THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER Book 1: Bleeding Kansas: A Novel Of The Zombie Apocalypse

by L. ROY AIKEN

  “He experimented on his own family members when they died!” says Hannah. “Had ‘em tied up in the basement! Then he had Evans take him into town to find other bodies he could play with!”

  “Hannah, you don’t know that.”

  “Your own boyfriend told you that!”

  “Brandon tells me lots of things. God knows I love him dearly but I’ve learned not to pay attention to half the shit he says.”

  “Excuse me, Krystal,” I say. “Can I get a shower here while I’m at it?”

  “Good Lord, I never thought you’d ask!” laughs Krystal. “Let’s get you to the gym!”

  Hannah is too petite for me to even consider leaning on but Krystal is of sturdy build and just the right height to put my arm across her shoulders. I curse myself for needing that sturdiness halfway down the hall. Krystal reminds me once again I’ve been off my feet for five days with nothing to eat, and little to drink.

  This will make six days out. I’m not even leaving tomorrow. Nor the day after that.

  I peel out of the gown, resolved never to wear anything remotely resembling (or smelling) like this ever again. I turn on the hot water and soap up without any self-consciousness at all in front of these women. They’ve already seen it all.

  “Don’t use up all the hot water! We only got so much left, remember!”

  I take my time. The water is just too damned life-affirming. Good water pressure will do that for you.

  Without air conditioning the showers are so steamed we can hardly see each other. The steam wasn’t enough to take the creases out of my trousers and suit jacket, though. I’m impressed it isn’t torn to shreds.

  But it hangs falsely on me. It’s not just taking the belt in two more notches, though that sure as hell doesn’t help. I wipe a mirror clear. Aside from the five-days growth of beard, I can’t imagine this was the man taking thousands of dollars in vouchers out on the town in Kansas City, planning a life away from four years of poverty—and the people he’d lived through it with. Who had bluffed his way past trigger-happy National Guardsmen.

  Christ, I really did that, didn’t I? Bantered with a cop, then fought that same cop in his undead form. I played and won the alpha-dog game with Tanner, escaped a zombie swarm, flew away from another just in time.

  I look at myself. My family is gone. I couldn’t save them. Can’t save them. Not now, not even two days from now.

  And with them gone I realize I have no idea who the fuck I am. What I am. What to do.

  “Let’s get some more food into you and get you walking up and down the hall.”

  “Yeah.”

  We walk out of the shower room into the gym. Krystal frowns at my suit. “That is so not you,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  I make it all the way through the gym, down the hall to our wing of the school, all the way back to the nurse’s office without having to lean on Krystal. “Doin’ good, hon. You wanna rest a bit before we go walking some more.”

  “I want to lie down and sleep.”

  “What? Already? Well, at least you’re clean. Can I change your sheets first?”

  “Make it fast. I’m fading.”

  I hang my suit as she works. Later, slipping between the sheets I close my eyes and think over and over to myself, I will get out of here. I will get out of here. I will not give up....

  Krystal wakes me for lunch. A TV dinner heated on a grill. Still, I’ve got to get my strength. She talks me into walking up and down the length of the hall after I eat. The pain in my knees is better. I don’t tire quite as quickly. I can’t exactly go running out of the building towards Colorado yet. But I know I can. Eventually.

  I’m left blessedly alone in the evening. I hear the others in the large building, but never see them. I wonder if Evans has this wing of the school off-limits. I’m guessing he does and for that I’m grateful. While there’s still light I remove my suit and hang it up. I begin attempts at pushups. I do balancing exercises, rudimentary yoga poses I learned when we were doing that interactive fitness disc on the TV years back.

  That had been fun; I wonder why I’d quit that. Then I remember it was because my wife and I were both home. She liked to watch her six-ugly-old-hens-around-a-table daytime chat show shit. I could never watch anything because she’d come in and start talking right in the middle of it. Never felt like I had my space to do it.

  Well, I’ve got that space and more, now. Thank you, Mr. Final Flue, and whoever cooked you up. Asshole.

  I lose my balance doing a one-legged stand. I carom off the door jamb and somehow find myself facedown on the bed, having landed so hard into it the coarse sheet burns my cheekbone.

  Shit. What the hell. While I’m here….

  “Huh,” says Krystal when she arrives in the morning. “Seems the better you get, the lazier you get.”

  “Yeah,” I say, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

  She plops down on the bed next to me as I sit up. “Oh, I’m just pickin’ on ya!” she says, rubbing my back. “You’re still workin’ on getting better. I’m still not crazy about the idea of you going out with us tomorrow.”

  “If it looks for a second like I’ll slow you down—you can see for yourself today. I want to get out and look around at stuff. Where we are, where we’re going, what’s all around here.”

  Hannah is standing in the doorway; she looks apprehensively at Krystal.

  “Oh,” I say. “I take it the Great and Powerful Mr. Evans disapproves of my moving around freely.

  “No, no,” says Krystal. “We can take you outside.”

  “He didn’t want him talkin’ to people,” says Hannah.

  “There’s only so many people here,” says Krystal. She turns to me. “We’ve been gettin’ newcomers every day. Mr. Evans thought it’d be best if everyone got settled in before people started swappin’ How I Escaped the Apocalypse stories. All the people we’ll be workin’ with are fair game, though. We can get your tools, too.”

  “I’d wondered what happened to my belt.”

  “Well, Mr. Evans is hangin’ on to your gun—but only for the time bein’! He just wants to see how trustworthy you are before you start packin’.”

  “Well, whaddya know. Gun control comes to America at last.”

  Hannah looks confused. Krystal shoots Hannah an irritated glance while putting her arm across my shoulders. “He just wants to protect everybody the best he knows how. I’m sure you’ll get your gun back after tomorrow.” She pats me on the back. “All right now, up! Let’s give you the tour!”

  I’d take a shower but I’m under the impression that’s off the table for whatever reason. Hannah slaps a pack of baby wipes into my hand. I wipe under my armpits and dress. Deodorant would be nice but it’s the post-apocalypse. Gotta loot that stuff for myself.

  If I thought it was warm inside I never knew how good I had it until my first taste of sunshine in seven days. I don’t know what hits me harder, really—the summer sun, or that it’s been seven days. I stagger out the door, my hand up to shield my face.

  “You gonna be all right?” says Krystal.

  “I’ll adjust.”

  “Krystal, do I need to be here?” says Hannah.

  “Oh, go find your boyfriend, Hannah! Yes, we’ll get by fine without you!”

  “Like you’re not taking him to see your own!”

  “Makes sense when we’re the ones goin’ on the raid to Wally World tomorrow, don’tcha think?”

  Hannah sniffs and turns away.

  Krystal grabs my arm, squeezes. “Good!” she half-whispers up into my ear. “We might actually get to talk for a minute.” She pulls me along. I stumble after, my arm up against the punishing sun.

  13

  This being Kansas, there’s no shade except inside the buildings. I would ask why we can’t walk through the main building to the exit closest to the vocational building but I’m guessing there’s a reason for this, a big one being that the windows are shaded on this side. Smart. Christ, it’
s hot, though.

  I hear hammering and banging, the sizzle of welding, the hiss of cutting torches. After what seems an endless hike beneath a sun that hates us and wants us dead we enter the vocational building, its every door and window open for ventilation. Generators work the industrial upright fans, and the equipment. At least they have fans, if all they do is re-circulate the hot air. Young men and older men are instructing children and each other on the use of the tools. I see women standing to the side, shy about stepping up though it’s clear they’re students, too.

  “Evans wants everybody to know about everything. We try to keep busy during the day, anyway. Since I was an almost-medical assistant, I got to experiment on a plane crash survivor.”

  “What about Hannah?”

  “Her?” Krystal laughs. “She wanted to be a nurse. That’s her only qualification. She’s not good for anything but complainin’. I just got stuck with her.”

  A young man steps out of one the rooms. Krystal lights up at the sight of him but he puts his finger to his lips and we follow him down the hall out the other side of the building. We push through the doors and I’m no sooner out when Krystal throws herself into the young man’s arms and they’re kissing.

  I make a point of looking for something else to look at but this is a large high school in the middle of Kansas. I notice the flags on the flagpole are still looking good. I wonder if Evans has them taken down every evening and raised in the morning. Wouldn’t surprise me.

  There’s a tugging at my sleeve. “Oh, hey, Derek, this is Brandon!”

  I turn and shake the hand of the tall blonde youth in the standard young working man’s uniform of jeans and T-shirt, with a cotton shirt hanging untucked and unbuttoned over it, a pack of smokes in the breast pocket. “Good to meet you.”

  “Krystal says they found you with a meat cleaver and a hammer with blood on it. You’ve killed deaders?”

  “Yep.”

  “So, how ya like it here so far?”

  “I dunno. I haven’t seen anything but the inside of the school since I crashed.”

  “Well, it’s time you seen some shit, then!” He looks around. “Keep quiet.” He begins walking away to the adjacent parking lot.

  He’s walking fast and I almost have to jog to keep up. Krystal holds out her hand for me but I pretend I don’t see it. Brandon is already around the driver’s side of a brown, dented-up warhorse of a pickup truck. Krystal pulls open the door and climbs in. By the time I pull myself up on the runner the truck’s already started, and I’m pulling the door closed as he backs out of his space and drives off.

  “Evans doesn’t like us driving around,” Brandon says as I pull my shoulder belt across and click it into the buckle. Krystal looks at me like I’m crazy. Neither she nor her boyfriend are strapped in.

  “Force of habit?” Krystal says.

  “Force of body crashing through safety glass. Fuck Johnny Law, it’s the laws of physics I’m respecting here.”

  Brandon hits the brakes. Krystal shrieks and puts her hands out to the dashboard. Brandon grins. “Fuck Johnny Law. I like that.” He pulls his own shoulder belt over, looks at Krystal. “Whatever you wanna do, babe. Free country and all that shit.”

  “Hold on!” she says, twisting from one side to another to find her belt. But Brandon has already taken off again.

  When Krystal finally digs the buckle and clasp out of the seat she looks up through the windshield and says, “Oh.”

  “What?” All I see are flat, browned-out fields of wheat and corn.

  “We’re headed towards where we found you,” says Krystal.

  “We gotta be careful, though,” says Brandon. ”They’re watchin’ that area a little more closely now.”

  “How many people does Evans have now?”

  “Right now it’s mainly him and his boys. Maybe a couple more people over the last couple of days. Quite a few people up there in the rich section of town, though. They don’t come out, neither. Hell, they don’t have to! They got their people goin’ back and forth. Shit, more I think about it, I’m not even sure that Evans fucker is really in charge.”

  “Aw, he’s not all that bad,” says Krystal. “But, yeah, he’s got his people he answers to. He don’t like people to think that but he does. There’s too many people back in that nice neighborhood street there. It’s like he says, they’re all holed up in there. They’re not just hidin’ from the dead people, either.”

  “Still,” I say, “some puff-chested ex-Army major with two teenage boys and a nephew are calling the shots for how many people? I don’t get this.”

  “Evans has some others in town goin’ along with him. Not everybody’s at the high school, either. Just the refugees he’s pullin’ off the road. He uses the principal’s office during the day sometimes to play administrator, but just the other day he got someone else in to do his pissant wranglin’ for him. Most of the time he’s out tryin’ a round up survivors in town. There were 50,000 or so used to live here, which wasn’t a lot as of week ago. I imagine it takes some time goin’ through the whole town, talkin’ people out of their hidin’ places, decidin’ where they should go….” Brandon pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket. He lights it, stares ahead. Krystal glowers at him.

  “Of course,” says Brandon, “there’s people him an’ his kind ain’t got any use for.”

  “You don’t know that, Brandon!”

  Brandon blows a volley of smoke at the windshield. “You know how these flim-flam men’ll tell ya, give us your money now, get in on the ground floor or you’ll miss your chance? The way I see it with Evans and his people, you get out while there’s just a ground floor. The longer we stick around, the harder it’s gonna be to get away. Evans is gonna get’ more an’ more people to carry guns for him. He’s gonna build that little community of his. Basically one big work camp while he an’ his kids an’ his rich buddies live easy. He’s gonna have shit locked down so tight out here you got just as good a chance as bustin’ out of prison.”

  “Pretty much the way it was before,” I say.

  “Yeah, ‘cept there ain’t gonna be no welfare or disability for those who can’t or won’t cut it. You just won’t show up for dinner that night. Or maybe you’ll turn up missin’ come breakfast.”

  “Now you don’t know that’s what happened to Marcus!” says Krystal. “He’d been talkin’ about cuttin’ out ever since Evans got everyone together at the school!”

  “Correction: ever since Evans put people like us into the school. You know, for our own good and shit.” Brandon looks at me. “Marcus woulda come and got me. He an’ I were tight from way back. Krystal here’s too sweet to wanna wrap her head around it but those fuckers took Marcus’ poor white ass out!”

  “I thought it wasn’t safe in town. With all the deaders, that is.”

  “Back when you were alive, you didn’t have no business in a place, you didn’t go there. Just like that now that everyone’s dead. That’s the way it is in the rich people’s section. Reckon it didn’t take ‘em all mornin’ to clear the dead outta there. Shit, Krystal, I showed you this! They’re out there runnin’ their generators and sprinklers and everything like they don’t care! It’s a miracle all them stinkin’ mobs ain’t all come in to check ‘em out. I’m guessin’ it’s all those nice shade trees they got growin’ over the streets soakin’ up the sound. Hell, most of these former citizens see a tree they know they don’t belong there. Just graded-off dirt and heat stroke for the rest of us.”

  “So we ring a louder dinner bell. Or just draw ‘em in, like with bait.”

  Brandon nods. “Yeah. You could do that.”

  Krystal looks from her boyfriend to me as if she’d just found herself among total strangers. It’s all I can do not to crack up.

  “Fuck!” says Brandon.

  Krystal squeals and reaches out for the dashboard.

  Brandon backs the truck up. Through his window I can see a man in overalls sitting outside the rows of corn, chomping away
at a snake. The snake’s fishbone-thin rib bones are sticking in his teeth and the soft parts of his mouth and the man has to pause to pick out the slivers, sucking the meat off of them as he goes. By some reflex the snake begins slithering away, even with its midsection chewed out. The man’s large, pale hand falls upon its tail. He’s still picking the bones out of his mouth with one hand as the snake coils back and bites furiously at the other.

  “That’s Mr. Sanderson, isn’t it?” says Krystal.

  Brandon looks over at me. “Help me with this, will ya?”

  We both jump out of the truck. My heart almost stops as Brandon turns his back to the man in the overalls to look through the items scattered in his flatbed. “Shit, there it is!” he says, pointing to my side of the truck. I pick up the demo bar and run around the front of the truck.

  The former Mr. Sanderson is looking in our general direction, sniffing the air. He lets the snake go and gets to his feet. The snake flops around in the dirt, bleeding out.

  “Mr. Sanderson, oh man! I’m sorry, sir! Mr. Grace, toss me that bar!”

  Sanderson is already on his feet and moving towards Brandon. Once his back is to me I bring the curved end of the bar hard down on the back of his skull. It stuns him; he’s just about to turn around after me when I club him one, two, three more times. He falls to his knees and I step around to the front and club him three more times on that side. I get a crack going in the skull and hammer at that until his head opens up.

  At last he is still.

  Krystal has both hands to her mouth. I turn to Brandon, hold up the demo bar. “I’m sorry, you wanted this?”

  Brandon looks at the dusty, bloodied form face down in the dirt. “He used to pull the hay wagon for us in the fall when we were little. I made extra money helping him bring in hay when I got older. He was one of the few—he was a decent man.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Brandon. Except you’re going to need something better than this. I know I’m weak, but it shouldn’t have taken me more than a couple of strikes to crease his skull.”