The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(60)

“Real soon.”





“We caught a couple of them today, working their way up the creek,” Vance said over the radio. “They were eating weeds and cactus, anything they could find.” He sounded tired. He’d been gone for only a day but already he’d covered ten square miles. He was pushing himself and his people hard, which made me nervous. “Honestly, Darcy, I didn’t expect to see even one out here. But I’m worried these might just be stragglers from a larger group.”

“How so?” I asked. I spooned cold baked beans onto a plate for Candy, the walkie-talkie cradled between my ear and my shoulder.

“One of them was wearing a business suit. One sleeve was torn off but his tie was still knotted around his neck. He didn’t look like a rancher or a tourist. He looked like somebody who belonged in a big city. I’m worried that we’re seeing people from Tucson.”

I stopped what I was doing and put down the spoon, careful not to spill any food. “That—would be bad,” I said.

When it happened, when the dead came back to life, most people in this part of the country lived in the big cities. There were millions of them packed into small geographical areas. That just meant that when the end of the world came, there was more food for the dead. They rarely ventured out into the desert, which is why we had made our home there. But we had always considered the possibility that the city dead would eventually exhaust their food supply and start wandering out into the country looking for more. The dead are always hungry, and they don’t sleep.

“It’s too soon to start panicking,” Vance told me. “How are things back on the home front?”

“Fine,” I said, steeling myself. He was right, there was no need to get worried—yet. “Finster’s been a perfect gentleman. Simon took apart the cash register and now it’s in pieces all over your office. He says he wants to build an electric water heater so we can have hot showers.”

“It would be nice,” he sighed. “All right. I’ll check in eight hours from now.”

“I’ll be listening.”

Candy picked up a finger full of beans and put it in her mouth. I watched her face, curled up in concentration. She was still learning such basic things—like how to feed herself. I smiled and she smiled back, then ate some more.

I stood the next watch, during which nothing happened. Candy played quietly while I walked back and forth on the roof of the motel, making long circuits from the rooms back to the reception building to the poolhouse, keeping my eyes open, keeping moving so I didn’t fall asleep. The red rocks beyond the fence never changed, and nothing moved. A breeze picked up for a while, which was kind of nice.

When my watch ended, I sank down in a folding chair and sucked some water out of a bottle. Finster climbed up behind me and just stood there for a while, not saying anything, just looking out at the horizon. I wondered if he was looking for Vance, the way I had been for hours.

Then he put his hands on my shoulders and started to rub. “You’re tense,” he said. “Worried about them?”


“Yeah.” I reached up to push his hands away. Then I stopped myself. If something happened, if Finster made a pass, would that be so bad? It would help pass the time. And it had been a very long time since anyone touched me like that. There had been a time when I’d gotten too much male attention, when it had been a drag. But that was Before.

It wasn’t like Vance was responding to my veiled hints, after all.

I started leaning my head back, eyes closed, letting things happen. The tension of eighteen months started draining out of me.

Which, as we all know by now, is exactly when the bad things happen. This time, it was the radio squawking. I sat up straight and grabbed for the walkie-talkie.

“We’re coming back fast,” Vance said. There was a lot of static and he was barely whispering, but my heart raced as I made out his words. “Get everything you can into the backpacks. We’re going to have to bug out.”

“What did you find?” I asked, whispering myself. Behind me Finster crouched down to try to hear better.

“About fifty of them, all coming up the same canyon. They’re spread out pretty loose, and I think I haven’t seen them all. There’s probably more. Probably a lot more. This is Tucson. Go, now. Get things ready—we won’t have time to pack when I get back.”

“Understood,” I said, and signed off. I turned to face Finster. His face was as white as—well, as white as a dead guy’s. “Let’s move,” I told him.





We cracked open one of the motel rooms we used as cold storage and found the back packs waiting for us on an unmade bed. Ten of them, still half-full of stuff we never bothered to unpack. Bottles of purified water, bags of beef jerky and boxes of hard crackers. Canned food is heavy and if you’re carrying your supply on your back it slows you down. Into each pack we put survival gear, camp stoves, thermal blankets, first aid kits. Knives, lots of knives and other basic weapons. As much water as we could shove into the packs. If we were going to walk across the desert until we found another safe place we would need a gallon per day per person. There was no way we could carry enough, but the supply we had would just have to do.

Finster and I didn’t talk while we worked. Candy was slung on my back, fast asleep. She learned how to do that very early on. When Mommy’s busy, you just go to sleep—that’s a survival strategy. Good girl.