CHAPTER 15

Ed Moore hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours. He and Julie Carnes and Margaret O’Brien and the others had been up in this attic with no food, no water, no air-conditioning to speak of, all that time, and they were demoralized. Ed could barely keep his eyes open. His eyelids weighed a ton. His back and his legs were stiff and achy. Sleep seemed so deliciously seductive, and yet his forehead burned with a fevered alertness that wouldn’t let him relax. He could see the same thing on the faces of the others. Nobody looked up, nobody spoke. They sat, staring, eyes glazed with exhaustion, all eight of them baking away in silence.

And, worst of all, he had to go to the bathroom so badly he wanted to cry. A few of the others had been able to go—by tacit agreement, they were using a low-ceilinged corner that, thankfully, hadn’t started to smell yet—but Ed couldn’t make himself go in front of the others. Peeing, of course, hadn’t been a problem. But pulling down his pants and steaming out a loaf was another matter. Of course, if they were up here much longer that would have to happen, and he was dreading it.

The constant moaning and banging around below them didn’t help either.

He scanned the crowd he’d collected, and a wave of pity and helplessness swept over him. Julie Carnes was sitting next to Art Waller, trying to make him comfortable. Barbie Denkins was stretched out on the floor, sleeping fitfully, her face glossy with sweat. Margaret had the kids nuzzled up against her. The boy looked like he was close to falling asleep. The girl was sobbing quietly into Margaret’s shirt.

Only the guy in the prison scrubs, Billy Kline, was doing well. He was awake, but he looked bored and angry.

Ed rose to his feet, his knees cracking like pistol shots, and for a moment he wasn’t sure he’d be able to straighten out his back. He went over to Julie and nodded at Art. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s not good, Ed. I think he’s dehydrated.”

I believe it, Ed thought. Barbie Denkins would probably start showing the same symptoms here in a little bit. He put his palm on Art’s forehead. It was hot and damp. His face looked flushed. Not a good sign.

“How about his medication? I know he takes something for his heart.”

“He doesn’t have it with him.” She touched his arm. “Ed, we can’t stay up here.”

“I don’t see where we can go,” he said.

She just looked at him. She didn’t have to say more. He understood exactly what she meant. The same feeling had been worming its way into his brain within a few minutes of coming up here. It was like they’d painted themselves into a corner and now they were just sitting, waiting on the paint to dry.

And then she surprised him. She said, “Ed, how far do you think this thing has spread?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible it could have spread pretty fast. From what I’ve read, it depends on the severity of the initial injury, the health of the person infected, and probably a hundred other factors that nobody’s really sure about. A person can turn anywhere from a few minutes to several hours after they’ve been bitten. That leaves a lot of time for the outbreak to spread before anybody really knows what’s going on.”

Julie glanced over at Margaret holding her two grandchildren. Margaret met her glance and nodded, then squeezed the children tighter.

Julie wiped the back of her hand across her forehead and to Ed it looked like she was trying to conceal her tears.

“Where’s your family?” he asked her.

She smiled faintly. “What are you, a mind reader?”

“Body language.”

“You get that from interviewing suspects?”

“Something like that,” he said.

“I have a daughter in Chicago. She’s forty-two.”

“What’s her name?”

“Gwendolyn.”

“That’s pretty.”

“It was my mother’s.”

“Ah. Grandkids?”

She nodded, not trying anymore to wipe away the tears. “Three. All girls. The youngest is twelve. How about you?” she said. “You said you’d been on your own for six years.”

“No family,” he said. “We never had kids.”

“You were too busy fighting crime?”

“Too much of a cynic,” he said.

“You can’t leave me with just that,” she said. “Come on, tell me.”

He looked down at his hands and picked at a callus on his thumb. “I always told myself I couldn’t see bringing a child into a world I didn’t trust. I lived through all that crazy stuff you see on the news, you know? The wars, the riots, the sickening things people do to each other because of drugs and racism and religion and just plain meanness. And the more I saw, the easier it got to tell myself I was never going to have a child. It would seem like a betrayal, bringing them into a world like the one we’ve got.”

He held out his hand and made a useless gesture around the room that was meant to include the whole world.

She didn’t say anything.

He stood up again, and all at once he felt like an ass. Nobody wants to hear you rant, he thought.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Usually, I get to know people a little better before I go off like that.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Under the circumstances, I understand.”

Beside them, Art Waller groaned and bent over, holding his gut in his hands. His skin had turned an ashen white, and sweat was popping out all over his face.

Julie caught him in her arms. “Art? Art? Are you okay?”

He shook his head.

Julie looked up at Ed and her expression was desperate.

“Hold on,” he said.

He crossed over to the other side of the attic and knelt down next to Billy Kline. The younger man looked up at him and frowned.

“What the hell do you want?”

“I want to see if we can get out of here.”

“You’re shitting me, right?” He pointed down at the floor. “You hear that, old man? All that moaning? Tell me you ain’t so deaf you can’t hear that.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my hearing,” Ed said. Then he leaned forward and whispered, “I’m worried about these people here. They need water and food and medicine. If we stay up here much longer, we’re going to be sharing space with some dead people.”

“Well, shucks, Mister. How about I jump down there and let those things tear my ass to pieces? That way you and the fucking Geritol Brigade over there can just waltz on out of here. That what you had in mind?”

“What’s wrong with you?” Ed said. “These are human beings. Why do you have to act like a fool?”

Billy was silent, his face inscrutable.

“I just want you to help me,” Ed said. “If there’s a way to get out of here, and to do it safely, we need to do it.”

“Safely? Old man, you are fucking nuts, you know that?”

“Please watch your language while you’re up here with us.”

“My language? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No, I’m not. These people are from a different generation. It’ll only scare the others.”

Billy laughed. “You want to see scared?” he said. “I’ll show you scared.”

Then he got up and went to a spot where the insulation was exposed. He balled his fist, and before Ed could tell him not to, he punched a hole through the floor.

“Come here, old man. Take a look down there.”

Walking in a crouch, Ed stepped over to the hole and looked down. Flakes of Sheetrock and pink cotton candy strands of insulation rained down on the infected below them. The office was packed with zombies. At least a dozen pairs of hands were reaching up for them, bloodstained and snarling faces below those.

“How’s that for fucking scared?” Billy said. “You think that’ll scare ’em? Because it sure as hell scares me.”

Ed sat down on the floor and looked at Billy. He had no idea what they were going to do. All his life, he’d been the one responsible for making decisions. Now he could barely think straight.

“Well?” Billy said.

Ed shook his head. He looked away.

Later that afternoon they heard muffled voices. At first, Ed wasn’t sure he was really hearing what he was hearing. He looked up at the others.

“What was that?” Margaret asked.

“Shhh,” Ed said.

He heard more voices, getting louder, turning to shouts. Then the crackle of gunfire.

“What is that?” Billy asked. “Cops?”

“Maybe,” Ed said.

The sound of fighting grew suddenly intense, like it was right below them. Ed recognized the sound of fully automatic M16s, fired in well-controlled, short, three-round bursts.

He crawled over to the hole Billy had made in the floor, and the two of them looked down into the office below. The few zombies they could see were turning away from the ceiling and to the front door.

As they watched, three of the infected were knocked backward by head shots.

Another shambled out of a side room and got a full burst of machine-gun fire to the chest.

They heard a man’s voice yell, “Clear!”

“Hey!” Billy shouted. “Hey, we’re up here!”

The sounds of movement from below came to an abrupt halt. A man’s voice, different from the first, said, “Who’s there? Show yourself.”

“We can’t,” Billy said. “We’re up here. In the attic.”

“Stand by,” the man’s voice said. “Don’t move.”

A moment later, a man in a SWAT uniform was shining a shotgun-mounted flashlight up at them.

“Easy,” Billy said. “Don’t shoot.”

The man lowered the weapon, and Billy thought he’d never been so glad to see a cop in all his life.

They were taken to the rounded driveway in front of the office. About twenty soldiers and cops stood by with M16s. Most of them looked tired and bored now that the initial rush of fighting was over. There were dead bodies everywhere, and Ed recognized quite a few of them.

A few other survivors were being led from their cottages to waiting city buses nearby.

“Are we being evacuated?” Ed said to a National Guardsman standing next to them.

The man looked exhausted. His eyes were rimmed with red and his cheeks were dark with dried sweat and dirt. He nodded without really looking at Ed.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know, Mister. Albany, Georgia’s the last I heard.”

“Georgia? That far? What’s happened?”

“I look like a general to you? How the hell should I know?”

The soldier started to walk off.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Ed said. “You can’t just expect us to climb on a bus and go to Georgia without being told what’s going on.”

“Mister, this whole area’s under martial law. If you’re told to put your wrinkled old butt on a bus, then that’s what you’re going to do. You can have an opinion about it if you want to, but nobody around here gives a shit what that opinion is.”

“You don’t need to cuss at me like that,” Ed said.

“Mister,” he said, “I don’t give a shit what you think one way or the other. I’ve just spent the last thirty-six hours fighting zombies and rescuing crusty old motherfuckers like you, and I ain’t even had so much as five minutes to myself to call, my wife and find out how she’s doing with my three kids. So if you think I give a shit about you or what you think, you can go—”

“Stanislaw!”

The soldier stopped talking. He stood there for a second, breathing heavily, his lips squeezed together in a look of barely controlled fury.

Behind him, a man with a major’s insignia on his chest stood with his hands on his hips. He was tall, lean, his neck corded with veins. His hair was a deep, unnatural-looking black. It looked like he dyed it.

“Stan,” the major said. “Go get Weber. The two of you stand down for a thirty-minute break.”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier said.

He was gone a moment later.

The major watched him go, then turned to Ed. “My men have been fighting for almost two days straight now. Tempers are strained.”

“I can see that.”

“Are you folks okay?”

Ed looked over his shoulder. Art Waller was standing on his own, but Julie was right next to him, looking like she expected him to fall over at any second.

He said, “We could use some water and some food.” He gestured at Art. “And my friend isn’t doing so well. He has a heart condition.”

The major nodded. “Food and water is on the way. Once we get you guys settled on the bus, I’ll have a doctor come by. We’ve got a field pharmacy, too. I imagine you folks probably had to leave your medications behind.”

“That’s right.”

The major nodded. “We may not have everything you need, but they should have pharmacy facilities where we’re going. In the meantime, if you’ll write out your cottage numbers and the names of your medications, I’ll have my people go by your rooms and round up what you need.”

“Thank you,” Ed said. He looked across the courtyard at all the dead bodies in the grass, the blood on the walls and the sidewalks, and the bullet holes everywhere. He said, “That soldier said we were going to Georgia.”

“That’s right. Albany, Georgia. It’s one of six camps that have been set up to help with the evacuation.”

“Are things really that bad?”

“Worse than you can imagine,” the major said.

The major looked over at the rest of the group and saw Margaret and her two kids. To the boy, he said, “Where’d you get that badge? That looks like a real U.S. Marshals’ badge.”

“It is,” the boy said. He looked at Ed.

“I gave it to him,” Ed said. “U.S. Deputy Marshal Ed Moore, retired.”

The major nodded. “Outstanding,” he said. “We’re under martial law right now. You knew that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we need help. Are you fit enough to return to duty?”

“Fit enough?” The question seemed ridiculous. “I don’t know, Major. Honestly, I feel like every bone in my body aches right about now, and all I was doing was sitting down.”

The major shrugged. “That sounds good enough. You think you can take charge of these people? See them all the way to Albany?”

“You’re kidding?”

“Not a bit. They’ll need a leader. Can you do it?”

Ed hesitated. There was a streak of vanity in him that ran fairly deep, and that part of him was stirring. He felt an excitement in his gut, like butterflies.

“How many…survivors did your men find?” Ed asked.

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two,” Ed said. He sighed. “There were more than two hundred people living here.”

“I’m sorry,” the major said. He put a hand on Ed’s shoulder and said, “Why don’t you get your people ready to move out? Somebody will come by with food and water once you guys are loaded up on the bus.”

Ed nodded, and the major turned to leave.

Billy Kline called after him. “Hey,” he said. “Hold up.”

The major stopped and looked at Billy. He took in Billy’s prison scrubs and his bearing stiffened.

Billy said, “You guys are running things now?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, look. I was part of a work detail from the Sarasota County Jail. I got four months left on my sentence and I don’t want to get in any trouble for skipping out. If you’re in charge, I’m turning myself over to you. I don’t want any trouble.”

The major stared at him for a long moment. Then he smiled. “Deputy Moore?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Deputy, it looks like you got yourself a prisoner as well.”

“No fucking way,” Billy said.

The major walked off.

“I don’t want to go with this geezer,” Billy called after him. “Hey. You gotta take me someplace else.”

The major made no answer.

“Hey,” Billy said. “Hey!”

Billy turned to Ed and said, “No fucking way, man. It’s not gonna happen.”

But Ed Moore went right on smiling.