Rae pulled out her canister of chewing tobacco, put a pinch in her mouth, and chewed as she tried to see what Cory saw. Out of the eighteen zombies that called the area around Winnebago their home, only six were left. The answer came to her quickly. She’d been preoccupied with the disappeared zombies, not with the position of the ones that remained. All six were to the east and slightly south of the town.
“Did someone kill them?” Rae asked.
“They’re already dead. I keep trying to tell you that, but it’s like you aren’t paying attention.”
“I’m paying plenty of attention. I just don’t have the same limited idea of what death means anymore. Answer the question.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Cory said. “If they were dead, we would have found bodies.”
“So twelve zeds just vanish, no bodies, and it doesn’t affect the ones in a specific area. Whatever’s going on, why doesn’t it seem to be happening on the east side of town?”
“I wondered that, too, but then both Luke and Jojo told me that had to use the shock prods more than usual today. Those six remaining zeds? They were trying to get into town.”
“You think all the others are hiding somewhere in town?”
“No, I don’t. Look.” He threw the rest of straws on the map, placing them randomly around the town. “These six were trying to get into town. They were all going the same direction. Do you see now?” He pushed the six toward town but stopped them at the first groups of wrecked buildings. Then he pushed all the others in the same direction. There was no town or security detail to stop them, so they all kept going.
Rae pulled out the old mayonnaise jar she’d been keeping under the table as a spittoon and spit a wad of dark saliva into it, then stared at the map. They were all heading west.
“And when did this start?” she asked.
“All the zeds were accounted for as of the midnight patrol.”
She nodded. “Something’s going on west of here. Any ideas?”
“Not a clue. If we really want to know, we’ll have to send someone out there to scout it.”
“The old man hasn’t said anything?” Rae asked.
“He hasn’t left the library. Jojo went in to check on him, make sure nothing had happened, and the old man just shooed her out again. Although, yeah, now that I think about it Jojo said he looked kind of excited when she said most of the zeds were gone. You think he has something to do with it?”
“You know him just about as well I do. What do you think?”
“I think that if that crazy old fucker isn’t behind the disappearances, he at least knows what’s caused them.”
“Then I say we go ask him,” Rae said.
She was about to go into the kitchen to tell Larissa to keep an eye on the place while they were gone, but Luke came in through the door before she could do anything.
“Holy shit guys. You need to come see this.”
“What is it?” Rae asked.
“Me and Jojo found the zeds. Rae, look, I know you’re got this whole pacifist thing going with them, but I think maybe you should rethink that for today.”
“Come on, quit teasing us, honey,” Cory said. “Are you going to tell us or not?”
“No, Cory, this is something you’ve got to see to believe. If Larissa’s here she should probably come, too. And everyone should bring their guns.”
Larissa and Luke took their ATVs while Rae and Cory took his car. They didn’t have to go far. There was the remains of a major highway just north of the Culvers, and they all found Jojo huddled behind her own ATV with a pair of binoculars in hand and her rifle at the ready nearby. Rae went to her side with Spanky in her hands, and the others soon joined them.
“You moved,” Luke said. “Weren’t you further down?”
“I had to get back closer to base,” Jojo said. Her deep voice quavered a little. That was odd and a little disturbing. Jojo had always been the stupidly brave sort. “They’re moving faster than they should.”
“Can you still see them?” Luke asked.
“Yeah, but you won’t need to binoculars for that very soon.”
“Give them to me,” Rae said. Jojo handed her the binoculars without argument, and Rae pointed them where she had been looking. It was immediately apparent what had rattled the two of them. Down the road she could see all the painted zeds that had disappeared, and far more besides. She couldn’t be sure of the exact number, but she thought fifty would be a conservative estimate. It was a true horde, the kind her parents had told her about in hushed tones, the sort of thing a human had to get away from as fast as possible if they wanted to survive. But although her first instinct was to run, her heart started to calm the more she stared. Jojo was right. They were coming fast, and the longer she looked the easier it was to tell why.
“Stand down, everyone,” Rae said. “Put all your rifles away.”
“Okay, that is now officially crazy,” Luke said.
“No, it’s not,” Rae said. “This is exactly what we’ve been waiting for.”
She focused the binoculars on one particular zombie, the one at the very front. It wasn’t usual for zeds to follow one leader like that, but apparently they had made an exception here.
Edward Schuett was finally here, and he had brought with him his own zombie army.
Chapter Thirty Seven
At first, Edward made the corpse of Billy Horton follow him as a punishment. He used Horton’s truck to get a reasonable distance from Laramie, but it was an older model with gas mileage more like what Edward remembered from his own time and it ran out in what he guessed was somewhere in Nebraska. He forced Horton to spend all that time in the truck bed. For a while he was even petty enough to force Horton to lean over the side where all the various insects would splatter in his face, but that got old. In fact, the whole idea of vengeance against this man lost its appeal very quickly. The man who had killed Liddie was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. Even if Edward did learn the secret to turning a regular zombie into a Z7, Horton wouldn’t get that treatment. Let the bastard wander around and eventually get shot in the head.
Once Edward had to go back to walking, however, he found having Horton around made some things easier. After some practice he figured out how to use the pheromone to make the zombie flush out small animals from their hiding places, where Edward could then pick them off with Horton’s rifle to feed himself. He used the next zombie he found for pretty much the same use at first, but that didn’t feel right. Edward didn’t give a rat’s ass about Horton, but the new one could maybe be saved by whatever process had turned Edward. It gave Edward some satisfaction that maybe he could help at least one person where he had so terribly failed Liddie. So Horton continued being Edward’s lapdog while the new one was closer to Edward’s equal. He made the next one follow him as well, and the next.
Pretty soon he wasn’t just picking up stray zombies in his path. He sought them out, sniffing for any hint on the wind that a zombie was nearby. And he sent out his own pheromones that grew stronger with every zombie added to his horde. The more he found, the further his reach.
The problem, however, was keeping them fed. He couldn’t stop them from eating entirely, since if they started starving they became slower and less responsive. He could push them to greater speeds with the pheromones, but that only went so far, and the various animals they found were generally too fast for the zombies to get them on their own. The horde grew too quickly for Edward to be able to feed them, especially since he only had a limited amount of ammunition and he had to use that for his own hunting if he ever wanted to reach Winnebago. Eventually he let a few go that were too slow to keep up.