other.

  “I was dreaming. They were coming for me…” Buddy was sitting up and pulling on his boots.

  “You were whimpering in your sleep.” Mickey’s voice was hoarse. “I tried to wake you.”

  “God, I’m so sorry, I’m—”

  “Okay, Buddy. It’s okay.” Mickey sounded like a frog, “I know you didn’t mean it.”

  Buddy paced around the fire. “I…I...”

  “I get it. It’s okay. I know it won’t happen again.”

  “I swear, I’d—no, you’re right, it won’t happen again. It’s me man. I’m sorry.”

  Mickey nodded. Bear continued to crouch next to him, eyeing Buddy.

  Why’s the big guy eye-fucking you, Jig?

  “Oh shut up,” Buddy muttered a little too loud, aware that he was answering a voice only he heard. He shook his head and said, “Nothing, never mind,” to the group then walked off into the dark away from them and the fire. He silently cursed himself.

  When he had his head straight he went back to the others. They were all sitting around the fire but no one was speaking. He knew they must have talked about him, about what had happened. Somewhere in the back of his mind a venomous voice assured him he was right.

  “You okay Mickey?” asked Julie.

  “Yeah, yeah, I just need a minute,” He stood and walked off in the opposite direction Buddy had come from, taking his assault shotgun with him. It was a USAS-12 auto-shotgun, though he never fired it on full auto. No need with zombies. The twenty-round drum magazine added some weight to it, but it was a big, blunt looking weapon, and for Mickey, a guy who didn’t know much about guns, its fierce-look was reassuring.

  He hacked and spat in the night. His throat was raw.

  Buddy had almost killed him. He shook his head. Mickey was scared. The Buddy thing, yes, but…he had noticed the scabs on his chest and stomach the day before when he’d tried to clean himself up at a stream. Small patches of his skin were discolored. He felt okay. He hadn’t been bitten. He thought he knew what it was: plague. But if it was plague, wouldn’t he be feeling worse? He’d seen people in Eden come down with the plague. They’d been quarantined because they were contagious. All of them had died.

  Mickey wondered if he was contagious. If he was… If he was then it was already too late for Gwen and Bear and Buddy, for Julie and her baby. Mickey felt selfish. A part of him knew he should have told the others as soon as he’d found the scabs on his body. But he was scared. Mickey didn’t kid himself. He could kill a zombie if he had to, and he had. But he was no tough guy. He wasn’t like Buddy or Bear. He wasn’t even like Harris or Bobby had been. A part of him detested himself. He should have gathered his stuff and walked off as soon as he’d noticed the outbreak on his body the day before. He should have left the group without a word and hoped it wasn’t too late for them.

  Still… Gwen and Bear, Buddy and Julie, they were all he had. The only people left. His people. Mickey felt very alone. He felt like he imagined Josey Wales must have felt after the Redlegs had killed his wife and kid; the way Jeremiah Johnson must have felt… But those were characters in movies, not real people, and Mickey wasn’t like them anyway. He was a man who felt alone but wasn’t alone. He was a man alone in the crowd.

  Mickey breathed deeply a few times, hefted the automatic 12 gauge and walked back to the others. Buddy was talking to them.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said to the group. “I can’t explain what happened. I was dreaming, and in my dream they were coming for me. He was coming for me. They had me…”

  “Who Buddy?” asked Julie.

  He shook his head and looked down. Julie thought it was the closest she had ever seen the man come to crying.

  “Still a few hours before dawn,” Bear spoke up. “Everyone should try and get some sleep.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Good idea,” said Buddy, composing himself. “I’ll keep watch. I can’t sleep anymore anyway. Mickey, you have my nine-millimeter?”

  Mickey had been on watch before Bear. When they’d switched and Mickey had turned in he’d handed Buddy’s silenced pistol to Bear. Bear hefted the 9mm in his open palm and looked at Buddy.

  “I got the pistol,” said Bear. “I got the watch.”

  Buddy considered what he could say, and when he decided there really wasn’t anything he could say he simply nodded.

  In a few minutes they settled back down, deep in their sleeping bags.

  Julie and Gwen slept on one side of the fire, side by side for warmth.

  “It’s okay, Julie,” Gwen assured her friend. She slept on one side, her sleeping bag unzipped enough she could bend her right arm and hold the vertical grip mounted on the hand guard of her M16A4 assault rifle.

  “I was dreaming,” Julie said. “About Harris.”

  “Go back to sleep. You need your rest.”

  Without a word Buddy gathered up his sleeping bag and moved away from the fire, away from the others. He took off his boots and climbed into the bag, zipping it up, turning his back to the fire and his companions.

  He knew Bear was watching him.

  Bear sat on a log and looked out into the night. It was quiet and still. The moon was a giant white orb in space, reflecting off the snow. He got up to retrieve some branches and feed the fire. When he sat back down Mickey said to him, his voice hoarse: “We’ve got to keep an eye on Buddy.”

  Bear nodded. If Mickey saw him he didn’t acknowledge it.

  They woke at dawn and ate from cans then resumed their march north, following train tracks half buried under snow drifts. They saw many strange and disturbing things on their journey. The Hudson River flowed past on their left, bearing with it debris and decomposed bodies and the hulks of destroyed water craft. Across the watery expanse the palisades of New Jersey tower
ed over the river—a sheer vertical drop of over five hundred feet in places to the icy waters below. Purple Royal Paulownia would bloom at the base in the spring, but now the bottom of the cliffs were a brambles of bare, dead branches. An elevated highway was on their right for most of their trek. At times the natural rise of the land put them at eye level with the road and they could see the thousands of stalled cars and jackknifed trucks. Everywhere on the road the undead, in their ones and twos and threes, wandered aimlessly. Some stood alone amidst the snow and patches of bituminous surfacing.

  The five men and women from Eden walked quietly and did their best not to draw attention to themselves. Occasionally a zombie from the road would spy them and begin to gesticulate and howl. Others would look and see them but they kept their gait steady. With time the tracks they followed dropped or the road turned away from the river, replaced by the trunks and limbs of deciduous trees that had shed their leaves and fruit. The howls of the undead receded in the distance.

  They met few zombies on the actual railroad tracks except for where the tracks passed the outskirts of a town or small city. They followed four tracks which were mostly buried under the snow, ice, and debris. The electrified third rail collected power at the bottom and was insulated from above, but there had been no electricity flowing through them in a long time. The tracks stretched over eighty miles from the city to Poughkeepsie further north.

  In Yonkers the train station was teeming with zombies. They had to abandon the tracks and claw their way through the snow and trees and brush bereft of leaves and foliage, scratching their hands and faces in places where dandelion, goldenrod and Black-eyed Susan had thrived and would return with the warmth and the sun. They kept roughly parallel to the train tracks, emerging back onto the rails away from the platforms where the dead stood in their hundreds.

  Buddy volunteered to walk point and stayed well ahead of the others. Bear had handed back his silenced nine without a word. Buddy considered the previous night’s situation. He’d almost strangled Mickey. Mickey of all people. Mickey, who’s most important thing in life were his movies. Buddy imagined it must have hurt Mickey to leave his DVD collection back in Eden. He remembered nights on lawn chairs watching one of Mickey’s films under the stars with Harris and Julie and Bobby and Gwen and the others, the intermittent cries of the undead still outside the walls.

  Mickey. Damn. Buddy pulled his leather jacket closer to his torso and rifled through his saddle bags as he walked. His situation wasn’t good. He carried a slew of amber vials and most of them were empty or near so. They’d have to pass a CVS or Duane Reed or some such place sooner or later, wouldn’t they? In the week or so they’d been on the road since leaving Eden they had only stopped a few times, holing up for a day or two in various stores and buildings. New York City teemed with the undead, millions upon millions of them.

  They’d made their way from Queens to the Bronx to Westchester County then crossed west until they’d reached the river and followed it north ever since. The Harbor gave way to the Great Bays and the Bays would let onto the Highlands in the near distance. The river flowed past them southward to the Upper and Lower Bays then into the Atlantic Ocean, salty sea water pushing up the estuary.

  Buddy’s memory had been slipping lately. He thought he remembered things but then was left wondering if the things he remembered were true.

  It’s true, Harris said in his head. All of it.

  Buddy had been hearing voices for some time. He didn’t mind Harris’. It was a reassuring voice—an old friend. But there was another… Buddy realized the voices must only be in his head, but they were so real. Sometimes, like with Harris, they were talking to him. Other times, they were talking about him.

  He gripped one of the amber prescription vials in his saddle bags and only let go when a low moan greeted him from his right. An industrial chain link fence bordered the tracks here, enclosing the back lot of a construction site. It looked like a cement mixing plant. A zombie gripped the links and leered at him. It wore a back support and had a wrist brace on one arm. Buddy stopped and the thing grew more excited, its body jerking in place as it shook the fence, rasping.

  He looked back to the four men and women behind him and signaled everything was okay. He checked the slide on his silenced 9mm and walked over to the fence. The thing there was voicing something, a rasp emanating from whatever was left of its vocal cords. Buddy stuck the silencer attached to the 9mm through the links and pressed it to the creature’s forehead. The creature ignored the muzzle pushed up to its skull and focused on him.

  Buddy changed his mind, holstered the pistol, shrugged his AK-47 off his back. The zombie had itself pressed against the fence. It wanted him. Bad. Buddy fit the affixed bayonet between the links and drove it deep through the thing’s forehead. Its eyes bugged out. When he pulled the AK-47 back and the bayonet cleared, the zombie pitched to the side, bouncing off the fence with a last rattle to lay in the snow. Its eyes still open, it stared up into the wintry sky.

  Buddy looked around but couldn’t see any more of the things. He walked back to the tracks and waved to his companions and resumed his march north.

  “Who would have done something like this?”

  Bear and Buddy stood staring down at the horror before them. Someone had dug holes in the wintry earth and planted half a dozen zombies, buried to their necks. The zombies stared back at the two men, their jaws yawning, yearning. They were stuck on the side of the hill that rose from the track line and ran off to the road somewhere above.

  “This is just terrible,” Bear said.

  Buddy looked ahead to where the tracks disappeared in a turn, the bare limbs of dormant trees blocking their view. He ushered Bear towards the heads in the snow and earth then signaled to the three behind that had stopped well down the tracks.

  “They must have buried them when the ground was soft. No way they could have done it in the middle of a winter like this.” Buddy stomped down on the solid ground with one booted foot. “That means these things have been here for awhile.”

  Bear nodded.

  They’re waiting for you up there big man.

  “What’s that?” asked Buddy.

  Bear looked a question at him and Buddy realized the man had not spoken.

  “Thought you said something. Yeah, that’s exactly what that means,” Buddy shrugged out of his saddle bags and opened one, rummaging around inside. He came out with a pair of binoculars.

  “Bear, wait here. I’m going to go on ahead around that bend. See what’s to be seen.”

  “Don’t go alone,” Bear said, both of them aware other human beings were responsible for this and those others may be nearby. “It’s not safe.”

  “I’ll be okay.” Buddy threaded the silencer on the 9mm as Bear watched.

  “He’s right,” Julie said as she and Gwen and Mickey caught up to them. “You’re not going alone. I’m going with you.”

  “Oh my God…” Mickey’s voice trailed off when he saw the heads buried in the snow. “This is some Motel Hell shit here.”

  “You can’t go with him,” Gwen said, “so I’m going.”

  “No,” Bear said, and the way he said it made it clear the topic wasn’t up for further discussion. “Let’s go, Buddy.”

  Buddy decided it wasn’t worth arguing about, and having Bear around for anything he ran into might not be a bad thing.

  The five of them moved off the tracks into the thin cover offered by the dead trees. Buddy pulled off his leather jacket. It was cold but the cold didn’t feel bad. Bear slipped off his pack and chainsaw and unstrapped the disposable M72 rocket launcher from his pack. Buddy raised an eyebrow at the sight of the M72.

  “You never know,” Bear said, raising the M72’s tube-like body.

  They stayed to the trees on the hill paralleling the tracks, their boots crunching in the snow. Buddy went first, the silenced 9mm in his hand, AK-47 slung over his back. Larger and slower, Bear followed some distance behind, a Glock 9mm in either
hand, the M72 on his back.

  Julie and Mickey sat in the snow. Gwen stood with them, her breath pluming in the cold winter air. Julie had her knees pulled up to her chest.

  “That’s freaky,” she said.

  “That’s sick,” agreed Mickey. “That’s what that is.”

  Gwen watched Buddy and Bear disappear from sight then she looked over to the Hudson River as it flowed by, sheets of ice massed near the shore. On the other side of the river were hills and mountains. She wondered if she was looking out at New Jersey or greater New York State, then dismissed the thought, figuring cartography and geography had no meaning any longer aside from day to day survival.