“Don’t kill us!” Horton said. “Please, I can pay you.”
“It’s too late,” Edward said. “I’ve already killed you.”
Horton looked like he was about to say something, but no words came out of his mouth. He started to shiver noticeably. Bert watched this, completely unaware of what was going on.
“Billy, you okay?” Bert asked. “Holy shit, what the fuck did you do to him?”
Edward didn’t answer. He just watched as the son of a bitch who had killed Liddie dropped to the ground, shook violently for a few seconds, then stopped. That was all Edward really needed to see. He went over to Horton’s truck to make sure it still had the keys in it as Horton got back up. Horton didn’t even need any of Edward’s special orders to know that his dinner was desperately trying to crawl away.
Edward didn’t take any satisfaction as Bert’s screams turned to gurgling croaks, but neither did he cringe from it.
Part Four:
ILLINOIS
Chapter Thirty Six
Larissa pulled her ATV up to the entrance of what had once been an abandoned Culver’s restaurant just north of Winnebago, Illinois. When they’d chosen the building the interior had been coated in thick layers of dust, and the walk-in coolers had still contained the desiccated remains of long-decayed food. It wasn’t in quite the same sad shape now, but no one had made the effort to fix it up properly. They’d chosen it because it was one of the few buildings on the outskirts of town that looked like a stiff wind wouldn’t blow it over, but that didn’t mean they were going to stay here long. Neuman Security was still in its infancy, and they weren’t sure yet where they were going to call home.
Rae Neuman came to the door as Larissa got off the ATV and took her rifle from over her shoulders. Rae had given all of her new “employees” explicit orders to keep their weapons ready at all times. They didn’t know who, or maybe what, they would be facing, but Rae knew that a threat could pop up at any time. Just because she had confidence that they’d be getting some action soon, however, didn’t mean the others believed her.
“Yet another round of the town and we’ve still got jack shit,” Larissa said. “This is getting to be a little ridiculous, Rae.”
“Oh don’t give me that,” Rae said. “You would be finding just as little action if we had stayed in Fond du Lac, and you know it.”
“Yeah, but if I had stayed in Fond du Lac then at least I would know Merton was going to be paying me sometime soon. You still haven’t proven to me that you will.”
“Everyone will have their Goddamned pay, but you’re still going to have to wait. If you don’t fricking like it, then you can walk back up to Fond du Lac.”
Larissa grumbled but went inside. Rae didn’t think she had to worry about the girl leaving, at least not for a while. The girl was only barely an adult, and she hadn’t had a chance to get out and do anything with her life yet. Even if she found this boring, it was still better than her previous job desk-sitting in the Merton building.
Larissa was one of only a handful of the first wave of people Rae had recruited from Merton when she walked out on the job a couple of weeks earlier. Few people had believed her stories of a thinking, talking, human-looking zombie at first. Some, such as Larissa, had heard enough of the idle talk from onlookers on the day of Edward’s standoff that they at least gave Rae a chance to make her case. Rae had walked out of Merton that very day, not wanting any part of the cover-up. Johnny had tried to talk some sense into her, so she’d walked out on him as well. That would have been the end of it if she hadn’t dug deeper, looking for evidence to back up her claims. A few questions to the right people had turned up the term Z7, as well as a few key names in the CRS that she could use to at least make her story believable to a few more people. The real coup, however, had been finding the picture of Edward someone had taken just as the CRS was taking him out of the back of Ringo’s truck. It had been enough get the attention of a few somewhat disreputable media outlets. She had made her appearance on national television almost a week ago, and that was when things had gotten interesting. Merton Security didn’t (she hoped) have any idea where she was right now, although she couldn’t expect that to continue for long.
“Please tell me Cory finally got those old grills working,” Larissa said.
“Yeah, he did,” Rae said, “But that doesn’t mean he can cook worth a shit. And the dumbass didn’t bother to clean them off before he turned them on for the first time. So beware, the entire kitchen area smells like burning dust.”
“Hell, I don’t care,” Larissa said. “I’ve been patrolling the town all morning. I’m starved.”
“All morning? You’ve only been out for an hour.”
“And I didn’t wake up until almost eleven, so it was all of my morning.”
She let Larissa go back into the kitchen while Rae proceeded to the dining room and the makeshift command center Cory had set up. He’d pushed together any old tables that could still stand by themselves and covered them with the yellowing city maps the old man had found for them. Broken salt and pepper shakers marked the places where they had sentries around the town, while chopped up pieces of straw represented the zombies that had been found so far and pushed out of the town limits. Larissa, Jojo, and Luke had wanted to kill the zombies they’d found, but Rae made it perfectly clear that if any of them killed a zed then she would put a hole in that person’s head to match. Her parents were probably spinning in their graves over such an order, but Edward had put a significant amount of doubt in her mind when it came to the reanimated. So she kept the zeds out of town, far away from the old man, but did nothing else to them.
“Did I just see Larissa come in?” Cory asked.
“She went in back to see if she could burn lunch less than you could.”
“Damn it, she knows that the first thing she’s supposed to do when she comes in between patrols is report to me.”
“You and I both know her reports are less than reliable anyways. What did Jojo and Luke have to say when they came in?”
Cory indicated the maps. “Look for yourself. I sent them both off to see if they could confirm this, but do you see anything weird here?”
Rae sat down on the least-rickety looking chair she could find and stared at the maps. Shakers indicated Luke and Jojo’s approximate locations, both on the west side of town. A normal patrol would have taken them all around the town with Larissa and occasionally Rae acting as extra sets of eyes looking west, but Rae could see right away that there was a major discrepancy that hadn’t been on the maps yesterday.
They’d been tracking at least eighteen zombies in the area immediately surrounding Winnebago. Jojo had found some paint that hadn’t gone completely bad in the ruins of an old hardware store, and they’d been using the brightest they could find to tag the zombies with marks on their chests and backs so they could be seen from a distance. If a zombie showed up without a tag, they knew it had to have just recently wandered in. They’d had a few of those new additions in their first two days here, but not in the days after that. The straw pieces on the map were colored with the same paint as their respective zombies, giving them an idea where each one was. Everyone on patrol kept track of which ones they saw where, and reported it in to Cory.
The strange thing now, however, was most of the straw pieces had been removed from the map.
“Well, it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?” Rae asked. “So the question is where did they go?”
“I don’t think you’re actually seeing what I’m talking about,” Cory said. “Take a look at the pattern.”