Flesh-&-Bone(83)

“Who are you?” Lilah asked again. “I mean . . . what are you?”

“I’m a ranger,” he said after a short pause. “It’s a group of scouts. Most of us are former soldiers or SpecOps and—”

“SpecOps?”

“Special Operators,” he explained. “Soldiers who did special missions.”

“Oh,” she said, “like Delta Force and the SEALs. I read about them in books. Novels, mostly.”

“Like that. Our outfit’s been around for a few years now, working the southern states mostly, but a couple of us started going north and west to see how things had fallen out. I even spent a little time up your way.”

“My way? How do you know—?”

“You mentioned Tom Imura.”

“You knew him?”

There was the slightest pause before the man said, “Once upon a time.”

They sipped their soup and studied each other.

“Why are you here?” she said, indicating the forest.

He shrugged. “I poke my nose in here and there. Guess you could call me a professional troublemaker.”

As Lilah set her cup down, the injury throbbed and she hissed between clenched teeth. “How badly am I hurt?”

“Nothing that won’t heal if you take care of yourself,” he said. “You have a world-class collection of bruises and scrapes, and your left knee is puffy, so we might be looking at a sprain. You got thirty stitches down your side. Looks like you got clipped by the boar’s tusk. Wound’s clean, though, no sign of infection.”

Lilah chewed on a word for a few moments before she said it. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure. And I saw the way you handled yourself out there. You are one tough kid.”

“I’m not a kid,” she said.

“Fair enough. No offense meant.”

She let it go and changed subjects. “That boar was a zom.”

“Yup,” agreed Joe.

“How?”

“Darned if I know,” he admitted. “Only seen a few of those critters around these last few months, and I don’t mind saying that it scares the bejesus out of me.”

“You’ve seen this before?”

“Yup. First one I saw was around Jericho Junction over in Utah. Then last week I saw a small pack of them chasing a bunch of other hogs. There’s been a population explosion of wild boars down south, all uninfected, at least as far as I know; but these were definitely walkers. Haven’t had a really good night’s sleep since. The thought that this plague has crossed the species barrier is . . . ” He shook his head, unable or unwilling to quantify the potential danger.

Lilah nodded. “It doesn’t make sense. Zoms are zoms. They’re people. The plague was never in the animals.”

“It is now.” He rubbed his eyes. “The plague’s been changing. Diseases do that. They’ve always done that. Before First Night there were new viruses every year, some of which were new strains of diseases we thought we’d beaten. It was simply good luck that most of the diseases of animals didn’t jump to humans, and that most human diseases didn’t jump to animals. That’s all past tense, though. The zombie plague, whatever it was, wiped out humanity, and now it’s moving into animals.”

“Other animals?”

He shrugged. “Let’s hope not. So far it’s only a small percentage of the boar population, and pig biology is pretty close to humans. That might account for it. If it gets into flies or insects, or birds, then we’re really screwed. We can’t build a fence to keep them out. Even so, those pigs . . . man, they give me the creeps.”

Lilah could tell that he was trying to keep his tone light, but the horror was in his eyes. “That’s not the only thing that’s changed,” she said. “Some of the zoms are faster.”

“Yeah, that’s old news. I’ve seen some real Olympic sprinters in the last year. Mostly in the Pacific Northwest. Not so much here, though.”

“We saw some today.”

He narrowed his blue eyes. “You’re sure?”

“I killed two of them today. One of them picked up a stick and tried to hit me with it.”

That news seemed to jolt Joe, and he stared at her for a moment. Several times his mouth began to form questions, but he left them unsaid. They ate their soup in silence, each of them contemplating the implications of faster and perhaps smarter zoms.