CHAPTER 18

Nate Royal was sitting on a bench across the street from where he’d parked his van when Jessica Metcalfe pulled up in her shiny new Jag.

He smiled as she climbed out of the car. Somehow, he had a feeling he’d be seeing her today. His knee was throbbing, and in his mind, the girl and the surging pain in his knee always went together.

She was older, like about thirty-five, but the gulf between them was a lot wider than years could measure. She lived with her husband in one of the big white houses on Kansas Street. Martindale, Pennsylvania, was your typical post-industrial town, and it didn’t have much in the way of filthy rich, but the Metcalfes came about as close as anyone.

Nate, however, lived with his dad and his dad’s girlfriend, Mindy, in a rotting two-bedroom house with the railroad tracks on one side and a drainage ditch mounded with garbage on the other.

Actually, that wasn’t totally true. Actually he lived in a converted work shed behind his dad’s rotting two-bedroom house. But Jessica Metcalfe didn’t need to know that. As far as Nate was concerned, all she needed to do was shake that beautiful ass of hers all the way up the sidewalk, and she was taking care of that just fine.

Nate watched her disappear into the dark, tinted front doors of the Wells Fargo bank, and his mind tumbled back a few years, to the day her husband, the city attorney, had fired him from his job with the Sanitation Department and then turned right around and offered him a completely different job: two hundred dollars to touch up the paint on their pool house.

“Come by this Sunday,” he said. “Say, nine o’clock?”

Confused, Nate merely nodded.

Then he arrived at the huge white house on Kansas Street, and he saw the gleaming white marble trim around the pool and the dazzling blue water, and a fantasy was born.

Jessica Metcalfe, wearing an itty-bitty white tennis outfit, had showed him where he’d be working and then gone inside, and as he stood there waiting for her to come back out, he could almost picture her stepping out her back door in a red bikini, peeling it off like Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High as sun-dappled beads of water sprayed over her head.

But of course in real life, she hadn’t peeled off anything except a page of unlined paper covered with a loopy, girlish handwriting.

“Here are your instructions. You think you can handle that?”

It was real bitchy the way she said it. He had bristled at that, but he needed the money, so he squinted at the page and tried to make sense of what she had written. Even back in school, when the teachers were working with him in the special classes he took, he’d never been able to pull the sense out of anything more than four or five words long, and she’d written so much stuff down on that paper. He stared at it, feeling lost.

Two hours later, when she came out to check on his progress, she said, “Oh, holy hell! What have you done to my house?” He followed her gaze up to the gutters he had just painted eggshell white and couldn’t see what the problem was.

He didn’t catch what she said after that, just the part about how he was a stupid retard who couldn’t even read, but that was enough to start a trembling rage crawling up the back of his scalp.

He followed her inside the house.

She was sitting at an old-fashioned rolltop desk in the kitchen, doodling little flowers with a pink pen while she talked on the phone. She left him standing there for a full minute before putting a hand over the phone and saying, “Are you still here? You’ve done enough damage for one day, don’t you think?”

“Take it back,” he said.

Into the phone she said, “Linda, let me call you back. Uh-huh. No, everything’s fine.” Then she turned to Nate and said, “You’re getting mud on my floor.”

He looked at his feet, momentarily derailed.

“I ain’t no retard,” he said. He heard the high, squeaky register of his voice and puffed up his chest to compensate for it.

“Get out of my house,” she said. “You’re fired. Leave.”

His anger broke then and he took a step toward her, cocking his fist back as he came. What happened next happened all at once, so fast he couldn’t really piece it all together. It was like a series of photographs in his mind, arranged in no certain order.

Her eyes got huge.

His elbow bumped something and he felt whatever it was slide off the table next to him.

Some sort of fancy glass crystal vase hit the floor and popped with a hollow and expensive-sounding poof.

The sound stopped him.

He looked at the glass shards on the parquet floor and said, “I…didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”

“You bastard!” she screamed. “That was from my wedding.”

He had been to the county jail once before. In his head, some dim logic worked itself out, telling him that whatever had just happened was about to put him back in county, where he had been beat up four times in three days. He didn’t want to go back there, so he ran.

The cops showed up at his house later that day.

He thought they might, and he was ready.

When his dad peeked through the blinds and said, “Oh shit, Nate, what the hell did you do?” Nate didn’t stay around to answer. He ran out the back door and jumped the fence. But when he landed on the other side, his left leg curled under him and he went down. All the cops had to do was follow the sounds of his screaming. By the time he made it to county later that night, the knee had swollen up like a watermelon. He didn’t get treated till the next day, and by then it was too late. The knee was never the same after that.

A man in a white-and-blue jogging suit ran by, the soles of his shoes slapping on the wet pavement. The whole town seemed to be shaking itself apart getting ready for the refugees they were talking about on the news, but not this guy. He had the calm, faraway look in his eyes that Nate remembered from his own days as a runner.

Nate had run cross-country his freshman and sophomore years in school, before a combination of academic and disciplinary probation got him booted off the team, and he had good memories of running.

Once, they’d gone up to Gatlin to run in a district meet. Gatlin was surrounded by pine forests, and their cross-country course took them through two miles of dense tree cover, the dirt trails beneath them red as baked brick. A senior from Gatlin had managed to stay pretty much even with him for most of the course. Nate could still remember hearing the note of exhaustion in the older boy’s breathing as they rounded the last bend two hundred yards from the edge of the trees. It was another half mile after that to the finish, and Nate had been pacing himself, saving his strength for the last hard push to the tape. But when he heard that older boy’s breathing start to falter, he began to chant to himself You’ve got more than this. Turn it on. Burn him up. And when he broke through the trees and into daylight, he was running better than he had ever done in his life. It was the one time he could truly say, without question, that he was better at something than anybody else around him.

That had been ten years ago, yet it seemed like another lifetime now.

Now, he was just another of life’s losers, sitting on a bench, nowhere to go, nothing to do, no purpose.

And then Jessica Metcalfe came out of the bank. She was holding the strings to about a dozen pink and white balloons in her hand. Watching her, studying her, he realized that she was more than just a nice ass. She was all around smokin’ hot, like that girl Bellamy Blaze, whose movies he had in his shoebox back home. He wiped the moisture from his lips as he watched her long black hair, tied back in a ponytail, bouncing playfully between her shoulder blades. She wore a thin white shirt, and even from across the street, he thought he could trace the outline of her bra underneath. His eyes flicked to the hint of bare midriff at the top of her low-rise jeans, then followed the curve of her hips down the length of her legs to where her black high-heel shoes clicked on the pavement. He imagined what it would feel like to peel away the straps of those shoes and stroke her bare feet.

Something flared up inside him, something that felt like hunger, and before he knew it, he was on his feet and walking across the street toward her.

She was already at her Jaguar, the driver’s-side door open. She was bending into the car, her perfect ass pointed at him as she wrestled the balloons into the car.

He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back from the car. She let out a grunt of surprise—not a scream, but an oddly feminine grunt that almost made him laugh. With his free hand, he threw open the van doors and, before either of them knew what had happened, tossed her inside.

She still had her legs out of the van, but they were off the street, swinging free like a little kid in a big chair. Jessica looked at him, her eyes wide with fright, and said, “Nate, what the hell are you doing?”

She knew his name. That surprised him, and he stopped.

Her question surprised him, too. He didn’t really know what he was doing. He hadn’t planned on this and didn’t know what to do now that he’d done it.

Her eyes darted over his shoulder.

He turned briefly and watched the balloons she had been carrying drift down the street. It was an odd sight, those pink and white balloons floating sluggishly down the wet, dreary length of Brockton Street. They were beautiful, bobbing just above the pavement, trying to take to the sky.

“Help!” Jessica shouted, and the piercing shrill tone of it split Nate’s thoughts like a razor.

“Help me!”

“Stop it,” he said.

She kicked him, catching his chin with her heel. The blow surprised him, but rather than clear his head it had the opposite effect, and his mind went red.

“Get the fuck away from me, you creep. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He knocked her foot away, took a step closer, and slapped her across the cheek.

She cried out, not a word, but a weak little yelp. She had her hand on her cheek, cradling it, but gingerly, almost like she didn’t dare touch it. Her eyes were wide with fear and panic, and it made him feel really strong, and angry, and somehow vindicated.

He raised his hand again, and she shrank up into a ball, cringing from him, backing up, farther inside the van.

Feeling oddly blank inside, he closed the van door.

He looked around. No one was watching him. No one was looking. He took a small length of baling wire from his pocket and slowly started wrapping the wire around the door handles, murmuring to himself as he worked.

“Oh, Nate, you did it now. You’re so fucked. You’re so very fucked.”

He parked the van behind his dad’s house and got out and walked around to the back of the vehicle, staring at it, thinking about the woman inside. What in the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t just strip her, look at her, then let her go. Could he? That was all he wanted to do, just look at her. Maybe touch her breasts, pinch the hard little eraser tips of her nipples, maybe get her to turn around in her panties so he could lock that image in his mind along with the daylight at the edge of those trees. Nate Royal’s greatest hits.

He undid the baling wire from the door handles.

He was still murmuring to himself, but he felt good, strong. Even the knee felt strong.

He opened the doors, threw them wide, smiling, and got a heel in his teeth.

He staggered backward, his hands over his mouth.

Still doubled over, he took his hands away. They were bloody. He touched his front teeth with the tip of his tongue, and one of them was loose.

“What the hell did you do that for?” he asked her.

But she was already scrambling out of the back of his van and running past him with everything she had.

He turned, tried to snag her blouse, didn’t do it.

He watched her run. She turned back and looked at him for just a moment, her face lit with fear. She whimpered, stumbled, then took off again.

God, she was fast.

The thought thrilled him, and once again the adrenaline was pumping. One more big run, he thought. Catch her. Catch her. Catch her now.

He took off after her, and all the strength, all the grace, all the power that had been his so long ago was back, and he felt great.

She ran over the railroad tracks and across a muddy, weed-choked field before turning up an alley and running parallel to the tracks. He stayed with her the whole way, even gained on her. They were both running for their lives, and he could hear her panting. She was tiring already, and he still had more. Turn it on, he thought. Burn her up.

Jessica turned one more time to look at him, and in that moment he knew he had her. He was closing fast. Nate reached out a hand, his fingers playing at the fabric of her blouse, and then everything went black. He fell. He tumbled forward, hit the ground, rolled and rolled into a cluster of trash cans and loose garbage and mud.

Something had tripped him up.

Stunned, but unhurt, he looked around.

For a moment, he had no idea what he was looking at. Then it hit him. Jessica was fighting with somebody. The two of them were rolling in the mud. She was screaming. The man beneath her, now on top of her, now side by side, like lovers in a cuddle, was Darnell Sykes. He lived two houses over. Nate had gotten drunk with him about a million times, traded pornos with him. But now he was all fucked up. His face was anyway. His arms, too. His clothes were smeared with blood and dirt and mud.

“What the hell did you do that for, Darnell?” Nate said.

But Darnell did not acknowledge him. He was fighting with Jessica, pulling her arms apart, forcing them down by her side.

He was snarling.

He lunged forward and bit her mouth, caught a corner of it and pulled until her cheek tore open. She screamed, and it was such a hideous, gut-turning sound that it instantly cleared Nate’s head.

“Get the fuck away from her,” he said.

He put a hand on Darnell’s shoulder and tried to pull him back from the writhing woman underneath him.

Darnell turned on him.

Nate’s forearm was in front of Darnell’s face, and Darnell took a bite of the soft flesh just above the elbow.

Nate screamed. He stepped back, crashed into a trash can, but managed to keep his feet by grabbing ahold of the fence.

He looked down at his arm, and that’s when it hit him.

Zombies. The infected. He’d been infected.

He could feel the wound screaming at him, pulsing like somebody had stuck a live electrical cord through it.

“No,” he said aloud. “No. Not me.”

Darnell rose to his feet. His eyes were milky white and vacant. There was no recognition there. No feeling. No Darnell behind those eyes.

“Dude,” Nate said. “You fucked me, man. You fucked me.”

Darnell moaned. His hands came up, the fingers opening and closing.

Nate turned and ran.

And that’s when the knee went out. He dropped to the ground and screamed.

Behind him, Darnell was lumbering forward, getting closer.

“No,” Nate said.

He rose to his feet and hobbled away. Darnell’s mother’s house was just around the corner. Nate went to it. He limped through the front yard, got close enough to the wooden steps to see blood on the doorway.

Darnell moaned behind him.

“No fucking way,” Nate said. “No. No fucking way.”

Nate limped on, forcing himself to move.

He managed to get a good amount of distance on Darnell, even with the pain in his knee. He looked behind him, didn’t see Darnell, and decided to turn in to a space between two houses.

Another neighbor, Mr. Hartwell, had a lawn mower shed behind his house. Nate could see it from where he stood. He limped toward it, slid inside, and closed the door behind him.

He was in darkness now. He listened for a long time, but heard nothing. There were gaps in the sheet metal. He peered through them, and saw nothing.

The knee was killing him. So, too, was the pain in his arm.

“God, I fucked up so bad,” he said. “Oh, God, I don’t want to be like that.”

He slid down onto his butt, his back against the thin metal siding of the shed, and waited.

What was it the man on the news had said? You get bit, you got four, maybe five hours at the most.

It wasn’t much time, Nate thought.

God, not nearly enough.