by L. ROY AIKEN
I laugh. We crest a ridge and the house looms larger before us. A solid granite monstrosity from the days when people knew how to build proper estates.
“I can’t believe you find this funny,” Evans says.
“I can’t believe you think this is unusual. You just saw how the royal sausage gets made, and you refuse to believe the evidence of your own eyes.”
“What are you talking about?” he says angrily.
“You’ve made it quite plain you’re incapable of believing the truth of how power is acquired. I’m not wasting time explaining the facts of life to you. That said, I appreciate learning this detail. I’d love to know the full backstory.”
“All anyone knows is this entire family disappeared! They were here, then they were gone!”
“One man suffering death by misadventure is one thing. An entire family, though, vanished without a trace?” I shake my head. “Even in the absence of law and order, that kind of stunt takes a lot of pull. An old family, too….”
“Just don’t make them tell me to shoot you,” Evans says.
“Lighten up, Evans. No one’s making anyone do anything they don’t already want to.”
We ascend the ridge to the large circular parking area. We take what’s apparently a reserved space for Evans around a tall, spurting fountain. It’s a majestic piece of work, reminiscent of the one at the hotel last week. Except this one is three times as large and made of real polished stone, not molded concrete.
I keep close to Evans’ back, avoiding eye contact with the others walking across the plaza. A large black man in a suit, sunglasses, and a Bluetooth in his ear gestures us to move towards the rear of the estate. We follow a white pea-gravel trail around the side of the massive stone house, an impossibly green, impossibly uniform lawn to our left, a wooded park to our right, the thick storybook trees shading the path.
I catch the whiff of cooking meat. The sounds of people talking increase with our approach. I realize you can’t mime a barbecue but if the trees surrounding the property mute the sound, they still won’t entirely blunt the smell of the meat. For all our sakes I hope Kerch has some people watching his perimeter.
At the end of the house we circle around to take the steps up to the wide stone balcony overlooking the back lawn. I stop to look at the revelers. They’re young, though the orangey, leathery-skinned wannbe-young are also represented. Some dance to the DJ, others stand and mingle, talking over their drinks. Fans blow across huge blocks of ice to cool them as they pick at plates of shrimp and roast beef and God knows what else as the world dies screaming.
“I hope to God you don’t envy those people,” says Evans. “You ever hear the saying, ‘Fattening hogs ain’t in luck?’”
“’Be careful when you’re gettin’ all you want. Fattenin’ hogs ain’t in luck!’ Yes, the down-home wisdom of ex-slave Uncle Remus. As for how that relates to shiny happy people who want for nothing but more beats per minute and a hit of Ecstasy, I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Evans is once again mortified into silence. Still, as we approach the steps and begin climbing I get the feeling he knows something. He just doesn’t know how to tell me because he can’t even explain it to himself.
Still, he’s still a good guy to know. The big black guy we pass at the foot of the steps doesn’t even glance at me as I pass; he knows I’m with Evans. “This is a private area,” he says in deep bass voice to the people coming up behind me.
“Look at him!” I hear Kerch saying just before I reach balcony level.
“He’s not liking this at all!”
“I’m sure he’ll like it just fine when he realizes we got it covered. Today, anyway.”
I look over Evans shoulder. Sure enough, there’s Kerch wearing his white Stetson like a crown on top of his long, toothy head. A squat, somewhat stooped gentleman wearing tinted bifocals stands next to Kerch.
“Doing quite well for a man with cracked ribs,” the stooped gentleman says. “Come on, let’s have a look at you. By the way, I’m Dr. Hearn.” He holds out his hand as I follow him into the main house. I turn and look at Kerch, who smiles and waves. Apparently I’m meant to do this.
We pass through a pickup area/lounge with a window in the wall for the kitchen. We keep walking until we come to a study larger than my own master bedroom back home. Shelves and shelves of books circle the walls to the high domed ceiling.
Dr. Hearn has me strip to my boxers. He feels around my rib cage. “They said your ribs were cracked.”
“That’s what I was told. I’ve made a point of not testing the theory.”
“For all I know I might see a hairline fracture somewhere in an X-ray but near as I can tell they’re just badly bruised. Or, rather, they were badly bruised. You seem to be on the mend. You’ve apparently lost weight, but it was weight you could stand to lose. You’d make a nutritious meal.”
“What?”
“The bacteria reanimating the dead can only process proteins. They pass fat as waste.”
“Oh.”
“It’s not something most people are around long enough to see. You have to have done enough time in the field to see this.”
“There was this middle-aged guy in blue silk pajamas staggering along down the street in Kansas City. Something was falling out his pants leg. It didn’t look like normal…feces.”
Dr. Hearn seizes my arm. “Describe it!”
Yeah, I see where Hannah gets her heebie-jeebies about this guy: “Pale yellow, with brighter spots of yellow, shot through with red and pink. It seemed to have the lumpy texture of cottage cheese, but more gelatinous. The stench was beyond description.”
Dr. Hearn nods vigorously. “Yes, yes! Your subject had just eaten within six hours! The bacteria have a quicker collective metabolism than living people do, apparently. Of course, as with us, meat proteins break down easier than fat. That’s why when people starve themselves trying to lose weight they lose muscle tone before anything else. In the case of the reanimated, they just pass the fat altogether. They don’t even try to break it down. The bacteria lack the necessary enzymes.”
“Uh, have you been able to…analyze it?”
“The zombie scat? No, I frankly can’t get that close.” He chuckles. “I do understand it’s highly flammable, though. Which makes me wonder about what might happen if a reanimated one swallowed a bone, or something else that would stop him up. Even worse, it could rip an intestine and have all the meat and fat falling into the body cavity. It’s bound to have happened somewhere already. Most just gulp their flesh down after masticating for two or three bites.”
“You’ve gathered quite a bit of data in a little over a week.”
“I talked to the senior medical officer with the Army unit that came through on Sunday. He’s the son of a friend of mine from medical school. Good boy. They’re on top of this all the way.”
“An Army unit came through while I was out?”
“You notice they don’t have any problems at the high school. Or on Oak Blossom Lane. They were here maybe 90 minutes but they cleared quite a bit of space for us. Anyway, if you see any unnaturally bloated looking specimens would you please send me pictures? I can put my e-mail address into your phone.”
“I don’t have a data plan.”
“Sure you do. You work here, you’ve got data.”
“Oh. Good to know.” I hand him my phone.
“Any other issues you’d like to talk about?” he asks as he thumbs his information into the slide-out keyboard.
“No. Just grateful nothing’s really broken.”
“Well, I think you’re good for the grand expedition tomorrow. Just pace yourself, take it easy.”
“Trust me, I’d sit it out altogether if I could. I need underwear, though.”
He smiles, hands me my phone. “Come, let’s tell Emory the good news. I have to get home and rest up. I expect I’ll be plenty busy tomorrow.”
Emory is standing just outside the door as we
leave the study. Dr. Hearn nods and his grin fills the room end to end. “I take it he can handle swinging at things with his arms?”
“He should be okay for a quick run.”
“Quick is how we’re doing this,” Emory says, nodding at me. “We get in there, grab everything we can find and carry in two minutes, and leave in three. These things mob up fast. We’re gonna be faster. Anyway, thanks, Clyde! I’ll stop by after lunch tomorrow with some liquid encouragement for ya.”
“You have a detail going to the liquor store?”
Emory’s grin widens. “After tonight, I don’t see any way around it!”
“All right, Em. I’ll be looking for you, then.” Dr. Hearn turns and walks through the front of the house to show himself out.
I turn to Emory. “I appreciate the professional visit.”
“He would have seen you earlier but he had his hands full, as you can imagine. Not a young guy. We need to find some doctors in town, let ‘em know we have a safe place for ‘em to live and work. Speaking of safe, Clyde and I were talking about you coming up. We were impressed how you were assessing the security and finding it wanting.”
“This is why I don’t play poker.”
Emory laughs. “Well, just so you know, we’ve got people in the woods and on the other side of the golf course. If they see any of the former citizens looking too interested, they sneak up on ‘em and take ‘em out. We got people taking phone calls from the front. If it sounds like the former citizens are mobbing up we’ll shut it down and take them out as they come through the woods.”
“I stand corrected.”
Emory slaps me hard on the back. “You’re smart! There’s a future for smart people here, just so ya know!”
“Does that future include a frosty-cold pale ale?”
“Oh, no! That’s the here and now! By the way, you hungry?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“How do you like your steak? We got some shrimp to go with that, too!”
“Medium rare, and hell yeah on the shrimp.”
Evans wasn’t lying; these are frosted mugs fit for Norse gods. Now this is how you do carrots, I think as I carve into my perfectly medium-rare steak, careful not to shove my mounds of fries and jumbo shrimp off of my plate. Emory Kerch even has lobster brought out, and sees to it I get a fat claw, “For what I saw this man do today right in the middle of the street. Three at once!”
I hoist my mug to the assembled. I realize I’m eating among other would-be monster slayers and they don’t appreciate the attention the alpha dog is showing me. These folks strike me as people who have been waiting for the world to go to shit for a long, long time. And why not? There weren’t many opportunities to shine when things were “normal.”
Kerch apparently wasted no time finding people who would approach a hungry “former citizen” for the pleasures of cracking its skull, stabbing its eye, making a once functional human fall to the ground like a pile of dirty laundry. Given the looks I’m getting I wonder if I’m being set up.
Or maybe we’re all being set up. A skinny Goth kid, with a line of rings on one nostril and the whitest skin I’ve ever seen on a white person glowers at me in a way I’m guessing is supposed to be menacing. There’s another barely-legal-to-drink boy in a gray wife-beater who looks over from time to time, but is otherwise pretending not to acknowledge my presence. A petite blonde girl with olive skin who stares at me when she thinks I’m not looking.
All at once the three get up and leave their places. “Dinner break’s up,” says the older man next to me.
“Oh.”
“So how you liking it so far?”
“The food’s good. The beer’s better than I hoped for. Course, it’s been a while.”
“You ready to be in charge of that crew?”
“What crew?”
A hand claps down on my shoulder. It’s Emory Kerch. “Come on, George, you know I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet!”
“He’s been here nearly a week!” says George.
“Most of it unconscious. It’s been a busy week here. Anyway!” Kerch claps his hand on my shoulder. “You about done? Just wanted to take you away real quick.”
“Can I bring my beer?”
“Well, hell, yeah! I was thinking of taking our meeting at the bar!”
“By God, then lead the way, good sir!”
“Wooo!” crows Kerch. “You gonna be so much more fun to take meetings with than Evans! Let’s go!”
I walk with Kerch away from the table and force myself to dismiss the idea of all that steak, shrimp and lobster going to waste. Too bad for all the people in their hiding places all over the world, struggling with that last can of beets no one wanted a week ago….
The bar is beyond the room leading to the balcony, built around the kitchen. A smiling, buxom lady in a black tube dress steps forward to wait on us. “See, here’s the thing,” Kerch says as we settle into our seats. “I think you could clear out the town.”
“How many lived here before the Final Flu?”
“Maybe fifty-thousand. It’s a lot, I know. But if I could get enough people trained to fight like you, we could get it finished before the end of the summer. We could have a chance to live! The ones walking the freeway, we’d only take on for exercise. Just so long as we can clear the city, and make it safe for cattle in the country. We can build an old-fashioned city-state here. You know that’s the future, right?”
“You know more about this that I do. I’m just looking for some clean underwear.”
“See, maybe you think that’s funny, but I call it practical! Practical thinking is the difference between just surviving and thriving. You like all this, right?”
“What’s not to like?”
“That’s just it. If we can keep the supply of meat and whatever coming until we get a grip on raising our own—without people trying to eat the steak right off the hoof!”
“What do you need me to do?”
“Just ride with Evans tomorrow. He normally wrangles our dead-people fighters, but I think you’re a far better example. You’ll get out there and do it with them! You know how these officer types are. Hell, they get flustered over a paper jam! You’re more the senior enlisted mentality. Were you in the military?”
“No, but I’ve spent a lot of time working with them.”
“Coulda fooled me. You move like a man with training!”
“Nope. Just an older guy who knows he’s only got so many moves before he wears out.”
“Not into a bunch of show-offy drama, like some of these kids we’re working with. They watch some movies, read some comic books, and they think they’re King Shit out there. You can’t tell ‘em anything!”
“Well, I expect ‘market forces’ to take care of them in short order.”
“Market forces! The way the wannabe badasses of business used to talk. Especially when they wanted to absolve themselves of responsibility for a bad decision.”
“Failing to acknowledge that they themselves were a ‘market force,’” I say, finishing the thought for him.
“That’s exactly what I used to tell these punks! I’d tell ‘em, You screw me over and the biggest goddamn market force you ever saw is comin’ down on you!”
I nod. Point taken. “So, ride along with Evans. See what he does. Anything else?”
“Well, Clyde—that is, Dr. Hearn—was concerned you’d overdo it here.”
“Yeah, I should get my rest.”
“This is all shutting down before nightfall. Evans and the people out there already got their hands full taking out the curious. Hell, I oughta shut it down, now! Anyway, Denise here is getting you a growler to go! Oughta help you get to sleep.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh, and don’t forget this!” Another attractive young blonde rocking a tight black dress and cleavage appears with a clam-shell carry-out box. She doesn’t smile, though. Her face is hard, all business. “I can tell you’re a man who hates waste,” says Kerch. �
�I had ‘em throw a couple more steaks in there for you. A man needs all the red meat he can eat!”
“You know it. I’ll drop a couple of more zombies for you just for that.”
“That’s the spirit. Rebecca here’ll drive you home.”
I slide down from the bar stool. “Thanks, again, Emory.”
“Nothin’ to it. You gonna be ready to roll by seven tomorrow?”
“That was my next question. And, yes.”
“All right! We’ll see ya then!”
I take my growler from the bar and follow Rebecca out through the house to the front entrance. She carries my take-home clamshell, her hand holding it up just so as if it were the Christmas goose. As if by magic a chauffeur’s cap appears in her free hand. She sets it atop her perfect hair as we step outside. This lady is so fluid and professional in her movement that walking behind her makes me stand that much straighter.
And there are eyes upon us as we descend the palatial stairs from the front entrance, towards the black SUV closest to the door. Yes, we’re stepping down towards the Big Man’s personal conveyance, but if there’s any envy in the glances, it’s easily missed. There’s an urgency to these dozen or so couples flooding out to their vehicles parked around the fountain and along the lane.
Something’s going on and we’re being sent away. As close as Rebecca and I are to our vehicle the others have already started their cars and are driving as fast as they dare away up the dual-rutted road. Like frightened animals before the stampede.
16
Everyone else is in an obvious hurry but Rebecca doesn’t waste a move. Rebecca unlocks the SUV with the remote and opens the rear door for me to climb in. She waits for me to straighten my legs and settle in with the growler jug before closing the door and walking around to the driver’s side.
She’s climbing in when a deep, nearly subsonic THOOOM! nearly blows the door back. Rebecca puts the take-out box on the passenger seat and closes the door. Our ears are spared the brunt of the now-pulsing bass, but we can still feel it in the soundproofed interior of Kerch’s Luxury Tank. Rebecca turns the ignition, pulls the shifter into gear. We swing around the vast fountain and up the long trail to the main road. I turn to look behind us. One other car is following us out. Indeed, all the cars parked around the fountain and in front of the house are now gone.
