“You are in my woods,” he said. “I wanted to know who and what you are. I needed to decide if you were still alive.”
“Okay, fair enough,” said the soldier. “Thing is, there aren’t a lot of us humans left. You could have verified that I was alive by asking.”
“You could have lied.”
“Last I heard, zoms don’t speak, and that means they can’t lie.”
“What’s a zom?”
“Zom? Short for zombie? Dead guys that seem to think the living are part of an all-you-can-eat buffet. We had the whole zombie apocalypse thing fifteen years ago. Maybe you heard of it? It was kind of a big thing.”
“I know the dead rose,” said the hunter. “Never heard them called ‘zoms’ before. And zombies were from old black-and-white movies. Are you saying this started in Haiti, with all that voodoo stuff?”
“Not saying that at all,” said the soldier. “This isn’t some kind of black magic. Might have been better if it was. No, this whole thing was a bioweapon, and people started using the nickname ‘zoms’ for the biters.”
“We call them shamblers,” said the hunter, making conversation because he was looking for an advantage, waiting for a moment to make his move. “Or los muertos vivientes.”
“The living dead,” said the soldier, translating it. “Good a name as any. But let’s get back to the point, shall we? I don’t look or smell like one of your los muertos and yet you were hunting me. I’d like to know why.”
“There are a lot of bad things out here,” said the hunter. “And a lot of bad people. All sorts of mutations, and some of them can talk.”
The soldier stiffened. “Okay, that’s scary as all heck.”
“Are you going to kill me?” asked the hunter.
“I’m keeping my options open.” The pistol barrel was an unflinching black eye that did not waver. “Right now I’m enjoying our little chat. Mess with me, though, and I don’t like your odds, feel me?”
The hunter nodded. “I heard a sound. In the sky. And saw smoke. Now you’re here and your leg is splinted with pieces of metal. You’re dressed like a soldier.”
“Those are statements, sparky. What’s the question?”
“Were you on a . . . helicopter?”
The soldier smiled. There was something dangerous in his smile, but not threatening. It was dangerous because for a split second he looked oddly familiar to the hunter. He looked like someone he’d known a long time ago. Someone who was definitely dead. Which made the feeling of unreality swirl inside his head even more.
“Yes,” said the soldier, and his smile faded. “A Black Hawk. Well . . . not anymore. Now it’s a pile of junk. I got out. Maybe my combat dog too. Not sure. My friends weren’t so lucky.”
“How?” begged the hunter. “There hasn’t been anything flying since the EMPs.”
The soldier gave him a quizzical look. “Boy, are you out of touch. The EMPs knocked everything out, but it’s been a lot of scared people keeping them grounded. Some folks seem to believe that it was the machines that made the dead rise. Or make the dead come after us. Or something. Lots of crazy theories, and you can really hurt yourself trying to make sense of ’em. Truth is, pretty much anything that’s busted can be fixed. Where I come from we have planes, choppers, all sorts of stuff. Nothing new, of course. It’s all rebuilt or repaired. But we’re fixing more of the stuff all the time.”
The hunter licked his lips. It was so dangerous to simply accept this as real. Machines had been dead for so long they’d become like extinct animals to everyone. Like dinosaurs. Real once upon a time, but not part of this world. To accept their present reality required a leap of faith, and the hunter had so little to spare. He studied the big soldier.
“You set a trap for me,” he said. “You doubled back on your trail and came up behind me. No one’s been able to do that to me in a long, long time. Since before the End. You’re no ordinary scavenger. You’re a soldier. Or were.”
“You’re quick, sport. Did the uniform give me away?”
“I was a soldier too.”
“Yeah, from the way you moved I figured you had training. What kind of soldier?”
“Special forces,” said the hunter. “I was a sniper.”
The soldier studied the hunter’s face for a long time. Really studied it, and the hunter knew the man was trying to see past the grizzled gray-black beard and long hair. The soldier narrowed his eyes as if trying to carve years off the hunter’s face. Deep vertical lines appeared slowly between his brows, and there was doubt and confusion in his blue eyes. “Do I . . . do I know you . . . ?”
“No,” said the hunter bluntly.
The soldier kept staring at him, and then he jerked as if he’d been slapped hard across the face. He blinked several times, and the barrel of the gun, which had been rock steady, began to waver.