CHAPTER 14

Ben Richardson closed his notebook and slipped it into his pack, which Jerald Stevens had thoroughly rifled twice more since that first time Richardson let him help himself to the Snickers bar and the almonds inside. The poor guy had obviously thought he was doing it on the sly, but of course Richardson had caught him in the act both times. He didn’t try to stop him, though. The notebooks were the only thing in the pack Richardson valued, and as long as Jerald didn’t touch those, Richardson was willing to let the trespass slide.

But now it was time to get back to business. He zipped up his pack, slid it over his shoulders, and went down the hallway to the sixth-story window where Officer Barnes was watching the quarantine wall.

Barnes hadn’t moved since the night before, when heavy zombie traffic in the area had forced them to take shelter up in this office building. He glanced back over his shoulder when he heard Richardson come into the room and then went back to looking out the window without so much as a nod of recognition.

Richardson slid up next to him.

“How’s it look?” he asked.

“Pretty fuckin’ crappy,” Barnes said. “Looks like all the Quarantine Authority folks have given up.”

A light rain had fallen earlier that morning and the streets were wet. Here and there, oily puddles reflected the thin shafts of sunlight that managed to penetrate the high, gray cloud cover. The most obvious feature Richardson could see was the quarantine fence, a forty-foot-high monstrosity made of red cedar and barbed wire that cut through the cityscape with all the severity of a prison wall. But now there were no soldiers, no sharp, metallic echo of assault rifles in the distance, only the constant moaning of the infected and the whistling of the wind through the open windows of the building.

Below them, the street was still thick with the infected. They were moving slowly, but steadily, toward the gaping holes in the quarantine wall. Already a great many of them had made it outside and were moving into the cleaner streets on the free side of the wall.

“How does something like this happen?” Richardson asked.

“How the fuck should I know?” Barnes said.

Richardson wasn’t put off. He said, “Sandra Tellez was telling me that the uncles have been rioting a lot lately near the walls.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Is that true?”

“Why do you keep asking me shit I don’t care about?”

“But is it true? Have there been more riots near the walls? I’ve heard the Coast Guard catches them all the time.”

Barnes didn’t answer right away. He watched the infected below them and sighed.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “It’s true.”

“Is that what this is, do you think? Did the riots cause those holes in the wall?”

“Doubtful.”

“Why?”

“A riot would have been easy to put down. All they would have had to do would be to play some amplified zombie moans to draw the infected into the area, and that would break up any riot before it had a chance to get too big.”

“So you think the infected did this?”

Barnes shrugged.

“Wouldn’t the Quarantine Authority have been able to stop a wave of the infected? Even if there were a bunch of them?”

“Maybe. If they were here.”

“Why wouldn’t they be here? I see that building over there. That’s a Quarantine Authority outpost. Surely they’d have people here.”

“Normally, yeah. But if there was major activity somewhere else down the wall, they would have relocated that way. It’s not like we have an unlimited number of people to do this job, you know? We got a shit load of territory to cover and a minimal staff to cover it with. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.”

“How come nobody told me about all the riots? I’ve been talking to Quarantine Authority people for months now and nobody said anything.”

“We’re under orders, Mr. Richardson.”

“Under orders to mask how bad things are here?”

Barnes didn’t answer him. He didn’t have to. It was a moot point, and they both knew it. Richardson went back to looking at the scene below them. This part of Houston hadn’t flooded like the areas farther south and east, but it had been hit harder by the rioting during the first days of the quarantine, and the area inside the wall looked like a war zone. All of the windows were broken out. Some of the buildings had been damaged by fires. He could see bullet holes in the brick walls. Trash and rubble and abandoned cars were everywhere, choking the street.

Out beyond the wall, the scene was different. The buildings there were in more or less good repair. There were a few broken windows, lots of dead bodies. There was trash in the streets, pieces of paper, soft drink cans, sheets of plywood, a few bloodstained yellow blankets, an amazing proliferation of spent shell casings, but it was all fresh trash, all of it put down in the three days it had taken them to walk across Houston.

Richardson scanned the horizon. He counted the columns of black smoke he saw rising skyward from fires he couldn’t see, but he gave it up at thirty.

“Why are there always fires?” he said.

“What do you mean?” Barnes asked.

“In disasters,” Richardson said. He turned away from the window and sagged down onto his butt, his back against the wall. “There’s always fires. I don’t get that. Every time something bad happens on a grand scale…it doesn’t matter if it’s a flood or an earthquake or a tornado, there’s always fires. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“About what?”

“About us. If we weren’t meant to burn.”

“I don’t know,” Barnes said. “I’ve never given it much thought.”

It rained off and on throughout the afternoon. Eventually, the crowds of infected thinned out, and here and there they saw small groups of the uncles making a break for it.

“I think we should chance it,” said Sandra. She and Barnes and Richardson were standing at the window, watching the street.

Richardson thought it was a good idea, too, and said so.

Below them, they heard a young man yelling. They all looked down. He was standing across the street from a trio of the infected, throwing rocks at them and taunting them with a ridiculous string of obscenities. It seemed ridiculous to Richardson, anyway. A zombie didn’t care what you called it. It didn’t matter what you said his mother sucked in hell, because he wasn’t going to get mad. He’d eat you regardless of whether you were kind or profane. You tasted the same either way.

“What’s he doing?” Richardson said.

“Distraction.” Both Barnes and Sandra Tellez said it at the same time, and they looked at each other in good-humored surprise.

“Distraction?” Richardson said.

“Just watch,” Barnes said.

Richardson did. The zombies began shambling after the young man, who was still throwing rocks and yelling. He was slowly backing up, but was careful to keep an eye out for anything moving behind him. He let the zombies get much closer than Richardson would have, and then he turned and trotted off, leading them away from a large hole in the quarantine wall.

He continued to yell. More of the infected stumbled out of the doorways on both sides of the street.

Soon, the street was filled with zombies. It had seemed nearly deserted moments before, but now there had to be at least forty of them staggering after the man.

And then his attitude changed. He stopped waving his arms. The bravado left him. He stopped, looked around, seemed to be gauging the distance between two points that Richardson couldn’t see.

“Okay,” he yelled. “Do it. Move, move.”

Richardson heard running footsteps on the pavement to his right. He glanced that way and saw a small group of people, mostly young women in their late teens and early twenties, a few of them carrying children, running for the hole in the quarantine wall.

The young man watched them go. When the last of them had made it past the barricades and entered the breach in the wall, the young man grew suddenly animated. He was getting ready to run.

“Oh, no,” Sandra said.

She was pointing at the young man, who was yelling now, waving his arms over his head in an exaggerated pantomime of a semaphore flagman.

Behind him, a zombie was pouring out of a wrecked car.

Richardson could see what was going to happen. The man would let the others get too close. He would turn to make his break around the bunched-up crowd, and he would step right into the waiting arms of the zombie behind him.

He had to yell out, warn the man. But it was impossible to speak. The words were frozen in his throat and he couldn’t force them out.

And then a rifle went off in Richardson’s ear. He fell to one knee, cupping his ringing ear with one hand, looking up at the profile of Officer Barnes, who was standing as still as a sentry, the butt of the smoking AR-15 tucked into the crotch where his shoulder met his cheek.

“What the hell?” Richardson said.

Then he glanced down at the street. The young man was looking at the headless zombie on the ground behind him. Then he turned and scanned the windows of the building above him until he saw Barnes, Sandra Tellez, and Richardson.

He gave Barnes an exaggerated flyboy salute.

Barnes nodded back at him.

A moment later the man was gone.

A few zombies followed after him, but slowly, no real chance of catching him. Others had turned with the sound of the shot and were moving toward the building, their ruined faces directed upward to the window.

“We need to leave now,” Barnes said.

“Yeah,” Sandra said.

“You ready?”

“We’ve been ready for a year and a half.”

“Well, it’s time.”

Crossing through the breach was sort of an anticlimax for Richardson. He had expected some kind of celebration from Sandra and her group, but there was none. They stepped through just like they were leaving yet another abandoned building. The guarded edge of weariness never left them.

“It’ll be dark soon,” Sandra said.

“Yeah. We need to find transportation,” Barnes said. “We’ll need something that’ll give us some temporary protection.”

Barnes scanned the area. There were dead bodies everywhere, and the infected were still walking around, though none of them were close enough to be an immediate threat.

He said, “I got it. Come on.”

They walked along behind him until they came to the Quarantine Authority outpost. With Barnes taking the point man position, they circled around to the back of the building and came up to a covered carport that Richardson hadn’t been able to see from the building.

Under the carport was a large bus with armored sides and armored skirts coming down over the wheels.

“Oh, my God,” Richardson said.

“Wow,” Sandra said.

“Yeah.” Barnes looked around. “It doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence though, knowing the guys from this outpost weren’t able to use it for their evacuation.”

He scanned the vehicle dubiously.

“Well.” he said, “We might as well use it, right?”

“I hope they left the keys,” Sandra said.

Barnes chuckled.

“No worries there.” He reached onto his belt and unclipped a key ring. “All these vehicles are keyed alike,” he said.

Sandra smiled. “Beautiful.”

The bus made it seven miles before the transmission slipped out of gear and refused to reengage. The mood on the bus had been one of waxing elation, a terrible thing slipping away behind them, a brave new world rolling out before them, but as the bus lost momentum and eventually trundled to a stop, the smiles died away.

Richardson moved forward, the images of the bus ride he had taken into San Antonio in the early days of the quarantine with Dr. Carnes and her UT students suddenly flaring back up in his mind.

He put a hand on the back of Barnes’s chair.

“What’s going on?”

“Transmission’s fucked,” Barnes said.

Richardson could hear the engine revving. He could see Barnes’s foot pumping the clutch, but the transmission wouldn’t engage.

“What does that mean?” Richardson asked.

Barnes looked at him angrily. “You know what? You’re starting to piss me off with your fucking questions.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just…I don’t understand.”

“We’re fucking stuck here. You understand that? This bus ain’t going nowhere.”