The Infects Read online

  It all comes back to the elemental question. The ontology of zombiedom. The first great and most enduring mystery: why are they all so goddamned hungry?

  At times the path would disappear in the snow and mud, with no clear direction, forcing Nero to reach into black space and feel his way along, like sticking his hand into a dark hole and waiting to be bitten by something rabid.

  Or worse.

  Watch out for that loose rock.

  He stepped over it, palm itching madly. War Pig and Yeltsin were right behind him. Estrada was a few feet back, with Idle and Billy taking up the rear.

  “Idle takes it up the rear,” Billy said.

  “Billy sniffs my rim,” Idle replied.

  Nero stopped in front of a familiar stand of pines.

  Too familiar.

  Shit.

  “Which way, chief?” War Pig asked.

  There were no footprints in the snow, none in the mud. If any of the girls had made it out of the campsite, they hadn’t come this way.

  “Made it out” is relative. Question is, made it out as what?

  The moaning got louder.

  Nero slid down a muddy incline. Trail was no longer an accurate term. It was now just the slightest cleft between vegetation, like a rotting green thong pulled tight between the ass cheeks of being lost.

  “Nice jacket, by the way,” Idle said, tugging at Nero’s fur hood.

  Billy pointed at the pink zipper and laughed. “Make it work, baby.”

  Nero had forgotten about the jacket. Cared what it looked like even less. All that mattered was what it smelled like.

  At the end of a long incline, there was a fork.

  His gut said right. Right felt right.

  Go left.

  “You sure?” War Pig asked, breathing heavily.

  Left again.

  “Man, I didn’t even see that turn,” Billy said, almost sliding off the edge. “You got mad eyes.”

  They went another two hundred yards, and then Nero stopped. There was an enormous boulder in the way.

  “Great.”

  “Is completely perfect.”

  “Way to go, Magellan.”

  There was a sheer drop-off to the north. They could try to climb over the smooth frozen rock or descend for a hundred yards to the south, back toward the Infects, and work around it.

  “I say we climb, yo.”

  “Most definitely.”

  Work around it.

  Nero turned and started down. The van key jabbed him in the thigh.

  “Screw that, son.”

  “They bite in that direction, remember?”

  Nero ignored the twins and kept going.

  “Kid got a death wish.”

  “Hella suicidal.”

  War Pig turned and followed Nero. So did Estrada.

  Idle and Billy pouted for a minute and then did as well.

  “Hello! Please to wait up!” Yeltsin said.

  They took the long sloping curve in a jog, through heavy underbrush, making too much noise.

  “Bet every biter for miles can hear us coming.”

  “Convert that shit to kilometers. Then they’re farther away.”

  The smell of Infects got heavier, a settling mist. Dead rot. Like steaks left on a hot dashboard.

  “When is this freaking rock going to end?” Billy whined. “I mean, who makes a rock this big?”

  Nero kept going, keeping his left hand against the jagged outcropping. A low, insistent buzz rose, getting steadily louder, like an army of weed whackers advancing in formation.

  “They know we’re here,” War Pig said. “Like, right here.”

  “Maybe we should turn back, huh, Nero?” Estrada said. “Shit, man. I think —”

  The children from the porta potty stepped out from between two pines just below the path. They were wet with blood, holding hands, their naked arms gray in the moonlight.

  Shamblers hold hands?

  The little girl bared her teeth.

  The little boy bared his teeth.

  ZOMBRULE #5: The only routine worse than kid zombies is knocked-up zombies. Got a pregnant girlfriend? Guaranteed she’s a scene away from being chomped. And then the midwife is all “Push, push” and the boyfriend is all “Don’t push, don’t push,” and suddenly you’ve got a yowler that wants to bite its own umbilical cord. Forget the rhythm method. Zombception? Zombzygote? Zombbirth? Abstinence is rule one in Plagueville.

  The boulder jutted down another few feet, impossible to see beyond.

  “Why don’t they rush us?” Estrada whispered.

  “Little freaks must be full. That Mr. Bator nose was like an eight-course meal.”

  “Don’t mean they won’t bite just for fun.”

  Rocks began to slide down the trail behind them.

  Keep going.

  Nero took three quick steps.

  The children watched, on their toes, breathing heavily, but didn’t move. If they came now, he would have nowhere to go.

  One more step.

  The boy licked blood off his sister’s cheek.

  One more step.

  The girl shuddered. Then purred.

  One more —

  Nero almost fell as his hand slipped into a gap in the rock, a shaft cut like a long hallway. It was wet and dank, narrow but large enough for his body. Between two jagged risers led a natural path, extending forty feet. It wound through the rock and back up the hill.

  Impossible to find unless you knew it was there.

  Exactly. So how about a little love for Uncle Rock?

  Nero turned to go back and tell the others.

  When something grabbed his wrist.

  Hard.

  And nearly pulled him off his feet.

  He tried to pry the hand away, but it was too strong.

  There was no room to move, nowhere to run.

  Don’t move. Don’t run.

  The pressure on his wrist increased as he was slowly dragged against a small crevasse, up to the armpit. It wrenched the joint, but he resisted the urge to cry out.

  Don’t cry out.

  Nero set his feet so that he couldn’t be pulled any farther and grabbed a heavy rock, but there wasn’t enough room to swing it. He had no leverage. And his other arm was going numb.

  Disembodied.

  He felt pressure points moving down his elbow, incisor points along his wrist.

  Then a warmth.

  A wetness.

  He tensed, waiting for the first bite.

  But whatever held him was not biting.

  It was licking his palm.

  A tongue, soft and pointed, ran along his stitches.

  Lapping at the blood.

  Moving very slowly along the long vertical cut.

  In and out of the tear, along the edges, down the sides.

  Softly, clockwise.

  Gently, counterclockwise.

  It felt good.

  Too good.

  How can anything feel too good?

  Nero arched his back and closed his eyes, could feel himself giving in to it. Wanting to give in to it.

  The tongue went deeper.

  His entire body pulsed.

  He dropped the rock he’d been holding, and it landed on his foot.

  Startling him.

  Just enough.

  To feel the teeth again.

  Nibbling along the lips of the gash.

  NERO BRACED HIS LEG AGAINST THE ROCK and jerked backward.

  There was a giggle.

  He pulled again, harder. The momentum threw him back against the shaft’s interior face. As he grappled for purchase, something ran past. Something cold.

  He knew who it was.

  Knew in his (uneaten) bones.

  A silhouette suddenly filled the rock opening.

  “Swann!”

  The silhouette leaped and then disappeared. Nero scrambled the rest of the way down and stuck his head out. War Pig was holding off the children with a pointy stick, jabbing them into
the dirt every time they got up and came at him again.

  “Did you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “Never mind. Come on!”

  War Pig tossed the stick like a javelin. It nailed the girl in the center of her forehead. They all ran into the gap, Billy the last one through. The little boy reached out and just managed to grab his leg. Billy wailed, trying to shake him off, but the boy hung tight, jaw distended and glistening.

  “Yo, can a pimp get some help?”

  Idle turned and swung his boot. It was a solid shot, all arch and tip, launching the boy like a football. His little body spiraled end over end, flew back off the ledge, cleared a horizontal branch, and then crashed into the woods far below.

  Idle pulled Billy to his feet just as the horde entered the gap.

  “Move ass!” War Pig yelled.

  They scrambled over the loose shale, pure thrash-metal adrenaline coursing through jangled synapses as they rushed between tall faces of black rock, barely able to see. Hands gripped things that were soft and wet. That grew in the dark. Mold and rot. Guano. The air was thick and fetid, moans and echoes of moans booming over their heads.

  Nero finally clambered up the last rise, where the cave mouth yawed and the trail resumed below a small rock ledge.

  Just to his left was a perfect circle of fresh snow.

  And in the center of that circle was a single footprint.

  Could be anyone’s. Could be anything. Could be a peg leg who digs spelunking.

  It may not have been Petal’s, but it wasn’t a man’s.

  Which meant at least one of the girls must have made it this far.

  Nero smoothed the print with one hand, a bubble of hope rising in his bones.

  “Man, it feels good to be back,” War Pig said, holding on to Nero’s shoulder. “Above the teeth line.”

  “It’s official. No way I’m ever having kids,” Estrada said, sliding onto the ledge.

  “Little doinker wanted to drink my milk shake,” Billy said.

  “Extra-point conversion,” Idle said, raising both arms for a field goal. “Knew I should have tried out for the fagball team.”

  The moaning from below echoed louder, rhythmic, a group exclamation of want, a berserk mazurka funneled between the rocks.

  Nero looked down at his palm and shuddered. The wound was fresh and pink and wet, licked clean of dried blood. The stitches were straightened, scabs torn away to the raw skin beneath.

  In some circles they call that foreplay.

  War Pig tested a boulder, gauging if it could be pushed back into the gap. “We got them hemmed like nine pins. All we got to do is roll a strike.”

  “That is such genius,” Estrada said.

  They all worked together, straining, like grunts on Iwo Jima, trying different handholds. The larger rocks had no give at all. They sent down a few smaller ones, which tumbled into the darkness and maybe broke a few toes or shattered the occasional femur.

  “With the dynamite, we could wait until last second, take out entire platoon,” Yeltsin said.

  “You got a few spare sticks on you, Kasparov?” Idle asked.

  “No.”

  “You got any blasting caps?”

  “No.”

  “You got a match?”

  “No.”

  “Right. Other than that? Great idea.”

  “Enough,” War Pig said as the sound of footfalls, mindless and leathery, edged up behind them. “Let’s go.”

  Wait.

  Nero crouched and motioned for quiet.

  Along the trail, trees began to shake.

  “No way.”

  “So unfair.”

  “But how did they get ahead of us?”

  Pines shook and swayed. There was a low rumbling, like a crowd of angry voices.

  “We’re screwed.”

  “Total hors d’oeuvres.”

  “Oh, well,” Estrada said, looking back into the dark chasm. The first empurpled hands, outstretched, were now visible — eyes and teeth reflecting menace in the low light. “Time to die.”

  The trees parted violently.

  And then a horde emerged from the woods.

  But it wasn’t Infects.

  It was animals.

  Running in a pack. Deer and raccoon and squirrels. Mice and rats and opossums. A twelve-point buck. A moose. Foxes and ferrets and voles. Skunks and chipmunks and an ocelot. A bear. No, two bears. Breathing hard. More animals came. Dozens. Hundreds. Marmots and skinks and rabbits. Dogs. A ram. Bobcats and weasels and beavers. Woodchucks. Boars. Rats. They tore by in a furry stream, not making a sound, just the padding of their paws and hooves and claws and ragged exhalations.

  All of them with flat terror in their eyes.

  “Holy Christ, that’s weird,” War Pig whispered.

  “Shamblers eat moose?” Yeltsin asked.

  “Maybe they’re just freaked out,” Idle said.

  “It must be the smell,” Estrada said. “Rotting lip. Dead sweat. Blue skin. The animals don’t get it.”

  ZOMBRULE #6: Shamblers do not eat moose. But, my friend, when the day comes that animals run together in terror, having flicked the switch from predator to prey and been reduced to abject communal fear, you bipeds should probably take it as a bad omen. If only because it means Usain Bolt with a taste for face is closing in on the outside lane.

  The last of the animals streamed by — the bedraggled, the slow and the old, the fat and the skinny, the outcasts, the four-legged versions of Mr. Bator and Heavy D. Finally, an ancient raccoon hobbled from the scrub, the very last one. It stopped, looked at the boys, and sighed as if about to offer a pearl of wisdom.

  They waited for it, even as Infect hands reached up, just feet away.

  The raccoon opened its mouth, pulled back its lips.

  And then lay on its side and died.

  Pretty good advice, actually.

  “What, of old age?” Estrada said. “Now? Are you shitting me?”

  Okay, go.

  Nero leaped down from the rock and headed up again, the others practically clinging to his back. The path was colder, darker, steeper than before. He shivered, suddenly desperate to be home. Warm and full. In bed. Half studying an algebra text while the comfortable background sonata of Amandaranto hummed beneath him, the reassuring patter of sound effects and three-button combinations. Graphics violence instead of graphic violence. The option to PAUSE. The luxury of START OVER. Replay the level. Snap off the OFF and make the screen waver; turn the entire horizon into a calming and nonfatal blue.

  From within the cave came a high-pitched caw, almost like a bird’s.

  A large and taloned and angry beast.

  They stopped at the next rise and watched as the horde emerged from the cave mouth, like dirty sausage shoved through a dirtier grinder.

  Falling onto one another in stacks.

  Tangled into a dim, groaning pile.

  Getting up. Sniffing the air.

  Lurching forward again.

  A woman’s high moaning could be heard above it all.

  “Sounds like chula blondie’s getting close,” Estrada said.

  Close? Chick was already as close as it gets without taking your virginity. Or, wait, does that hand job count?

  “You really think that’s Supermodel?” Idle asked.

  Nero pulled down the sleeves of Petal’s coat. The seam of one armpit split. He wanted to take the whole thing off and hold it up to his face, breathe her scent in. But he knew it wouldn’t smell the same.

  The Petal smell would be there, but faint.

  Now it was mixed.

  With someone else’s smell.

  Someone who’d held him in the cave.

  Tightly.

  “I don’t care how hot she is, I don’t ever wanna see that spinderella again,” Billy said.

  “Me neither,” Nero said, then turned and made like an animal.

  Taking off in a flat-out, tail-up, snout-first run.

  MOM WAI
TED UNTIL THE DUDE HAD LUBED UP and hit the lawn chair in the driveway, then changed back into her sweatpants. She got Nick and Amanda to eat breakfast and brush their teeth, then told them to strap in.

  “Mom? No school?” Amanda asked, pushing her glasses up her nose.

  “No school today, Amand-O,” Mom said, backing the car out too fast.

  “Why, Mom? Mom? Huh? Why?”

  “We’re taking the day off, honey. Just me and my guys.”

  “Where are we going?” Nick asked.

  “The mall.”

  “Hate the mall? Mom? Hate it?”

  “I know, honey, but I need a new dress. And I thought we could go to the game store before we get burgers.”

  Amanda nodded. Game store was the magic password. Mom drove faster than usual, whistling along to the new tune by Tawnii Täme that even people who liked Tawnii Täme hated.

  They parked out front, early, the usual bench sitters and speed walkers and bargain rackers clogging the revolving door. At the top of the escalator, Amanda walked into a marble column. And then fell down, rubbing her head.

  “Ouch? Nick? Ouch?”

  A pack of high-school kids pointed and laughed. The guys wore rap-metal shirts and enormous black boots, the girls’ mouths wrapped around smoothie straws. Nick thought about flipping them off, then didn’t. For one thing, the guys were bigger than him, with longer hair and dirtier jeans and deceptive punch-you smiles. For another, they listened to rap metal, which was punishment enough.

  At the game store, Amanda hit the shelves with purpose. There was no browsing or reading. No comparing or contrasting. She believed in a policy of random volume, within minutes returning with a huge stack of Palmbot titles. Mom picked five and then slid her Visa to the clerk. He had stringy hair and wore a Pulseman X hat that was shaped like a clenched fist.

  “Pulseman?” Amanda said. “Ten?”

  “Heck, yeah,” the clerk said.

  “Thought it was? Still? Pulseman seven?”

  “Heck, no. Where you been? That was last year.”

  In the corner was a Zombie Corner. It had displaced the vampire displays, which were shoved aside and unperused. There were zombie FPSs, zombie MMOGs, zombie dictionaries, zombie oral histories, zombie shirts, zombie masks, zombie music, zombie Muzak, zombie suntan lotion, zombie noodle soup, and the best-selling and dead-serious ZombieFacts Q&A with renowned necrologist Dr. Henry E. Kyburg.