Shooting him a sidelong glance, Duncan said, “Did you see the pink mist?”
Swallowing hard, Charlie described the halo of skin, blood, flesh, bone, and one would have to presume, brains, sent airborne the second the Latina’s male friend discharged his black shotgun a foot from Wife Beater’s head.
“Seen it more than once to varying degrees,” Duncan said softly before going strangely silent.
Chapter 31
For a long spell not a word was spoken between Duncan and Charlie. Eventually the impatient man in the small car passed them where Woodstock merged with Foster and automotive concerns suddenly appeared on both sides of the four-lane. The wrecking yards, detail shops, and a U-Pull-It place—all with darkened windows and vehicles in different stages of repair for sale in their empty gravel lots—soon gave way to half a dozen treed blocks home to sprawling business parks full of industrial-looking, cement and steel low-rise buildings.
After traversing thirty blocks lined with darkened businesses and having to treat the handful of dormant overhead lights like four-way-stops, Duncan was amazed to see working traffic control lights where Foster intersected 122nd. So, with the brush with the bikers fresh in his mind, he slowed at the glowing red left-turn arrow and treated it the same as the others: looked both ways twice, then blew through it with no remorse.
As the Dodge swung wide, Charlie got up the nerve to say what he figured Duncan had been unable to twenty blocks back. “Saw the pink mist in ‘Nam, did ya?”
Duncan didn’t answer at first. He continued driving with his eyes fixed on the road ahead as long blocks dominated on both sides by multi-storied apartment buildings scrolled by. Then, out of the blue, he drew a deep breath and fixed a quick stare on Charlie. “You read my mind, Charlie,” he said softly. “I had a buddy over there. He was a real kick-butt door gunner named Dave Thigpen. We called him Pig Pen, more so on account of the beer bottles and trash always littering his poorly sandbagged hooch than how well it rhymed with his surname.”
“Two birds, one stone,” said Charlie behind a soft chuckle.
Duncan exhaled sharply and slowed and swerved wide left to avoid a young woman who had just stumbled off the curb on Charlie’s side.
Wearing an ensemble consisting of dollar-store flip flops, hip-hugging black biker shorts, and a ribbed tube top in neon pink that left very little to the imagination and the mottled bruising peppering her swinging arms hard to miss, it was clear to anyone with half a brain that the woman was drug addicted and on a mission to fuel her habit with the commodities on display.
Seeing the road free of moving vehicles for blocks in both directions, Duncan committed the Dodge to a left-hand three-sixty across three lanes and slowed the truck to walking-speed equidistant between the curb and prostitute.
All through the impromptu maneuver both men had tracked the staggering woman with their eyes.
Charlie said, “What the hell are you doing?”
Duncan answered, “Testing the rules.”
They were tight-lipped and apprehensive when the Dodge finally ground to a halt broadside with the emaciated woman.
After burning a few seconds watching the woman doddle away, seemingly oblivious to the truck idling behind her, Duncan cleared his throat.
Nothing happened. The steady slap of flip-flop rubber against cement continued unabated.
“Considering what’s going on downtown,” Duncan called, “it’s not safe for you be out here all alone.”
Abruptly the streetwalker halted in her tracks, one pink flip-flop hanging on by a toe.
“That did it,” Charlie said, fingers curling around the pump gun. “She’s our problem now.”
“Says the guy who got us stuck with Biker Girl.”
Rooted in place, back still facing the truck, the woman emitted a raspy growl and began a slow, stilted, left-hand pirouette that exposed in tiny snippets the angry purple bruises running up and down the insides of both arms. And as she finished her head-down, four-point about-face and paused squared-off with the driver’s side door, Duncan spotted the smaller bruises standing out like Dalmatian spots against the pale dermis in the crooks of both arms. Needle tracks, perhaps. Not much of a stretch considering the nearly identical set of horizontal bruises encircling her upper arms. Duncan was no detective, but if he had to put a wager on the source of the bruises, safe money would be on someone with bad intentions having laid hands on her there. And as a side bet, judging by the deep lacerations and torn and jagged flaps of flesh on the knuckles of both constantly flexing hands, he’d put his last thin dime on the fact that whoever she’d tangled with had gotten their lips and teeth rearranged.
“Might want to get yourself some help …” Duncan was saying when just an arms-reach from the pick-up the twentysomething’s head ratcheted up and, much like Charlie’s recent visual exposure to death by buckshot, a surreal image entered Duncan’s retinas and was burned into his mind alongside dozens of other unspeakable horrors. Only with this one there was no pink mist involved. No exploding skull or chunks of airborne brains, either. No men screaming and pleading for their momma’s comfort as they expired above the thick jungle canopy far from a loving embrace. Instead, Duncan witnessed true living death up close and personal for the first time. The poor woman was beyond saving. The deeply sunken eyes acquiring him were soulless and clouded, the pupils barely discernable. As her greasy locks swung to-and-fro in front of the fixed stare, Duncan suddenly knew how a gazelle must feel in the face of a hungry lioness.
Moving slothlike, yet with a certain determined purpose, the woman raised both arms horizontal and took one step closer to the truck’s open driver’s side window.
Duncan felt a chill wrack his body as he tried to break from her gaze. But he couldn’t. For a split second it was as if he was inside her head and staring back at himself. And he didn’t like what he was seeing, for in his heart of hearts he knew that behind that lifeless stare somewhere in the gray matter, this infected shell of a human being was savoring the idea of ripping the flesh from his bones. And to punctuate the obvious desire he saw reflected there, her thin lips drew back and the mouthful of rotted teeth began to piston up and down, subconsciously chewing the living flesh it so desired.
His living flesh.
And he wanted to keep it that way—living.
“Go,” Charlie said. “Rule number one. Don’t get bit. She lunges and her teeth so much as nick you—anywhere—you’re as good as dead.”
“You already told me the rules.”
“Then go.”
The dead thing swiped at the truck but found only thin air, because Duncan had taken Charlie’s advice and released the brake. He let the idling engine pull them forward a dozen feet, applied the brake and peered into the gently vibrating wing mirror.
“Why’d you stop again?” whispered Charlie.
“Shouldn’t we put her out of her misery?”
“Who’s we?” Charlie asked, turning to look out the back window. “You got a mouse in your pocket?”
“You jump out and do it.”
Charlie shook his head and nudged the shotgun across the seat towards Duncan.
In his head, Duncan heard Charlie parroting what the newscasters had said while he was sleeping: Destroying the brain is the only way to stop the living dead.
He jerked the transmission into Park, grabbed the shotgun and, after determining his inaugural infected was still a few steps away, shouldered open his door.
On the road, he felt totally exposed. In his mind there were a thousand infected about to stream out of the surrounding businesses and apartments. The delusion reached a crescendo when he spotted a nearby bus stop and imagined a bus pulling up and conveniently disgorging some infected backup for the one plodding dangerously close to him.
Pushing the silly notion out of his mind, he began to walk a wide counterclockwise circle, slowly drawing the ghoul away from the truck. Once he had created a full lane of separation between him and the dead thing, he
took his eyes off the threat just long enough to peer north down the length of 122nd.
Nothing.
No cars or pedestrians moved for as far as he could see, which, because of the bi-focal prescription lenses in his aviator glasses, happened to be only half a dozen of these extremely long suburban blocks.
Still backpedaling, he craned over his right shoulder and saw more of the same to the south: no people on the sidewalks and desolate lanes of traffic all the way back to Foster—also devoid of pedestrians and crossing traffic. Beginning to feel like the last of the living in a city going through its final death throes, he stopped his backwards march, set his feet shoulder’s width apart, and disengaged the stubby shotgun’s safety.
Chapter 32
The infected woman continued her steady march down the centerline in Duncan’s direction.
Ten feet.
With the alternating slap-crack of flip flops striking dead flesh and sun-warmed pavement resonating eerily in the early morning still, he raised the shotgun and tucked the buttstock tight against his shoulder.
Eight.
Duncan laid his right cheek on the black polymer stock.
Six.
He squeezed his left eye shut and gazed down the barrel, parking the sight between those flesh-devouring eyes.
Four.
Finger tensing on the trigger, Duncan eased the weapon off his shoulder a bit and dropped the barrel by a few degrees.
With a little more than an arm’s reach between the business end of the shotgun and the hissing creature, Duncan drew up the last bit of trigger pull.
The explosion was tremendous, setting his ears to ringing and causing him to narrow his eyes to slits, which kept him from seeing the initial results of his gruesome experiment.
Back in the truck, however, Charlie witnessed it all. And because of the perceived safety and acoustic barrier the glass and metal of the cab provided, he didn’t flinch or close his eyes when the discharging shotgun rocked Duncan in his forward-leaning stance.
Consequently, Charlie saw pink mist again, only this time it was jetting from the small of the woman’s lower back just before she seemed to levitate off of the blacktop. In the next microsecond the violent impact from hundreds of tiny lead pellets shredding her guts had her flying backward, nearly horizontal to the road, pink flip flops tumbling away wildly on separate courses all their own.
“What the …” Charlie mouthed as he watched two more wholly unexpected events taking place. He saw Duncan crunch another shell into the chamber, sending the spent one tumbling out in a wide arc, spinning and refracting the rising sun all the way to the road, where it bounced and skittered to a stop near the prostrate corpse that—despite missing a cantaloupe-sized chunk of abdomen—was struggling mightily to rise.
Bare feet somehow finding purchase in the gore sloughing from its own destroyed midsection, the aerated woman rose to standing and took a long lurching step toward the unwavering shotgun barrel.
“The rules,” bellowed Charlie through the half-closed driver’s side window.
Complying with the barked order, Duncan elevated the gaping muzzle until it was aimed at a spot between the listing corpse’s button nose and meth-affected picket of teeth. He drew a breath, said a prayer of absolution in his head, and then squeezed the trigger.
This time, on account of the ringing in his ears from the first blast, Duncan didn’t flinch or jump or close his eyes. He saw it all. The nose and cheeks and soulless eyes disappeared with the booming report. Close behind, the frothy morass of pulped skin, hair, and cranial bone rode the shock wave for a short distance before painting the warm blacktop in a gray and red sheen.
Torn to ribbons by the expanding cone of buckshot, what was left of the pink tube top flopped limply through the air for a long moment before settling softly back to earth like a large scrap of tickertape.
Casting his gaze in a full three-sixty, Charlie saw they were still alone at street level. Once he scrutinized the surrounding businesses and apartment buildings, however, he learned the shotgun blast had drawn attention to them. Here and there curtains were drawn back in the windows flanking the street. Heads were bobbing behind the glass. Jaws were moving and phones were pressed to ears. But he wasn’t worried. The threat was eliminated along with any doubt still in his mind that the recently deceased infected were in fact coming back to life.
Shaking his head against the shrill ringing, Duncan took a pace forward and crouched next to the mutilated corpse. He lifted one hand off the ground. Turned it over, inspecting it closely. The skin was cool to the touch. The two fingers and thumb not missing their tips and nails were strangely white. The palm was marred by a deep semicircular laceration—a kind of imperfect bloodless arc divided every quarter-inch or so by a bridge of unblemished skin. Teeth did this, thought Duncan. The wrinkled skin on the corpse’s knuckles was cut so deeply that when he manually flexed one hand into a dainty half-fist, white bone glistened within.
“C’mon, Quincy M.D. People are stirring,” Charlie called out as he reached over and ran the driver’s window all the way down. The next admonition as he hinged back over was said quieter and lost on Duncan, “And I’m sure they’ve already called the cops.”
Before the word “cops” had escaped his lips, Charlie detected movement in his right side vision. Partially obscured by the A-pillar and telescoping side mirror, whatever it was tore his gaze from the crumpled form Duncan was standing over, which in turn got his head moving directly into a blast of air being driven forward by the impossibly large barrel of a wooden baseball bat.
As the brown blur and subsequent sensation caressing his cheek caused Charlie to reflexively flinch and recoil from the window, two things became abundantly clear. The first was that the bat was being swung on a flat arc right-handed by an incredibly tall African American teenager standing just off the Dodge’s passenger-side front tire. The second thing that came to Charlie in the ensuing microsecond was that something else was moving off his right shoulder. And it was coming in fast, with purpose, and drawing dangerously close to his face.
The two moving objects, one known, one still a mystery, came together equidistant between the A-pillar and right side-channel of Charlie’s open window. The slap-crunch of wood impacting flesh and bone was entirely unexpected. Grateful the morbid noise was from the bat meeting the human head now filling up the entire window opening, Charlie simultaneously released the grab bar and began drawing his head and upper body toward the center of the bench seat.
But he wasn’t as quick as he used to be. Fast twitch muscles failed him and suddenly a misshapen head was driven into the truck and had butted his upper arm and shoulder before his body could respond to the neural commands.
Impacting Charlie with roughly the same load of kinetic energy the bat had just transferred from the young man’s coiled muscles, the forty-some-odd pounds of greasy hair and clammy flesh sent a shiver through his shoulders before striking the B-pillar with a resounding thunk.
Even as the kid’s perfect follow-through was cutting the air outside the door pillar, like a mini hail storm, shards of the mystery assailant’s splintered teeth were pelting Charlie’s face and the truck’s back glass.
Torn between twisting back around to check on his friend, or leaning over the gore-spattered window channel and gawking at the form that had just crumpled into a vertical heap on the road, Charlie drew in a deep breath and did both—sort of.
As he lifted his butt off the seat to regard the male form on the road with its arms and legs askew and cratered head leaking rivulets of brackish blood, he yelled at the top of his voice: “Duncan ... get your ass over here!”
Before Charlie could swing his gaze from the still-moving corpse to the young man who had bravely come to his aid, said young man rapidly delivered two more chopping blows to the squirming body. One, a solid shot to the temple that snapped the head around, and the other, a coup de gras thunk to the dome that opened a fissure and started a slow trickle of g
ray matter.
Breathing hard, the young man regarded Charlie and his eyes seemed to soften. “You and your friend best get,” he said, tapping the bat on the road to rid it of accumulated detritus. “It ain’t safe here. It ain’t safe anywhere.”
“Duncan,” Charlie bellowed, as he craned around.
“I’m here,” Duncan said, rounding the tailgate on the passenger side.
“This guy just saved my ass.”
Stopping and eyeing the corpse, Duncan replied, “Then thank the man so we can get a move on.”
“It was nothing,” the young man said to Duncan. Hitching a thumb toward the apartments off his right shoulder, he added, “But there’s more of these things back thataway.” His eyes narrowed as he regarded Charlie. “And your friend’s right. Y’all better go.”
Duncan looped back around, opened his door and crawled behind the wheel. He leaned forward and met the young man’s stare. “You need a lift somewhere? We’re heading east. Going to put some distance between us and the city.”
Shaking his head no, the young man propped the bat on his shoulder and backpedaled away from the Dodge, warily eyeing the nearby two-story complex adorned with foot-high wooden letters that read: Norma Jean Apartments.
“Thanks, bud,” Charlie called out after the kid. Then, massaging his aching right arm, he sat back hard into the seat. “Helluva close call that was.”
“Yes. It. Was,” Duncan said as he watched the young man until he disappeared from view behind some hedges fronting another nearly identical apartment building. “And it’s got me thinking—”
“About what?”
“Who,” Duncan said. “In a roundabout way … this little near disaster got me thinking about my brother. He’s one of those guys who have that prepare-for-the-worst, hope-for-the-best kind of mindset. Before the Y2K scare he was always preaching that in case of a societal breakdown, no matter what caused things to go to hell, you gotta gather friends and family together. Good people who have your back.”
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) Page 18
