CHAPTER 43

There were two zombies in the middle of the road. Barnes was behind the wheel again, and he didn’t even bother to slow down. One of the zombies turned at the sound of the approaching vehicles and he was the first one hit.

The other was sucked under the RV a moment later.

In the passenger seat, Richardson glanced at Barnes. Barnes exhaled through his nose and tightened his grip on the steering wheel, ignoring the apprehension in Richardson’s expression.

They drove through the main gate and stopped. Barnes studied the perimeter fence and liked what he saw. It was a good twelve to fifteen feet high and sturdy, solid wood beams framing heavy-duty hurricane fencing, and they even had crews up on top attaching razor wire. Excellent, he thought. Farther in, he could see a number of well-built wooden structures with metal roofs that looked like pools of molten light beneath the late-morning sun.

The main road leading up to the buildings was thick with mud from a recent rain. Two men trotted down it and pulled the gate open.

Then one of the men waved them through.

“The welcoming committee?” Richardson asked.

“I doubt it,” Barnes said. He rubbed his chin, smooth for the first time in weeks. “Look at that fence. These people are too well organized for these jack-offs to be the security. Keep your eye out for buildings along this main road here. I bet you’ll see guys with rifles.”

“Rifles? You mean in case we have any infected on board.”

“It’s what I’d do.”

Barnes put the RV in gear and drove forward. They passed a pair of buildings and what looked like a concrete water reservoir on their right.

“There,” Richardson said, pointing at the rear shed where a man with a rifle ducked out of sight. “You were right.”

“There’s another over there,” Barnes said. “Beneath that truck in the parking lot.”

Richardson squinted at the truck, then nodded slowly.

“I wonder where the others are,” Barnes said, scanning the spaces on either side of the road.

They reached the turn-off to the parking lot and stopped. Up ahead, there were people walking from what had to be a kitchen to a large covered structure. They were carrying food on white Styrofoam plates. On their left, they saw a middle-aged balding man in a brown shirt and jeans walking toward them.

“This is our welcoming committee,” Barnes said. “Part of it, anyway.”

Aaron Roberts approached the lead RV. The vehicles were brand new and painted with flamboyant splashes of color. Traveling in style, he thought.

A door opened on the lead RV and a man stepped out. He walked around to the front and stood watching Aaron, his arms akimbo. He was white, somewhere between thirty-five and forty, and carried himself like a soldier or a policeman.

Aaron stepped forward with his hand outstretched. “Hello,” he said. “Welcome to the Grasslands. I’m Aaron Roberts.”

The man shook his hand, then dropped it.

“Thank you,” he said. “Michael Barnes.”

Barnes was a good six inches taller than Aaron and built solidly. His face was clean shaven and severe, and when he met Aaron’s gaze, he didn’t blink. His eyes were dark brown, but they glinted with a hardness that spoke of self-confidence and resiliency.

“Are you folks looking for a place to stay?” Aaron said.

“We are.”

“How many are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Where are you from?”

“Originally from Houston. Some of us are refugees from inside the quarantine zone. Others we met along the way up here.”

Aaron looked down the line of RVs. “Not bad for refugees.”

“A lucky find along the way,” Barnes said. His voice was flat, emotionless. “It’s been a hard road.”

Aaron hesitated. He didn’t like this man, he could tell that already. “You should know we have a mandatory temporary quarantine here. You and your people are welcome here, but they will need to spend several hours under observation before they’re allowed to mingle with our community.”

“I expected as much,” Barnes answered. And then, as an afterthought, he added, “Your security is admirable.”

“We get very few zombies this far north. And what few we do get never make it past the fence.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Barnes said. His bluntness surprised Aaron. “Not if what I saw on the road up here is any indication. But I was talking about your snipers. The one behind that building behind us. The two in the parking lot there. And the two in that field over there.”

So, Aaron thought, knows his stuff, this one. Jasper will want to know that.

“You spotted the two in the field,” he said. “I’m impressed. Those are our aces in the hole.”

“They’re not as dirty as the others working the field,” Barnes said. His tone suggested they weren’t that well hidden, and when he turned away from the fields and faced Aaron, it was clear he’d dismissed them as unimportant. “Where is this Jasper Sewell I’ve heard so much about? He’s all over the radio. What little there is of it.”

Aaron stiffened. He wasn’t used to being treated as an errand boy around the compound, but that was exactly what was happening. This man had been inside the walls for less than ten minutes and already he was asserting himself like he was doing them all a favor with his presence.

Self-consciously, Aaron straightened himself up before he spoke. “Jasper tries to greet all our new arrivals personally, but today that isn’t possible. You’ll have to wait for that honor. He tends to stay very busy. But I’m sure you will see him very soon.”

“Fine,” Barnes said. “My people have been on the road for a long while, Mr. Roberts.”

“Why don’t you call me Aaron? We are informal around here. If you are allowed to stay, you will come to see that.”

Barnes didn’t react to the needles in Aaron’s voice. He simply said, “Aaron, okay, that’s fine. What do you say we get this quarantine thing out of the way as soon as we can?”

“Fine,” Aaron said stiffly. “I’ll lead the way.”

“That one is the leader of their group,” Aaron said.

He and Jasper were standing outside the quarantine cells, looking in at Michael Barnes through one-way glass. Barnes was standing, one of the only ones who had yet to take advantage of the chairs and couches offered to the group. Instead, he stood near the back wall in a black Windbreaker over a white T-shirt and jeans, watching the people he’d brought with him. He reminded Aaron of a sheepdog watching a flock.

“Really?” Jasper said. “That’s what you see, a sheepdog?”

“That or a hawk.”

“Do you want to know what I see?” Jasper asked.

“No, what?”

“I see exhaustion,” Jasper said. “That is a man who has been pushed beyond what he was meant to endure. What do we know about him?”

Aaron consulted the clipboard he carried. He had asked each of Barnes’s people to complete a personal history questionnaire, and they had used that to do a more detailed background check through LexisNexis and Accurint. This was a bigger party than usual, and luckily Aaron didn’t have any trouble with the Internet today. Part of the reason the quarantine took so long was that, most of the time, they had difficulty getting online. Not today, though.

“His name is Michael Barnes,” Aaron said. “He’s a former Houston Police Officer and Gulf Region Quarantine Authority Agent. He’s a helicopter pilot and SWAT officer. He served six years as a warrant officer in the army, fought in Afghanistan, where he earned the Bronze Star.”

Aaron knew how Jasper felt about the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority, and he expected to see derision on Jasper’s face. But instead Jasper smiled.

“I think I can make something of that man,” Jasper said.

Then he pointed to a woman who was making her way around the cell, talking with each of the group in turn. Aaron noticed the way they smiled at her.

“And what about this one?” Jasper said.

“Sandra Tellez,” Aaron said. “She’s from Houston. Lost a daughter and her husband right after the quarantine was established. She worked as a registered nurse before getting married, then got certified as a day-care provider and worked out of her home. See that skinny young man with the shaggy black hair? His name’s Clint Siefer. Apparently, he’s been going to her day care since he was a baby. He found his way back to her after his family was killed by the infected and he’s been with her ever since. Hasn’t spoken since then, though.”

They needed more teachers and more infant and toddler care, and Aaron expected Jasper to fit her there, but he didn’t.

Instead, he frowned. “There are two leaders in that room, Aaron. Officer Barnes over there. And that woman.” Jasper stared at Sandra Tellez for a long time before speaking again. Finally, he said, “Separate her from the others as soon as possible. Assign her to the infirmary.”

Aaron raised an eyebrow. They were actually lousy with trained medical personnel and didn’t need any more, but if that’s what Jasper wanted. He waited for Jasper to go on.

“What about that one,” Jasper said at last. “The one writing in the notebook over there.”

“That’s Ben Richardson,” Aaron said. “He’s a—”

“A reporter,” Jasper said. “Yes, I know.”

“Yes,” Aaron said. “He’s written quite a bit about the outbreak since it started.”

“I read about his trip into San Antonio with those college kids from Austin in The Atlantic. My guess is he’s still writing about the outbreak.”

“And probably his trip up here,” Aaron said.

“Exactly what I was thinking.”

He turned away.

“Is that it?” Aaron asked.

As he walked away, Jasper said, “Get me that notebook he’s writing in. I want to read it.”

When they released him from the quarantine cell and told him he was free to go wherever he liked, Michael Barnes wandered through the village until he came to the pavilion. It was early afternoon, still a good two hours before dinner, and the large, open structure was empty. There was a stage at one end with steps leading up to it. He sat down on the top step, took a tennis ball from his jacket pocket, and laid down on his back so that he could throw the ball up into the air. It’d been so long since he was by himself that he’d almost forgotten how restful it was to just take his mind off-line and focus on the ball going up, coming down, going up, coming down.

It landed in his left palm with a smack, and the sound was a trigger. Instantly, his mind was back online, but somewhere else, looking back at Houston.

Images rose up like snapshots.

He saw a flooded street and hurricane-damaged houses in the sepia light of a Houston summer evening, the air still strangely alive with the echoes of the recent storm. He saw himself from above, like he was a spectator in his own memory, wading through the flooded ruins, his pistol in his hand, scared, searching for movement. A shot rang out to his right, coming from a storm-damaged, crumbling house that many years ago had been a mansion but was now carved into seven separate, ratty apartments. Jack’s apartment. His brother Jack.

He saw himself peering into the building’s bottom floor, completely flooded and filled with floating trash. Zombies everywhere. He heard shouting from upstairs and went inside, and he shot his way through the bottom floor till he reached the stairs. A voice called to him for help. At the top of the stairs, he saw a wounded man sitting against the wall, an infected woman with ruined legs pulling herself along the floor to reach him. He shot the woman in the back of the head and asked the man if he’d been bitten. When he nodded, Michael stopped talking and simply walked away. He pounded on Jack’s door while the wounded man pleaded at his back for help. “I’m sorry,” he said over his shoulder, and then kicked in Jack’s door.

Jack was there, on his knees, crying over his wife’s body on the couch. The back of her head had been smashed in, and there was a nasty bite wound on her wrist. A bloody crowbar was on the floor next to Jack. The two brothers shared a look. Michael swallowed hard. “Come on,” he said. “It’s time to go.”

The vision flashed away. In its place, he saw the two of them, him and Jack, at the bass boat where Michael’s team had been ambushed. Officers Waters and Parker were still in the boat, dead. Waters had one hand cupped in his lap and was holding his intestines. Parker’s face was gone and his shirt was torn open. The infected had fed on him, devoured his torso. The inside of the boat was filled with blood. Michael, who despite having seen combat and having made countless high-risk entries in his career as a SWAT officer, had no idea the human body could hold so much blood.

Michael waited for Jack to finish throwing up before handing him Parker’s AR-15.

They roamed the wasted city throughout the night. Michael tried to radio in for air evac, but got only empty promises that help was on the way.

Near dawn, they’d found a group of survivors, volunteers from the Red Cross who had managed to evade the infected throughout the previous day. There had been sixty of them, but now they were down to just twelve. They had two wounded, and they were out of food and water and medical supplies. None of them were armed.

Morning found them pinned down, the infected swarming all around them, the moaning so loud it felt like a jumbo jet was continuously flying overhead at treetop level. They had to shout at each other to hear, and sometimes not even that was good enough.

The infected were pouring out of the buildings all around them. From his position atop an abandoned car he was using as a platform to get a better view, Barnes could see west along Westheimer Boulevard and north along Dairy-Ashford Parkway. Both streets were filling with the infected. There were thousands of them. To the south and east, the streets were flooded, and the crowds of infected were not as thick.

Barnes turned his group east down Westheimer, thinking they could skirt the crowds moving down from the Town & Country Mall area and come out somewhere north of where he’d originally planned. He had given up on an evacuation. The radio had gone silent. Huge columns of smoke rose from fires all across the city, and he could hear gunfire coming from all around him. Screaming, too. They were on their own.

One of the Red Cross volunteers next to him was suddenly pulled under the water. The woman let out a startled, panicked cry before she went under. Barnes stared at the empty spot where she had just stood, blinking.

The woman popped up a few feet away, but she wasn’t moving. The water was turning a greenish-red around her.

“They’re in the water,” he shouted.

He could see faces in the water, their noses and mouths just above the surface. They were closing in. Red Cross volunteers were toppling over all around him. The moaning was growing louder again, and Michael jumped onto the hood of another submerged vehicle and did the only thing he knew how to do. He started firing.

He burned through an entire magazine before he was able to slow down and get a grip on his fear and start placing his shots. The roar of activity around him was deafening. The infected just kept coming, pouring out of every building, every alleyway, rising from the water. People were falling all around him, screaming at him for help. He was firing as fast as he could, but it was like trying to spear fire ants with the head of a pin as they rushed out of the mound.

All that noise and movement and violence dropped around him like a curtain. His heart was pounding in his ears. Someone was screaming his name. He turned and saw Jack, one of the last of his group standing, backing toward the hood of the car. Three zombies were on him, clawing at his face, pulling him down. He looked back at Michael and his eyes were wide with fear.

Michael fired at the zombies, putting them down in fast order, but the damage was done. It was too late. Jack’s face was a mess of bleeding fingernail scratches. He was missing the tops of two fingers.

He fell face-first onto the hood of the car, and his rifle skittered out of his hand and landed at Michael’s feet.

“Jack!”

He held out a hand to his brother, but Jack didn’t take it. He stepped back from the car.

“Jack!” Michael screamed.

A zombie popped up from the water and grabbed Jack by the throat, pulling him down. A moment later, Jack was gone. Vanished.

Stunned, Barnes looked around. Everything was falling apart. Jack was dead. The world was dead, and so too was something inside Michael. What was left was as hard as a rock, and every bit as cold.

He took up Jack’s rifle along with his own, and holding both of them over his head, he jumped down into the water and ran for his life.

He emerged from the wreckage later that evening, only a few hundred yards from where work crews were assembling the wall that would seal up the city forever. Soldiers looked at him as he walked away from the city, a tired policeman, dripping wet, holding a rifle, head down in a world of his own, and they let him pass.

As that image faded, Barnes tossed the tennis ball into the air, caught it, threw it up again.

“Michael Bar—”

The man hadn’t even finished saying his name before Barnes rolled off the stairs and pulled his pistol from inside his Windbreaker. But the man didn’t flinch. He looked at the big black hole at the business end of Barnes’s .45 and simply smiled.

“My guess is you’re an expert with that,” he said.

Barnes just stared at him over the front sight. He was trembling and unable to stop himself. His mind felt like it was teetering for balance on a high wire.

“You probably shoot a rifle with surgical precision, but my guess is that pistol there might as well be an extension of your hand. Am I right?”

“What do you want?”

“To talk,” the man said, spreading his hands apart as if to suggest there was nothing else he could want.

“Just leave me alone, guy.”

“Ah,” the man said. He moved to the stairs and sat down. He looked at Barnes and patted the spot next to him. “No? Well, okay. Stand there with your pistol if you must.”

“You got a lot of nerve, talking down to a man who’s got a gun pointed at your head.”

The man smiled. “Two things,” he said. “First of all, Michael, I’m not talking down to you. I will never do that. My promises don’t mean anything to you now, but they will someday, and I’m making you a promise now. I will never talk down to you.”

Barnes was not impressed. “And the second thing?”

“Just this. I know you won’t shoot me.”

“How’s that?”

“Michael, I’ve thought a lot about death over the years. I’ve thought about the death of our self-respect, the death of our country, the death of the world. I’ve also thought about my own death, and I know I wasn’t meant to die like this. Not from a gun.”

Barnes started to speak, then stopped. He kept the gun pointed at the man’s oddly square face. The man’s skin had a grotesque, plastic look about it, like an aging actress with a bad face-lift. He wore large sunglasses that hid his eyes from view. The combination of his features should have made him look ridiculous, but for some reason, Barnes found him oddly compelling.

“How can you be so sure about your own death?” Barnes asked at last.

“Mmm. Well, that takes some explaining, doesn’t it? Let’s just say that I’ve found a purpose for my life. I’ve found that thing that makes a life worth living.”

“You’ve found the meaning of life? Tell me, please, I’m dying to know.”

“You’re being sarcastic, Michael. But you’ve touched on something. Let’s talk about you.”

“Not interested.”

“But I am, Michael. I am, very much.”

“Why?”

“Because I know you. I know the demon that drives you.”

“You know jack shit.”

The man’s smile didn’t waver.

“Always on guard, aren’t you? Ever ready. Always set to take on the fight. You’ve been fighting a long time, haven’t you, Michael? You’ve seen more death and meaningless suffering than most men could ever imagine. You’ve come to see the world as a mean and brutal and selfishly nasty place. And you’ve met that world head-on, with your fists and your courage and your skill. Everything they heaped on you, you gave it right back to them. With interest.”

Barnes nodded. He lowered the gun an inch.

“You know what I see? I see exhaustion, Michael. You’re tired because no matter how hard you fight, you can’t make the world make sense.”

Barnes nodded again, more slowly.

“You’ve been going at it all wrong, Michael. You’ve been fighting the wrong battles. I can show you the right path. But you have to trust me.”

Barnes looked at him.

“You’re Jasper Sewell, aren’t you?”

Jasper smiled broadly, confidently. “Guilty as charged.”

Barnes looked at the gun in his hand. His body was still trembling. He said, “Can you really help me?”

Jasper nodded. “I can. I will. But you must trust me completely, Michael. If you don’t, this will just be another wrong battle. Like all the others you’ve fought before.”

“What do I have to do?”

Jasper clasped his hands together above his knees. He said, “I want you to put that gun on the step between my feet.”

Barnes lowered the weapon. The man’s expression never changed, but Barnes could feel the confidence, the positive energy flowing out of this man. He put the gun on the steps and backed away.

“Now sit here beside me.”

Again, Barnes did as he was told. Already, he was feeling better. He was releasing a burden, giving up the need to be in command that had kept him going for so very long now.

It felt good, not being in control.

Then Jasper did something that surprised him. He reached over and put his arms around Barnes’s shoulders and pulled Barnes’s face to his chest.

Barnes surprised himself by letting Jasper pull him tight.

And he surprised himself again by crying.

“Do you promise to trust in me entirely?” Jasper said.

Barnes nodded, still crying.

“You’re no pansy, Michael Barnes. Don’t give me a pansy’s answer.”

“I do,” he said, his voice muffled by Jasper’s chest. “I will.”