Tooth & Nail

4

They perched in the tree like a flock of birds. Five silent shapes, crouched on branches, their bodies and weapons dappled with sunlight and shadow. Only the fact that no actual birds shared the same tree hinted that they were there.

The tree was a stout and twisted cottonwood with many crooked arms reaching in improbable directions. Spring had come early this year and the branches were thick with leaves, but the early season had brought drought with it, and the leaves were already curling for want of water. It was the hottest spring any of them could remember. The sky above the valley was as hard and blue as bottle glass. Only a few small clouds moved above them, pushed along by a brisk wind that offered no relief from the heat.

A shadow cast by the largest cloud sailed down the far side of the valley, moving like a dark stain across the fields of weed-choked grass. The five figures watched as several zombies staggered in pursuit of the cloud shadow.

The dead always followed movement. They were slow but relentless, walking on legs stiffened to sticks by withered tendons and nearly moistureless flesh. They would follow the shadow until it vanished or until the sun fell into the Pacific Ocean nearly four hundred miles away. They would chase it the way they chased anything else that moved, hoping for a meal they didn’t need to satisfy a hunger that was as bottomless as forever. And if they caught up to the shadow and found that it was nothing but an illusion, with no substance, they would not cry out in despair, because that is an expression of emotion, and the dead were empty.

Nothing but empty shells.

As the watchers sat on their perches, they saw that the dead began angling toward one another while still pursuing the shadow. Soon a dozen of them were lumbering along in a loose and awkward cluster.

“See?” whispered Samantha, the oldest of the girls, pointing with the tip of her short spear. “I told you, they’re moving in packs.”

A second group of dead came in from another angle, staggering out from the ruins of a small factory where they had probably worked and where they’d almost certainly died. Seven of them, stepping into the sunlight through different open doorways, hearing the moans of the other zombies and catching sight of the shadow. Without pause the seven dead formed a new pack and moved off in pursuit of nothing.

“They’re doing it too,” said Laura, who was on a nearby branch. She had spiked hair and her face was painted to match the dappled sunlight. A hunting bow was slung across her back. “They never used to do that.”

“I know,” agreed Samantha. “But they’re doing it now. Amanda and I saw a bunch of groups like that while we were hunting last week.”

Amanda nodded. She was generally the quietest of the group, deep and brooding, but fierce in combat. She wore a pair of matched hatchets tucked through her belt. “We saw one pack with nearly fifty of them in it.”

Michelle, the second archer of the group, shook her head. “No, that’s impossible.”

“That’s too many,” agreed Laura.

“Amanda’s right,” countered Samantha. “At least fifty. We both counted.”

The two packs out in the field followed the shadow for long minutes, but then it reached the top of the valley and vanished from sight. The packs slowed as confusion set in. They looked around, saw nothing else to chase, and one by one the dead slowed to a walk and then stopped.

And stood there.

The five girls knew that they would continue to stand there until something else drew their attention. Otherwise they had no reason to go anywhere.

Some of the dead, lacking an impetus to hunt, stood in fields with years of vines wrapped around them. Zombies like that were among the most dangerous. One of them could be lying on the ground covered by vines or fallen leaves or low-growing plants like pachysandra, and you’d never know until they smelled you. Or until you stepped on one.

The girls remembered that lesson very well, as they remembered all such lessons.

There used to be twenty-two of them. Girls, boys, and three adults.

Now there were six girls. Five in the tree and one… missing.

Tiffany had been on patrol in the woods surrounding the old motel where the girls lived, and sometime this morning she’d vanished. They found her weighted fighting sticks and a scuffle of footprints, but nothing else.

The other five girls had formed a party to hunt for her. A cold morning had caught fire to become an inferno afternoon. Each of them was sick with dread at losing Tiffany. They couldn’t bear to lose another of their family.

Now they perched in a tree, letting the day tell them what was happening, what was there, what to expect.

They always paid attention to the lessons nature and experience provided. It was how they’d been raised. Samantha was the oldest of them by a few days. She’d been born one day before the world ended. The others had all been born in the days that followed. None of them ever knew their parents. Their mothers had been at a hospital near Sacramento. The nurses and doctors had tried to protect everyone from the dead, but they hadn’t been able to. During one terrible battle the hospital caught fire. Nine adults gathered up the babies in the nursery and fled in a convoy of cramped ambulances. The leader of that group of adults was a tough-as-nails prenatal care nurse named Ida from Haiti, a place that probably didn’t exist anymore. Because most places didn’t exist anymore. Not with names, at least. Ida brought her small group of survivors out of the teeth of the zombie uprising and away, deep into the forests of California, where people were always sparse even before the nightmare. There they settled and learned to survive. To forage, to hunt, and to kill.

Or so the story went.

That tale was passed down from the survivors of the hospital to other refugees they met along the way and finally to the children as they grew old enough to understand.

The five girls were the last of that group.

Ida’s main support and allies in the running of their group were Dolan, a man who used to be an actor, and Mirabel, who sold houses in Sacramento. Two springs ago Dolan had been attacked by a panther and dragged off. Ida said that the big cat probably escaped from a zoo during the End, or its parents did. There were all sorts of animals out here that used to be in zoos or circuses. Elephants and zebras and a huge white pregnant rhinoceros they saw heading north toward the Sierra Nevadas.

Mirabel and three boys had gone hunting one winter day, and none of them were ever seen again. The only trace of them that anyone ever found was Mirabel’s locket — a beautiful thing with a cameo front. Samantha spotted it hanging from a tree branch. But its owner and the last of the boys were gone. That was nearly three years ago.

And Ida… she died of the flu early last year.

Ida came back almost at once, but it wasn’t really Ida. It was a hungry thing that looked like her, but everything that had actually been her was gone.

The girls did what they had to do, what they’d been trained all their lives to do. Afterward they buried Ida in the cemetery, which used to be someone’s garden. Ida now slept in the cool, quiet ground along with the other kids and the adults who’d died at home.

Home.

They lived in what had once been known as the Rattlesnake Valley Motor Court. It was a V-shaped building with forty bedroom units, an empty pool, a tennis court, and a wall that had been meticulously built of tractor-trailers by previous tenants of the place who’d later died of plague. The tires of the big trucks had been slashed, and all the spaces under and around the vehicles had been packed with heavy stones and clay. There were a dozen ways out, but you had to know where they were and you had to have a working brain to use them. Even then, there were booby traps in case bands of human raiders tried to get in. A few tried every year. None had ever managed it. Not alive.

One thing Ida and the other adults had taught the girls was that they had to do whatever they needed to do in order to survive. The girls learned those lessons well, which is why these five were still alive. Along with the missing Tiffany, they were the top hunters, the best fighters. They were the fiercest of the little tribe that had lived — and died — at the Rattlesnake Valley Motor Court. They understood how to hunt, cook, do first aid, farm, observe, process, react, and fight.

They knew about their world, and they relied on what they’d been taught and what they’d learned from doing.

But now the rules were changing.

The dead were beginning to move in packs.

And Tiffany was missing.

Heather, the fifth and youngest girl in the hunting party, was the only one with a working pair of binoculars. While the others talked, she sat in silence and studied the dead through the high-powered lenses. When she finally spoke, her voice was filled with doubt and fear. “They look the same as always.”

“What did you expect?” asked Laura sharply. “Little monkeys sitting on their backs, steering them?”

“No, stupid… but if they’re the same, then why are they moving differently?”

None of the girls had an answer to that. When it came to the dead, their security, their hunting patterns, their lives depended on a total lack of change. So many other things in their world changed all the time — friends and adults dying, exotic and dangerous animals coming through, drought ravaging the crops, bad storms. Those things pushed them to their limits. If the dead somehow changed, then that could push them over the edge.

And they all knew it.

Michelle touched Heather’s arm and in a small and fragile voice asked, “Do you see…?”

She didn’t finish the question. There was no point. They all knew what she was asking.

Did Heather see Tiffany out there?

Among the dead.

Heather was a long time answering. Not because she was afraid to answer the question, but because she was being sure, making certain. She moved the glasses from face to face, lingering long enough to study the features. Most of the dead were ravaged by old wounds — the injuries, bites, or bullets that had killed them — or pocked by the diseases that had swept through the fleeing human populations after the dead rose. The flesh of any zombie older than a week would be withered to a leathery mask of wrinkles. Once, when doing this kind of meticulous search among a cluster of zombies, Heather saw a torn and twisted figure whose body lacked arms and had much exposed bone showing through the remaining flesh. She could not be sure — and she didn’t want to make sure — but in her heart she believed that it was Dolan. Or what had been left of him after the panther had done its awful work.

She let out a slow sigh.

“No,” she said with real relief, “she’s not down there.”

As relief went, it was as thin and capricious as a brief waft of cool air. It did not mean that Tiffany was still alive. All it meant was that she was not part of this group of the dead.

Suddenly all the dead turned at the same time, twisting around to the east, raising their heads as if listening to a sound; however, none of the girls could hear or see anything. The dead seemed to tremble with indecision for a moment, their fingers twitching, mouths opening and closing, and then as one they began moving toward the tree line on the east part of the valley.

“What’s going on?” gasped Michelle.

Samantha narrowed her eyes as she watched the dead move toward some very specific part of the forest. “I don’t know. They must have heard something.”

“Might be a deer,” suggested Michelle, but Samantha shook her head.

“No, they heard something, and deer don’t make enough noise to cause them all to react like that.”

The other girls nodded.

Small, strong hands gripped the tree limbs and tightened around the handles of weapons.

Then a yell split the air.

A high, piercing scream of total terror.

A millisecond later Tiffany burst from between two shaggy shrubs and came running full tilt into the field the zombies had recently vacated. Her clothes were torn and streaked with blood; she held a broken spear in one hand, and her dark hair snapped in the wind as she ran.

Michelle opened her mouth to yell out, to let Tiffany know that her friends were close by, but Samantha silenced her with a sharp gesture. Laura leaned forward and pointed.

“Oh my God… look!”

The darkness under the trees roiled and twisted, and then the zombies staggered out into the sunlight. All the ones who had followed whatever lure had drawn them to the east… and many, many more.

At least a hundred of the tattered gray figures lurched after their fleeing prey, and as if in chorus they opened their mouths to utter a moan of unbearable hunger. It filled the sky and tore another scream from Tiffany.

“We have to do something,” pleaded Michelle.

“If she makes it to the creek, she’ll be okay,” said Laura. A small ribbon of blue meandered through the valley floor. It was waist deep in places and the current, though not brisk, would nonetheless confuse the awkward feet of the mindless dead. They watched as Tiffany spotted the stream and cut right toward it, angling in the direction of the deepest section.

“Good,” said Samantha under her breath. “Good…”

She took the field glasses from Heather and spent several long, agonizing moments studying the darkness under the tree line. Heather and Amanda must have seen some expression on her face, because they both asked, “What?” at the same time.

“Look!” snapped Samantha. “Behind the zombies.”

They all looked, first by squinting and then as the binoculars were handed from one to the other. Soon they each wore identical expressions of mingled surprise, confusion, and fear.

“I don’t understand,” murmured Michelle.

“I don’t either,” said Laura.

None of them did, because what they saw made no sense in the world as they understood it.

As the dead continued to stagger out of the forest, a line of people walked slightly behind them. There were at least twenty of them, and they wore identical clothes: black pants and black shirts with some white design on them. Red cloth streamers were tied to their ankles, knees, waists, and wrists. Each of them held a weapon in one hand, a sword or ax or knife; and each of them held something to their mouths that flashed with silver light as they emerged from shadows into the sunny field.

None of them made a sound, though it looked like they were all blowing whistles.

Silent whistles.

“Are they… dog whistles?” wondered Michelle.

“I… think so,” said Laura. “Dolan found one in that house we raided for food three years ago.”

The people in black and red continued to walk forward without hurry, the silver whistles constantly held to their puffing mouths. Some came from different arms of the forest and stood waiting for the tide of dead to reach them.

The dead moved around them and past them, but not one of the cold zombies reached out a hand to touch what was clearly warm, living flesh.

It was a totally bizarre moment.

“What are they doing?” breathed Amanda.

Samantha shook her head.

But in fact it was clear what these strangers were doing. It simply seemed impossible.

Using their silent whistles, the strangers were driving the zombies into the field, calling them together, turning them into a pack.

And sending them after Tiffany.

There were now at least a hundred and fifty of the dead converging on Tiffany, and it was in no way certain that she’d reach the stream in time. The dead were coming from everywhere, some walking out of shadows to the north and south of the field, closing the teeth of this terrible trap. And now there were at least two dozen of the strangers. All of them were adults, and each of them carried a gleaming weapon.

Heather gripped Samantha’s arm with desperate force. “We have to do something.”

Samantha opened her mouth but she said nothing, gave no orders.

Because to go down there was certain death.

Absolutely certain.

Tiffany screamed again as she ran.

The dead moaned as they followed.