The Crossing: A Zombie Novella Read Free Page A

movie?”
    “ No,” I said. “Thomas Wolfe.”
    “ Ah.”
    We talked about the movies. We liked a lot of the same shows - French Kiss; Sleepless in Seattle; While You Were Sleeping; anything starring Molly Ringwald - and that was nice. But it didn’t last. It couldn’t last. The movies are the movies, and real life is something else entirely. Jessica had changed too much. This world, this awful place, had changed her, and we both knew it. Soon she grew sullen and morose again.
    I couldn’t blame her.

FOUR
     
    When we left the shack, we left the bodies of Jessica’s friends where they lay. Nobody buries the dead in the Zone.
    We walked the rest of the day, and around dusk we came upon a group of people headed toward a place off the main road. They said there was sort of a compound there, an old ranch house, and that we could get some fresh water there and probably something to eat, too.
    But it was dark by the time we arrived and they were all out of food. They didn’t have any room left inside the house, either, so we couldn’t even sleep where it was warm. It’s easy to forget, while you’re walking all day in the Texas sun, how cold the desert gets at night. The best we could do was to huddle beneath a vent that carried some of the hot air from inside. We spent the rest of the night in each other’s arms, trying to stay warm.
    The next morning we woke to gunshots.
    “ What was that?” I asked.
    We had both flinched awake. We stared around in panic. Jessica said nothing. Then we heard some men talking. Jessica and I traded a look. The men didn’t seem excited at all, just talking.
    “ What’s going on?” I whispered. Guns weren’t all that common in the Zone. There were still a few around, of course, but not that many. That seemed odd to me, at first. This used to be Texas, after all. I had expected there to be guns everywhere. When I asked Jessica about this she said most had been confiscated by homegrown militias in the early days of the Outbreak. Where those guns had gone to she didn’t know.
    “ Jessica, what do we do?”
    “ Let’s go see what they’re doing.”
    “ Let’s go...?” I didn’t get a chance to finish. She was already moving.
    I followed her around to the front of the house and got my first look at the place in daylight. It was dilapidated, of course, but still large and impressive, and I could see that it must have been something rather special before the wall went up. There were several large, fenced off areas that looked like they had once been horse pastures but were now being used for crops. Enormous Spanish Oaks, rising like green skyscrapers over the flat, grassy landscape, dotted the countryside. Until the shooting started again, it was quite beautiful.
    The men we’d heard talking were standing in the middle of a wide circular drive. Beyond that was a long, straight driveway that led out to the county road. A large hurricane fence, topped with razor wire, surrounded the property, and a wrought iron gate that I didn’t remember seeing the night before stood boldly at the entrance.
    The shooting came from a pair of men in camouflage hunting outfits up in a deer blind near the gate. Their target was a knot of zombies that had gathered just outside the fence. They didn’t seem to be in a hurry to do much killing though, only taking a shot when it suited them, and one of the men standing nearby remarked on that.
    “ Don’t matter,” one of the other men said. “They got three good ones.”
    “ No fast ones, though.” The man sounded sullen, like a pouting kid.
    “ They’re good enough for the likes of Barry.”
    The men turned away from the drive and walked around to the east side of the house.
    “ What was that all about?” I asked.
    “ No idea.”
    A crowd gathered around the east side of the house, so we went that way.
    One of the horse pastures had been sectioned off with hurricane fencing. In the middle of the small enclosure was a man chained to a metal