The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors (7 page)

She was slow to get moving after that, but eventually she eased the board forward until she saw a meager light ahead. This grew to dazzle her, while at the same time the smell grew to send her almost to the point of throwing up.

The tunnel ended abruptly at a hinged gate. With meek little steps Jillybean went to it, and, looking out at the Schuylkill she discovered the source of the smell. Rotting bodies by the hundreds in various degrees of decomposition lined the shores or gently drifted along in the murky river water.

Jillybean’s beans face contorted at the sight. “Are those monsters, or…”

They’re people
, Ipes said sadly.
Or they were people. Here, don’t look at them. Instead look across the water. There’s smoke behind those buildings.
Sure enough across the river, just behind an industrial complex a thin ribbon of smoke stretched into the blue afternoon sky. And smoke usually meant people—living people.

“Do we chance it?” she asked lifting her chin to her left.

There was a bridge not more than a hundred yards away and though it was cluttered with cars, there wasn’t a single monster anywhere on it. Nodding, Ipes pointed at it and then he swung his hoof to aim at the far bank directly across from them.

I think we should. See that over there? Another storm tunnel. We can go up that for a mile or so and come out and look around. If it doesn’t curve at all we should be right near that smoke
.

She didn’t ask about the possibility of monsters in the tunnel—there was always a possibility. They were everywhere
, or so it seemed to her. With skateboard in hand, the little girl slipped between the bars and then ghosted through the tall river grass, barely parting it with the slimness of her form, until she came to the bridge where cover was sparse.

With what felt like the world staring down at her, Jillybean followed her instincts and slowly
drifted from car to car, pausing at each to spy all about her. Had anyone seen the little thing moving with careful steps they might have thought, by her demeanor, to be a timid, frightened wisp of a girl, however a closer inspection would’ve revealed that her face was hard and her eyes sharp, and that there wasn’t a flicker of fear anywhere on her.

Skill, luck, and the western sun behind her allowed her to cross the Schuylkill unnoticed by anything larger than the feasting seagulls. Once on the far bank she dashed to the tunnel, waited with a cocked ear for all of a minute
, and then when no sound came to her she pushed between the bars.

Again the dark was on her like wet on a fish. It seemed even to invade her lungs which struggled for breath.
Take it easy
, Ipes said coolly.
Just start walking and you’ll get used to it again. There you go. Do you want to use the board? It’ll be easier than
…

A rumbling
from above them stopped the flow of his words. At first Jillybean stepped back in fright, ready to run, but then she understood what she was hearing: a car was passing overhead.

“There’s people for sure, Ipes! Come on.” She began to rush forward but the zebra stopped her.

Now is not the time for the hare
, he intoned.
Now is the time for the tortoise. Slow and steady wins the race.

Chapter 6

Ram

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

On his way to discover the source of the smoke, Ram spent a few
of his remaining hours wasting gas and wearing out his patience trying to drive the eight or so miles into the city. Someone had systematically blocked all the roads into Philadelphia.

When he came upon the obstruction at the intersection of
MacDade Boulevard and Ridgeway Avenue, a seven car pileup that not even his hummer could get around, he thought it was just happenstance. He turned back and skirted north, but found the very same thing at Baltimore Avenue and then again on the West Chester Pike.

With gun in hand he had inspected the vehicles closer and saw that the windows of each had been smashed, and not by vandals. Glass in the driver’s side seats but not the in the passenger seat was the te
lltale evidence left by a front-end loader equipped with pallet forks. Someone had purposely blocked the roads.

“
What a friggin’ headache,” Ram griped, pushing at the starred window of a Lincoln Continental. The safety glass made it a mesh that resisted his hand, bending without breaking. For some reason it had a calming effect on the man.

“So what’s in there that you don’t want me to find?” he asked, staring eastward toward the city and the little smudge of smoke that rose above it. The
barricade of cars was to dissuade humans, not zombies. Either could climb over the cars without too much difficulty and go on to the city by foot, though it was only a zombie that would do so. Any human making the attempt would last only as long as his ammunition did.

This was why Ram kept skirting north, poking east at every street that went in that direction. Eventually he found a way around one of the barricades…or rather through i
t. On a street called Ridgewood, the jumble of cars went across the road and right up to the houses on either side. Ram was just in the midst of a curse laden K turn when he had an idea. His turn had been sloppy; he nicked part of a white picket front yard fence and for just a moment he had reverted to his pre-apocalypse programming and felt an immediate contrition.

Then he laughed at himself since the owners were all long dead—and then he laughed at him
self some more. He was in a badass Hummer H2 with a heavy grill in front; what was to stop him from just plowing through this fence and through the one in the back yard? That one was six foot privacy fence that wouldn’t last a second in a tussle with his hummer.

A minute later, t
he fence came down with a very satisfying crash.

Now there was only one more barrier to the city: the Schuylkill River, and again, just like the streets, the bridges were blocked, only this time brute force wasn’t going to be much help. One after another he found his way across the water stymied by piled cars, so that he was forced ever northward. After another wasted hour and with aggravation setting in, he passed through the tony area of
Wynnfield Heights, where the smallest homes were mansions and the largest were veritable palaces.

Here he came across a new sign of humanity: a long wall of rusty steel that would stop even the most aggressive zombie. Someone, likely the very same someone who had blocked up the city, had hauled cargo containers up from the port and had sent them end to end so that they encircled, strangely enough, a golf course of all things.

“Now that is an exclusive course,” he said with a smirk.

In truth it was an entire country club with many posh homes and buildings included within the walled area, however with the land as flat as it was, Ram couldn’t see much beyond only a few ill-tended fairways. Intrigued, he drove his
Humvee closer and parked it just up the street from a tall tree that sat near one of the cargo containers. The tree, with its many branches, looked like a snap to climb and so, forgetting his illness and the fact that climbing trees was the sport of kids, he decided to hoist himself aloft to see what there was to see.

In spite of
dark clouds that had begun to mass in the west, it was still a fine afternoon and although the nearest zombie was a tiny figure far down the road, he slung his M16 on his shoulder and proceeded on foot toward the tree. It wasn’t more than a forty yard tramp through the new grass, but it proved nearly too far.

He was halfway to the tree, humming a bit of nonsense, when a strange noise had him turning, and there in his tracks raced a pack of zombie dogs, charging at him with fearfully large teeth bared in either anger or hunger. In a split second Ram judged the distance between them, calculating how many he could bring down with his rifle before the rest were on him and tore him into shreds. It was far too few.

Because it would only slow him down, he let the M16 fall with a clatter—he still had his Beretta at his side and more than enough ammunition to take care of the dogs—and raced for the tree. Though he had a good head start and wasn’t exactly slow, the dogs gained on him so quickly that there wasn’t time to climb; instead, as he neared the tree he leapt for one of the lower branches and not three feet behind him, the lead dog leapt along with him as well. It was a strange and unnerving sensation to feel the razor sharp teeth of a German Shepherd close on his ankle just enough for him to feel a hard pinch and then let go.

Gasping, Ram clawed the bark, struggling higher into the tree, while below the dogs snapped and snarled, yet none barked. Instead they made an odd
hu-reh, hu-reh noise deep in their throats. When he finally got a good perch beneath him, he pulled his pistol thinking he would kill these devil dogs and get back to his search for Julia’s murderer, only now that he wasn’t running and climbing for his life he saw that these were not zombiefied dogs after all. They were real.

“Wow,” he whispered, eyeing the motley pack. Besides the Shepherd and an array of mutts, there was a Pug, three Dobermans, and a Labrador. These were the first live dogs he had seen since…he couldn’t remember when. “And they’re certainly not wild,” he added,
realizing what their strange, quiet barking meant: their vocal cords had been surgically severed.

Ram holstered his gun. He wasn’t about to kill a real dog. Instead, he eased lower and began to croon a long stream of happy sounding nonsense hoping that it would calm the beasts down.
It did, to a degree, just not one that allowed him to feel safe enough to climb down.

“Well this sucks,” Ram said, giving up after a while. “Look
fellas, I can’t stay up here all day. I’ve got to get going…”

Just then a pair of pick-up trucks came
racing down the road toward him; the beds of both were crammed with men, each armed to the teeth. When they got close, the trucks slowed and the men came piling out, calling the dogs to them.

Ram eyed the
men close and with disappointment noted that they were all white, which meant it wasn’t likely that Cassie was within the bounds of the walled golf course. Still, they might have heard something of her passing.

With a little wave of friendly gratitude, Ram climbed down and came forward to greet them. “Thanks. It’s not every day a guy gets treed like a…”

“Shut the fuck up and get those hands in the air!” one of the men ordered, adding, much to Ram’s astonishment, “Spic.”

“Spic?” Ram repeated, half in shock, half in anger. He was about to throw down a challenge, however the man’s clear hatred wasn’t singular; all of the men glared at him and it was only then that he noted how their guns were trained straight on his chest. “What’s going on here?” he asked, raising his hands to shoulder height.

“Get those hands higher,” an older man with a patchy grey beard growled. “And turn around nice and easy.”

Ram shrugged and did as he was told. He wasn’t exactly scared of being shot since his life’
s meter was running down anyway, as evidenced by the fact that he was already starting to feel a little queer inside. His main worry was that out of spite they would allow him to turn; a fate worse than death in his mind.

When he spun in place to face the rows of cargo containers, rough hands yanked out his
Beretta and then he was pushed to his knees where he was thoroughly and properly frisked. “I also dropped a M16 over there in the grass,” he said helpfully. When they had gone through his pockets he began to get up.

“Stay down, Spic,” one of them demanded, threatening him with a rifle.

With a roll of his eyes, Ram got up anyway. “Are you that afraid of me? There are ten of you and you’re all armed for goodness sakes. Now really, what’s going on? What’s with the rough treatment?”

One of the men came forward and his blue eyes were like hard diamonds. He pressed a long barreled shotgun into Ram’s chest and said in a soft voice, “I should plug you right now.”

The older man, the one with the grizzled beard put a hand out and said, “Let’s find out what he knows first, Scott. There’ll be time for revenge later.”

The word revenge got Ram’s attention more than the shotgun did. “Revenge? What happened?” he asked quickly. “Was there a girl? A black girl? I’m looking for a girl named Cassie. She’s a murderer. She killed my…
someone close to me.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” the younger man drawled with a stony sneer. “We learned the hard way you can’t trust the blacks…or the spics.” Ram began to splutter in anger over this, but the man nodded to his friends who grabbed Ram and wrestled him down to the ground. And then, when he was trapped beneath them, Scott pushed the shotgun down onto Ram’s left palm, pinning his hand to the dirt. “You’re going to tell me what you’re doing here or I’m going to take off this hand in a manner you aren’t going to much like.”

It was clear he wasn’t playing games, yet Ram was so bewildered that the threat of the gun still wasn’t striking home. “I already told you,” he said. “I’m after a girl…a young woman of about nineteen, named Cassie. She’s around five and half feet, 135 pounds, African-American with a dark complexion. She’s a murderer. She killed a woman named Julia with an axe. That’s why I’m here.”

The older man stood above Ram and stared down; he wore an old
Phillies
baseball cap with a sweat stained bill. He took it off and scratched his bald pate. “And you think she’s with us? Is that what the
Blacks
told you?”

“The
Blacks
? If you’re talking about black people, then no. You guys are the first people I’ve seen since I got here,” Ram said. “I just came up from the CDC in Atlanta.”

A man lying across Ram’s chest pulled back slightly and said with some excitement, “The CDC? Is there any news of a cure? Or a vaccine? A free one I mean?”

Scott stepped on the man’s shoulder, forcing him back down onto Ram. “Don’t be an idiot, Herm. This guy’s not from the CDC, he’s from North Philly. You can make book on that.”

“You’d lose that bet,” Ram said in a muffled voice.
Herm had been heavy to begin with, but now that Scott was resting his foot on his back the weight across Ram felt doubled. “I’m from Los Angeles. Whoever took my wallet can check.”

“He is,” someone said in a quiet
, guilty voice. “And he was a DEA agent.”

There was a murmuring and the men began to get off Ram one after another and now it was Scott who looked puzzled and uncertain. “What are you guys doing?” he asked. “We aren’t going to let him go. He’s one of them, damn it!”

“One of who?” Ram asked, though he had a gut feeling he knew already.

Some of the men toed the dirt, while others gave a glance to a flock of birds that were mere dashes in the blue sky they were so high up. The older man stroked his beard and told a story that had Ram shaking his head.

“Philly is not a good place these days,” he said quietly. “When the zombies came, those that survived sort of clumped together, you know? There were a lot of white people out here in the suburbs and most of us came here when we heard that the walls were holding. And in South Philly there was a big trucking company that ran out of this warehouse. It had been almost a fortress to begin with and supposedly it was chock full of food and fuel. That’s where the blacks went.

“No one knows where the Latinos first congregated, but it was in North Philly someplace, but it turned out to be too close to the blacks. They quarreled over territory and b
efore we knew it there was full-fledged war going on. That was about two months ago.”

“A race war?
Really?” Ram asked with disgust in his voice. “This is the thing about humans I just don’t get. We have plenty of enemies all around us, yet we insist on fighting ourselves. So how did you guys get involved?”

“
We're not really sure. Maybe because we were trading with both sides,” the man said. His name was John. Ram gave him a sharp look and he grew defensive. “We have fourteen hundred people to look after and trading is the best way to get what we need in bulk. It benefits both sides, you know.”

Ram gave him a little shrug, “I suppose…sorry.”

“It’s ok. In retrospect I wish we hadn’t traded with either of them. Both the Latinos and the Blacks demanded that we stop trading with their enemy and when we didn’t bad blood turned into spilt blood. Ever since it’s been constant strife. We keep to our side of the river, but that doesn’t seem good enough and there isn’t a one of us who hasn’t lost someone close.”