CHAPTER 34

From the notebooks of Ben Richardson

Pine Prairie, Texas: July 16th, 1:40 A.M.

We got hit hard today. Four dead. Lost both buses. Now we’ve only got three trucks and a minivan left.

It happened as we were leaving Huntsville earlier this morning, around 8 o’clock. Jammed-up traffic on I-45 forced us off the freeway and we had to drive through town—something Barnes didn’t want to do because Huntsville is home to eight different state prisons, and, as he put it, all them prisoners had to go somewhere when the shit hit the fan. Hindsight is 20/20, of course.

What we saw as we entered town from the south was a mess of traffic on the freeway. A lot of the surface streets were even worse. All except Avenue Q. That was clear, and on the map it connected us back to I-45 north of town, so we took it. We made it past the Huntsville Municipal Airport, swung north again, and got on the connector ramp to I-45.

That’s where the trap was.

Barnes and I were in a pickup truck, leading the caravan, as we had done since leaving Houston. He stopped the truck at the base of the connector ramp and just sat there, rubbing the stubble on his chin as he watched the road up ahead.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

I tried to see what he saw. There were bodies lining the road, but they were obviously dead. You could see it from a hundred and fifty feet away. They were all shot up. On the right shoulder, the back left tire just barely over the lane line, was a broken-down van. Beyond that was a barren stretch of highway.

I didn’t see what the problem was.

“Look at the fat white guy on his back up there on the left.”

I did. I didn’t see anything wrong.

“What is that beneath him?” Barnes said. “See it? Right there under his back? Looks like a paint can.”

Somebody behind us honked.

Barnes ignored them. He had been watching the dead guy lying on top of the paint can, but now he was scanning the surrounding countryside. It was flat, green, uninteresting. Nothing moved.

“I don’t like it,” he said.

He got out, talked to some of the drivers behind us, then climbed back into the truck.

“We’re gonna drive through first. If everything’s cool, we wave the others through.”

I didn’t ask what the trouble was. Barnes scares the crap out of me. I think he’s a fucking lunatic. But I also think he’s a genius when it comes to surviving.

We drove up the ramp without incident. We stopped right where the ramp joins the highway and we got out. I looked back at our caravan. There were a lot of people standing next to their vehicles, watching us, a lot of them with what-the-fuck-is-going-on looks on their faces.

Barnes gave them the okay sign.

The buses started up the ramp. The lead bus got as far as the fat white guy on top of the paint can when the explosion happened. It was the paint can, an IED. The blast was tremendous. Must have been a shaped charge. The road, pavement and all, swelled up in an enormous ball, like a giant was below it blowing up a balloon. I saw it all in the slow-motion sensation that comes with shock and disbelief. The ground exploded upward. The front of the bus dropped down into the hole the charge had just made. People fell forward and I heard screaming.

Then the screams were drowned out by a second explosion. Our other bus had stopped right behind the first bus, right next to the minivan broken down on the right shoulder. Barnes was next to me, yelling, “No, get back. Get that bus out of there.” Something inside the van exploded. Our second bus was lost in a gray cloud of pulverized asphalt and car parts. It rocked over onto two wheels, hovered there for a long moment, then fell the rest of the way onto its side. Barnes was still yelling for people to back away, clear out of there, but nobody listened. They got out of their trucks and cars and raced forward to help the injured. They were standing there, confused, scared, unorganized, when our attackers popped up from their hiding holes in the ditches along the road and started firing into the crowd.

Through the clouds of smoke and dust, I saw three men with rifles charging out of the ditch. They were using the gutted and burned skeleton of the minivan for cover. One of the front tires was still burning, sending off a thick black smoke that hid our people from view. I looked for Barnes, intending to follow his lead, but he was already in our pickup, throwing it into reverse.

“What the…” I said, watching as Barnes raced toward the men. Two of them never saw it coming. They stood there, firing from the hip at anyone they could see, right up to the moment that Barnes ran them over.

The third man tried to fire at the truck as it slipped into the smoke, but he lost it.

I watched him turning around, trying to track the noise of the pickup’s engine in the smoke and dust around him, but he couldn’t get a fix on it. He was looking in a completely different direction when Barnes erupted out of the cloud and sandwiched him between the back end of the pickup and the wrecked bus.

Two other men had come out of the opposite ditch. They ran straight at Barnes, one armed with a shotgun, the other with a pistol. Barnes stepped out of the truck with his AR-15 and lit up the man with the pistol, dropping him at the edge of the pavement. The other man fired once, then, realizing he was outnumbered and outgunned, turned and ran as fast as he could back across the empty field between us and the airport.

Barnes motioned for me to help the others, then chased after the man on foot.

I didn’t bother to watch. I knew Barnes could take care of himself. I started helping the injured. A few minutes later, I’m not sure exactly how much later, I heard a single shot.

Barnes showed up a few minutes after that. He studied the scene and gave a disgusted snort at the four dead members of our group we’d laid out on the roadway.

“Anyone else dead?” he asked me.

“None of our people,” I said. “We got a bunch of injuries, though. Who the hell were those guys?”

“Prisoners out of the McConnell Unit. They were looking for food.”

“Are there more of them around here?”

“Apparently not,” Barnes said.

“That one you chased, he told you that?”

Barnes nodded.

“I thought I heard a shot,” I said.

“You probably did.”

“You executed him,” I said.

“Best thing that ever happened to him, trust me.” He surveyed the damage once more, our two damaged buses, our people soot-stained and hollow-eyed, some of them crying. “What do we have left, three trucks?”

“And a minivan.”

“Let’s pack whatever supplies we can salvage. We need to move out of here.”

“But these people aren’t going to all fit in the vehicles we’ve got,” I said.

“Anybody who doesn’t fit walks.”

And so, two hours later, our limping, crestfallen caravan made its way out of Huntsville.

Most of us on foot.

Latexo, Texas: July 29th, 11:40 P.M.

Tired. Jesus, I think the soles of my sneakers have melted.

We’ve followed a crazy path the last two weeks, zigzagging all over the map like Cabeza de Vaca on acid. Supplies have been hard to come by, and there aren’t many places to scavenge for more. Most of these places have been cleaned out already. So we’ve been going from one little Texas town to the next, taking whatever we can find. We passed through Staley, Sebastopol, Chita, Pogoda, Cut, and now we’re stuck here in Latexo. They all look the same, run-down, a lean-to look about them, like the wind just sort of blew a bunch of lumber into piles and they called them towns. I grew up in a tiny little Texas town, so I understand, up to a point. Sometimes, there’s not a lot you can do with the cards you’ve been dealt. But Christ, who comes up with all these crazy names? Sebastopol, Cut, Latexo? Seriously?

Alto, Texas: August 1st. 2:40 P.M.

Stopped for lunch. I’m eating a Snickers bar, a couple pieces of bread, some beef jerky. Washing it down with a warm can of Coke.

I want to talk about something that happened here in Alto yesterday. A lot of people, Sandra Tellez especially, have been complaining to Barnes about the pace he’s keeping us on. We made it into Alto yesterday about 10 o’clock in the morning. The heat was just starting to make the walking unbearable, and most of us were ready to stop, find some place to hole up, and take it easy for a few days. Barnes refused. He wanted to push on. He always wants to push on.

Sandra told him they had a few elderly folks and children. Even a few of the young people in their twenties were getting sick. She demanded they stay in the area for as long as they could, until they could get healthy.

Barnes said, “Sure. Okay. How about food?”

“We have a few trucks. You can take a few men out to gather what you can from the surrounding towns.”

“And the zombies? What about them?”

“What zombies?”

He pointed behind her.

I was standing next to Sandra. I looked where he pointed and didn’t see anything but a large, grassy field. Here and there, I saw a few dead bodies. At least I thought they were dead.

“They’re not dead,” he said. “They’re sleeping.”

I looked again, and sure enough, you could see a few moving here and there. One of them rolled over.

I was shocked.

“Why?” he asked me. “I thought you made a reputation for yourself studying these things. Isn’t that what you made that field trip to San Antonio to do? Isn’t that what you set out to write your great zombie book about?”

I was too stunned by the field of sleeping zombies to answer.

He said, “You’re the one who’s been telling me that they’re just living people with a disease, like leprosy or something. Well, living people have to eat. They have to shit. And they’ve got to sleep.” He turned to Sandra. “Well, if you want to stay here, what do you want to do about them?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Then, more quietly, “But these people don’t have anything left, Mr. Barnes. They need to rest.”

“Fine,” he said.

He grabbed me by the shoulder and told me to go to a barn at the edge of the field where the zombies slept and quietly open the front door. It looked to be a good quarter mile away from where we stood. A long way to run when you’re standing out in the open, surrounded by flesh-eating ghouls.

He told Sandra to get everyone out of sight and make sure they stayed that way.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Just be ready with that door,” he said. “When I tell you to, you slam it shut.”

I went off and did what I was told. Sandra did what she was told. Barnes, meanwhile, walked out into the field of sleeping zombies and started whistling, one of those ear-splitters that seems to carry for miles.

Here and there, sleepers sat up and looked around for the source of the whistling. The infected are predictable in some ways; other ways they’re not. You can always count on them to go after something living if they spot it. But you can’t always count on them spotting it. Or hearing it, either.

Barnes had to whistle himself hoarse before he had a good number of them getting to their feet. Then the moaning started. That did it. I’ve become convinced their moaning is a trigger, the way certain gestures or sounds from a lead mare will trigger a herd of horses to change direction or suddenly break into an earthshaking gallop. That moaning, I think, is a key means of communication among the infected. Not the same kind of communication as speech or writing, obviously. More instinctive. Come to where I am. Food here. That sort of thing.

When the moaning started, the zombies—about twenty in all—got to their feet and followed Barnes. Barnes, for his part, calmly walked to the barn where I was waiting. He walked so slowly there were several times I thought he was about to get knocked down, but he never did. He just kept walking into the barn. I heard noises from inside, and I tried to figure out what he was doing, but it was no use. The noises were too indistinct, and I was too scared.

I heard them gathering inside the barn. It took nearly twenty minutes to get them all inside, but I wasn’t aware that it had happened. The first notice I had was when Barnes ran up beside me—scared the ever-loving crap out of me, too—and yelled, “Slam it shut, slam it shut.” He put his shoulder into the door and together we slammed the thing shut.

He put a bar over the door and that was that. The field was clear, all except for a few that couldn’t move well enough to walk.

“We’ll take care of them in a bit,” he said. “For now, let’s go get one of them gas cans from the truck.”

“What are gonna do?” I asked.

“Burn ’em,” he said, matter-of-factly. “What the hell did you think I was gonna do?”

“That seems inhumane to burn them.”

“They’ll kill us or turn us if we give ’em a chance. So what’s inhumane about burning ’em?”

“Good point,” I said.

Most of us hate Officer Barnes. We think he’s a tyrant, insane, abnormally cruel. But there’s a reason we keep following him.

He does keep us alive.

Dialville, Texas: August 6th, 10:00 P.M.

From Alto over to Elkhart, then north to Palestine, east again over to Rusk. We’re all over the place.

I’m hot, thirsty, irritable. If I never see another pine tree in my whole entire life, it’ll be too soon.

Christ, will we never make it out of Texas?

Frankston, Texas: August 10th, 7:15 P.M.

We have plenty to eat. It may not all be good stuff, but there’s plenty of it, lots of junk food, stuff that doesn’t have to be refrigerated. None of us are going hungry.

Sandra Tellez has done a wonderful job getting people organized, keeping them fed. She is, I think, a natural leader. She speaks, and the others fall in line. No discussion, no second-guessing. Maybe they recognize that she survived this way for nearly two years. Who knows? But whatever that elusive quality of leadership is, she has it.

And that’s part of the reason why I’m troubled.

I came to Sandra with something I saw the other day. Jerald Stevens is hoarding food. I was suspicious when I first met him in Houston. I was concerned when I saw him eating that ten-pound turkey breast right after we escaped the quarantine zone. Now I know it’s true. I’ve seen him do it. He has pounds and pounds of candy bars and beef jerky and moldy old sandwiches and bags of chips and God knows what else stashed away in his pockets and under his shirt and even inside his pants.

The hoarding I can understand. That’s the kind of thing a man can get over—that is, once he sees there’s not a need for it anymore. But it’s not just the hoarding. He’s eating constantly, and it worries me.

The other day, I saw him eat an entire country ham. Have you ever seen a country ham? We’re talking fourteen to sixteen pounds of pork. He gnawed it down to the bone during one of our daily marches.

And then he ate dinner with the rest of us, had seconds, and ate a candy bar in his sleeping bag while the rest of us drifted off to sleep.

Sandra didn’t think it was that big of a deal. She gave me the line about them surviving off scraps in the quarantine zone. She said he would swing back to normal soon enough. Let him be, she said.

But I disagree. I don’t think this is a phase you grow out of, like wetting the bed or chewing your nails. I think this is a bona fide mental illness.

Barnes, of course, had his own opinion. “Fuck him,” he said. “If he wants to eat himself to death, more power to him.”

Carrell Springs, Texas: August 14th, 8:20 P.M.

Right at dusk—the sky on fire with copper and red and orange, the land a dark purple along the horizon—a miracle happened.

For days we’d been hearing infrequent broadcasts on the AM radio bands about Jasper Sewell and his Grasslands village. Our group was divided. Most wanted to head that way. A few others, Sandra and Officer Barnes among them—the two of them on the same page for once—didn’t want to go there. Not to be with some religious nut job, they said.

And then, right outside of Carrell Springs, all of us dripping with sweat, tired, barely able to hold our chins up as we walked the last few miles into another town whose streets stank of human carrion, we saw writing on the road. The letters were huge, painted in white.

They read:

Cedar River National

Grasslands

We are going there

You should too

We all stopped and looked at it. Nobody spoke for a long time. Finally, I walked forward and tugged on Officer Barnes’s sleeve.

“What do you think?” I said. “These people. They need a plan, a destination.”

I looked at Sandra.

She nodded.

After a long time, Barnes did, too.