Chapter Six: A Tor.Com Original Read online

  It was going to be interesting.

  He might write a paper on it, if papers still mattered.

  And then they walked up on the most recent group of victims.

  They’d been hiding in an RV, it looked like.

  It was as good as anywhere, Crain supposed. No hiding place or perfect fortress really worked.

  It looked like this group had finally made their big run for it. The RV’s front tires were gummed up with zombies. They’d had no choice but to run, really. It was always all that was left, right at the end.

  They made it about the usual distance: thirty feet.

  They’d been gnawed down to the bone in places, of course.

  “If they ever figure out there’s marrow in there,” Dr. Ormon said, lowering himself to a likely arm, its tendons bare to the sun for the first time.

  “They don’t have language,” Crain said. “It would just be one knowing, not all of them.”

  “Assuming they speak as you and I do, of course,” Dr. Ormon said, wrenching the forearm up.

  The harsh creaking sound kickstarted another sound.

  In a hiking backpack lying across the center stripe, there was what could only be an infant.

  When it cried, it was definitely an infant.

  Crain looked to Dr. Ormon, and Dr. Ormon looked ahead of them.

  “It’s right on the asphalt,” Dr. Ormon said, his tone making this an emergency.

  “They go by smell,” Crain said. “Or sound. Just normal sound, not conductive.”

  “This is not an argument either of us wants to win,” Dr. Ormon said, stepping neatly over to the backpack and leaning forward onto it with both knees.

  The crying muffled.

  “We’re reenactors,” he said, while doing it, while killing this baby. “My brother-in-law was a Civil War soldier on weekends. But this, this is so much more important. An ancient script, you could say. One written by the environment, by biology. Inscribed in our very instincts.”

  Crain watched, and listened, his own plundered tibia held low along his right leg.

  Soon enough, the cries ceased.

  “You can test your theory about—about methods of child transport—later,” Dr. Ormon said, rising up to drive his knees down one last, terrible time. For emphasis, it seemed.

  “That was probably Adam,” Crain said, looking down at the quiet lump in the backpack.

  “If you believe the children’s stories,” Dr. Ormon said, casting around for his ulna. He claimed their flavor was slightly headier. That it had something to do with the pendulum motion they’d been subjected to, with a lifetime of walking. That that resulted in more nutrients getting trapped in the lower arms.

  Crain didn’t care.

  He was still staring at the raspy blue fabric of the backpack, and then he looked up the road as well.

  Left Arm was watching them.

  He’d come back. The sound had traveled along the asphalt ribbon of 95 and found him, bringing up the rear of the horde.

  It hadn’t been scent or pressure waves in the air, anyway; the wind was in Crain’s face, was lifting his ragged cape behind him.

  So Ormon was right.

  Crain looked across to him, one foot planted on a dead wrist, his chicken elbows cocked back, trying to disinter the ulna from its double-helix soul mate of a radius.

  “You’re right,” Crain said across to him.

  Dr. Ormon raised his face, waited for the punch line.

  “About how they hear,” Crain said, pointing with his chin down 95.

  Left Arm was still two or three car lengths from Dr. Ormon.

  Dr. Ormon flinched back, tangled in the legs of the woman whose marrow he was plundering.

  “I got it,” Crain said, and stepped forward, past Dr. Ormon, and, when he was close enough, timing it after a clumsy left-arm swipe, he planted the sole of his boot in Left Arm’s chest, sent him tumbling, then stepped in neatly to finish it with the tibia as hammer, as axe, as—as tool.

  It made his arm feel floppy and chimp-like, as if unaccustomed, as if only using this long bone from sudden, forgettable inspiration.

  “Not very persistent after all, are they?” Dr. Ormon said from his corpse.

  Crain looked back to Dr. Ormon about this, and then down to Left Arm.

  Right beside him was one of the plundered, the dead, the feasted on. The dead-dead.

  Crain lowered himself to this clean corpse, to salvage what he could—pockets first, then the bones, for marrow—and found himself holding Left Arm’s left arm. Just to move it away, off.

  But then he pulled on it instead.

  Because zombies are already decomposing, it came off at the shoulder.

  Crain studied it, studied it—not very persistent, are they?—and finally nodded to himself, reached through the rancid meat for the bone, liberated it.

  The brittle end snapped off under his thumb like a Pez dispenser.

  There was still marrow inside.

  Crain considered it, considered it (not very persistent, are they?), finally nodded to himself.

  “You still into ulnas?” he called across to Dr. Ormon.

  “Give them a chance,” Dr. Ormon said back, not bothering to turn around.

  “Here,” Crain said, walking Left Arm’s ulna across, careful not to tip the syrupy marrow out. “I broke it already, sorry.”

  “I really shouldn’t,” Dr. Ormon said, smiling, taking the ulna between his fingers. “Male or female?” he asked.

  He was keeping track. Like it mattered.

  “Male,” Crain said, loving the truth of it, and watched Dr. Ormon tip the broken end of the bone into his mouth.

  Dr. Ormon had already swallowed by the time the taste registered.

  He fell to his knees coughing, trying to puke.

  Crain pinched his pants up at the thighs to squat down, say it right to Dr. Ormon: “We’re not bone suckers, doctor. We’re persistence hunters. I think you’ll come to agree with me here shortly.”

  Dr. Ormon tried to respond but could only sputter and gag, swing his arm back and forth for Crain’s pants leg.

  He was already changing, then.

  “This can be chapter six,” Crain said. “That sound good to you, sir?”

  Dr. Ormon’s head bobbed with his regurgitation efforts. With his transformation. With his inevitable acquiescence. Not just to the virus, but to the strength of Crain’s argument.

  Chapter six, then. It was going to be perfect.

  Crain stood, turned to survey his options.

  Eighty miles behind him was the campus, with all its vending machines, all its dorm-room toilets to drink from.

  All its concrete and asphalt, stretched tight like an eardrum.

  The woods, then. Back to the trees.

  The soft earth there wouldn’t transmit his location to the herd. To any stragglers.

  In this particular reenactment, Crain was to be prey, he knew.

  Behind him, the all-too-human horde, exhausting the landscape.

  This was his thesis in action. His final proof.

  He smiled to himself, if smiles still mattered, and was flipping a coin in his head—trees to the east, or trees to the west?—when the blue backpack pulled his attention over.

  The lump was gently kicking. A small fist, pushing against the fabric. The baby, more resilient than Dr. Ormon had thought. More human.

  Crain turned to Dr. Ormon, already trying to figure out how to stand again, into this new world.

  Maybe fifteen seconds, then. Ten to be safe.

  Crain ran to the backpack, grabbed the infant up.

  A girl.

  “Oh, Eve,” he said, and pulled her to his chest, one of her arms more floppy than it should have been, the ribs on that side dangerously concave. But the other lung was working fine. She mewled, was building to a scream.

  Crain chose the side of the road where the trees were closest.

  Crossing the ditch, the infant held tight in both arms, because
he didn’t have close to enough body hair for her to clutch on to with her tiny right hand, Crain shook his head to clear the sweat from his eyes.

  The gazelles did learn to perspire, he said in his head to Dr. Ormon, shuffling into place behind him, and the race, it was on, it had never really ended, not since those first delicate steps, six million years ago.

  Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Graham Jones

  Art copyright © 2014 by David Palumbo