“Question for you.”
“What?” I asked, without trying to fully wake from my rest.
“How come the young Z’s are so damn fast?”
I opened my eyes and stared at the underside of the kitchen table. I had taken to napping on the bench as opposed to climbing up into the secondary sleeping area. I could sleep nearly anywhere, a throwback to my college days when I did pretty much sleep anywhere.
“Dunno,” I replied. I slid my feet to the floor, slowly pushing myself up to a sitting position. “Maybe it has something to do with the different body chemistry,” I said, scratching my head. My hair was starting to get a little shaggy without Sarah around to trim it up. I blinked and looked at Duncan, who was standing by the table.
“What do you mean?” Duncan asked, leaning back on the sink.
I looked at him closely for a second, wondering if he was serious. I glanced around and saw Tommy driving, so I knew he hadn’t sent Duncan on any joke missions. Zeus the cat was up in a storage bin, his pale yellow eyes looked at me as if to say, You’ll probably regret this.
I shrugged. “Keep in mind this is just speculation, but kids have different body chemistries than we do. Youngsters bounce back more quickly from serious illnesses than we could ever hope to. Some say that their immune systems are hyped up because they need the protection to get to adulthood, which results in different wiring. But I couldn’t say for sure, because it makes no real sense. The older kids, teenagers and such, they aren’t much faster than the really old ones. The brain dies and that’s it. That’s what the virus has to work with, just rudimentary responses to stimuli.”
Duncan looked down. “What about what we saw at that apartment?”
“The doorknob turning?”
“Yeah, that.”
I leaned back. “Been giving that some thought. If the zombies are actually starting to learn, then we’ve got to jump start our timetable and get moving to the final phase.”
“That bad?” Duncan looked somewhat concerned.
“If the Z’s are able to problem solve, then all our defenses won’t matter for crap, because the Z’s have nothing but time on their side. There is one thing I haven’t seen yet, but I get the feeling it’s just a matter of time.” I took a swig from my water bottle.
“What’s that?”
“Zombies taking shelter during the winter, or finding hidey holes to wait out the cold.”
Duncan, a veteran of nearly every zombie fight I could think of, actually shuddered. “Good God,” he said, as the implications hit him. “We’d have to hunt them out of every sewer, attic, basement and drainage area. And when we found them, they’d be still active.
I shook my head. “Nothing about this whole mess makes me believe in a benevolent god anymore. Want to hear the worst of it?”
“Not really.”
“When was the last time you saw a lone zombie?”
Duncan thought a minute. “It’s been a while, but the last one was in the parking lot back home. The one you killed. Why?”
“They are learning on more ways than one. They are laying ambushes, like we saw recently and they are attacking in groups. They seem to have learned the strength of numbers and how vulnerable they are attacking one on one.”
Duncan’s eyes got wide and I just nodded. “We need new tactics,” he said.
I smiled and eased my way up to the front of the vehicle. Tommy was driving and he looked up as I sat down next to him.
“What’s the plan, boss?” he said soberly. I figured he had heard the conversation between Duncan and myself.
“We need to stop a bit, I want to go and stretch my legs,” I said, picking up a map. The road we were on was empty and there were large swaths of land on either side. Here and there were farms and barns, but I didn’t feel the need to stop and see if anyone was alive. Eventually we would have to, but not on this trip.
“Where are we?” I asked. I knew we were swinging south to avoid Columbus, but as to our current location, I had not a clue.
Tommy pointed to a sign as we lumbered past. “Township Highway 160, whatever the hell that means, since a minute ago it was Carson Road and ten minutes earlier it was Township Highway 160.” As we discovered, it was a running joke to try and figure out who named the stupid roads in Ohio. Currently, if the road was running East-West, it was named one thing. If running either Northwest-Southeast or Northeast-Southwest, then it was named something else. The general consensus was to just keep moving east. We wanted to eventually hit Route 50, since that would take us to the heart of DC.
“Right.” Looking at the map, I indicated a stopping point. “When we get to the interstate, let’s stop for a bit and have a look around.”
“You got it.” Tommy was another old campaigner and would be able to get us out of any trouble we happened to come across. “Hey, John?”
“Yeah?” I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes.
“What if the zombies aren’t really dead?” Tommy asked seriously.
“Explain.” I hadn’t travelled this course of thought before.
“What if they caught the virus and instead of truly dying, went into a deep coma, where the virus took over the brain functions. Technically, they become brain damaged due to lack of oxygen to the brain, but they are still alive, with the body responding to the virus’ impulses to survive,” Tommy said.
I considered it. “Not sure about that. All early reports said this virus killed people. What about the people we’ve seen who have been ripped in half and still coming at us? What about those with the awful wounds that don’t bleed, or those with missing organs?” I didn’t want to play the devil’s advocate, but what Tommy was suggesting was creepy.
“Suppose the virus shuts down non-essential systems and slows down the heart rate to a beat or two a minute. There wouldn’t be much blood flow and the virus could thicken the blood to prevent loss. That would explain how arms and legs could keep moving. The nervous system has shut down, save for movement impulses, making the victims immune to pain and they are decaying because the skin is not being maintained as a vital system. The bone weakness we’ve seen is the virus not paying attention to supporting systems, just looking out for number one.
“Basically, the virus makes the victim resemble a truly dead, back from the grave zombie, but is actually living, just not with what we consider life,” Tommy concluded.
“So what you’re saying is these things, which we have always believed to be dead, are actually still alive on a sub-normal level?” I asked, mulling over the theory. In a way, it made sense and actually restored my faith a bit. Seeing these creatures as victims of a plague as opposed to something Hell spat forth was oddly reassuring. But one part didn’t make sense.
“What about the still-living zombie heads? Remember the fight at McCard’s? Those kids had a pit full of severed zombie heads, which they used to kill Kevin Pierce.”
Tommy thought about that one. “Not sure, but maybe the virus goes on overload for survival when the host is truly dead, animating the leftovers for as long as possible, in the hope that another victim might be infected. For all we know, a severed zombie head will live for a while, then be truly dead.”
I had to admit it was possible and made a certain amount of sense as far as reasoning goes, but for the time being, I was going to kill any zombie I came across, actually dead or not. But it was worth thinking about and gelled fairly well with the way the zombies were acting lately. I wondered if they were starting to recover, with the body actually able to fight back from some small enclave of resistant cells, which led them to increased cognitive functioning. This was going to make things really interesting and we were running out of time.
Of course, we could be wrong, they were just reanimated corpses and God hated all of us.
We pulled up onto an overpass which crossed Interstate 71. It was a big highway, four lanes separated by a grassy median. We were the only vehicle on the crossroad and I could see for miles in either direction.
I decided to get up as high as I could, so I climbed up to the top of the RV and pulled out my binoculars. To the north I could see a long line of cars stuck on the road behind an overturned semi, the unfortunate accident which held up a large exodus from Columbus. The other side of the road was full of cars travelling in the same direction, They were stopped by another series of accidents. I could see many ruts in the grass and in the surrounding fields, footprints of those who tried to escape the deathtrap of the roads. I could see the outline of the city, but I had no desire to go into that mess. We had spent a good deal of time already on the road and I was anxious to get back to my family.
As I was looking around, Nate poked his head out of the hatch. “Anything interesting?” he asked, climbing up out of the hole and sitting cross-legged on the roof. He had another pair of binoculars and unfolded a map across his lap.
“Not so far, I was just wondering where all those people went who got away from the interstate,” I said, looking around.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I see lots of cars, but no zombies.”
Nate brought up his own binoculars. “Seriously?” he asked. I could understand his incredulity. Normally when we encountered a large line of cars from a major population center, there were a lot of casualties and dead people walking around. Interstates were usually fenced, keeping the zombies from wandering off.
“Seriously. I have been looking around for a while and haven’t seen a single one.”
“Wonder what it means.”
“I’ve learned not to be hopeful, if you catch my drift.”
“Got it. Hey, John?” Nate queried, staring into his binoculars to the northeast.
“What?” I was getting ready to head back down.
“How come you missed that blonde on the car out there?” Nate asked.
“Say what?” I looked in the direction he was and after a certain amount of scanning, I could just make out a small figure standing on the roof of a pickup truck. The hood was up and she was holding what appeared to be a towel, ready to signal anyone she saw.
“I’ll be damned,” I said, taking down my binoculars. “Wonder what she’s doing out here?”
“Same as us, I guess,” Nate said, looking at his maps and then back up at the position of the blonde. “Looks like she’s on this road here, just outside this town.” Nate pointed to a small junction of roads called Harrisburg.
I looked at the map and back up at the scene before me. She likely couldn’t see us too well if she didn’t have binoculars and to be honest, something about the scene before me was making my warning bells go off. Maybe I was being too paranoid, but I just had a heart-to-heart with Major Thorton and then this girl shows up in the middle of nowhere. I had no reason to believe in coincidences, so I had to take the paranoid route.
“Something’s wrong, Nate. Look closely, tell me what’s wrong with this picture.” I was not sure what was bothering me, but if I could get another’s eyes to think for me, that worked.
“What could be wrong?” Nate chided. “You’ve been on the frontier too long. You’re starting to see things that aren’t… really… there…” His voice trailed away as he studied the scene very carefully. I could tell something was bothering him as well, but he couldn’t put his finger on it, either.
In situations like these, I found the best thing to do was to go over carefully what I could see and let my instincts take over. From where I was I could see a blonde woman and a pickup truck. The truck’s hood was up and the bed was empty, the glass wasn’t broken and the headlights seemed okay.
Wait a minute. I thought to myself. Empty truck bed? That was wrong. If the truck bed was empty, then she was running scared, but if the truck broke down, she wouldn’t stay with it.
I said as much to Nate, who snorted. “You were right, before,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, not understanding.
“You are better than me.” Nate grinned and put down his binoculars. “So what do we do about this little trap?”
I shrugged. “See if it is what it seems to be. If not, we’ll help someone out.”
We both dropped down into the RV and gathered the other two men around the table. After convincing Duncan that we really didn’t know what the blonde looked like and no, we didn’t know if she was single, we decided on a fairly straightforward plan. We would drive the RV to the damsel in distress, leaving behind a pair of men to see if it was a trap and if so, spring it on the trappers. What could go wrong?