“What is that?”
She looked closer, flipping through the first couple pages. “Oh. Shit.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a list.”
“What kind?”
“Look, here’s Sewell and his wife,” she handed me the notebook.
SEWELL, HOWARD M., 4865 GOCHIE FORD FARM ROAD, QUARANTINE, LENA C., SPOUSE, POSSIBLY INFECTED, CULL.
“It’s full of names,” she opened the console and pulled out another notebook, and a third. “They’re all full. They must have everyone in the county listed here.
“A cull log.”
“It’s not right. There are innocent people locked up by madmen.”
“There are dangerous people locked up, too.”
“Not all of them.”
“No.”
I steered the truck toward the school road. The snow was mostly gray slush. The school was circled on one of the maps and labeled “Containment.”
The high school was outfitted with lights on cranes and blocked off by barricades. Three rows of razor wire wrapped the fences. A lone man sat inside a tiny concessions booth keeping guard over the two gates. I sat up and aimed at the man, but Audrey slapped my forehead.
“Don’t you see the guards up there?”
“I don’t see anything.”
“They’re on the roof. They’re on the lights. They’re all over.”
I squinted. Sure enough, portly guards stood on the roofs, shifting foot to foot and rubbing their hands together.
I drove straight, auxiliary lights burning. The guard waved. I tapped the horn and we made our way inside the compound. I followed the road to the main building. Gas tankers were parked in the lot to fuel generators. Million-watt bulbs turned the campus into a movie set. Watchmen patrolled the sidewalks, fingers off their triggers and up their noses.
We toured the campus. Everywhere we drove, we were greeted with happy waves by guards. They thought we were Matthew Scudder, Revolutionary. Leader of the New World. And everywhere we drove, we came across more guards.
We stopped in front of the football field. Hastily fastened to the top of the fence was more razor wire, sagging in some places and taut in others. A lookout had been made out of the announcer’s box, and the floodlights shined brightly on the field. A couple thousand infected strangers were locked inside. Their skin was gray and black, bubbling with maggots. Their faces were gaunt, mouths agape and drooling black blood.
“Do you see that?” She pointed to the bleachers. “Jesus. Do you see that?”
“See what?”
“That woman under the stands. Right there.”
I saw her. She was in a nightgown and clinging to a girder.
“Can those things climb?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like that woman, Jack!”
“I don’t think they can climb. If anything, they’re clumsy.”
“She’s not one?”
“Not yet, looks like.”
“We have to get her down. Jack, we have to help her.”
“We can’t go in there.”
“She’s stranded.”
I drove behind the stadium, drawn by headlights hovering back and forth, blinking behind a patch of spindly trees. We came across a bulldozer pushing buckets of dirt into a hole. We made out the hands and feet of the damned. Their limbs jiggled as the bulldozer scraped by.
“Shoot him. Shoot the driver,” she said.
“What good’s that?”
“Watch. He pushes the dirt to the hole, he makes a pass to the dirt. When he’s facing the stadium, just shoot him. The bulldozer will drive right through the fence.”
Audrey was right. With every other turn, he aimed straight for the football field. I rolled down the window and aimed at the driver. I followed him for several bucket loads, mesmerized by the spinning lights atop the machine. When he faced the stadium again, I fired. I missed, nicking the steel cage around him. The dozer twitched to the left. I made the next shot, but the bulldozer was off course. It headed toward the corner of the field, chugging along.
The yellow and dirt-brown dozer plowed through the razor wire and chain link fence. The metal poles bent under its tracks and there was a satisfying snap as wires whipped through the air. It plowed through the swarm of bodies in the corner of the field. Their hands reached out of the bucket and groped for release. The others ambled straight for the opening in the fence. A tornado siren howled. Guards barreled out of the announcer’s booth, assault rifles aimed at the muddy field. The guards fired madly at the Heathens, but there were too many. The Heathens swarmed the bleachers, and the guards desperately scrabbled back to the booth. Or so they tried. The Heathens weren’t fast but they were many. They were inescapable. They tore the guards apart. It was a free-for-all. The guards thrashed and cried. They didn’t want to die. They didn’t want to become what they loathed. But it was all in vain.
The bulldozer took out half a dozen fence sections. It drove through campus and into a building, stalling after it crashed halfway through a wall. The bodies dispersed. They wandered into their own freedom. Guards fired at them from the roofs.
We drove into the field, back to the spot where we saw the woman cowering on the girders. I stopped near the woman’s shadow.
Audrey called to the woman. We waved her to the truck, but she was frozen with fear. Stragglers surrounded us. Audrey and I pushed them back with the pistols, cleared them out to thirty yards. Plenty of room for the lady to climb down.
Audrey helped the lady into the back seat where she was at once hidden in shadows. The lady’s heavy breath caressed my neck.
“There are more,” the lady said. “They’re in the gymnasium. I told them they were wrong. I wasn’t bit. It’s just a bruise,” she was exhausted.
“But they threw you in.”
“They did, and I was up there three days.”
“Show me the bruise,” I said.
Audrey slapped me twice. My cheek and temple stung. My eyes watered.
I turned to the woman. “Show me.”
She pulled her shirt up to the bottom of her breasts. Her stomach and side were scratched and bloody, a fingernail embedded in her skin at the end of one of the scratches. She peeled back a piece of skin and the flesh below seeped a yellowish fluid.
“Wasn’t a thing wrong with me until I got thrown in that pen.”
“Where’s the gymnasium?” I asked.
The guards outside had quadrupled and flanked all around the stadium. The shamblers spread out faster than they could be contained. They moved tirelessly, continuously, never stopping for fatigue, never considering which way to move.
“The gym is that tall building back there,” she turned in the seat and pointed. “That’s where they keep everyone else.”
Behind the gymnasium was a ghost-town place. An awning shielded piles of retired school equipment from the flustering snow. Empty barrels, broken desks and chairs covered in graffiti and carved insults.
The double doors to the rear entrance were chained and padlocked. I swung the truck around, shifted into reverse, and sped backward. The tires spat out snow and mud, rocks clanged against the frame. We rammed the door and stopped abruptly. Our heads snapped against the headrests, our brains like mush. I plowed the truck into the doors again. The chains snapped and whomped against the truck bed.
“Give her some of our rations,” I told Audrey.
“I’m not hungry,” the woman said quickly.
“Lady. How are you not hungry, held up under the bleachers three days?”
“I’m just not. And my name is Jean-Anne Huston, I thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And I happen not to be hungry because…” she trailed off.
“You happen not to be hungry because why, Jean-Anne?”
Her face soured. “Because right now, the thought of food makes me sick.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I hate to keep sitting in this truck. Then we’ll all be sick. They’ll be on us in a minute.”
Jean-Anne sighed. “He’s right. I don’t know how they know, but they just follow you all over. Does that make sense? I must have crawled through a mile of bleachers. Those heathens always knew where I was. They’ll come for sure.”
I threw open my door and the cold air whipped us sober.
The sirens whistled sadly. Sporadic gunfire on top of it. We limped and shuffled and hastily dragged ourselves into the gymnasium. We dumbly went in the godforsaken place we’d been trying to avoid.