Once he and his apprentice were up on top of the rock, they pitched a camp, and ate a meal of cold salted rabbit and water. The elevation kept the dead away, but a cooking fire up here could be seen from miles and miles away. They sat together, wrapped in blankets against the cold of the desert night, and talked.
“I wish Sam was here,” said Tom. It wasn’t the first time he mentioned his older brother, who had been a sniper on Ledger’s Echo Team. As far as Ledger knew Sam had been killed a few days after the dead rose. Or so he had been told.
“Me, too,” he said.
Tom must have heard something in his voice because he turned to the soldier. “Joe… do you think there’s any chance he’s still alive?”
“A chance? Sure,” said Ledger, nodding. “The lady cop I met who’d been with him said she had been told that he fell under a swarm of zoms, but she didn’t actually see him get bit. Sam and his field team, the Boy Scouts, were helping the cop get a whole convoy of school buses filled with kids out of danger. They were overrun and Sam was doing what he could to give them a chance. He went down and the buses got out, but…”
“But…?”
“Sam was dressed for combat. Ballistic helmet with a face shield, Kevlar vest, limb pads, armored gloves. The works,” said Ledger. “He wasn’t exactly naked and painted with steak sauce, you dig? He might have made it out. But he didn’t have a vehicle, at least as far as the cop knew. And going back for him would have put the kids on the table for an all-you-can-eat buffet.”
“Then he could still be out there?” asked Tom. He was a nice young guy. Early twenties. Tough as nails. Smart. Decent. Damn good fighter. But he wore his heart on his sleeve and he pinned his own survival on ideals like hope and optimism, which was dangerously fragile scaffolding as far as Ledger saw it.
Even so, he didn’t try to kick that structure down. Tom had a little half-brother, Benny to think about. The kid was back in Central California, in a small makeshift town built around a reservoir high up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Tom had helped establish, build and defend that town, but he often left his brother in the care of his neighbors while he went out into what the people in town called the great ‘Rot and Ruin’ to look for survivors. Tom had rescued more than two hundred people so far, which made him a hero.
Joe Ledger had no interest in settling in the town. Like Tom, he was on the prowl for survivors, too. However, it was only half of his own self-imposed mission. The rest of it was less humanitarian. Or, maybe it was a service to the community in the most extreme terms.
He and Tom were not out here to kill zoms.
No, they were hunting people.
Tom must have read his thoughts. “What’s wrong with them?”
It was a question the young man asked in one way or another nearly every day. What’s wrong with them? Them. Not the dead. Smart as he was, Tom did not seem able to crawl inside the head of living people who saw the apocalypse as the chance to shake off all moral constraints, all ethics, all inhibitions. There were packs of predators out here — mostly, but not entirely men — who preyed on camps of survivors. Stealing their food and supplies, brutalizing the men, raping the women. Sometimes raping the children, too. Ledger and Tom had found absolute proof that human beings — the uninfected living — were a thousand times more savage than the legions of hungry dead. They had come upon camp after camp and read the proof in the twisted bodies, in the small violated corpses, in the leavings of monsters in human shape. Tom had called them animals at first, but later changed that to ‘monsters’ because animals did not do this.
Tom had been about to graduate from the police academy when the world fell. Since then he had bloodied his hands, but it was only after Ledger had taken him under his wing that Tom Imura had become a practiced and efficient killer. A hunter of hunters; a predator who preyed on predators.
“They do it because they’re weak,” said Ledger. He tore off a chunk of rabbit and chewed slowly.
“Weak?”
“Sure. Don’t confuse dangerous with strong. You’re strong, kid. So am I. So are the kinds of people, trained or untrained, who stand up to protect those who can’t protect themselves. That’s what defines strength. Just as being brave in the face of danger defines courage.” Ledger chewed and shook his head slowly. The sun was down and there were ten billion stars spread like diamond dust above them. “The people we hunt aren’t tigers or lions. They’re jackals. They hunt in packs because they’re too fucking afraid to hunt alone. And in those packs they trash talk so that everyone thinks they’re tough, but it’s a thin coat of paint on a pile of shit.”
“They put up a good fight, though,” observed Tom, but Ledger shook his head again.
“No. They fight, but it’s not a good fight. They fight because they’re afraid of dying, and they’re afraid of the pain of dying. But they aren’t warriors. They’re not going down in any fucking blaze of glory. Even a cockroach will fight.” He spat over the edge of the rock, listened, but didn’t hear it land. He shrugged.
They sat in silence for a long time. There was no moon tonight and the wind was quiet. Far away they could hear sounds in the night. The rustle of something small and fast moving through the brush. A little ground squirrel, maybe, or a rat. The distant call of a night bird. The soft, plaintive moan of something dead and hungry.
They sat and watched the stars.
“I miss my dogs,” said Ledger.
“Me, too.”
When Tom had met Ledger the big soldier was traveling with two monstrous dogs that were half Irish wolfhound and half American mastiff. Baskerville and Boggart. On one of their ‘training’ trips up to San Jose Boggart had gone missing and when they found him the dog had adopted a girl who called herself Rags. The girl was a scrappy little thing. Young but tough as iron, and she and the dog had bonded. After a violent run-in with a group of raiders who called themselves the Skull Riders, Ledger, Rags and the dogs had gone east. When Ledger returned nearly two years later, he had Baskerville with him as well as a new full-bred female mastiff he called Cupcake. Boggart, Ledger told Tom, had elected to stay with Rags, and the soldier was fine with that. Cupcake had joined his little pack. However the two big dogs were back in Mountainside because Cupcake had just dropped a litter of five very large, very noisy pups. Ledger missed his dogs. He liked them a lot more than he liked most people.
After nearly an hour, Tom said, “Maybe we’ll find some horses.”
“Maybe,” Joe said dubiously.
“If we don’t it’s going to be a long walk to Oro Valley, Arizona.”
“Yup.”
They sat in silence, watching the stars above them swim through the Milky Way.
“Joe…do you think it’s real?”
Ledger said nothing.
“The cure they keep talking about,” persisted Tom. “Do you think it’s real?”
Ledger sipped some water and washed it around in his mouth before swallowing.
“Christ, kid, I hope so.”
—4—
Top and Bunny
Top and Bunny wound up spending the night in the loft of a barn on old but clean hay, taking turns sleeping three hours then keeping watch — each twice that night. The next morning, they headed for the Arizona-Colorado border, several survivor groups having hinted that they’d heard rumors of another group struggling in the small town of Sun Valley near Petrified Forest National Park.
Top led the way, because the Georgia farm boy rode horses like it was second nature. Bunny, on the other hand, was an Orange County, California surfer, and his horse riding skills continued to amuse Top every time he watched him. Since riding along with a constantly chuckling companion had begun annoying Bunny fairly quickly, Top just rode ahead, so he could avoid the spurts of spontaneous laughter he’d been prone to when they’d first started out. Bunny knew this although it went unacknowledged. He loved the old guy anyway, though God knew he’d never say that out loud.