Jack looked at him and shook his head. They didn’t get it. They didn’t want to or they couldn’t - he didn’t know which. He wasn’t afraid of the dead man. He was afraid of what they were doing. How could they be the good guys if they hurt things just because they could? He shook his head again, because even that didn’t seem to quite cover it. What if there was still a person stuck inside that wasted, rotted thing?
Caution is made for grown-ups. Kids tend to leave caution in the dust. Despite his recent epiphanies, Jack was still just twelve. He reached for the stick, fully meaning to push it aside, and his left foot caught the viscera that had spilled around the dead thing. He couldn’t have pulled a better slapstick moment if he’d had a banana peel. Jack’s heel went up and he went down, his ass slapping against the wet ground and his head bouncing lightly. He could feel the filth and decay soaking his jeans and the hair on the back of his head. The dead man next to him on the ground struggled to reach him, but its limbs no longer worked and it could only wiggle closer. Jack had time enough to push away, his adrenaline kicking in at the thought of how close he was to the vile thing.
All of the boys laughed, except for Jack. There was nothing funny about the situation - well, okay, the fall was worthy of a chuckle, maybe - and his confusion and frustration were as deep as ever. Instead, Jack braced his hands and pushed himself into a sitting position then onto his knees before he tried to stand up. And he slipped a second time, falling across the dead man, his hand slapping the corpse’s face as he struggled to save himself.
Jack felt a sudden pain spike deep into his left palm and across the little finger.
‘Ow! Fuck!’ he looked toward the pain as he pulled his hand back and froze. The zombie had bitten down good and hard. He looked at the blood welling from his hand and skittered back, his eyes flying wide. There was a tooth sticking out of the ridge of his hand. He’d pulled it from the corpse’s mouth when he yanked his hand away.
The zombie lunged as best it could and snapped at him again. Without even thinking, Jack kicked at the face and knocked the jaw aside with ease. The muscles had atrophied to the point where even its ability to stay together was more luck than nature.
‘Jack. You’re bit.’ Billy’s voice was distant; it sounded like a whisper.
‘I gotta get to Grampy’s house. He can fix it,’ Jack said through lips that felt numb. The ringing was back in his ears, only now there was a different source to it.
Skunk spoke up next, shaking his head. ‘It’s been in the news, Jack. Ain’t no cure. You get bit, you become one of those things. It’s all over.’
‘That’s shit!’ Jack blinked his eyes and shook his head, denying what he had heard himself. ‘That’s shit! No way!’
He looked at the dead thing again. It was barely even capable of moving. His desire to give it comfort was dead, torn away like the flesh on his bleeding hand. He lashed out again and again, kicking at the broken face, until his tears completely obscured his vision and he had to stop and wipe them away.
All around him his friends stared at him in sickened fascination.
Billy shook his head. ‘It ain’t shit, and you know it. You been watching the news, too. Those things, they’re spreading. You can’t even go home, Jack. You might try to hurt your own family.’
‘It isn’t that fast.’ He shook his head again. ‘It takes time.’
Tom shook his head, too, but his face was unreadable. ‘Not much time. Maybe a couple of hours.’
‘Well, I have to try and get it fixed.’
‘Too late.’ Tom stepped to the side and took two more steps. It took Jack only a second to realize he was blocking the way past the dead thing.
‘You need to get the hell out of my way. I’m sick of you, Tom.’
Charlie was wheezing; his breaths sounded wrong. José leaned over and shook his head, whispering something in the other boy’s ear.
Tom didn’t answer. Instead he jabbed out with the stick in his hand and drove the point into Jack’s left shoulder.
‘Ow! What the hell, dude?’ Jack covered the spot quickly, not even thinking as he used his wounded hand. The good news was that the bite barely even hurt now. The spot where he was poked felt worse. It flared with a little extra pain as the blood from his hand fell across the small area where the stick had broken skin. Jack pulled his hand back quickly. He could make the infection worse that way, couldn’t he? He wasn’t really sure.
He was about to say something else to Tom, when the boy poked him a second time, on his other arm. This time the point put a hole in his shirt and the blood was more obvious.
‘Tom! Stop it!’ He stared hard as Tom’s smile spread.
‘Skunk, cover the door.’
Jack knew that tone in Tom’s voice. It was the cool and level voice of the expedition leader. The same tone used to gather the troops and offer instructions when they were hunting for crawfish or trying to sneak up on someone they were about to pull a stunt on.
‘Billy, get your rope.’
Jack looked around quickly as both Skunk and José headed for the narrow staircase, and Billy reached down, his eyes never leaving Jack, and grabbed his lasso.
‘What are you doing, guys? Come on, this isn’t funny.’ He could barely breathe.
The look in their eyes said otherwise. The look they cast his way said the fun was only about to begin.
José reached up and closed the storm doors firmly, leaving them lost in the near darkness. To his left, the rope in Billy’s hands snapped in the air twice and then grew silent.
SHOOTING POOL
BY JOE R . LANSDALE
My daddy told me it wasn’t a place I ought to be, because the owner, who had once been a good friend of his, and the owner’s friends were troublesome, which was his way of saying they were no-accounts or hoods. My mother didn’t want me there, either, but after high school, about twice a week, sometimes three times a week, me and my friends Donald and Lee would go over to the pool hall to shoot a few runs of Solids and Stripes, which was the only pool game we knew.
I think what we liked about going there was that pool was thought of as a tough guy’s game, a game played in bars with lots of cigarette and cigar smoke and some rough-looking characters hanging around. And that’s just the way Rugger’s Pool Hall was. I saw Jack Rugger and his friends at my father’s garage from time to time, where my daddy kept their cars running. My daddy was no shrinking violet, either, but his strength and anger were generally of a positive sort and not directed at my person. Rugger and his pals were a mystery to me, because they talked about drinking and whoring and fighting and about how bad they were, and the thing was, I knew they weren’t just bragging.
I figured I was pretty bad myself, and so did Donald and Lee. They were my fan club. In school, with my six-three, two-hundred-pound frame, and the bulk of it weight-lifting muscles, I was respected. I had even, on occasion, gotten into fights outside of school with older, bigger college boys and whipped them. I had a few moves. I was always waiting for a chance to prove it.
So, this time I’m talking about, we walked over there from school to buy a couple of soda pops and shoot some pool and slip a cigarette and talk about girls and tail, like we’d had any, and when we got there, Rugger’s cousin, Ray Martin Winston, was there along with Rugger and a retarded kid who cleaned up and kept sodas in the soda machine. The kid always wore a red baseball cap and overalls, lived in the back, and Rugger usually referred to him as ‘the retard’. The kid went along with this without any kickback. He was as dedicated to Rugger as a seeing-eye dog, and about as concerned with day-to-day activities as a pig was about algebra.
Ray Martin was older than we were, but not by much. Maybe three years. He had dropped out of school as soon as he could, and I had no idea what he did for a living, though it was rumored he stole and sold and ran a few whores, one of which was said to be his sister, though any of it could have been talk. He was a peculiar-looking fella, one of those who seem as if their lives will be
about trouble, and that was Ray Martin. He was lean but not too tall, had a shock of blond hair, which he took great care to lightly oil and comb. It was his best feature. It was thick and fell down on his forehead in a Beach Boy kind of wave. His face always made me think of a hammerhead shark. It had to do with his beady black eyes and the way his nose dropped straight down from his thick forehead and along the length of his face until it stopped just above lips as thin as razor cuts. His chin looked like a block of stone. He had chunky white teeth, all them about the size of sugar cubes. He would have made a great Dick Tracy villain. He had a reptilian way of moving, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, as if he undulated and squirmed. I guess in the back of my head there was a piece of me itching to find out just how dangerous he really was.
We shot a game at our table, while Ray Martin shot alone at one of the other three, knocking the cue ball around, racking and breaking and taking shots. Free time had given him good aim and a good arm for the table.
I was feeling my oats that day, and I looked over and said, ‘You’re pretty good playin’ yourself.’
Ray Martin raised his head and twisted it, cracked his neck as he did, and gave me a look that I had never seen before. Rugger came over quickly with a beer from the cooler, handed it to him, and said, ‘Ought to be someone comin’ in pretty soon. Maybe you can get a game up.’
Ray Martin nodded, took the wet beer bottle, sipped it, and examined me with the precision of a sniper about to pop off a shot. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘That could happen.’
He went over and sat in a chair by the wall and drank his beer and kept his eye on me, one hand in his baggy pants pocket. I turned back to the game, and Donald leaned over close and said, ‘He didn’t take that well. He thought it was some kind of crack.’
‘I meant it as a crack,’ I said.
‘I know. And he took it as a crack.’
‘You think I’m worried?’
Donald’s face changed a little. He licked his lips. I thought his lower jaw shook. ‘No. I’m not worried about you. I know you can take care of yourself.’
I didn’t believe him altogether. I had seen that spark of doubt in his eyes, and it annoyed me. I didn’t like him thinking I might not be as bad and tough as I thought I was. I saw the retarded kid glaring at me, his mouth hanging open, and it somehow hit me that the kid thought the same thing, though truth was, if that kid had two thoughts, they probably canceled each other out.
I gave Ray Martin a glance, just to show him my ball sack hadn’t shrunk, and his stare was still locked on me. I won’t lie to you, I was feeling brave, but there was something about the way he looked at me that clawed its way down inside of me. I had never seen anyone with that kind of look, and I wrote it off to the way his face was and that no matter what he was thinking and no matter where he was looking, he’d look like that. Hell, his old mother probably looked like that; she probably had to tie a pork chop around her neck to get fucked.
I peeked at Rugger. He was looking at me, too, but with a different kind of look, like someone watching a dog darting across the highway in front of an eighteen-wheeler, wondering how it was going to turn out. I thought maybe he was hoping I’d make it. When he and my father were kids, my daddy had been on his side in an oil-field fight that had become a kind of Marvel Creek legend. Him and dad against six others, and they had won, and in style, sending two of their foes to the hospital. I guess, through my dad, that gave me and the old man a kind of connection, though now that I look back on it, he wasn’t that old. Probably in his forties then, balding, with a hard potbelly, arms that looked as if they had been pumped full of air, legs too short and thin for the bulk of his upper body - a barrel supported by reeds.
This concern and Donald’s doubt didn’t set well with me, and it made me feel all the more feisty. I was about to say something smart to Ray Martin, when the front door opened and a man about thirty came in. He was wearing khaki pants and a plaid shirt and a blue-jean jacket and tie- up boots. He was as dark as Ray Martin was blond and pale. ‘How’re y’all?’ he said. He sounded like someone who had just that day stepped off the farm for the first time and had left his turnips outside. I looked out through the front door, which was glass with a roll-down curtain curled above it, and parked next to the curb I could see a shiny new Impala. It wasn’t a car that looked like it went with the fella, but it was his.
Rugger nodded at him, and the fella said, ‘I was wonderin’ you could tell me how to get to Tyler?’ Rugger told him, and then the hick asked, ‘You got any food to sell here?’
‘Some potato chips, peanuts,’ Rugger said. ‘Got a Coke machine. We don’t fry no hamburgers or nothin’.’
‘I guess I’ll just have some peanuts then.’
Rugger went over and pulled a package off the rack, and the hick paid for them. He went to the Coke machine and lifted the lid and reached down in the cold water and threaded a cola through the little metal maze that led to where you pulled it out after putting in your money. You don’t see those kinds of machines any more, but for a while, back in the sixties, they were pretty popular.
He pulled the cap off with the opener on the side of the box and turned around and said, ‘Ain’t nothin’ like a store-bought Co-Cola,’ as if there were any other kind. He swigged about half the drink in one gulp, pulled it down and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and tore open his bag of peanuts with his teeth and poured them into the Coke bottle. The salt made the soda foam a little. He swigged that and chewed on the wet peanuts and came over and watched us play for a moment.
‘I’ve played this game,’ he said, showing me some crunched peanuts on his teeth.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Well, we got a full table.’
‘I see that. I do. I’m just sayin’ I know how. My old pappy taught me how to play. I like it. I’m pretty good too.’
‘Well, good for you,’ I said. ‘Did your old pappy teach you not to bother folks when they’re playin’?’
He smiled, looked a little wounded. ‘Yes, he did. I apologize. ’
‘Hey, you,’ Ray Martin called.
We all looked.
‘You want to play some pool?’ he said to the hayseed. ‘I’ll play you.’
‘Sure, I’ll play,’ the hayseed said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘But I warn you, sometimes I like to play for nickels and such.’
Ray Martin stretched his razor-thin lips and grinned those sugar-cube teeth. ‘That’s all right, yokel. We’ll play for such, as you call it.’
‘I reckon I am a bit of a yokel,’ said the fella, ‘but I prefer to be called Ross. That’s what my old mama named me.’
‘Say she did?’ Ray Martin said. ‘All right, then, Ross, I’ll ask you somethin’. You know how to play anything other than Stripes and Solids? You shoot straight pool?’
‘I know how it’s done,’ Ross said.
‘Good. Let’s you and me knock ’em around.’
It wasn’t a very exciting game. Ross got to break on the flip of a coin, and he managed to knock the cue ball in the hole right off, without so much as sending the ball’s shadow in the direction of any of his targets.
Ray Martin took his shoot, and he cleared about four balls before he missed. Ross shot one in with what looked like mostly a lucky shot, and then he missed, and then Ray Martin ran what was left. They had bet a dollar on the game, and Ross paid up.
‘You’re good,’ Ross said.
‘I’ve heard that,’ Ray Martin said. ‘You want to go again?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Sure you do. You want to get that dollar back, don’t you?’
Ross scratched the side of his nose then shifted his testicles with one hand, as if that would help him make a decision, and said, ‘I reckon . . . Hell, all right. I’ll bet you that dollar and two more.’
‘A high roller.’
‘I got paid; I can spare a little.’
Ray Martin grinned at him as if he were a wolf that had just found an injured rabbit caught up i
n the briars.
By now we weren’t shooting any more, just leaning against the wall watching them, not really knowing how to play straight pool but pretending we did, acting like we knew what was going on.
The game results were similar to the first. Ray Martin chalked his cue while Ross dug a few bucks out of his wallet and paid up. Ray Martin called out, ‘Hey, Retard, get over here and rack these balls. You keep them racked, I’ll give you a quarter. You don’t, I’ll give you a kick in the ass.’
The retard racked the balls. Ross said, ‘I don’t know I want to play any more.’
‘Scared?’ Ray Martin asked.
The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Page 38
