Duality (The Hitchhiker Strain) (11 page)

I
’m drifting off into a nap when I feel her disappear completely. One second she's there—barely. The next, she’s gone. I’d been expecting this, but the end result is still incredibly jarring.

Ding dong, the beast is dead.

The moment after it happens, I become instantly aware of every part of myself—my mind, my body, everything I am. Like slipping on an old, favorite pair of shoes, Chelsea Zimmerman slips back into the voids in my mind that the beast used to fill.

The next breath I take fee
ls like my very first. I can feel the air enter my lungs. I can sense the blood pulsing through me, my muscles tensing, and my vision focusing.

I'm not the same as I was before. I'm not whole yet. But I'm here.

The beast is gone. There is only Chelsea Zimmerman.

Chapter 16 – Savannah

I leave the Paulson's house
a few minutes behind the main group, but already the plan to get out of here is falling apart. Instead of rushing to get everyone to their cars and out of the complex, the people of New Ravencrest have chosen to stand and fight. Admirable, but so very stupid. Maybe they saw the first few Zs and thought they could handle what was coming for them. Maybe Patrick convinced them to hold their ground. Whatever their reasoning, they haven’t taken my warning to heart.

I can easily make out at least two dozen people either fighting Zs or preparing to fight as the infected continue to spill in. In theory, they could keep this up for a while so long as the number of undead stays manageable, and they may only su
ffer a few casualties. But the real danger of first generation Zs is in their numbers, and this group has numbers like I've never seen before.

Liam swears as he steps out onto the small porch and closes the front door behind him. At least forty Zs have alr
eady made it into the complex and more are wandering through the narrow driveway that leads onto the main road, dragging their decomposing bodies as fast as they can. Most of what we’re dealing with are within reach of the Ravencrest survivors and are already lying crumpled on the ground. But for each one that falls, two more are ready to take its place.

The men and women working together to stem the flow are more brutal and efficient than I would have given them credit for. They've come a long way since be
ing forced out of their shelter and into the big, bad world.

Where we first drove in, a small group of people is working together to try and block up the main driveway, using everything from cars and furniture to the corpses they destroy to build a wall. I
t won’t hold for long, not against an onslaught of first generation Zs.

In some ways, we're lucky that
what we're dealing with is the undead, the first generation of monster the infection created. They're slow and nearly brain-dead, reacting purely on instinct. Many have lost vital chunks of their bodies—either when they died or since—which gives them a real disadvantage in a fight. They have no survival instinct at all, which is where we run into trouble. They'll always keep coming, trampling over one another, each one equally desperate to be the first to overwhelm our defenses and get a chance at a meal. Once that happens and the majority of the horde move on, the ones that are crushed beneath their brethren will simply get up and keep coming too, no matter how deformed or mangled they are.

Unless you destroy their brains, there's no stopping them.

Swinging down over the railing and onto the Paulson's lawn, I run to join the fray and lose track of Liam as he turns to go help elsewhere. Side by side with men and women I've never met, I take down any groaning, rotting corpse that gets near me, trying to stall for time. Except no one is moving to do anything besides fight.

Everywhere I look, people keep attacking, as unrelenting as their opponents. If anything
, more people have joined in on the action. There's no longer any question in my mind—they're going to try to hold out.

"Damn it," I say out loud, drawing the attention of a blood-soaked woman standing over the corpse of her latest nemesis.

"Were ya bit?" she asks, sneering.

"I'm fine. Have you seen Paulson?"

"If yer bit, you gotta tell us. Thems the rules."

"I'm fine!" I don't have time for this. Even if I were bitten, it would be the least of my problems. A bite I could recover from; it
’s the picture of me being torn limb from limb that keeps my guard up. The good doctor wouldn’t be able to Frankenstein me back together again. "Have you seen him?"

The woman grunts and points east. I take off at a run, trying to stay out of the way of any fighting. I pass D
ooley's car and sacrifice a second to bend down and check underneath to see if my gun was left there. Nothing. Someone must have picked it up already. With any luck it will save a life today, but I'd still feel a lot better with it in my hands instead of this knife.

I find Paulson huddled with Patrick and two other men, talking in hushed voices while a fifth keeps watch. We're close to the driveway, but the chaos of the mass fighting is drawing most of the infected in the other direction.

I cough obnoxiously and Paulson looks up. "Savannah." He doesn’t seem at all surprised to see me.

"Come with me," I snap.

Paulson blinks. Patrick glares at me, his gaze unyielding, but I don't wait for Paulson to agree—we've lost too much time already. I have to hope that he'll be willing to trust me. Moving quickly around the growing crowds, I head for the first house with an open door. Paulson's heavy footsteps follow behind me.

As soon as we're inside, I run up the stairs to the second floor, completely
ignoring the three women counting ammunition at the living room table. Reaching the top, I turn down the hallway and move in the direction that will show us the view from the far side of the house. We're not in the best position to see the driveway from here, but we should be in exactly the right spot to see the big picture.

"What are we doing here, Savannah?" Paulson asks as I swing open a door that leads into a cluttered bedroom.

I shove an overflowing laundry basket out of my way and make for the window. As soon as I fling the curtains open, I stop worrying about Paulson not understanding the danger we’re in. It’s impossible to miss the sheer number of infected that is headed right to their doorsteps. Two thousand Zs, maybe three—far more than any group of civilians could ever hope to survive on its own, especially with limited weapons. The herd seems endless.

"You're going to fight
that
?" I stare out the window until Paulson joins me. I’m sure he can hear the tone of ‘I told you so’ in my voice.

Paulso
n doesn't speak. Is he still weighing his options? He can't really be considering risking the lives of these people he's worked to protect in order to save a group of houses. Then why isn't he already moving to order his people to get out while they can? He’s probably reassessing whatever he’d been planning, but I can’t trust him to come to the right decision on his own anymore. I’ve already tried to explain what they’re about to be facing, and they didn’t listen.

"There's something else. There wasn't any t
ime to explain it properly before, and there still isn't now." It's time to play the final card I've been saving in my back pocket. I know it will be enough to convince Paulson. It has to be.

Paulson looks at me, and I suspect he's still too shocked to sp
eak at all, as a million different scenarios run through his mind.

"The people I've been staying with... They've found a cure."

"A cure," Paulson mimics back slowly, practically tasting the sound of the word in his mouth. "A cure to..."

"Yeah. For the inf
ection. It's not perfect. And I barely understand it, but it exists. If you start the treatment program before you become one of them, these people have the ability to bring you back, to keep you human."

"That's impossible."

I pull back the collar of my shirt as proof, showing him my scar. "I've seen more than enough to know that it's true. You have to believe me." My voice is shaking now, frustration tearing me apart. I need to keep it together. And he needs to start trusting me. "This is real. It's everything we've been waiting for, but we have to get these people out of here. Please!"

“
A cure, Savannah. That’s huge. How long have you known?” The look in Paulson’s eyes has gone from worried to almost manic. This is exactly why we aren’t supposed to tell people, but it’s too late to backtrack now.

"Please don't tell the others yet…
about the cure. I’m sure I wasn't supposed to tell anyone. But there's more at stake here than your homes and your stuff, and I wanted to make sure you knew."

"It was never about o
ur
stuff
."

“
Well, now it's about saving people like Tilly Mason. If anyone out there is bitten, we can save them. But if you wait around here until there are more Zs than you can fight off, there's no coming back from that."

I can see the exact moment whe
re Paulson makes up his mind, when a light practically turns on behind his eyes. He has a plan.

"All right, head to the driveway that leads out toward the shopping complex and start getting people out that way. We'll meet at the Park-N-Eat." Okay, he has m
y plan. "They aren't going to like it, but I'll tell them it's temporary. Then once we've gotten everyone to safety, you can show them this cure of yours."

I know it isn't going to be as simple as that, and there will be hell to pay for sharing the Initiat
ive's dearest secret with outsiders, but I'll take what I can get.

"How do I get to the other driveway?" I shout into the crowd, hoping someone will hear me over the sounds of fighting and the hungry dead.

Surprisingly, it’s Patrick who answers me between swings of his axe. "In the middle of the farthest row of houses to the back. You can't miss it." Back driveway, head to the back of the complex.
Logic, Savannah.

Leaving the townhouses, Paulson went full speed in one direct
ion, so I opt to head in the other so we can cover more ground. If I were to go around telling all of these people to leave their homes, no one would listen—something they've already proven. Hell, they'd probably even laugh in my face. That will have to be Paulson's responsibility. But if I can find my friends, people who I know will trust me, maybe I can get them to help.

I find Alex first but wait to shout his name until his current opponent falls with a thud to the asphalt. “
Alex!”

He stops moving long
enough to wipe blood from his face but then moves farther away, not looking up at me.

"Alex!" I yell again, repeating his name until he finally turns and looks up. It takes him a second to spot me in the crowd, despite my manic arm waving, but as soon as
he does, he shifts into a jog and heads in my direction. I do the same until we meet in the middle.

"Paulson's changed his mind."

"We're leaving?” Sweat trickles down the side of his face, but he seems otherwise unfazed by the chaos going on around him.

"Y
eah. Do you know if the back driveway is still clear of Zs?"

"We can beat them back, Savannah!" Alex answers, ignoring my question. Am I really going to have to convince every single person in this damn town to listen to me? Even my closest friends? "Most
of these guys are practically rotted away to nothing. It's almost too easy."

Around us, the human side of the battle obviously has the upper hand, defeating most of the Zs easily. I can understand his confidence, but he hasn
’t seen what I’ve seen—what Paulson has now seen.

"I need you to trust me. Please. This is nothing compared to what's coming. Please, please, please believe me. You're going to lose people. It's not worth the risk."

Alex is barely looking at me, his eyes darting around the scene as he bounces on the balls of his feet, desperate to get back into the fray. "Fine," he agrees finally, probably to get me to leave him alone more than anything. "If Paulson says we go, then we go."

"He's already telling the others. You're not going to call me a
liar and go check with him, are you?”

His fingers wrap around the hilt of the short sword he is carrying with him. "No. We'll finish this fight tomorrow after we get everyone else to somewhere safe."

Thank God. "Where's your mom? And Pierce?"

"Mom didn't e
ven stick around long enough to hear we were going to fight. She grabbed Marybeth and I think she went right for the sick house to start loading up everyone there. She's probably already halfway to the meeting point."

That sounds like Mrs. Park. At the fi
rst sign of trouble, she's always putting the needs of those who need her help above everything else. There's no way she's made the trip to the Park-N-Eat already, but it's still nice to know that someone is taking me seriously.

"Pierce..." Alex pauses, l
ooking around. "I don't know. What do you need me to do?"

"Okay, I'll find him. Get people to their cars
—any cars—and tell them where we’re meeting. Supplies would be useful too, food especially, but we don't have long. The longer they wait, the harder it will be to get out."

I spot Liam next. I was so caught up in my old life and the people who populated it that I actually forgot he is here too, doing everything he can to help the people I care about. I find him working with several others to clear spots w
here the dead have started to get through—small spaces between houses, a pathway that leads to the nearest park. Each body is left where it falls or thrown on top of another, gradually making it that much harder for the next to get through. As soon as I can, I pull him aside and take him to a clear area with a legless, crawling Z for company.