Resurrection: A Zombie Novel by - (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📕

Annie knew the real reason Lane sent Bobby with her and Kyle to scavenge for bicycles. Bobby wasn’t their bodyguard. He was Lane’s bodyguard. Lane didn’t want Kyle and Annie scavenging for weapons instead of for bicycles.

Bobby unholstered his pistol with one hand and picked up two crowbars with the other.

“Let me see one of those,” Kyle said and reached out his hand.

Bobby jerked away. “You can have one of these when I tell you.”

This wasn’t going to work, Annie thought. They didn’t need to like each other, but they did need to work together out there, especially if they were attacked. She approached Bobby slowly and placed her hand on his shoulder.

“Hey!” Bobby said and shrugged her away. “Keep back.”

This was going to be worse than she thought.

“Let’s try to be civilized,” Kyle said. “We aren’t your enemy. Our enemies are outside. We all need weapons if we’re going out there.”

“You can have one when I say you can have one,” Bobby said.

“You keep your pistol,” Kyle said.

“You’re goddamn right I’m keeping my pistol,” Bobby said, his upper lip curling.

Annie wanted to argue but decided against it. Bobby would eventually settle down, especially if she and Kyle didn’t spook him by invading his space. She decided to be as nice as she could, to pretend she and Bobby were friends. If she acted like his friend long enough, it might become less of a lie after a while.

“After you,” Bobby said and gestured for Kyle to go out ahead. Bobby was not going to turn his back on anybody.

Kyle unlocked the front door and peered out. “Looks clear,” he said and stepped out. Annie looked over at Bobby. He motioned her out with his eyes.

She stepped outside and was overwhelmed with the putrid stench of rotting trash. The odor was faintly detectable inside the store, but outside she could taste it.

She looked out at a generic suburban street that could have been just about anywhere in the country—with strip malls, big-box stores, and fast-food joints—but absolutely everything was ruined. Windows were either broken or all boarded up. Pieces of glass crunched underfoot. No cars on the street. Trash blew in the wind. What looked like a used-car lot had exploded, its charred remains looking like the architectural equivalent of bones littering the parking lot.

Everything was quiet and still. The setting just didn’t seem real, as if this whole thing were some kind of elaborate put-on. And where on earth were these things everyone kept talking about? The only one she’d seen—and an alleged one at that—was the man Frank hit with his truck not twenty minutes after Hughes had fired his shotgun at her.

“I think I remember seeing a bike shop not far from here,” Kyle said. “Down that way, I think.”

He pointed toward the east, or the direction Annie assumed was east. She had a decent sense of direction, but she still wasn’t entirely sure which town she was in or where it was in relation to everywhere else.

“So let’s head that way then,” she said. “Better to get bikes from a store than from people’s garages. It’s quieter and won’t take as long.”

“Bobby?” Kyle said.

“Fine. Let’s go.”

“We should walk down the middle of the street,” Kyle said. “We’ll be a little more visible, but we’ll be farther away from the buildings. In case some of those things come out running at us.”

“Those … things, as you call them … could be in these buildings?” Annie said. Most of the windows and doors were boarded up.

“They could be anywhere,” Kyle said.

“Enough talking,” Bobby said.

So they walked “east” and said nothing. Just down the street a ways on their left was the blown-up car lot. On their right was an ex–Burger King. Up ahead were more strip malls and big-box stores, including a Target. There might still be items worth scrounging in there, she thought, except the windows were smashed in.

They walked for a good twenty minutes saying nothing and hearing nothing, and part of Annie found the whole business exhilarating. Who would ever expect to see something like this? American cities and suburbs had always looked and felt permanent. On some level she knew they weren’t, of course—everything falls apart eventually—but it never occurred to her that they could slide into decay so rapidly. She certainly never expected to see everything disintegrate at once.

She felt a few drops of rain on her face, but only a few. The Northwest’s weather was bizarre. Some days it rained so lightly she could be outside for hours and not really get wet, while rainstorms in South Carolina could drench her to the skin faster than if she stood with her clothes on in the shower.

Harder rains were coming, however, if it really was early November like the others were saying. The dry summer season was over and November’s rains were the worst. Soon the rain would fall without stopping for days.

Life was about to become a lot more complicated. She loved the smell of fall, the earthy fragrance of mulch and dead leaves and coldness and rain, but that was absent now and replaced by the retch-inducing slum reek she’d once encountered on a trip abroad to India. Maybe the late-autumn rains would wash the stink off this town. She doubted the stench of rotting trash and—what else, dead bodies?—could last through the season.

Nature was coming back fast and hard. How long before she saw bears in the streets? And how long before moss, grass, and even trees start growing on top of the pavement?

“So what did you do?” Annie said to Kyle as they walked. “Before all this.”

“Huh?” Kyle said. He heard her, but he hadn’t actually heard her. His mind was somewhere else.

“I asked what your job was,” she said. “Before all this.”

Kyle shook himself back to his immediate surroundings.

“I worked in high tech. Programming computers. The job paid well, but it never really defined me. At least I didn’t define myself by my job.”

“So what defined you?” she said.

Kyle ignored her and stopped in the middle of a four-way intersection. The wind kicked up and Annie heard the darkened traffic signals creaking as they swung on their cable under the dishrag sky.

“What?” Bobby said.

Kyle said nothing for a moment. He just stood there with his hands on his hips and looked to the left and the right. “I think,” he said, “that I saw the bike store down there.” He pointed toward the right. Toward the south? The suburban business district continued in that direction just as it did straight ahead, but there was less debris on the streets to the right.

“So let’s go then,” Bobby said.

“Right,” Kyle said.

So they headed right, toward what Annie thought was south. They walked in silence for a few minutes, passing a boarded-up bank, a gas station with the windows smashed in, a car that had accordioned into an electrical pole, an ambulance turned onto its side, and an apparent massacre site next to an Arby’s fast-food joint with bones and torn clothing and bloodstains smeared on the pavement.

Bobby stared transfixed at the massacre site, tripped on a tire in the middle of the street and pitched face-forward onto the asphalt. He managed to keep hold of his pistol, but the two crowbars clanged onto the street. He didn’t appear to be hurt, but he could hardly have made more noise if he tried.

Annie considered offering Bobby a hand up, but it would just humiliate the guy and probably piss him off. Instead, she spun around slowly and eyeballed the buildings and wreckage around them.

Bobby grunted and picked himself up.

Then Annie heard something new. It was far away and barely even detectable, but it sounded like pounding on pavement on the other side of the Arby’s.

“It’s them,” Kyle said.

“Fuck,” Bobby said and pointed his pistol toward the restaurant.

The sound grew louder. Annie stepped behind Bobby since he was the one with the gun.

“Bobby,” Kyle said. “Give me one of those crowbars.”

“Me too,” Annie said. She could hear the sound clearly now. It was definitely feet running on pavement. Running hard. She was nearing panic and felt like her heart might explode.

“I got this,” Bobby said between breaths. He was damn near hyperventilating and he couldn’t hold his gun steady.