CHAPTER 27

From the vehicles, all they could see were feet sticking out of the grass. Here and there, they could make out the length of somebody’s lower leg. It wasn’t until they got closer that they saw the rest of the bodies, fourteen in all, the hands and ankles tied together with baling wire, headless necks pushed up against a rail line.

“That’s a clever way of killing ’em,” Barnes said. “Certainly gets the job done.”

Richardson turned away. He wasn’t squeamish, not by a long shot, but the bodies had been there a long time, decomposing in the hot summer sun. They were blackened with rot and were badly swollen. A few had burst open beneath their clothes.

They were in a Chevy pickup leading the caravan. Behind them were two buses, six other pickups, and a few cars.

Barnes said, “Probably won’t see more of that.”

“Thank God,” Richardson said.

“Effective, but a little too much effort for what it accomplishes. Somebody’s got to hold ’em there, you know, while the train comes. And I bet we’re not gonna see too many more trains from here on out.”

“No,” Richardson said. “Probably not.”

The wind shifted and carried with it the smell of burnt things.

Richardson crinkled his nose. “You smell that?”

Richardson knew they were entering the little town of Tobinville, Texas, population 1,458, because there was a sign still dangling from a crazily leaning post on the side of the road. He never would have known otherwise. Everything was burned beyond recognition.

Black snowflakes of ash drifted across the roadway. What had once been pine forests on either side of the road were now smoking, smoldering fields. A few trees, burned to blackened stalagmites, poked up above the black ground. Here and there, wisps of smoke drifted across a surface that looked alien and forbidding. The smell of burnt wood and grass hung heavily in the air, and Richardson coughed quietly into his shoulder as he stared across the remains of the forest.

Soon, the fields gave way to houses, the town proper visible just ahead. They passed a line of cars and fire trucks, all of them burned and sitting on rubberless wheels wrapped in skeins of wire, their windows shattered by the heat, their interiors melted into gooey piles of plastic and twisted metal. The bodies weren’t obvious at first because they were as black as the ground upon which they rested, but here and there a charred hand or a knee rose up above the level ground, and once Richardson saw one, it was easier to spot the rest. And there were many.

They entered the town in silence, driving slowly. The buildings were fire-blackened and all but unrecognizable now. They saw the remnants of what might at one time have been a factory up ahead, its charred, crumbling walls towering in jagged lines above the rest of the town.

A line of storefronts along the main street had been reduced to smoking heaps of ashes. A few were made of brick, and those few had partly survived the fire. They also seemed to have acted as a firebreak, because beyond them, the houses and buildings seemed relatively undamaged.

“What happened here?” Richardson said.

“Controlled burn.”

“What?”

“This was a controlled burn. My guess is the people in town here started it and it got out of hand. Those zombies we saw at the tracks a ways back, they were probably the first zombies these folks encountered. But when the big waves of them started coming down the road, they probably figured burning ’em would be the way to go. Hasn’t rained around these parts in a while. Add a good, strong wind to that, and you’ve got yourself the recipe for a disaster. The fire probably swept over the town in a matter of minutes.”

Richardson looked at him, shocked.

“How in the world do you know that?”

“I’m guessing,” Barnes said. “But I saw a couple of drip torches on the side of the road on our way in.”

“What’s a drip torch?”

“A tool firefighters use to start controlled burns. Think of a metal watering can full of gas and a burning wick at the head of the spout. We used ’em in the early days of the quarantine, when we were trying to force the zombies back inside Houston.”

“But the zombies don’t react to fire.”

“Yeah, I know. But we didn’t know that then. The infected just walk right into the flames. Some of ’em walk right back out the other side, like human torches.”

Richardson thought of that. These people here in Tobinville—they clearly didn’t know that, either. He pictured them, making a last stand behind their vehicles at the edge of town, watching the first wave of burning zombies descending upon them, a wall of out-of-control fire raging behind them.

“Sweet Jesus,” he said.

They stopped for fuel at a gas station on the other side of the burn line that divided the town. Barnes got out of the truck and directed vehicles into the stalls. He set up armed guards at either end of the station and told the rest of the people to stay close, nobody wander off.

Richardson, eager to get away from Barnes for even a short while, walked across the parking lot and entered the convenience store adjacent to the pumps. Two men from their group were already behind the counter, forcing open the Plexiglas screens where the cigarettes were stored.

“Want one?” one of the men said. He held up a carton of Marlboros in one hand, Camels in the other.

“No, thanks,” Richardson said. “I quit back in college.”

The man shrugged, then went back to the cabinet and continued removing carton after carton of smokes. A few women were at the coolers, which had evidently stopped working some few days earlier, and started removing bottles of water. Smart, Richardson thought, though the stench of the soured milk in the coolers was enough to make him gag, even over the smell of the burnt buildings.

On the next aisle over, Jerald Stevens was sitting on the ground with a bag of chips open in his lap and a Slim Jim in each hand. He looked up at Richardson and smiled, his mouth full of something.

“How’s it going?” Richardson said.

“Awesome,” Stevens said. Or at least that’s what it sounded like.

Stevens kept on smiling as he ate. His pockets, Richardson could see now, were absolutely stuffed with food. The man is probably hoarding it, Richardson thought. But he couldn’t blame him for it. Not after what he had been through, two years inside the quarantine zone, living hand to mouth.

Still, it seemed unhealthy.

“Take it easy,” Richardson said. “There’s plenty of food for everyone.”

Stevens’s smile wavered a bit but didn’t entirely disappear. Richardson did notice him tighten his grip on the Slim Jims, though.

He looked out the window and saw Sandra Tellez walking across the lot with Clint Siefer, her arm around his shoulder. He nodded to Jerald Stevens, then grabbed three bottles of water from the shattered cooler in the back of the store. Outside, he caught up with Sandra Tellez and Clint Siefer and offered them each a water.

“Thank you,” she said.

Clint took his without a word, without making eye contact.

Poor damaged kid, Richardson thought.

He said, “Sorry they’re not cold.”

Sandra shrugged as she opened hers. “What can you do, right?”

“Right,” he said.

He’d already gotten a little bit of her story, but he was eager for more. He knew that she had run an in-home day care before Hurricane Mardell drowned Houston. He knew that she had a daughter of her own, the little girl killed along with her husband during the first few days of the quarantine.

She was closely connected to the young man who clung so tightly, and so silently, to her. Clint had been going to Sandra’s day care since he was only seven months old. He had grown up in her house, right next to her own daughter. He was fourteen now. His parents were killed by the infected, and somehow, he had managed to wander through the flooded ruins and the hordes of zombies to her house. She had returned to the house merely by chance, she told him. She wanted the three cases of bottled water her husband had stashed in their pantry before he had died, and she entered the house to find Clint curled up in a ball in her living room, crying to himself. The childless mother and the orphaned child had found each other. To Richardson, it seemed there was something very human in that.

The three of them walked toward the buses, Richardson trying to keep the smell of burnt buildings out of his nostrils.

“You must be relieved to be out of Houston,” he said.

She nodded.

“What was it like in there?”

She stopped walking and looked at him. “Mr. Richardson,” she said. “Are you trying to interview me?”

He shrugged.

“If you don’t want to talk,” he said.

“I don’t mind talking to you. Up to a point, anyway. I won’t tell you about my family. And I won’t tell you about Clint here or his family. That stuff is private.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

“But you want to know what life was like inside the quarantine zone?”

He nodded. “Very much.”

“We felt abandoned. We felt like our government and our fellow Americans had turned their backs on us.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Is it? Do you really understand? Do you know what I heard on the radio on the way up here?”

He shook his head.

“I heard some man from, I don’t know, I think they said he was the Secretary of the Treasury, saying that people had broken through the walls all along the quarantine zone. He said he thought the people who had broken out should be shot as traitors. Can you imagine that? He said we were selfish to endanger everyone else’s lives. Can you imagine?”

Richardson shook his head.

He was about to ask her about how they had gathered food in the quarantine zone when they heard Barnes yelling. He was out in the middle of the street, directing traffic in and out of the gas station and yelling at a group of two men and three women who were checking the front doors of houses nearby.

“Stay close,” he ordered them. “Stay where we can see each other.”

One of the men waved in acknowledgment.

Richardson heard screaming off to his left and saw people running.

Richardson followed where the others were pointing and saw a zombie dragging itself along across a front yard on the other side of the street. The face was blistered and cracked, burned so badly he couldn’t tell the person’s race or even their sex. There was no hair, only a few wiry strands matted to the scalp with melted gobs of skin. Its clothes were unrecognizable. Not even the moan that escaped its damaged throat was recognizable.

Barnes crossed in front of him from his right, drawing his pistol as he came.

“Back away,” he ordered.

The crowd zippered open for him.

He stepped into the grass, leveled his pistol at the burned zombie’s head, and fired. The thing collapsed instantly, and to Richardson’s mind at least, it almost seemed grateful.

Then Barnes wheeled on the crowd, his anger and his contempt dripping off every syllable. “Listen up, people. I want everybody back in the vehicles, now. Get away from those houses. There’s gonna be more of these things around here, I guarantee you, and all you idiots want to do is go on a fucking scavenger hunt.”

A few members of the crowd started back toward the vehicles, but most just stood there, gaping at Barnes.

Barnes shoved one man into the street. “I said move it. Go on. Get!”

Sandra Tellez stepped around Richardson and walked right up to Barnes, Clint Siefer trailing along behind her.

“You can’t talk that way to them,” she said. “You have no right to call them scavengers. You have no idea what these people have been through.”

“News flash, lady. That’s what they fuckin’ are.”

“That’s what all of us are,” Sandra said. “We don’t need to be reminded of it. People need dignity as much as they need food and water, Mr. Barnes.”

He looked like he wanted to tear her head off. But instead, he lowered his voice and said, “Lady, I am here for one reason, and that is to live. I don’t give a damn about your dignity. I do care about surviving. Now, if you care about that, too, help me get these people back into the vehicles so we can get the hell out of here.”

Sandra stared back at him for a long time. Then she put her arm around Clint and started gently prodding the crowd back toward the vehicles.

Richardson was watching them cross the street when he happened to spot one of their group running from a backyard fence. “Run,” the man shouted. “Ya’ll run!”

“What the hell?” Barnes said.

Richardson saw four badly burned zombies staggering out of the yard and into the street. Their skin was red and cracked all up and down their arms and on their faces. One zombie was almost completely nude, and the skin down his right side was blistered and oozing.

More zombies stepped into the street behind the first four, all of them burned, and Richardson had just enough time to think they must have all gotten trapped back there somehow when a woman screamed from the far side of the yard. She was holding a little girl of about seven, hugging her tightly as the zombies changed direction and surrounded her.

Barnes turned away and walked toward the bus.

Sandra said, “Where are you going? You’ve got to help her.”

“Fuck her,” he said. “I told you people not to walk too far from the vehicles. She can’t do like I tell her, then fuck her.”

“Are you insane?”

Barnes ignored her.

The woman screamed again, and this time Sandra ran for her. “Help me,” she said to Richardson, passing him up at a sprint.

Richardson pulled his pistol and ran into the fray.

There were four zombies ahead of him. He shot two before they had a chance to turn around. The third was almost to the woman with the little girl when Richardson shot the man in the side of the head, sending him tumbling over sideways into the grass. The fourth zombie turned toward him, but Richardson hesitated. The man looked completely normal, the eyes unfocused and vague, but otherwise the same as anybody’s.

He lowered his weapon, uncertain.

“Shoot him,” Sandra screamed.

He looked at Sandra, then back at the man in front of him. There was a jagged crescent missing from the top of the man’s ear and bits of dried blood along the edges, and seeing it switched something on inside Richardson. He raised his pistol and fired, catching the man right under the nose and sending him sprawling onto his back.

But they were surrounded. Richardson pivoted on one foot, scanning the tightening ring of burned and mangled faces around him, and began firing until the slide of his pistol locked back in the empty position.

“I’m out,” he said, and stepped back until he and Sandra and the woman and child were side by side.

The little girl whimpered into her mother’s shirt. Richardson reached back and put a hand on her shoulder. Sandra stepped forward and pushed one of the zombies to the ground, but there were just too many of them.

One zombie, a woman in a yellow dress dotted with tiny red flowers, staggered forward over the one Sandra had pushed to the ground. Richardson tensed, his hands up against his chest, ready to sidestep the zombie’s grasp and push it down to the ground.

But he didn’t get the chance. A shot rang out, and the next moment the zombie’s head snapped violently to one side and it sank to the grass, immobile.

Another shot, and another, and another.

They were coming in rapid succession now. Richardson looked up to see Barnes moving across the street in a tactical crouch, his AR-15 tucked up tightly against his cheek as he moved. Barnes fired through his magazine, ejected it, slammed in another, and went on firing. When he was done shooting, and the echoes of his shots faded into silence, there were bodies everywhere. Most of them nearly headless.

The crowd stood watching him.

Barnes surveyed the mess without expression. Watching him, Richardson remembered the reputation the Texas Rangers acquired during their outlaw hunting days in the Old West. Tireless, unforgiving, a law unto themselves.

Barnes used the barrel of his AR-15 to turn over the corpse of a zombie who was facedown in the street. He stared at it, and he seemed to be deep in thought.

Then, suddenly, he stepped over the body and said, “Everybody back in the vehicles. Let’s go, people. Move it.”

Richardson walked Sandra and Clint back to their bus. Barnes was there, AR-15 cradled in his arm like a baby, watching the crowd as they got on.

Ahead of Sandra, a young man and a woman who was evidently his wife or girlfriend were getting on the bus. The woman climbed on, but as the man was about to follow her, Barnes grabbed the man by the back of his shirt and threw him down onto the pavement.

“What the hell?” the man said. He was on his back, staring up at Barnes.

“You,” Barnes said. “Stand up. Move over there.”

“What are you doing?” the woman said. “Leave him alone.”

Barnes ignored her.

“Get up,” he said.

The man didn’t move. Barnes reached into his Windbreaker and pulled his pistol. A few people screamed. Others scrambled out of the way.

“Wait!” the man said. “Wait!”

Barnes leveled his weapon at the man and fired three times, twice to the body, once to the head.

The man collapsed onto the pavement, glassy, sightless eyes pointing up at the portico roof above him, and lay still. Blood trickled out of the wound in his forehead and down the side of his face.

“No!” the woman behind Barnes screamed. “No!”

Richardson couldn’t believe it. He stared from the corpse to Barnes, too shocked to even ask why.

Barnes holstered his weapon, then took a lock blade knife from his pocket and snapped it open. He knelt by the corpse and cut the man’s shirtsleeve open all the way to the shoulder. The fabric fell away, revealing a nasty bite wound just above the elbow. It was already starting to darken to an angry reddish-black.

The crowd gasped.

Barnes looked at Richardson. “You didn’t notice he rolled his sleeves down?”

The woman from the bus pushed her way through them and rushed to the fallen man’s side. She was crying when Richardson turned away.

“He had his sleeves rolled up when he got off the bus,” Barnes said. “They’re down now.”

“Are you serious?” Sandra said. “You just killed a man for rolling his sleeves down?”

“I just killed a man who was gonna bring that virus onto that bus. He didn’t give a damn that he was gonna infect everyone else onboard. I just saved your ass.”

“But you weren’t sure. You killed him without knowing he was infected.”

“I was sure enough.”

“Sure enough? Do you hear yourself?”

“Lady, I told you, this is about survival. I told him to stand up and move away from the crowd. He didn’t do it.”

“You didn’t give him a chance.”

“Fuck that, lady. You do what you’re told the first time or you get fucked. I don’t give second chances. I don’t play games with my survival. You hear that, lady? All of you, listen up. If you want to survive, you do what I tell you to do. You don’t ask questions, and you don’t make me tell you twice. I will get you through this. If you’re too scared to act, then I’ll let you die. If you’re too stupid to do what needs to be done to survive, then I’ll let you die. There’s no place here for sentimentality. If you don’t like it, go off on your own. Good fucking riddance to you. But if you want to live, you stay with me, and you do as you’re fucking told. That’s it.”

He looked around the crowd, searching their faces for anybody who would dare to challenge him. Everyone, even Sandra Tellez, stared at the ground.

“Fine,” he said. To Richardson he said, “Get them on board. I’ll be in the truck.”