This Rotten World | Book 2 | Let It Burn

shops inside. The upperlevels of the mall were a black hole of commerce. People came there for thefood, and the clothes, and little else. There were other malls around Portland,but Lloyd Center was the oldest. He wondered what was inside there now. Had themall fallen while the stores were open, or had all of the gates been loweredand locked by the time the dead had taken over the city?

The question was purely philosophical time filler. Thedistance between here and there was too great for them to make a trip to scoutit out. It was only a hundred yards or so, if that, but the amount of dead thatwould see their group would be somewhere in the hundreds. He might as well havebeen looking at the moon. Heading over to the mall was nothing short of aone-way ticket. There was no getting around it. They didn't have the amount ofammo that they would need to fight their way back through the tide of the dead.

The dead were slow and unwieldy. Their greatest strengthresided in the fact that they had the numbers. How badly did they outnumber thehuman race? In Portland, just looking at his own situation, the only situationthat really mattered to him, it looked like a twenty to one shot. There wereeleven of them, counting that Andy guy, and easily a few hundred of the deadjust below them.

In the distance, he could see the dome of the Rose Gardenrising up. Unseen, on the other side of the Rose Garden, lay the MemorialColiseum, once a refugee center for Rudy and the other survivors. Who knew howmany of the refugees from the Coliseum had been killed on the day they escaped.No matter the number, it had probably been quite a swing in the favor of thedead. Rudy looked at the mall again, to avoid the uncomfortable speculationthat came into his mind. The mall...

He had been there a few times. From what he remembered,the stores in the mall would be mostly useless as far as their needs went.There were some fast food joints inside, but most of the edible food would havespoiled or gone rotten by now. There were some clothing stores, and he could definitelyuse a belt, perhaps even some new pants. Rudy sniffed inward. Underneath thesmell of the dead, he could get a whiff of his own funky body odor. He had acouple changes of clothes in his possession, but each item of clothing now hadfour or five days on it. Yeah, he was due a new change of clothes.

"Don't even think about it, kid."

"Think about what?" Rudy asked.

Lou looked at him sideways, his eyes still focused on thedistance. "I see you eyeing that mall. Ain't no way we're going into thatplace. There's nothing we could use in there anyway."

"I suppose you have a better idea," Rudy said.

Lou said nothing.

"Well, we can't just sit here."

Silence.

"We'll die." Rudy looked over his shoulder atLou.

He merely shrugged his shoulders.

"You think the military will help us?" heasked, more to break the silence than anything else.

"You mean the way they helped us when we were tryingto get away from the Coliseum? Blowing shit up? Getting everyone killed?"

Rudy gave up. If Lou wanted to wallow in defeat let him.They hadn't seen a sign of the military in two days. The last they had seen wasa handful of helicopters flying east. They had never returned. It was beginningto feel like they were the only people on the entire planet. Rudy began tocount the dead.

****

Katie sat in the darkness of the theater, her mindboiling with emotions that she couldn't control. She held her revolver in herhand, Fred Walker's revolver, used to kill her child and her husband. She hadrecovered it in a room in the bowels of the Coliseum just before the fences hadcome down and all of the refugees and soldiers had turned into a giant buffetfor the dead. When they were escaping, she had used it to kill another child, someoneelse's child. That child's sister was sitting in the hallway, at the bottom ofthe ladder, next to the square of light.

She wanted nothing to do with the light or the child. Thelooks that girl gave her were enough to send anyone running. The mental looksthat she had given herself were even worse. Katie, the real Katie, the one whohad always existed but who had never asserted herself until the world hadturned to shit, floated in a sea of doubt. She felt the fake Katie therebattling with her, filling the real Katie with guilt, suspicion, terror, andthe sense that maybe she had done something wrong. Maybe, when Brian had bittenhis youngest daughter, she should have let it sort itself out. Maybe she shouldhave let the little bastard turn into a mini-cannibal. But she hadn't. She haddone what she felt was right. Why then, now, in the darkness, did it feel sowrong?

There was a distance between her and the other survivors,not just Jane, the sole-surviving member of Brian's star-crossed family.Everyone had the same look. It was equal parts questioning and accusatory, asif they wondered if they could have done the same thing. Of course theycouldn't. They were still playing by the old rules. The fake Katie would havenever done such a thing. Hell, the fake Katie would have never had a gun in herhands in the first place. But the real Katie did what she wanted, and the realKatie did what was right.

She had done so when her family had turned. She had doneso when Zeke had made advances on her. She didn't regret a thing. But the oldKatie did. The old Katie lived in fear, the fear of being judged, the fear ofbeing deemed worthless.

Katie cocked the hammer of her gun in the darkness. Inthe silence of the movie theater, the sound seemed appropriate, reassuring. Sheeased the hammer down with her thumb, and then she cocked it again. It helpedher think. She thought about the bullets in the pocket of her jeans, which shestill thought of as her mom jeans. She thought about the film on her teeth