by Urban, Tony
"I'm not in charge of anything or anyone. If he wants to go, I believe that's his decision."
Mead looked in the older man's direction. "I hope he doesn't slow us down, is all."
Wim could tell Pablo was a man with a mission and he didn't expect him to be a hindrance of any kind. By the time Pablo returned with a bicycle, the wagon was loaded, and they were almost ready to go. There was only one horse in the town, a fact that made Wim smile and wonder if anyone else would get the humor. He rather doubted it. It was a young, black mare that made Gypsy look even older and more haggard. Aben had it by the reigns and walked it toward them.
"You do much riding?" Wim asked Aben.
"When I was in the Boy Scouts. I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle," Aben said. "Or a little easier preferably." He tapped his stump against his chest, then climbed into the saddle with surprising ease. The horse whinnied and took a few shuffling steps sideways, but Aben rested his hand on the mare's neck and stroked her mane and she settled.
Wim looked toward Mead who was locked in another embrace with the tearful, blonde woman. He was anxious to go but not to the point of interrupting their moment. He returned to the wagon where Prince meandered amongst the supplies and weapons, as excited as any dog to go for a ride.
That made Wim realize he was excited too. He knew that shouldn't be the case. That he shouldn't be looking forward to a trip that might turn him into a murderer, but having a purpose again, even a dark one, had reignited a fire inside him that had burned out several months ago.
Chapter 14
The men avoided the worst of the mountains as best they could. It was three weeks into their trip and they'd made it to Tennessee without issue. Travel was slow, but steady with Gypsy setting the pace. At times, Wim half thought the old girl might not survive the journey, but so far, she was plodding along. The new unnamed horse which Aben rode had no name, but its addition seemed to give Gypsy a renewed purpose and Wim wondered if horses possessed something akin to pride.
Around the time the sun began to drop toward the horizon, they were on the east side of a middling city named Morristown when Aben spied a run-down log cabin at the bottom of a ravine and suggested they make it their home for the night. It looked as good a spot as any.
While Wim tied off the horses, Mead checked and cleared the cabin. It was small, only four rooms, but none of the men needed much space. Wim had worked up a good appetite, but even his hunger wasn't quite strong enough for the thought of cold canned food to activate his salivary glands. That was the worst part of being on the road, he'd found, the monotony of the food. When he noticed a rusty charcoal grill set ten or so yards from the cabin, he got an idea.
His hopes of hot food were temporarily dashed when he found the grill empty aside from some equally rusty grates. He almost gave up, but then saw a dilapidated shed tucked into an overgrown honeysuckle bush. To Wim, that looked as good a spot to store charcoal as any and he decided to go exploring.
The door opened hard. It took three strong yanks before giving way and he couldn't understand why it had put up such a fight until he noticed the sharp end of three-inch nails poking out the back side. Before he could wonder who had nailed the door closed and why, a zombie stumbled out of the shed and into the waning light of day.
Wim had left his rifle inside the cabin and had already stripped off the pistol he typically had holstered on his hip and the knife that held residence in his belt. He was weaponless, but not too concerned at the plight. The zombie was a boy old enough to count his age on two hands without doubling up. On top of being young, he was barely tall enough to come up to Wim's ribcage and as the boy came at him, Wim simply reached out and grabbed a handful of his carrot-colored hair and held him at bay.
He glanced toward the cabin to see if any of the men might be taking this in, but saw none of them. Even Prince was safely inside and unaware.
The boy gave a strange, high-pitched growl and Wim returned his attention to the dead child that thrashed before him. Its jaws clicked together as it bit in his general direction but caught nothing but air.
Wim hated killing the children. Adults were bad enough, but at least they had a chance at life. These poor wretches didn't even get that. But, if Wim had learned anything in life, it was that it was far from fair.
He dragged the boy toward a good-sized rock that poked up from the overgrown crabgrass that grew in the clearing around the cabin. The dead child clawed and kicked but weighed less than a sack of feed and presented no challenge at all as Wim pushed his skull down on top of the stone.
The boy hissed up at him and Wim had a moment to think that he should have laid him face down, but he saw no sense in turning him over now. Instead, he brought his boot-clad foot down on the child's face and his head broke apart like a gruesome piñata.
As Wim wiped chunks of the mess from the sole of his boots, he heard the growling behind him and it was so close he could feel the creature's breath on his back.
He turned to see a second zombie, this one female and about his own age he guessed. She too had carrot-red hair and even though she was dead, he felt pretty bad for stomping her son in front of her.
The mom zombie swung at him and he caught her upper arm, spinning her around so her back was pressed into is chest. With her momentarily contained, his attention drifted away from her and to the shed where a dead teenage boy and an elderly male zombie had recently exited and were heading his way.
Wim sighed. All this for an attempt at some hot food.
The two newest arrivals were about five yards from him and Wim decided it was time to call in reinforcements.
"Hey fellas. I've got myself in a spot of trouble out here."
The mom zombie strained, trying to break free and he jerked her arm upward, so it pinched her neck. It would have been strangling her if she still needed to breathe.
The teenager was making better time than his undead gramps. Almost close enough to bite. Wim decided to use what he had in hand and he shoved mom his way. The two collided with enough force to send them to the ground and about that time Aben emerged from the cabin with his homemade war club in hand.
"I suspect these were the homeowners," Wim said to him. "And they're not taking kindly to our presence."
The two fallen zombies were back on their feet and moving Wim's way again. Gramps still lagged behind but continued slow and steady like the tortoise.
Aben moved toward the scene. He slowed as he passed Wim. "There's a knife in my belt."
Wim grabbed hold of it as Aben passed him but there wasn't much need. The big man swung his club at the mom zombie and the ground down maul hit her behind the left ear with so much force that it tore through her skull, gouging a channel that started at the side of her head and ended at her right eye. It was like a small missile had been shot through her face and, Wim supposed, that wasn't far off.
The dead woman's teenage son was next in the line of fire. That time Aben went with an overhead swing and connected with the top of the boy's skull. As the bones shattered under the force of the blow, Wim thought it looked like his face was melting and his flesh, loosened from the destroyed bone underneath, sagged down in way that reminded Wim of a discarded Halloween mask.
Wim thought about joining in but Aben needed no assistance. He looked over to gramps and shook his head. "Hell, old timer, if I wait for you to come to me it's liable to be dark before you get here."
He strode toward the old, dead man and finished him with a less forceful hit to the temple. Even at a distance Wim could hear the bones break like someone had dropped a sack full of china. It was a stomach-turning noise and some of his appetite fled.
Aben looked to him and Wim saw a grisly hunk of flesh caught in the man's beard. "That all of 'em?" Aben asked.
"I'd imagine so." Wim motioned to the shed. "But we might ought to check just to be sure."
They checked, and the shed was empty, of zombies and charcoal. There was a bright, red chainsaw that Wim thought might ha
ve made a good weapon in the years before the gasoline had expired, but aside from a few shovels and garden tools, the shed was now empty.
When he and Aben vacated the small building, they saw Mead and Pablo sitting on a wooden swing on the porch.
"Thanks for the hand," Wim said.
"Looked like you had a handle on it," Mead grinned.
As he walked toward them, Wim realized his boot was still sticky with preteen zombie skull and he scraped it against the porch step. "Took out just about the whole family. No pa though. You check the cabin good?"
Mead nodded. "Wasn't much to check."
"Well someone put 'em in there. Best to keep our eyes open, just in case."
Mead nodded. "I always do. But let's multitask and eat while we do it."
Even with his hunger halved, the thought of food brought a greedy rumble in Wim's belly.
"I saw a little grill over there." Mead turned to Pablo. "Pablo, you mind fetching that charcoal?"
"Not at all."
Pablo disappeared into the cabin and Wim raised an eyebrow at Mead. "Where'd you find charcoal?"
"Under the sink. With the tongs and spatulas."
Wim supposed that made sense.
They cooked the beans and spaghetti in the cans. The grill heated up quicker than expected and all were slightly charred, but the burned flavor was something new and Wim appreciated the variety.
As usual, the men agreed to sleep in shifts. So far, the nights had been uneventful but that was no reason to get careless. Wim had seen far too often what happened to careless people. Mead and Aben slept first leaving Wim and Pablo to sit on the porch and listen to the mosquitos buzz. After a couple hours, Wim decided he'd rather hear human conversation.
"Were you from Arkansas originally?"
Pablo nodded. "My entire life. However, I lived further south, close the Texas border."
Wim struggled to think of what to ask next. His previous conversations with Pablo hadn't gone far beyond the superficial and he still wasn't sure what to make of the quiet, private man. All he really knew of him was that Pablo had been a high school economics teacher before the plague.
Mead told Wim the story of finding Pablo holed up inside his house, the bodies of his dead family members rotting in the hot sun outside. After killing them, he'd piled them up and Mead said it looked like a mound of crash test dummies, except for the flies. And the smell. He'd intended to bury them, but the ground was too hard, and he'd been waiting for rain that never came.
The man didn't want to go with Mead. He said he owed it to his family members to give them a proper burial, so Mead offered to help dig. It took them two full days and even then, they only made it down four feet and created a hole barely wide enough to fit them all, but with some careful placement, they made it work.
Mead shared a particularly detailed memory about how the stomach of one of Pablo's daughters broke open as he was moving it. He said what came out made him think of a restaurant dumpster after a week in the summer heat and told Wim that there were so many maggots that it looked like someone had emptied a twenty-pound bag of rice into the hole in her midsection where her organs had once been. Only this rice moved.
That was more detail than Wim needed to hear, but it made him feel even more sorry for the man who was so quiet it bordered on shyness. Even as they traveled, while Wim spent the days and nights bonding with Mead and Aben, Pablo kept to himself and rarely spoke unless one of them spoke to him first. He often wondered if that was an aftereffect of everything the man had been through, or if it had been his manner even beforehand.
Much to Wim's surprise, Pablo broke the silence.
"The place we are going. The Ark. Do you think we will have to fight the other survivors when we arrive? I do not mind killing zombies, but I am unsure whether I could do the same to another human unless I had good cause."
Wim took a swallow of beyond flat soda from a bottle. "I don't believe so. When we left, there weren't many people left. It was mostly zombies. And if I had to put money on it, I'd say the zombies got most of them. They were an isolated bunch and on the soft side. They never had to learn how to do what's needed to survive and I suspect they went down without much of a fight."
"That is good."
"Mmm hmm."
"Did the Doctor say why he did this?"
Wim thought about that before answering. Over the years, he'd tried to block out most of Doc's ravings. "He was a cruel man. And angry. And intelligent. Those qualities don't blend well. Personally, I don't believe he had any reason beyond general meanness."
Silence fell between them for a while, their words replaced by the drone of the nighttime insects, until Pablo spoke up again. This must be a record, Wim thought.
"The woman you loved, she was his daughter?"
"My wife was his daughter. Yes. But she was nothing like him. She had no idea what kind of man he was."
"I hope I did not offend you."
"You didn't."
"Good. Because I did not mean to infer that she was in some way complicit. Children do not see their parents as they are, but rather as they wish them to be."
Wim supposed that was true. He certainly had idealized versions of his own.
"My daughters were not perfect children, but then I was not a perfect father either. I was hard on them. Demanding. Because I wanted them to make good lives for themselves. I hope they understood my reasons."
"I suspect they did."
"I oftentimes wonder about their deaths, if there was any shred of consciousness remaining inside and alert when I had to destroy them. And if there was, what they must have thought of me then."
It was a horrible thought, and similar to ones Wim had pondered over the years. Thinking it again, now, made him thankful that Ramey had left him before the end. That she'd spared him the agonized worries that haunted Pablo.
"I don't think there's anything human left in them at that point. I believe, I hope, that whatever made them who they were, that part goes away when they die. What gets back up and walks and fights and eats, that's just the brain misfiring and doing what comes from instinct. Like a rabid dog."
Both men looked to Prince who was sprawled on his side, asleep. That seemed to bring the conversation to an end and Wim was grateful. With these thoughts in his mind, he suspected that, when it was his turn to rest, sleep would be hard to find.
Chapter 15
Aben watched, silent, as Prince laid in front of Wim's feet, staring up at him and panting. Wim, however, seemed to be in his own world. He sat on a fallen tree and stared into the forested abyss, looking but not seeing. Aben was all too familiar with that blankness and, after another thirty seconds passed, decided to interject.
"For a farmer you sure can't read animals."
Wim came back to the land of the living and looked Aben's way. "What?"
Aben strolled his way, extra careful on the uneven terrain. Getting around without half a foot could be a bitch if he wasn't careful. "My dog. He wants your attention."
Wim realized the dog was at his feet and reached down to pet him. Prince rolled onto his back and Wim ruffled the mottled fur on his undercarriage.
"You ever have a dog?" Aben found a tree stump close enough to Wim to have a conversation and used it as a seat.
"Folks would drop them off at the farm occasionally. Sometimes they'd stick around for a spell, long enough to fill their bellies, but most drifted off soon enough. And the ones that decided to stay longer soon enough killed a chicken or got into the pig manure and Pa would end up chasing them off."
"So that's a no."
Wim flashed a weak smile. "I suppose. We had cats though."
"A cat's not a dog. To a cat, you're at best a landlord. And they're surly tenants. Now a dog, to him, you're his whole world."
"I always liked pigs."
Aben sighed. Wim gave Prince another quick pat which did little to satiate the mutt's need for attention. The dog rose up and went to Aben's side and he petted him
the way a dog deserved, and expected, to be petted.
"We're close now, aren't we?"
Wim's gaze drifted toward the road where the horses rested for a spell. "Mead's better with the map than me."
"But you've actually been there. And I can see it in you. We're close."
Wim nodded. "We are. I'd say less than a week out."
"You've grown quiet. You were never a Chatty Cathy, but you've been different. I can tell your mind's somewhere else."
"It might be."
Prince pawed at Aben's stump, wanting double the love. "I've only got one, you fool. That'll have to suffice." The dog whined but stopped begging. "I've got two ears though, if you want to talk about anything."
Wim looked his way again and Aben thought his eyes looked worried, or maybe haunted. "What if I made a mistake, deciding to go back to the Ark?"
"What's got you feeling that way?"
"I can't put a finger on it. I wonder if anyone's left there, or if maybe they all died of the zombies or finally gave in to the flu. Doc included. That maybe I dragged you all this way for nothing."
"I doubt a one of us would complain if that ends up being true. We all had our reasons for joining you."
Wim opened his mouth to speak, then stopped himself. Aben despised the role of inquisitor, but the man before him looked as if he might burst if he didn't get out whatever he had dammed up inside.
"It's more than that. Is this about your wife?"
"No. Not directly but maybe in a roundabout way. When I found out that she wasn't really immune, when Doc fessed up about the virus. I promised him I'd come back and kill him if Ramey ever turned. I was so shocked and scared and angry."
"A perfectly reasonable response, if you ask me."
"Maybe. But that's the rub."
"What?"
Wim broke eye contact, stared at the ground. "I don't know if I can."
"Kill him, you mean?"
Wim nodded but still focused his gaze on the dirt floor. "I owe this to Ramey. He needs to be punished. I know that. But if he's still alive, still human..."
