As we pulled to a stop in front of the hotel I said, “Looks like you guys have got room for what, about five, six hundred people here?”
“Do yourself a favor,” one of the guards told me, “and don’t ask no questions. You ain’t gonna be here long enough to worry about it. Now get out of the Jeep.”
A few minutes later I was standing in what had once been the hotel’s lobby, waiting on Heather, checking the smell of my breath in my palm. I’d cleaned up as best I could, but that wasn’t saying much. When you live in the Zone, in the rubble between the compounds, it shows. A lump of coal is still a lump of coal, no matter how much you polish it.
I didn’t bother to make small talk with the guard off in the corner, watching me.
Eventually, Heather came down the stairs. I watched her descend, my mouth watering. She was wearing a short denim skirt that showed about a mile of bare leg and a tight black camisole that got my Adam’s apple pumping in my throat. Her eyes were gray as smoke, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail that made her jaw and throat seem delicate as spun glass.
And she was wearing makeup. You never see that anymore. Her lips were so red they actually shined. I couldn’t look away, and I’m just glad I didn’t start drooling.
She dismissed the guard with a wave.
“Hey,” she said to me.
I tried to speak, but my throat had gone dry. “Hey,” I said. I couldn’t stop looking at her lips. God, how they shined. “You look great,” I managed to say.
She blushed.
“They didn’t give you any trouble at the gate, did they?”
“No,” I said. “Well, maybe a little. No big deal.”
“You sure?”
“Really,” I said. “No big deal.”
She smiled. “My dad wants to see you before we go. You don’t mind, do you?”
Mano a Mano with Big Dave Ashcroft. Christ, I thought. “I guess I don’t get to say no, do I?”
“Um, not really.”
I watched golden rays of light scatter from her hair and said, “Sure, why not?”
She led me back to her father’s office.
“Daddy,” she said, “this is the boy I told you about.”
Dave Ashcroft wasn’t the giant I was expecting to meet. You hear stories about these guys, growing up in the Zone, and they’re like gods, reshaping the world in their own image. You expect them to be six and a half feet tall, neck like a beer keg, arms like a gorilla’s. But Dave Ashcroft, he was just a normal looking guy in a white work shirt and khaki slacks, a donut of gray hair around the back of his head.
He didn’t offer to shake my hand. He pointed me to a chair opposite his desk and ordered me to sit without saying a word.
“What kind of name is Andrew Hudson?”
“It’s just a name, sir.”
“Yeah, but I know it from somewhere.”
“My dad, probably.”
“Who was your dad?”
“Eddie Hudson. He was a cop in the old days.”
He perked up. “You mean the one who wrote that book about the Fall?”
“That’s right.” I get that bit about my dad from some of the old-timers. Dad wrote a book about the first night of the outbreak, about how he had to fight his way across the city to get to my mom and me. But his book only covered that first night. He left off at a point when it looked like we were actually going to contain the zombie outbreak. Well, he was wrong, obviously, and sometimes the old-timers who remember my dad’s book look at me and I think maybe they’re remembering what it was like back then, back when it seemed we might win this thing. I think, at least for some of them, the memories make them angry, resentful, like they blame people like my dad for the naiveté that allowed the Second Wave to happen. But there are others who recognize my dad and they tune out, they become distant, like they’ve gotten over the anger and now they’re dealing with something else.
Big Dave Ashcroft-he was one of the ones who just get distant.
“What happened to your dad?” he asked.
“He and mom died in the Second Wave, sir.”
“You would have been what, about six when that happened?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did they turn?”
“Mom did. Dad got swarmed trying to stop a bunch of them from breaking into our house. Mom got bit, but she managed to stash me in a hall closet before she turned.”
“And you’ve been on your own ever since, living off the streets?”
“That’s right.”
“So what do you do now? How do you live?” But I could tell the question he meant to ask was, How the hell did a Zoner like you meet my daughter?
“Special deliveries. I take private packages all across the Zone. I’ve even done some work for you, sir. That’s how I met your daughter.”
He frowned at that.
“Where do you plan to take my daughter, Andrew?”
“Dinner, sir. And dancing. On the Starliner. Out on the lake.”
He looked impressed, though I could tell he didn’t want to be impressed.
“The Starliner’s not cheap,” he said. “Special deliveries must pay pretty good.”
“Business is fine, sir.” I paused, then said, “But that’s not really what you’re asking, is it?”
He raised an eyebrow and waited.
“Listen,” I said. “Heather’s a special girl. That’s not something you have to tell me. I mean I already know it. I recognize a class act when I see one, and I intend to treat her accordingly.”
I’d guessed right. That was exactly what he needed to hear. He knew as well as anybody the dangers waiting for his daughter outside his compound’s walls, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep her from them forever. Sooner or later, with or without his permission, she was going to brave that world. Maybe sending her out with me, somebody who had proven their ability to survive, was his way of hedging his bets.
But whatever his thoughts, he gave his consent. He called in his senior security officer, a slender, bowlegged man named Naylor, and Naylor drove us out to the main gate in an air conditioned utility vehicle. He told the guards to give me back my gear and my motorcycle, and while they were doing that, he pulled Heather aside and gave her a little talk.
After that, to me, Naylor said, “She has a portable radio equipped with a GPS tracker. My people will be monitoring it all night. We’ll be close.” Then he fixed me with a meaningful glare and said, “All she has to do is call.”
The message came through loud and clear.
“I’ll try to be on my best behavior,” I said.
Heather jumped on the back of my bike and pressed her breasts into my back. I could feel the hard pebbles of her nipples through our clothes. “You better not be on your best behavior,” she whispered into my ear. “Now drive fast, Andrew. Get me out of here.”
In the days after the Fall, when the necrosis virus emerged from the hurricane-ravaged Texas Gulf Coast and turned the infected into flesh-eating human train wrecks, the old world collapsed, and men like Dave Ashcroft stepped up to fill the power vacuum. They built compounds like the one Heather and I had just left to protect their interests, and everywhere else became a wasteland known as the Zone of Exclusion.
After my parents died, I became one of the fringe people, a Zoner. I was too young to be of any use to the bosses who were just then consolidating their power and building their compounds, and so there weren’t any other options open to me… These days I know the Zone better than most, and what I know I learned the hard way, fighting it out every day with the infected in the ruins of San Antonio.
I survived that way for ten years. Then, right after I turned sixteen, I stole a motorcycle. And before long, I’d worked up a reputation as someone who could get packages delivered anywhere in the Zone.