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“Well, we’re here. Why don’t we make a pass through to see if we can find anything useful while the others rest?” I suggested, and Stella and Max were already sitting down to eat. They were actually the reason I suggested it, because the longer we were wandering around looking for junk, the longer Stella could rest.

Boden shrugged. “Sure, why not? Anyone else want to explore with us?”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing what this place looks like now that nature is reclaiming it,” Lillian said.

“I’d like to see a mine,” Castor volunteered, and his sister looked at him in surprise. “It sounds interesting. You can stay back if you want.”

So Polly did, along with the others. Serg stayed back with them, too, and I figured between him and the lion, Max and Stella should be safe. Boden, Lillian, Castor, and I headed through the open gate, following the gravel roads that gave way to grass and dandelions.

“It’s so quiet,” Castor commented as we walked through buildings made of rust and vines.

It wasn’t until he said it that I realized there were no birds calling, no squirrels chittering, and no sounds of wildlife. But it wasn’t silent. There was an eerie deep humming at such a low frequency it was almost inaudible. It was closer to the sensation of a rumbling than a true sound.

“What is that?” Lillian asked, so I knew I wasn’t the only one hearing it.

Boden pointed up ahead. “I think it’s coming from over there.”

We weaved through the buildings, following the humming sound. It grew slightly louder until we finally reached the spot past the buildings were the earth opened up before us. Nearing the edge of the pit, the gravel on the road actually vibrated and bounced from the reverberation.

The mine was a vast crater carved into the ground, where the deepest part was at least 100 meters below. The walls had a stepped appearance, but they were massive steps. About a kilometer wide and at least fifteen meters tall, like a staircase built for Paul Bunyan.

And all throughout the enormous open-pit mine below us were zombies. On every level, in every state of decay. Hundreds of them, thousands of them, milling together, and the humming was coming from them.

12

Remy

“What the heck are they doing?” Castor asked, as we stared down at the sea of zombies.

“Seems like they’re just sort of existing,” Boden answered.

“They can’t die, and they can’t get out, so this is all they can do,” I said.

“How do you know they can’t get out?” Castor asked, with an undercurrent of fear in his incredulity. “Maybe they’re just hibernating here.”

“If they were hibernating, they wouldn’t be moving.” Lillian pointed to the ones closest to us, maybe fifteen meters beneath us on the benched step of land. They were stumbling and hobbling, not really going anywhere, but their feet shuffled beneath them.

Castor was at the edge, and he leaned forward slightly. His toe brushed against a small rock, and it rolled down the sheer dirt wall until it bounced off and hit a zombie right in the head.

The zombie looked up, tilting its head, and its eyes never seemed to look beyond the wall of dirt and stone just before it. But the rock had made it aware of us, and it walked straight ahead and ran into the wall.

“They don’t climb,” Boden said. “They took down walls at the government quarantine by ramming into them with brute force and waves of their bodies. But they didn’t climb over it, and they don’t really look up.”

“So they’re just trapped down there, without any food or water?” Castor asked.

“There’s water.” Boden motioned to a stagnant pond on the lowest level of the mine, where it was the most crowded. Presumably because the zombies would stumble and fall over the edge on the higher levels but never climbed back up.

There were so many zombies, it left hardly any room for them to stand, and yet they all avoided the pond, giving it a wide berth. They were all cramped together, mashing each other between their decaying bodies and dirt walls.

“Zombies don’t need water to survive,” Lillian said.

“They don’tneedanything to survive. That’s the problem,” I grumbled.

“Why are they so afraid of water?” Castor asked. “I only see them avoid rivers and lakes. That kind of thing.”

“They’re not afraid of anything, because I doubt zombies feel anything at all, except hunger,” Lillian said. “The virus that causes zombification is a mutant cousin of rabies, and that induces hydrophobia. I can’t remember why exactly anymore, but I am assuming that the there must be some sort of central nervous system active in the zombies, so they can walk and grunt and devour.”

“It’s the humming sound I can’t make sense of,” I said, and I shivered as if I could shake it off. “Have any of you heard that before?”