“I don’t want it anymore. I just want to know about the Lost Girl. ”
“And I’m wandering around everywhere but in the direction of the point, is that it?”
Benny gave an “if the shoe fits” kind of shrug.
“Okay, okay. Long story short, I got the hell out of Dodge. ”
“‘Dodge’?”
“Out of LA. No one else came out of the police station … At least no one alive. After I sat in my car for ten minutes, I saw the desk sergeant come shambling out. His face was smeared with red, and he was holding something in his hands. I think it was a leg. He was taking bites out of it. I spewed my lunch out the side window, backed the hell up, spun the wheel, and burned half a block’s worth of rubber getting out of there. I had three quarters of a tank of gas, and I was driving a small car, so I made it pretty far. To this day I couldn’t tell you the route I took getting out of LA. The streets were already going crazy, but I beat the traffic jams that totally locked down the city. Someone told me later that thousands of people were trapped in their cars on blocked streets and that the dead just came up and … Well, it was like a buffet. ” He shook his head, sipped some coffee, and continued. “I pa
ssed under a wave of army helicopters flying in formation toward downtown. Had to be a hundred of them. Even with the windows closed and the sound of rotors, I could hear the gunfire as they opened up on the city. When my car ran out of gas, I was actually surprised. I was in shock. I never even looked at the gauge. I ran the tank dry and then started running. I got to a farmhouse and met up with some other people, other refugees. Fifteen of us at first. This was around midnight now. By dawn there were seven left. One of the refugees had a bite, you see, and we still weren’t connecting the bites with whatever was going on. To us it still wasn’t the ‘dead’ rising. We thought it was an infection that made people go crazy and act violent.
“A few people had cell phones, but everyone they called was just as confused as they were. All the lines to police or government were jammed or were down. People kept trying, though. We were all conditioned to believe that our little phones and PDAs would always keep us connected, that they’d always be a pathway to a solution. I guess you don’t even know what those things are, but it doesn’t matter. The batteries eventually ran down, and as you do know, help never came. Everybody was in the same mess.
“At dawn a bunch of hunters came through the area and began clearing out the zombies. We thought that it was over, that somehow the good guys had gotten ahead of it. We went the opposite way, thinking we were heading in the direction of safety, of order. We didn’t get two miles before we hit a wall of them. ”
“Zoms?”
“Zoms. Maybe ten, fifteen thousand of them. God only knows where they came from. Some city or town … or maybe they started out as a few and the others followed with them, tracking movement the way the zoms will. Don’t know, don’t care. We kept running, kept trying to hide, but they smelled us—or heard us. They kept coming. We picked up a couple more survivors, and at one point we were back up to close on a hundred people. But, like I said, there were thousands of them. Thousands. They were in front of us, behind us, on both sides. They came at us from everywhere, and we died. I was in the center of our pack, and that was the only reason I survived. The dead kept dragging down the people on the edges of the pack, and with every few hundred yards, we lost another couple of people. Sure, we were faster, and one-on-one we were stronger, but we had no clear path to make a straight run for it. Then we went down into a valley near a vineyard.
“By now our group was down to twenty-five, give or take. We’d started arming ourselves. Rocks and tree branches. A few farm tools we found. A couple people had guns, but the ammunition had run out long ago. The valley had a stream running through it, and we splashed across. That helped. I think the dead lost the scent, or maybe it was the sound of the stream. Those of us who crossed where the water churned over some rocks—where it was noisy—we got across without being chased. Seven of us made it to safety that way. Me, four men, and a woman and her little daughter. The woman, though … She was pregnant. Two days away from her due date. Two of the men had to hold on to her arms to help her run. And I carried the little girl. We ran and ran, and even though the little girl was only two years old … After a thousand yards it felt like she weighed a hundred pounds. ” He stopped for a moment, and Benny saw a shadow was moving across his face. “I’ve never been a strong person, Ben. Not physically, and not … Well, let’s just say that not everyone’s as strong as your brother. ”
He looked suddenly gray and sick, and older than his fifty years. He drained the cup and turned to stare longingly at the bottle of bourbon on the drain board, but he didn’t get up to fetch it.
Benny watched the emotions that flowed over the man’s face. The artist was one of those people who had no poker face at all. Everything he felt, everything he’d ever seen, was there to be read.
After another few moments Sacchetto continued his story. “Somehow—maybe it was fear or adrenaline or maybe we’d gone completely crazy—we kept running. Four or five miles on the other side of the vineyard, we found a cottage. Pretty little place tucked into the woods. We managed to get the pregnant woman into it, and we locked the door, closed the shutters, and pushed all the furniture against any opening where the dead could get in. There was food and water and a TV and a laptop. The owners were nowhere around. While the others helped the woman settle down on the couch, I turned on the TV, but all we got was a ‘please stand by’ message from the Emergency Broadcast System. So I turned on the computer and skimmed the news. The Internet was still up. Do you know about the Internet?”
“Yeah. They cram all that old-world stuff into our heads at school. ”
Sacchetto nodded. “Well, I was able to access news feeds from all over the world. By then it was everywhere. I mean, everywhere. Europe, Asia, Africa. Cities were in flames. Some areas had gone completely dark. The military was in the field, and the authorities were saying they were making headway, pushing back the dead, stopping their advance. ” He shrugged. “Maybe it was even true at the time. My cell phone was back at the police station, but I sent e-mails to everyone I knew. I didn’t get very many replies. Those that did get back to me said that it wasn’t happening where they were, but as the day went on, they stopped replying to my e-mails. The situation kept getting worse and worse, until it was spinning completely out of control. The news reports were all mixed up, too. Some of them said that the dead were moving fast, some said that they couldn’t be killed, even with head shots. One reporter, a guy who was a really well-known news anchor from New York, reported that his own family had been slaughtered, and then he shot himself right on camera. ”
“God …,” Benny said breathlessly.
The artist snorted. “I was never much of a believer, kid, but if there ever was a God, then He wasn’t on the clock that night. That’s something you can debate at Sunday school. For my part, I don’t see much evidence of any divine hand in what happened. ”
“What happened then?” asked Benny.
Sacchetto took a breath. “I stayed glued to the Internet all day, mostly watching news feeds of these huge battles in New York and Philadelphia, in Chicago and San Francisco. And overseas. London, Manchester, Paris. Everywhere. One field reporter, a woman who was braver and crazier than I ever was, got all the way into Washington DC when the Air Force tried to reclaim the city. Jets were laying down napalm, and I saw whole masses of zombies burning on the lawn in front of the White House. They were still walking toward the troops who were making a stand on the other side of the Mall, but they burned as they did so, dropping to the ground as their tendons melted. Crawling until the fire destroyed too much of their muscles, or maybe till it boiled their brains. Wave after wave of helicopters fired on them. The helicopters hovered ten feet above their heads and used machine guns. Miniguns, I think they’re called. Firing hundreds of rounds per minute, tearing the zombies to pieces. I guess if you went by that footage, then it looked like we were winning. But I sat at that computer for more than twenty hours, and one by one the news feeds went offline. Then the power went out, and we got no news after that. The TV … It never came back on, so when we lost power, it was useless anyway. ”
Even though Sacchetto spoke of places Benny had never seen and technology that no longer existed, the images of carnage and desperation filled Benny’s mind. When they were out in the Ruin, Tom had reminded him that there had been more than three hundred million people living in the United States on First Night. The thought of all those people, fighting and dying in just a few days … It made Benny feel sick and small.
“What about the pregnant lady?” he asked after a long silence.
“Yeah … well, that’s the real story. That’s the story you want to hear. ”
“What do you mean?”
“That woman … She gave birth that night. There was a daybed that we wheeled out into the living room, and made her as comfortable as possible, but we didn’t know what we were doing. I sure as hell didn’t. The others helped. I … Well, I just couldn’t. You’d think someone who was around blood all the time—sketching crime scenes and all—you’d think I could take the blood and mess from her giving birth. But I couldn’t. I’m not proud, and I don’t even understand that about myself … but there it is. I was still cruising the Net when I heard the baby cry. It was right about then—right after the baby started crying—that the first of the dead began pounding on the door. ”
“The baby … ?”
“It was a girl,” Sacchetto said, but he looked away. “We didn’t know the mother had been bitten. ”
“God!” Benny’s mouth went dry, and when he tried to swallow, it felt like he had a throat full of broken glass. “The baby too? Was it a …” Benny couldn’t make his mouth shape the word.
But Sacchetto shook his head. “No. I know there have been a lot of stories about infected mothers giving birth to babies who were, um, monsters. But that’s not what happened. ” He cleared his throat. “Years later, when I told this story to Doc Gurijala, he said that maybe the disease, or whatever it was, either couldn’t cross the placental wall or didn’t have time to do it. The woman must have been bitten when we were breaking through the crowds of zombies. None of us noticed. ”