Patient Z Read Free Page A

finished off quickly than become one of those things.
    “Okay, fine,” Cal said. “I stole the boat, obviously.” He sat up on the edge of the cot and gave Mitch an assessing look, as if waiting for a reaction. Mitch didn’t react. You couldn’t call it stealing or looting anymore. The world lay out there rotting away. You had to take things while they were still usable.
    “Couple of weeks ago I ran into a group,” Cal said. “Mostly men, couple of women, and I traveled with them for a while.”
    “Safety in numbers.”
    “Maybe,” Cal said. “We came to a fork in the road, you might say. I wanted to go one way, to Santa Monica. They were heading to LA.”
    “Why Santa Monica?”
    “The bars and the beaches, of course.” Cal smirked.
    “Is that where you’re from?” Mitch asked.
    “No, I’m from New York. But I left a long time ago. Long before all this. Anyway, I wanted to go to Santa Monica because I’ve been there before. Had a good idea of places I could get myself some winter supplies. But my new friends decided I was coming with them whether I wanted to or not.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe they thought I looked tasty.”
    “Tasty?” Mitch’s mind rebelled at the first interpretation of the word. He couldn’t mean it literally. There was livestock wandering around the landscape just waiting to be shot and stores piled high with canned and dried food that might take the remaining humans fifty years to eat. It was hard to tell, because they couldn’t get news from most of the rest of the country, never mind the rest of the world, but Mitch thought only 5 percent of the population remained uninfected. Resources were not a problem. Getting to them was.
    “There’s some very strange shit happening out there,” Cal said. “Don’t suppose you see it, safe on your oil rig.”
    “We aren’t self-sufficient here, you know. We go ashore every few weeks for supplies.”
    “Right.” Cal went quiet for a moment and then picked up the story. “I got away from them, but they came after me. My car ran out of gas, and I got away into the brush on foot, but they were still coming.”
    “That when you were bitten?”
    Cal opened his mouth and then stopped and frowned at him. “Trying to trip me up, officer?”
    Mitch controlled his reaction to that. Had Bren told him while Mitch was off getting them dinner? Or was he guessing? Mitch neither confirmed nor denied the…accusation.
    “Yeah, that’s when the dog got me,” Cal went on. Emphasis on the dog . Maybe they should have looted themselves a polygraph on a trip ashore. Cal didn’t seem the sort to be fooled by the colander-wired-to-a-photocopier trick.
    “I found a marina,” Cal said. “Most of the boats were already gone, but that one was there. Where is it, by the way?”
    “Why?”
    “Well, it’s my boat now.”
    “Possession is nine-tenths of the law, eh?” Mitch said.
    “Certainly is in salvage at sea.”
    It would be a shame if he left and took his boat with him. The large cabin cruiser would make a nice addition to their small flotilla of boats. But would he leave without it? Because even if he wasn’t infected, he was not staying.
    “So I took it out to sea,” Cal said. “But I had kind of overlooked one thing.”
    “What?”
    “That I know shit about boats.”
    Mitch chuckled when Cal grinned. Yeah, he could laugh at it now. Now that he wasn’t dead. There were times Mitch and his people had sailed back from missions ashore to a chorus of giggling about fighting off zombies and feral dogs.
    “I went up the coast a bit,” Cal went on. “But then I ran outta gas about a mile from shore.”
    “A mile? Surely a fit man like you could swim a mile?”
    “Well, yeah,” Cal said. “A fit man like me who happens to be able to swim probably could.”
    “You can’t swim?”
    “I always preferred to play with the pool boy.”
    Mitch didn’t need gaydar to interpret that remark. Cal’s smirk told him all he