“Let’s get back,” he muttered.
They walked back to the old construction company in silence. Nikki’s teeth were chattering too much to talk anyway. It caused her to think back to a brutally cold winter she’d suffered through back when she was eleven or twelve. What few livestock they had were steadily killed off by predators and their group had eventually run out of food. They went several days without eating before one man happened upon a feral dog pack and managed to kill one. Any trepidations and revulsions about eating a dog were nullified by their empty bellies.
One member of the group, a woman named Esther, was a minister or something back before it went bad. She held weekly church services during it all. When they were starving, she rambled on and on about how God was punishing the entire flock for the sins of a few. Amazingly, people were listening to her and believing her words. They embraced it, devoured it. That is, until she proclaimed God had spoken to her in a dream and directed her to sacrifice two children to appease him.
Nobody listened to Reverend Esther after that. Thankfully.
Nikki never forgot that winter and learned two valuable lessons – don’t rely on other people to keep you from starving and be leery of religious fanatics.
It took them almost thirty minutes to make it back to their home away from home. By then, Nikki was so cold she could hardly move. When they arrived, Fred checked the pebble. It had not moved. In fact, it had frozen in place.
Once inside, Fred worked off his duster and then helped Nikki take off her semi frozen poncho. Her whole body was shaking uncontrollably. Fred noticed.
“I didn’t see any indication of people around, so we might be able to risk a small fire,” he said. “The rain will help dissipate the smoke. Get some food out of the truck and I’ll get it started.”
Nikki bobbed her head in numb agreement. She went to the truck and got some canned beans, corn, pork chops, and cooking utensils out, gathered all in a big armful, and joined Fred beside the steel barrel that had been converted into a stove. Fred had a fire going in no time. Nikki hovered near it and warmed up while Fred cooked. Soon the pork chops were sizzling in the skillet.
When she was no longer shaking, Nikki excused herself, grabbed her toiletry kit, and entered the men’s room. She had to use her flashlight to see but encountered no problems. After, she used some water to wash up and brushed her hair. Staring at her reflection in the mirror, she thought Fred might get the idea that she was fixing herself up for him, which may or may not have been accurate. Staring a moment longer, she roughly grabbed her hair, pulled it back into a ponytail, and secured it with a piece of string. When she rejoined Fred, he had two plates of food waiting. She forked several mouthfuls into her mouth before she finally spoke.
“Why didn’t you kill those zeds back at the hotel?”
Fred chewed thoughtfully on a piece of pork chop and swallowed before speaking.
“I’m going to give you a Zach Gunderson answer. He always like to give detailed, articulate answers. Unless he didn’t like you. You ready?”
Nikki gave a confused frown. “Uh, okay.”
“Has anyone ever told you that back before, the population of the United States was something like three hundred and thirty million?”
“I think I’ve heard that,” she said.
“Alright, so, the plague hits. I don’t know how many people died, how many survived, and how many got infected, but I’ve been told the infection rate was incredibly high, somewhere between seventy and ninety percent. Let’s put it at seventy percent. So, how many in America were infected?”
Nikki scrunched her face up in confusion, which reminded Fred of a kid. She thought about it for a moment and gave up.
“I’ve never been strong with math.”
“Roughly two hundred and thirty-one million that are spread across the country. That’s a lot of zeds, right?” Fred asked.
“Hell yeah,” Nikki answered.
“Now, a bunch of them have died off, but not all. Some of them seem to be evolving.”
“The fifteens,” Nikki said.
“Yep, that’s what they’re calling them. Some people seem to think back when that batch of vaccines was sabotaged, it created the fifteens, and maybe that’s true, but there’s also another type of zed out there. You just saw six of them.”
Nikki once again scrunched her face up in confusion. “What? Those zeds at the hotel? What’s different about them?”
“You spotted it yourself. They were afraid of us. Fear is an emotion, which means they are experiencing emotions again, and, this is important, they understood that we were a threat.”
“That’s not what everyone else is saying,” she said.
Fred gave a slight shrug and continued eating.
“You’re the only one who believes this.” She said it like an accusation.
Fred wiped his mouth. “Melvin once saw a zed exhibiting fear when he was being chased by some men. That was last year, I think. Zach and a few others have seen it as well. The point is these types of zeds are mostly harmless.”
Nikki was incredulous. “Harmless? They eat people!”
“Those six zeds didn’t try to attack us. I don’t know about you, but for the first few years every zed I came across immediately tried to attack me. They weren’t afraid of me at all, even while I was killing their companions. Some zeds still behave like that, but those six didn’t.”
Nikki thought about it a moment. “So, we leave them and hope they don’t sneak up on us and take a bite out of our ass?”
“Yep.”
Nikki grunted, much in the same manner that Fred would occasionally grunt and continued eating.
After dinner, they cleaned up their cookware and stored it back in the truck. Fred explained to always keep the truck loaded and ready to leave at a moment’s notice. He glanced at his watch.
“Time to call in.” He led
