I put my arms around her. “We’ll be okay.”
“I know that,” she says evenly. Her hat brim hides her face and I can’t tell if she means it. “Don’t worry about me.”
“Impossible.”
We close in on shore, where mansions sit on giant lots, and motor for one with a particularly long dock. The stone house spreads for five hundred feet at the top of a rise, with a pool and pool house facing the water at the rear.
“Wow,” Sylvie says. “I forgot people really lived in houses like this.”
The boat stops at the dock. We gather our bags while the crew lifts our bikes to the metal surface. Ren hands me a compact packet of flares. “Pyrotechnics. They work when wet—colored smoke. Jerry thought they might come in handy at some point. If you ever need help, we’ll try to come for you.”
“Like a bat signal?” I ask.
“Something like that,” Jerry says, smiling. “You sure you’ll be able to get back into the city? I hate to leave you out here like this. Radio if you get in a bind, same channel as before.”
“I’m sure we’ll figure it out,” I say. I don’t want to ask them to do this twice. “But thank you. Again.”
“We’re Coast Guard, that’s what we do.”
“Semper Paratus,” Sylvie says. “Always ready. To fight to save, or fight and die.” Jerry raises his brows, impressed. Sylvie shrugs. “I found a book about the Coast Guard after we talked on the radio. I liked the marching song.”
Jerry winks. “If I were twenty years younger…”
“I think you mean thirty,” she says with a grin. Jerry roars with laughter, slapping his thigh, and Sylvie takes his hand in both of hers. “Thank you so much for the food and the ride.”
“You are very welcome, my dear, and you are always welcome with us.” Jerry helps her to the dock and then shakes my hand, holding it firmly with an even firmer gaze. “Take care of you, but take better care of your better half.”
“I will,” I say.
Chapter 58
The house where we docked was on the market for a paltry twenty-two million dollars and included an indoor pool as well as the outdoor. This whole area was wealthy beyond belief. Stately trees, statelier houses, and well-heeled dead people. There’s only one road on the peninsula, but rich folks could afford their privacy, so we have time to react when Lexers come stumbling down the expansive grounds.
From our drop-off point, we have one hundred forty miles to travel, and acquiring a motorcycle is our next mission. Once we’ve moved into a less grand though still costly neighborhood, we have more options for travel, and more zombies. We begin our hunt on a street with no sidewalks, searching old houses set back behind good-sized lawns. It’s slow going, and garage after garage yields nothing.
“Why don’t I take one side and you take the other?” Sylvie suggests.
“No splitting up.”
“We’ll be right across the street.”
I peer through the glass of a garage door. No bike. “Too far.”
“How about you answer me in sentences over three words?” she asks. “I feel like your service dog or something.”
I hold out my palm. “Stay, girl. Staaaaay.”
She grins and points behind me. Two former people coming this way. The older couple stop at the wooden rail fence, fingers straining for us. Sylvie’s chisel hits one as my knife stabs the other. They land on the driveway of the neighboring house. A man creeps from the yard of a colonial three homes down, his hisses drawing a dozen more from between two farmhouse-type dwellings. Say what you will about the city, but at least there aren’t hidey holes like these yards every hundred feet.
“Time to go,” I say.
Sylvie is already on her bike. “C’mon, boy!” she calls with a whistle.
Once far enough for safety, we begin our search again. While Sylvie uses an indoor bathroom, I close the motorcycle-less garage and wait outside the sprawling farmhouse. There are no modest homes around here, unless you count the guesthouses behind a few of them. The lots are bordered by stone walls at the road and shielded by trees. It’s not my kind of neighborhood, though they do sit on hefty chunks of land and there were certainly worse places to live before. In this part of Connecticut, I imagine the property taxes alone were insane.
My thoughts are interrupted by a shuffle to my left, and the biggest Lexer I’ve ever encountered rounds the corner of the house. Inches taller and a foot wider than me. Shirtless, with exposed ribs and blue-black intestines. I drive my knife upward to stab under his chin, but I miss and graze his cheek when his head twists. His hand catches my wrist, sending my knife to the ground, and his tombstone-like teeth come for my neck.
I stumble back while I try to peel his fingers from my arm with my left hand. It’s no match for his grip. The knife in my boot would help, but, if I bend down, his teeth will be in my scalp before I get it out. I swing side to side, hoping to evade his teeth long enough to take hold of my pistol with my left hand. I could shoot him left-handed no problem, if I had time to reach the goddamned thing.
His cold lips brush my forehead on his next lunge. Icy, sharp panic explodes in my middle and races to my limbs. This isn’t a regular fight—the kind where you take your lumps and, win or lose, live to see another day. One scratch, one tiny nip, and I’m dead. This is how people die. This may be how I die.
I throw my right arm out to the side, and this time he stumbles, though his hold never loosens. I’ve managed to release my pistol when a gunshot cracks. The Lexer thuds to the driveway, a hole behind his ear, and Sylvie stands to my right with her .22 clutched in her hands. Her frantic eyes search me for signs of a bite.
“I’m fine,” I say, panting. “Thanks.”
She rushes for me but veers to her bike when six Lexers stumble from the nearby trees. This neighborhood is getting busier by the second, and there’s no doubt, after a gunshot, more are on the way.
Three miles north, just as we’re about to call it quits for the night, we find a motorcycle in the garage of an old colonial set back from the forested road. It’s a newer bike, unlike the Triumph I rode to the city, with a push-button start. It doesn’t have the same cachet, but it’s safer and will hold us and our gear comfortably. The battery is dead. We’ll have to find a working car to give it a jump or hit an auto parts store for a battery.
“Should we sleep here?” Sylvie asks. I nod, and she follows me into the huge and expensively decorated house. “We found a motorcycle. Aren’t you happy?”
I am, but now that I’ve had time to think about it, I feel pretty stupid about letting that Lexer get the best of me. I might’ve fired a shot in time, but you never know. Here I was, all geared up to protect Sylvie, and the fact that she rescued me isn’t proving to be much of an ego boost. I know it’s asinine to feel this way, but even that knowledge hasn’t made the feeling subside.
“Thanks for getting that big one back there,” I say.
“You already thanked me, not that you had to.”
“Maybe not well enough.”
She sets her pack on a chair. I unzip it, pull out the stove to make dinner, and head for the kitchen. Aside from having windows to cook by, I’m not sure why I still gravitate to the kitchen for meals when there’s no running water or electricity.
“What’s going on with you?” Sylvie asks. “And don’t say nothing.”
I keep my eyes on the sink and set the stove on the counter. “I guess I feel kind of dumb about you saving me from that Lexer.”
“That’s dumb. That thing was huge. He could’ve swallowed me whole.”
“Hardly.”
Sylvie inserts herself between me and the counter, dark eyes flashing. “Don’t be an idiot. There are zombies. Almost everyone is dead. The freaking United States Marines and Green Berets are dead. We’re either smart or lucky, and it’s probably luck. So, get over it, and be prepared to be saved again. It’s going to happen at some point, and you’d better hope it does because, if it doesn’t, tha
t means you’re dead.”
She takes a post-diatribe breath and tilts her head. “And you know what, idiot? I like you alive.”
She’s right about every bit of it, particularly the part where I’m an idiot. I smile, and then, because it’s irresistible, I pinch her butt. “I love you alive.”
She whacks my arm. “Me, too.”
***
In the morning, we find a car to jumpstart the motorcycle, then distribute my pack’s contents to the saddlebags and tie it down along with a small container of siphoned gasoline. It’ll eat through the non-gas approved container, but not before we use it.
I hand Sylvie the one helmet. A half helmet, but it’s better than nothing. “You wear this.”
She takes it, then views my empty hands. “How about you?”
“There’s only one.”
“That is not a satisfactory answer.”
“I’ll wear one if we find one. But we are not going anywhere until you put that on, and no amount of arguing is going to change that.”
She buckles it under her chin, yielding faster than I expected, and we hit the road. Between the out-of-the-way route we mapped and our ability to weave through cars and around Lexers, we cross the state line into New York in early afternoon. We’re on the right side of the Hudson River, so at least we’ve eliminated the headache of crossing it.
The leaves are changing color. They won’t be at their peak for a week or two, but it’s a stunning ride along narrow country roads blazed with yellow, red, and orange trees. I miss the country, having been in the city for so long, until we pass a mob that busts through a fence after us.
Maybe Cassie and the others should return to the city with us. The idea blows every preconceived notion I had about survival out of the water. It was always a farm, a fence, maybe a few bad guys, but millions of zombies have changed the game.
Some zombies die when they freeze, some don’t, and the Lexers in warmer climes won’t freeze at all. The mobs might be around for years, and after winter they’ll be on the move again. You can build walls, if you can source the required materials and make them sturdy enough to hold against what could be thousands of zombies, but we’ve seen how difficult that is with our intersections, forget land numbering in acres. I still like a good city block better than any other option, at least until there are fewer zombies in the world.
We pass house after empty house. Lawns are overgrown, windows broken. Lexers stand in yards and on the cracked asphalt of rural towns, but the world seems barren of living people. Nature is alive and well, however, and reclaiming what was once cut back.
Sylvie holds my waist, her arms tightening at turns. Overhead darkens, and the distant clouds are black with the dark haze of rain beneath. We’re closing in—forty miles away—when we hit the storm. I can’t see a thing, and if we skid out or I misjudge a curve, I could kill us both.
I slow the bike. “We should stop until it clears.”
Her arms clinch in sympathy. But another day doesn’t matter, not when I’ve waited this long, and our safety—Sylvie’s safety—is more important than a few hours. I turn for the white farmhouse we passed a half mile back, and we pull into the open garage as the rain intensifies.
Sylvie removes her helmet and stands at the door, watching the rain pelt the field across the road until the far-off mountains are obscured. “Go inside?” she calls over the drumming.
I pound on the connecting door to the house. A minute later, something hits. Sylvie steps back, chisel raised. I think of another garage, with Rachel, and how different this is. Sylvie isn’t in tears on a car—she’s motioning me to her side for safety. We’re a team.
I open the door and release a young couple about our age. I take the man by his shirt, stab him in the eye and turn in case Sylvie needs assistance, but the woman is already down. When nothing else comes, we enter.
The kitchen is fairly clean for having housed two Lexers. The living room is the same. The bedroom is a disaster—blood on the walls and carpet and a crusty bedspread. Sylvie checks a room off the hall and makes a sound that’s half dismay, half shock.
I find her in a pink nursery. A shelf of picture frames showcases a smiling infant and the parents we just finished off. The baby in the crib is untouched by Lexers, but she’s been gone for a while, slowly mummifying through a hot summer in her pale pink pajamas. The dark hair on her head hasn’t dulled. Maybe they never heard her cry, never broke in to eat her, but the thought of this baby girl wasting away might be worse than a quick, though painful, death.
I follow Sylvie’s about-face into the hall, shutting the door behind us, then pull the parents’ bodies into the grass and close the garage. I return to find Sylvie on the couch, watching the rain lash at the living room windows with an afghan around her shoulders. She opens the large blanket to include me when I sit beside her.
After a few minutes, she says, “She was all alone.”
I imagine that baby crying, whimpering, and finally succumbing to her thirst and hunger. Judging by the pictures, she was old enough to know emotionally, if not intellectually, that she had someone who’d attended to her needs in the past. It’s excruciating to think of the abandonment she faced.
“I hope you don’t want kids,” Sylvie says with a humorless laugh. “If you do, or if it’s a deal-breaker, then you should know I don’t.”
“Okay,” I say. A baby that could starve to death in a crib, as perhaps millions of babies did, is something I don’t need to worry about.
“Okay?” she asks, glancing at me. “That’s it?”
“I always thought I wanted them, but not anymore.”
She leans her head on my shoulder and we watch the rain fall in streams until afternoon turns to dusk. “We’ll get there tomorrow,” she says. “I’m sorry. This sucks.”
I nod, but the more I think about it, the less frustrated I am by the delay. I’ve been trying to be positive, to envision the outcome I want. But what if I find an empty house? What if I find them dead? What if I have to kill my own sister?
Chapter 59
Sylvie
We’re on the road at dawn under dry gray clouds. I don’t want to jinx it, but with only twenty miles left, this trip has been a breeze. In more ways than one—the bike’s movement generates a constant rush of wind, which has led me to question why people liked motorcycles before they were needed for travel through the abandoned cars of the apocalypse.
Eric slows at a sign that says Bellville before we speed up again. It’s the town closest to the cabin and similar to other towns we’ve passed through, though quainter with its pretty storefronts. The Lexers on the corners, the broken windows, and what looks to be a blown-up building in the distance indicate it didn’t escape the same fate as less-quaint towns.
It takes minutes to reach a two-lane road on the other side, and eventually Eric turns onto a dirt road and stops. He points to a mound of brush on the shoulder. “That was the mailbox. They must’ve cut it down.”
I lean out so he can see my smile, though my nerves zing. I’m going to meet Cassie. If she doesn’t like me, I’m screwed.
“She’ll love you as much as I do,” Eric says.
“Stop reading my mind.”
He laughs and pulls forward. The dirt road climbs up the mountain just as he described, with thick woods on either side. We travel for a minute before he quiets the engine, and, when he does, a zombie lurks in the woods to our right.
“It’s not too far,” Eric says. “We’ll walk the rest to keep the noise down.”
The Lexer trips toward us over fallen branches. Eric meets him in the trees and sends him to the ground. It was only one—nothing, really—but foreboding makes me want to turn around and go home before Eric’s heart is broken. His features are willfully devoid of certainty; his hopeful, expectant eyes tell another story.
Our footsteps crunch on pebbles in the packed dirt until Eric veers off the road and motions me to do the same. I jump over a deep ditch filled with yester
day’s rain, then step gingerly on the soft humus and twigs of the forest floor, attempting to be quieter than a Lexer. The thud of footfalls comes from ahead, though only trees are visible. It isn’t until we’re almost on it that we see the long trench winding between the trees—hand-dug, five or six feet deep, and a few feet wide. Four zombies wander the dirt, though the sides have collapsed in places, offering a slope to ground level for those Lexers smart enough to utilize it.
We back away before they spot us. Eric crouches to inspect the ground and eases a string of barbed wire from under the leaves. The other end is anchored to a tree. He moves to a grouping of cans and turns one over. Small rocks and old nails patter to the earth.
“John told me he was setting up a perimeter around his house,” he says quietly. “They must have done it here, too.”
It would be good news if it were still strung between trees, or if the trench were still intact. Eric tugs me through forest to the driveway, where splintered wood, cans, and barbed wire lay on the gravel, then leads me back into the woods beyond the trench. A scorched odor intensifies the nearer we get. I hope it’s the woodstove he’s mentioned, and not what I, having smelled a city burn, think it smells like.
Eric stops at the edge of the trees, his breathing loud in the silence. It’s the pictures in the apartment come partly to life: the large, grassy clearing holds a small barn and a smaller shed, but the homey log cabin has been reduced to a mound of charred logs. Not all logs—some of the thick, blackened lengths are bodies burned almost beyond recognition as such. They could be Cassie, Maria’s girls; there’s no way to tell.
Near the barn, feathers are caught in the shredded wood of a chicken coop. The trees of the woods across the clearing are charred skeletons, maybe set aflame by an errant spark, and their black arm-branches reach for the sky. Ten zombies wander the scene. I look closely, but none resemble the people we’ve come to find.
In the rear of the clearing, a fenced garden is rampant with weeds. I can tell it was planted this summer by the shriveled tomatoes that hang from vines and rot on the ground. An SUV emblazoned with NJ PARKWAY POLICE and a pickup truck sit in the driveway. They were here and now they’re gone. Just like Grace’s parents and Logan. I rack my brain for something to say, but I’m as useless as I was then.