The thing about resolve is that it doesn’t matter until it is tested. Until it buts up against the challenge that defines it, it has no intrinsic worth and is merely false hope.
Ken felt that reality acutely as he limped forward with the rest of his friends and family – one and the same, really.
Doom was behind, death ahead. And it was literal death: embodied in the moving forms of people that had risen up from rot and walking on bones and flesh that had ceased metabolizing days ago.
Liz’s hand twitched. Sally was there, the big cat growling deep in his throat as he walked beside Maggie. It looked like Maggie would have to fall, have to trip over the cat. But Sally was always just out of the way, always just beyond tripping range.
Ken realized that, all abreast and synchronized as they were, the survivors were almost walking like the zombies. Moving as one, each aware of the other and coordinating their movements to mesh with the others’.
There was something to that. Something important.
Liz’s limp hand drifted across Sally’s back.
One of the things behind them stumbled. Coincidence? Ken didn’t know, and he didn’t have any way to find out. Not now.
Not with a tight knot of undead ahead, stretching out into an uneven line that seemed random until you looked and saw they were within arm’s reach of one another. Nothing could get through without being grabbed. Probably by two or more of the things.
The Redhead reached into her pocket and withdrew her walkie-talkie. She flicked a switch. Murmured, “Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast.”
The return voice was too low to hear. Ken hoped whoever was on the other end of the radio had good news, but The Redhead’s expression clouded.
Not good news.
No such thing as good news anymore.
36
Ken felt himself drawn to one side. Aaron was pulling the group toward a storefront whose window had been broken out. A mannequin wearing a gray dress and a blood-spattered scarf leaned through the window like a drunk who had simply passed out after a particularly intense bender. Aaron’s intent was obvious: get inside, try to find a way through, to escape through the back.
Failing that, it was as good a place for a last stand as any.
The group stumbled with him for a few steps, then Ken felt a competing pull. Not toward the store, but forward again. Toward the zombies that stood before them.
“What are you doin’?” snapped Aaron.
The Redhead answered. “My best to save your ass, cowboy.”
Aaron growled, as though he didn’t like being called a cowboy. Or maybe he didn’t mind it, but didn’t think she had earned the privilege. “You gonna run us straight toward –“
The things hissed. It was the first sound that Ken had heard the undead zombies make. Not a vocalization in the strictest sense, but a sound that brought to mind the rattle of a cornered diamondback.
At the same time, he heard a louder noise. The sound of an engine. A diesel thrum that was louder than he would have expected to hear on Boise’s streets even before the Change. It wasn’t just the loudness of it, either, it was the choppiness of it. It had the rickety crick-crack of an engine that was used not for mileage but for hauling. Something built for more than its ability to get from point A to point B.
The rhythmic clock-tock-crick-crack of the diesel engine got louder. Closer.
The zombies remained silent. But also got closer.
Ken wondered which one would reach them first.
37
The engine arrived. And with it, thirty-foot blades with edges keen enough to slice a ream of paper cleanly in two.
Another curiosity of Boise, but one that Ken had always loved: it was the urban extension of a strictly agrarian community. As such, the buildings and businesses were placed around and among acres of open farmland. It wasn’t unusual for a dentist to have fifty acres of corn as his only neighboring business, or for a Wal-Mart to back up to a working ranch, the smell of livestock drifting over to greet people as they exited with inexpensive items that were “Made in America” even if they were assembled somewhere in Thailand.
Boise was a city of contradictions. Hungering to be taken seriously as a urban center, but unwilling to give up its roots as a farming community. It had a hockey team, an amphitheater for concerts. It also had a large number of kids who took a week or two off school every year to help with the crops.
It had Best Buy for electronics beside Cabella’s where you could buy all your hunting gear.
It had new megaplex theaters alongside old-fashioned places that still showed black and white films.
It had streets where you could see people driving to work in a Lexus or a Honda tricked out to impress, or a Ford or a Jeep tricked out to work.
And, apparently, you could also see people driving John Deere tractor combine harvesters down the middle of the roads.
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