CHAPTER 17

From the notebooks of Ben Richardson

Conroe, Texas: July 9th, 11:15 P.M.

There was some bad fighting today.

We stayed on that bus all night, not moving, just waiting, trapped on Jackrabbit Road right outside of Bammel, Texas, which up until a few days ago was a tiny little town of about 2,000 people just north of Houston.

When dawn broke, we off-loaded the bus and decided to start walking toward I-45. We hadn’t made it very far before Jerald Stevens, the young man who continues to raid my pack for candy bars even though I’ve told him I don’t have any more, stepped into the vegetation growing by the side of the road and shouted out that he had found blackberries. “They’re all over the place,” he said, and the delight on his face was enough to make anyone smile.

I watched him eat them straight off the vine, making his way down the ditch that paralleled Jackrabbit Road until he was a good hundred feet or so ahead of us. He was facing us, his chin and his cheeks black with pulp and juice, but he heard something and turned around, his back to us.

I heard him shout, “Hey, stop that. Leave her alone.”

A second later, there was a shot, and Jerald ducked his head and ran full speed back in our direction, his hands thrown over his head like he actually had a chance of stopping a bullet with them.

“Holy shit,” he yelled. “Officer Barnes!”

The street behind him met a smaller side street at a four-way intersection. We could see a gas station over the shrubs to our right. It was from that gas station that our trouble came, for just as Jerald got to where the rest of us stood, three armed men with black bandanas over their faces stepped around the corner and into the street.

Everybody hit the ground, diving for cover.

I heard gunfire, but my mind refused to recognize what was going on. For a crazy second, it seemed like the air had filled with bees around my head. Little white clouds of powdered concrete appeared all around me, and several times, I felt the sharp sting of bits of rock as they flew up from the roadway and peppered my cheeks and my arms.

I thought I’d been stung.

It was only after Barnes yelled at me to, “Get down, you idiot!” that I realized the bees were bullets.

They were shooting at us.

At me.

We all ran for the cover of the ditch at the side of the road, except for Barnes. He ran forward in a crouch, AR-15 up in a shooter’s stance. He returned fire, quickly but deliberately, and continued to advance until he was behind the trunk of an abandoned car.

From there, he continued to fire. As I watched, the three men who had rounded the corner with their bandanas and their guns went down. One of them, the last to fall, had gone down to one knee to fire. Barnes shot him with a quick three-round burst and knocked him backward onto his butt. The man sat there, weapon on the ground beside him, his shoulders slumped forward like a marionette with its strings cut, for a long moment. Then Barnes fired at him again, and the man fell onto his back and was still.

Barnes got up and ran for the gas station. I ran after him.

Before I even got to the intersection, I heard lots of shooting. When I rounded the corner, I saw the young man Barnes had saved with his sniper’s shot back at the breach in Houston. Behind him were the young women for whom he had created a diversion. All of them were huddled together in the gas station parking lot. Surrounding them on every side were the bodies of more men with bandanas over their faces.

I heard yelling, looked up, and saw Barnes chasing one of the men around the back of the gas station.

I took off after them.

I rounded the corner and saw Barnes had caught his man. The two of them were squared off against each other in the grass next to the men’s room door.

Both had knives.

The man lunged at Barnes. Barnes stepped gracefully to one side, and it was obvious from that first moment how the fight was going to end. The other man was clumsy. But Barnes with a knife was like Picasso with a paintbrush. He grabbed the man by his wrist and with his right hand ran the blade all the way up the man’s arm. He looked like he was buttering toast. He was that fast, that smooth. Everywhere he went, he cut. The blade licked deep gashes into the exposed skin of the man’s arm and sliced his shirt open down the back of his shoulder blade. Barnes came up behind him then and sliced the man across the line of his jaw. The man opened his mouth to scream, but the sound was cut off at the throat. Barnes grabbed him under the chin, forced it up, and before I could even process what he was doing, Barnes had jammed the blade so far into the other man’s throat that he nearly decapitated him in one slice.

I stood there, stricken, as Barnes continued to cut. He cut until the man’s head snapped back and the torso sank shoulder first into the grass.

A moment later, Barnes was holding the man’s head in his hand, grasping it by the hair like some perverse rendering of Perseus with the gorgon’s head.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t what happened next, for Barnes began to scream at the man’s head.

He threw it against the men’s room door.

He ran forward and kicked it like it was a soccer ball.

He said, “How do you like that, you fuckin’ piece of shit? You think you’re bad. You think you’re fuckin’ bad? Motherfucker, I’m your god!”

Then Barnes stepped forward and started smashing the head under his heel. Pounding on it. Grinding it under his foot.

“You hear me?” he screamed. “You ain’t shit next to me.”

Then he kicked the head some more.

That went on for a long time.

I got sick watching it. I was wiping the vomit from my mouth when he turned away from the battered head and the gore-stained gas station wall.

He wasn’t surprised to see me there.

He walked right by me and said, “Time to move out.”

I turned and watched him walk back to our group, where Sandra and her people were taking care of the young man and the women our sudden appearance had probably saved.

I am worried about Officer Michael Barnes.

They entered Conroe, Texas, on foot.

Nobody spoke. Nobody said a thing. Their group, which had grown to about thirty as they made their way up I-45, stayed in a cluster in the middle of the road, Officer Michael Barnes walking point about twenty feet ahead of them. They had been walking for hours. Most of the night, in fact. And now that morning had broken, they stared numbly at the pine trees and the well-kept yards and the simple, uninspired architecture of yet another small Texas town, and they were afraid of the emptiness that surrounded them.

They were on a quiet, two-lane residential street. Cars were parked along the side of the street and in driveways. Everything seemed well cared for: the houses, the lawns. Here and there, American and Texas flags still flew from poles in people’s front yards, stirring occasionally in the light breeze. And yet there wasn’t a soul in sight. The only sound was the constant padded thud of their shoes on the pavement.

Richardson, one of the few members of the group who was armed, walked behind the others, the tail to Barnes’s point.

He felt uneasy.

Something was wrong.

They were following the trail of refugees from the Houston quarantine zone and the zombies that had come with them. More of the infected were undoubtedly on the road behind them, pushing outward into new territory. So what was going on here, then? Were they in some sort of eye, the eerily calm center of the storm?

Probably so, he thought. And that ain’t good.

There was a sudden commotion up front. All at once the quiet that had been eating at Richardson’s mind was gone. People were talking excitedly, not yelling, not yet, and pointing off to the left at a fairly large brown brick building that looked like some kind of civic center, maybe a church, though there was no signage that he could see.

And then he saw the girl. She was twelve years old, maybe a year or two younger. The whole left side of her body was the color of iodine.

Dried blood, Richardson thought.

The girl was running toward them. Even at a distance, Richardson recognized the milky white eyes of the infected. She was emitting a noise somewhere between a stuttering moan and an oddly feral barking. Richardson had never heard anything like it.

The group was starting to move backward, toward Richardson’s position, and for a moment the crowd thinned enough for him to make out Officer Michael Barnes, standing perfectly still in the point position.

Barnes didn’t look around. He raised his AR-15 to his shoulder and squeezed off a round.

The girl’s lower jaw exploded in a spray of dark, wet bits and teeth.

Hit in the jaw, Richardson thought. Sweet Jesus.

The first shot spun her around and knocked her facedown on the ground. But she got back to her feet and she stumbled forward, trying to run, but managing only a careening sideways roll that made her look like a drunken sailor trying to stay on his feet after getting tossed into the street from some seedy Malaysian bar.

Barnes’s next shot put her down for good.

A few people gasped.

At first, Richardson thought they were gasping at what Barnes had just done, and maybe a few of them were, but then he saw the real problem.

From the building, a sickening moan erupted. A few of the infected appeared at one corner of the building. More followed. Richardson’s stomach turned at the sight of so many children.

Barnes wasted no time. He raised his rifle once again and, with an easy calm, fired into the approaching crowd.

Richardson turned away. Everyone around him looked stricken.

Richardson heard a woman sobbing. He glanced to his right and was surprised to see Sandra Tellez standing there. Her cheeks were shiny with tears. She looked like she was trying to make herself swallow the lump in her throat but couldn’t quite manage it.

Clint Siefer, silent as ever, put a hand on her shirt and gave it a gentle tug.

Sandra put her arms around Clint and squeezed. Then she looked toward Richardson and seemed as surprised to see him as he had been to see her.

They stared at each other, neither one speaking.

The shots kept coming, one at a time, slow and steady, like a hammer pounding on an anvil, and with each report, Sandra would flinch a little.

Richardson didn’t know what to say. He gave her a helpless shrug. There weren’t words to describe all that was wrong with the world. It was so terrible, so mean, so pointless.

He shook his head and looked away.

The shooting stopped, eventually.

Richardson looked up as the echo of the last shot died away and a silence once again descended on the world.

The group was zippering apart to let Barnes pass through. He was coming in Richardson’s direction, his weapon slung casually over one shoulder, his expression tight but revealing nothing.

Nobody spoke to him. Nobody, it seemed, could even bring themselves to look directly at him.

“There’s a Kroger up ahead on the right,” Barnes said.

At first, the words made no sense to Richardson.

“A grocery store?” he said, confused. What did a grocery store have to do with anything?

“I want you to take these people up there,” Barnes said. “But before you let everybody in, you secure the building. Send two people around the back. Have them check for more infected. If there are vehicles back there, check them to see if we can use them. Once you’ve got the place locked down, I’ll go inside and clear it.”

He ejected the magazine from his rifle, checked it, then slid in a fresh one.

“Go on,” he said. “Get moving.”

“But—”

“What is it?” Barnes said. He wasn’t looking at Richardson. He was scanning the surrounding buildings, his eyes reduced to two thin, hard slits in a nest of wrinkles. There was a two-day growth of whiskers on his face.

“I don’t understand,” Richardson said. “You want me to take them? Where will you be?”

“There are more of those things around here,” he said, and indicated the piles of bodies he had just made. “I’m gonna make sure we have a way out of here. I’ll see if I can find us some vehicles.”

“Okay,” Richardson said. That much made sense at least.

“Go on,” Barnes told him. “Get moving. We need to make this fast. I’ll catch up with you in a second.”

They stood in the nearly empty parking lot of a grocery store.

Presently, they heard a noise, a truck lumbering down the street. It was the first vehicle most of them had heard since leaving their homes and joining the trail of refugees and it created a stir among them.

The truck, a white Isuzu two-axle van, lumbered into the parking lot. Barnes was behind the wheel. He got the truck turned around and backed it up near the front doors of the grocery store. Then he got out and approached the crowd.

To Richardson he said, “What’s it look like?”

“They’ve got power in there,” Richardson said. “I looked through the windows and didn’t see anybody moving.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s clear,” Barnes said. “I’ll go in and check first. What about the back?”

“Nothing.”

“No vehicles?”

Richardson shook his head.

“Okay. Well, I think I’ve got that taken care of.”

Most of the little towns they’d passed through had been cleaned out by other refugees. They had seen nothing but empty shelves and garbage and dead bodies and wrecked cars in the streets. But Conroe seemed different. Hostile as its emptiness was, it was nonetheless relatively intact. Inside the store, at least from what Richardson could see, was an embarrassment of riches. Certainly enough food and supplies for all of them.

Richardson told him as much.

Barnes considered that, then looked at the faces of the others standing behind Richardson, waiting with wide, hollow-looking eyes.

Barnes had left his rifle in the truck. Shortly after killing the masked bandits in Bammel, he and Richardson had gone into a store and found a change of clothes. Now Barnes was dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt under a thin black windbreaker. He reached inside his windbreaker and removed his .45 semiautomatic pistol.

He ejected the magazine, checked it, then slapped it back into the receiver.

To Richardson he said, “I want you to keep an eye out for any more of the infected. I saw a few a couple of streets over.”

Richardson nodded.

To the crowd, Barnes said, “Listen up, everybody. Is there anybody here who knows how to drive a bus?”

A few people raised their hands.

“That’s good. I found some transportation for us. I’m gonna go inside here and check to make sure everything is clear. While I’m gone, I want you people who raised your hands to work out who’s gonna drive first. We have two buses, so we’ll be able to divide ourselves up into two groups. Try to figure out who’s going in which bus while I’m in here.”

And with that he turned on his heel and disappeared inside the store.

A few minutes later, they heard two shots.

Richardson and Barnes walked side by side up the bread aisle, past packaged tortillas and boxes of crispy taco shells and loaf after endless loaf of bread. Richardson’s initial impression of the place was correct. It was largely untouched by the other refugees. But ahead of them, at the end of the aisle, was a thick smear of clotting blood on the floor.

As they got closer, Richardson could see that the trail of blood led through a pair of swinging doors that opened into the store’s backroom.

“You put them back there?” he said.

Barnes nodded. He reached out and grabbed a loaf of Jewish rye off the shelf, tore it open, and handed Richardson a slice.

“Thanks.”

They ate their bread as they turned in to the refrigerated section of the store, an island of coolers displaying an array of steaks and pork and chicken.

“I want to be organized about this,” Barnes said. “I know some of these people have been trapped inside Houston for a long time. They’re probably gonna want to get some huge forty-ounce rib eye or something. I can’t blame them for that, but we’re not gonna have anywhere to cook it either. We need to stick to stuff that can keep while we’re on the road.”

“That makes sense,” Richardson said. But he was surprised. He had worked up an opinion of Barnes as unbalanced, uncompromising, brutal beyond words. He had a genuine fear of him. The others did, too. They sensed something awful about him. And yet here Barnes was, calmly discussing logistics, even showing some empathy for the other refugees.

“Oh,” Barnes said, “and find out if anybody in the group is a doctor or a nurse or a pharmacist. Something like that. If so, have ’em go through the pharmacy. I know we’re gonna need antibiotics, maybe some painkillers, things like that.”

“Okay,” Richardson said.

“I’m gonna go grab some of the others and get them to help me with loading supplies onto the truck.”

Barnes disappeared down another aisle, leaving Richardson standing there, shaking his head.

Somebody was laughing nearby. It was the reckless, drunken sound of pure joy, and with a half-formed smile on his face, Richardson followed the sound.

It was coming from Jerald Stevens. Earlier, Richardson and Barnes had found him in the candy aisle, sitting on the tiled floor, a five-pound bag of Gummi Bears turned up to his mouth. Now he was sitting on the counter of the deli, holding an enormous turkey breast with both hands and eating it like it was corn on the cob. He had already eaten a good deal of it. On the floor around him were the remains of a package of potato salad, two apple cores, three stones that might have come from some peaches or nectarines, even half of a raw zucchini.

“You eat all this?”

Jerald Stevens looked up at him with a huge grin on his face. There were tears in the man’s eyes.

He nodded at Richardson.

“Better slow down, partner. There’s plenty for everybody.”

Jerald choked down a piece of the turkey. He was breathing hard. “You know how long it’s been since I’ve seen food like this?”

“Too long,” Richardson said. He smiled. “Enjoy yourself.”

Jerald nodded. He had already taken another bite.

Still smiling, Richardson walked off to find somebody who knew something about prescription medicines.