CHAPTER TWO
The blade is longer than my arm, but it could be worse. It’s thin, and appears to be steel rather than iron — which means I can actually lift it.
“This looks old,” I observe, eyeing the ruins carved into the handle.
“Chinese dao,” says Levi, joining me. “From the museum.”
I know he means the Seattle Asian Art Museum, because it’s less than a hundred yards from our current location, and that’s exactly where my knife came from. Unlike my plain little dagger, this looks like it was made for royalty.
There’s another bang from below, this time followed by feet on the stairs.
I’m scared. More so than usual, because my knife, I trust. I’ll be clumsy with his blade. But I’m gonna believe he knows what he’s doing because he’s still alive, and because keeping me alive seems to be his only profession.
Also because I got nothing better and we’re out of time.
Despite my lack of practical experience, I do at least know something about form, because I took my pre-FOM job seriously. One thing my on-the-job research taught me is real historical combatants never performed the sort of sword ballet that passes for fighting in Hollywood. True to that spirit, I wait, sword held aloft, until the flesh-eater appears at the top of the stairs. Before he even has a chance to swing his rusty Mariners bat my direction, I cut him down in a single stroke.
The thing I don’t calculate for is the force it takes to pull the sword out of the leaking mass of yellow-gray flesh, but luckily Levi does, and my knife in his hand finds the soft parts of my kill’s companion.
Mine dies clean, but this one — well, it almost makes you forget there’s nothing human about them. It grips its distended belly in talon-like hands, coughing blood. I used to take the time to finish a sloppy kill, but I don’t any more, and neither does Levi, apparently, because the next moment we’re bounding down the stairs — or at least I’m bounding, while Levi limps along behind.
“You won’t last,” I call back to him. “We have to find another place to hide.”
He doesn’t get to answer, because near the bottom of the stairs three more are waiting.
Don’t be confused about what they are. They don’t shuffle along with unblinking stares, and they’re not reanimated. Less Walking Dead, more Reavers — minus the stagy tendency toward rape and mutilation. No scientists are left to say for sure what made them, but the madness and bloodlust started among the cannibals, and a graduate student of my father’s — who made it exactly six months after the shit hit the fan — speculated about a connection to Mad Cow, which was spread pre-FOM by feeding infected cow parts to other cows. (Seriously?)
At least partly because the last thing I wanna do is think about Aaron right now, I raise Levi’s sword and charge down the stairs.
But I’ve let in Aaron’s ghost, and as I clash with the first of the flesh-eaters — a sort of anti-Levi with ratty red dreads and a beard decorated with bits from his last meals — I remember how he died trying to protect me, and how I said that was never going to happen again. How I was never going to let myself need protecting, or get close enough to someone that we might find ourselves in a situation that inspired them to give their life for mine.
Anti-Levi is strong, and he’s got a homemade spear. As our weapons cross, he forces me backward with an animal snarl. I don’t know what to do now, because if I withdraw the sword his spear comes down on me, but if I don’t, it’s not going to be long before he overpowers me. Me and my knife depend on quick jabs and lateral movements, and there’s no room for either in this damn stairwell.
Spittle drips from the monster’s mouth onto my arm, his wild eyes only half a dozen inches from my own, and the foulness of his breath is a weapon itself. I can’t avoid mental comparisons to Peter Jackson’s Uruk-Hai, and this is the opposite of helpful. My heart thunders, and a river of sweat rolls down my back.
With a growl that rises up from somewhere in the lower half of my body, I take hold of the flat of the blade and shove.
The snap of his spear as it buckles inward punctuates my miscalculation — my forward momentum slams me against his chest.
His fist knots in my hair, yanking my head back, and it’s clear he’s going to sink those filed incisors into my throat right then and there. His hot breath marks my jugular as he ducks in for the kill.
“Levi!” I shriek, knowing my companion is pinned behind me, and even if he wasn’t he’s no match for this beast in his current condition.
But I feel the cold tickle of my blade at my waistline as it thrusts past me. I’m pretty sure it’s cut into me, but I don’t care, because my attacker is bawling with flesh-eater rage and I know my favorite weapon has found its favorite target.
Levi’s arm scoops around my waist and he shoves me against the monster. All three of us hang balanced for the space of a breath, and then we teeter and topple down the stairs, taking down the rear guard in the process.
Anti-Levi is dead weight at this point, bleeding out all over the ground, but I’ve gotten tangled up with a scrawny woman who’s hissing and clawing like a feral cat. I grope for my fallen sword, but it’s the blade I catch hold of. Ignoring the metal biting into my flesh, I twist toward her and jam the hilt against the underside of her chin. There’s a sickening pop, and her hissing terminates in a long, broken yowl.
Levi’s hand closes around my wrist and drags me free of the tangle of bodies. The last uninjured flesh-eater, hyena-like, has beaten a hunch-backed, loping retreat.
“He’ll bring others,” I pant. “The sun’s going down.”
No time of day is completely safe, but flesh-eaters have sensitive eyes and like to sleep from noon to early evening. Sometimes later, in the summer, when the sun doesn’t set until late evening. But prey is scarce these days, and the weaker ones sometimes break from the hives — where hunger can drive them to feed on each other — and roam the city without sleep for days. And therefore, until last night, I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in years.
“We have to get out of this part of the city,” Levi replies.
I’m following him down the road that connects the water tower with the museum, and eventually the collapsed conservatory, when suddenly it hits me and I stop in my tracks.
“Why didn’t you help Aaron?”
He freezes at my words, but he doesn’t turn.
“Did you see him die?” Whatever I owe this man, I can’t continue with him until he answers this question.
Finally he turns. He nods.
The pressure in my throat threatens to choke off my words. “Motherfucker.”
“I didn’t watch him die,” he replies softly. “I was attacked too. I couldn’t get to you in time to help him.”
“You didn’t get to me at all,” I snap.
Aaron was all I’d had left. We’d tried, together, to get to my family. In the beginning there was too much chaos. But when weeks later we finally made it back to Seattle after what was supposed to be a day hike up near Granite Falls, the city was under quarantine. Only food trucks were allowed in. Nothing was allowed out. Some kind of massive-scale food contamination. It had hit all the major cities, and authorities figured out early on that it could be transported on anything—vehicles, pets, people. There was a lot of speculation it was some kind of GMO doomsday prediction come true, but nobody we met after that had been given any definitive answer. All they could tell us was every fresh food item — anything that didn’t come from a box or can — had spontaneously shriveled into an indigestible glob of carbon. The same thing happened to anything that was trucked into the city.
Eventually the food trucks stopped coming, and there was no one left to watch the blockades. We drove into Capitol Hill — against the stream of panicked survivors driving out — only to find my parents' house deserted. It was there we met our first flesh-eater.
“What the hell have you been doing all this time?” I demand, clenching my fist over the hilt of his sword.
Infuriatingly, he shrugs. “I’ve always been close. I couldn’t save you from what happened here.” His arms swept out, indicating the park, and I suppose, the city beyond. “I could save you from them. I have saved you from them, when you needed saving. But one time I was too late. Yesterday I was almost too late.”
It was the last time I’d cried, when the flesh-eaters took Aaron. For two days I’d cried. Had the bastard hidden behind a tree and watched me? He’s some kind of genetic cocktail, he said so himself. He has a superpower, sure, but is he really all there emotionally and mentally? What must it be like to have no father or mother? To be raised by scientists?
“We have to go, Mila,” he says in a low voice. “I know why you stay here, but it’s too dangerous now, and resources are scarce.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I snarl, throwing down his sword. The metal clangs against the asphalt.
“I know you don’t want to die.”
Sonofabitch. God only knows why I cling to this empty, angry world. But I could leave him here for the flesh-eaters and survive on my own just fine. (Though admittedly, now, I’m second-guessing my own badassery.)
But if he’s really been following me the last four years he knows damn well I’m not going to do that.
“All right, Red. What’s your plan?”