by L. ROY AIKEN
I click the virtual stopwatch. “Let’s see what you got, son.”
Brian already has the girl over his shoulder and is running with her to the truck. The blood pumping from her head soaks his backside when it’s not slapping and splatting along the driveway. He shrugs hard by the truck and the girl’s body flips over his shoulder, clunking into the flatbed. He’s three steps into a sprint back up the driveway when he slips in the gore and bellyflops. His entire front is covered in blood and dirt; he almost looks the part of a rough-and-tumble deader just back from lunch.
Yet he still has 25 seconds to go by the time he gets back to his companion. He’s halfway down the driveway in his truck when his time is up.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, Derek,” Rebecca says. “I’ll call the cleanup crew and get that mess taken care of.”
“I just hope I have enough time for coffee before Evans gets here.”
“There’s a travel mug in the cupboard. Use it.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“I’ve got to get to work. Take care.”
“You, too.” I watch Rebecca walk away, her heels clacking smartly on the driveway around the pump-splatters from the unfortunate girl’s head.
I go into the house. I pull the take-out box from the fridge. The shrimp and the lobster are gone, along with half of one steak. Well, shit. It’s the least I owe her for doing the laundry.
18
Evans is running late. At least I’m able to get some coffee in me. I’m sitting with a cup on the front porch, listening to the flies buzzing over the mess in my driveway when he pulls up.
“Did you get any sleep last night?” I ask, climbing into the Big Yellow Truck.
“I’ll be all right,” he says.
“For the sake of everyone planning on walking away alive today you’d better be.”
“It’s like Mr. Kerch said yesterday. Real quick. In and out. Our job is to make sure these hammerheads we’re wrangling do their jobs. Which, after the example we set last night, shouldn’t be all that hard. By the way, can you tell me something?”
“What?”
“How is it we’re down another man as of this morning?”
“We’re down a lot more than that after last night, I imagine.”
“No!” he says sternly. “I’m talking about what went on after that fugitive got captured. I want you to tell me exactly what happened.”
“The fugitive? You mean that little girl barely older than my own daughter with the gunshot wound on her leg? That barefoot waif who escaped getting eaten alive only to—?”
“I’m not asking about the girl,” he says angrily. “I’m asking what happened to—”
“Evans, I don’t like your tone and I’m not telling you shit!”
Evans keeps his eyes on the road but it’s clear he’s rattled. I just want to keep pushing his buttons until his fat head explodes. He was annoying enough before but for some reason I really fucking hate this stupid, strutting rooster.
It’s one thing to talk to me like I’m the help who has no choice but to suffer for his bad day. But this is my bad day. What happened this morning was fucked up. Worst of all, there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do but turn my head and look away like a common citizen chickenshit who doesn’t want to die either.
I knew better than express outrage in front of Rebecca and her aim with that little .22. Hell, I knew so well I didn’t even feel that outrage until now. Which pisses me off even more. So congratulations, Evans. Your soft Veteran-of-the-Global-Tour-of-DoD-Golf-Courses ass is mine for the flogging until I can make peace with myself for being a pussy in the face of simple mean-ugly bullshit.
After a while, Evans sighs heavily and says, “I asked a simple question.”
“Why don’t you ask Mr. Kerch why he decided to kill his own personal security people?”
“Why don’t you?”
“I already know.”
“You do, huh?”
I look out the window on my side of the truck and pretend to be interested in the scenery. Seriously, I need to snap out of this. I’m getting into some serious mission creep. All I need to do is pack my bags and slip out of here. That’s all.
We’re taking that turn the red Caddy might have taken last night if it hadn’t been so important for the Good Families of Oak Blossom Lane to see how far Kerch would go to enforce obedience. Out from the shelter of the trees I’m reminded of North Nevada Avenue in Colorado Springs where it crosses the railroad tracks from the Old North End. You go from genteel old houses and shade trees to pawn shops and crumbling motor courts in less than 100 yards. Except the houses and lawns are considerably larger here, and the trees are so thick it’s like coming out of a cave. You’d never know what was back there.
A trash-strewn tallgrass lot on either side, the road ends at a commercially zoned four-lane street. Beneath the naked bulb of the sun the cool shade of Oak Blossom Lane seems an unimaginable fantasy. We’re rolling through the Real America, that hellscape of fat blonde weeds pushing through sun-bleached blacktop, of litter nesting in the corners of empty storefronts. Now fully owned—by popular uprising!—by the very people who used to live and (sometimes) work in the flat-roofed buildings squatting along the stained and broken concrete.
Evans drives quickly. Given all the shadows I’m seeing assert themselves as we pass that’s a good thing. I see wet trails along the sidewalks, pale pink globs to septic black stains on the concrete: zombie scat in varying stages of decay.
Evans veers right at a fork and charges up one of the many ridges in this Kansas Smoky Hills country most people mistake for “flat.” You can see the Interstate from here; in turn this Wal-Mart Supercenter is well within sight of the travelers there. I see all of two of them, both walking in the westbound lane. They don’t respond to the sound of our engines.
There have to be others closer by, however. So far, it’s just us chickens up here in the corner of the empty parking lot. Brandon’s brown rustbucket comes up, then a white pickup, then a blue. The red Caddy shows up. Another pickup, lavender with dark purple flames decaled on the side and pimped out low to the asphalt appears. I’m surprised I didn’t hear it bottom out at the foot of the slope.
“Aren’t we supposed to be spread out doing our thing? What’s up with the convention here?”
Evans doesn’t answer. Fine. As long as he’s got the motor running and the air conditioning on full. Other vehicles pull in, but the answer to my question drives up soon enough. Kerch’s black Luxury Tank, foreign made and worth three times the one I drove to death in Kansas City, pulls to the center.
Rebecca steps out to open the door for the boss. Kerch comes out and motions for everyone else to do the same. As we do so Kerch walks over to where we are. “Let’s get up there in the flatbed, all right?” he says, clapping us on either shoulder.
Evans drops the tailgate and helps Kerch and me up. I see Brick walking among the vehicles, pointing at the ones with their engines still running to support the air conditioning. The motors shut off one by one. Only Kerch’s Luxury Tank is allowed to remain running:
“We don’t have a lot of time, so I’ll make this quick. Last night, this crew—all of you here—killed 986 total confirmed walkers. Nine hundred eighty-six. If we can pull that number every day for forty-nine more days straight we can own this city free and clear! We can move some people into the power plant and look at getting it running again. You could be in your own houses before it starts getting cold. Would you like that?”
“Oh hell yeah!” someone hollers, and the crowd laughs.
“Every former citizen you take out is one closer to comfort and freedom. Some of you saw what they did last night. Every bit as ugly as it was tragic! You know Mr. Evans’ boy Daniel got swarmed.”
A low murmuring animates the crowd. I look at Evans. By this point I imagine he’s too tired and drained to show any emotion. I have to give him credit for not waving his bloody shirt at me, so to speak.
“
I’m taking Mr. Evans home where he’s gonna take some time, get some sleep.”
“Sir,” Evans begins. “I don’t—”
“No, no,” says Kerch. “I need you to take it easy for a spell, get some rest. It’s time for Mr. Derek Grace to step up to the plate.” Kerch claps me on the shoulder. “You’re looking fresh, Mr. Grace. You ready to get dirty?”
“Not if I can help it,” I say. The crowd laughs. I pat the handles of my panga and my hammer. “These, on the other hand….”
“They’ll get a workout, I’m sure! You’re all going to get a workout! But we know how to cull their herd, now, don’t we? Three hundred to the fields where we cut them down one by one, and six hundred here on the outside of town. In the woods, and in the dark! We lost Daniel Evans, Tyler McCracken and Jared Ledbetter. Three good men. Let’s honor their memory, see to it they didn’t die for nothing.
“I want you to all mind Mr. Grace here and hit our target areas. Let’s get the stuff on our shopping lists—nothing more!—so we can get the hell out, restock our community supplies, and scrub another thousand biters from our city. All right?”
“Yeah!”
“All right, then. The quicker we can get this over with, the quicker we can get to that barbecue at the high school. Good luck!”
Everyone turns to go to their vehicles while the group leaders appear at the back of the Big Yellow Truck to ask the obvious question, as voiced by a Latino man whose natural expression appears to be one of perpetual worried urgency: “How do we coordinate with this Mr. Grace?”
I take out my phone and find my number in the menu. I kneel down by the side to get level with the man’s face and show him the number. “Pass it on,” I say. “If I can get your number I’d like to put your name with it so I’ll know who’s calling right away.”
I hear Evans and Kerch walk to the tailgate and jump down. I hand my phone to the gentleman I now know as “Gitmo” (short for “Gutiérrez”). He’ll put the others numbers in for me—I would rather have introduced myself briefly to each of the squad leaders by way of getting their numbers but I need to know what the fuck I’m doing here even worse.
“Gentlemen!” I say loudly, jumping from the truck.
Kerch doesn’t indicate he’s heard me. Rebecca is already out and holding the door for him. Evans turns. He’s holding a set of keys up for me. As I take them, he says: “To give you an idea of how easy your job is I expect this truck back with no blood or damage on it. While your crew is loading up here you’ll wait for calls from the other squad leaders to inform you when they’re done.
“Now, they won’t need your permission to drive to the estate when they’re done. All they need to do is check in. If you don’t hear from the others in a reasonable time frame you call the other squad leaders and I’ll leave it to your discretion whether you’ll organize a rescue and who you’ll take with you to do it. If you decide to do it, that is. Were you ever military?”
“Nope. But I get the principle of bringing everyone I can home. By ‘estate,’ you mean Mr. Kerch’s house, right?”
“Right. You’ll be here at the Wal-Mart. Gitmo’s taking on the liquor store, Brick is raiding the sporting goods place in the mall, Jake and Brandon are coordinating the supermarket. The people you really need to be concerned about, though, are the herders.”
“Herders?”
“You’re all working in a relatively small area. Billy, Russ, and Darnell will be drawing the citizens away while you work. Of course, three minutes is just a guideline. If you think you can clear out everything in those freezers and get away, do it. Those are the priority for you and the supermarket crew. Mr. Kerch has a walk-in freezer at the estate. If we can get—”
A horn honks. It’s the SUV.
“I’ve got to go,” says Evans. “Text me if you have any questions.”
“Sure,” I say, but he’s already walking away.
I stand looking around at the people buzzing about in the parking lot. Some are grouping for a few quick words before driving off. I hear the roar and chuff of engines turning over. Some are already pulling away.
It took years and this one very long week but it looks like I’m back in management again. I’ve even got the Big Yellow Truck. I think of what Evans said about fattening hogs.
What the hell. I’ve got shopping to do.
19
Gitmo brings me my phone. “I’ll need a little more time. The liquor store is a few blocks over and they’ve got it barred up seven ways to Sunday. Give me a call if you don’t hear from me in 45 minutes. Everyone else should be done in about half an hour. You might want to take longer here, yourself.”
“Yeah, we probably do,” I say, and so much for that in and out in a minute bullshit. I figured as much, especially when it comes to all this frozen meat. Unless there are herds of deer and other wildlife roaming these Kansas fields that I don’t know about, meat will be hard to come by for a while. It’s this or canned food from here on out.
Gitmo and his crew are the last to pull away. It’s just me and Big Yellow, a white pickup truck, and the lavender lowrider truck with the purple flames on the side. My crew includes the tall, scowly-faced Goth kid from dinner last night with the katana at his back. A shorter, compact young man with long, stringy blonde hair squeezed beneath a trilby hat carries a crossbow at his back. I almost miss the little girl between them—actually a very small young woman with her breasts mashed together beneath her too-tight black blouse in case you mistake her age; she’s got a machete on her belt. The closest I’ve got to a normal looking kid wears a Kansas City Chiefs jersey and matching Snapback hat.
“That’s expensive gear to be wearing on what’s eventually turning into a bug hunt,” I tell him.
“These are all the clothes I got, man!”
“I’ve got to pick up some threads of my own. You wanna come with?”
“Shit, man!”
“What?”
“No offense, man,” he says grinning, “but I would never shop here!”
“Suit yourself.”
“A humble leader who walks with the peasants!” smirks the Goth kid, waving his sword about his head in short loops. “He can take on three citizens at once!”
“So let’s hear your mighty saga, then.”
The kid hisses and turns away from me. The stringy-haired man in the trilby shrugs. “He was actually pretty good last night. Just so you know, Mr. Kerch’s comment about seeing you take on three at once sounded pretty silly to the professionals.”
“The professionals?”
“Hey, man, it’s serious business! You heard what the man said about last night! We were taking on a lot more than three at once to rack up that score!”
“All right, then, so what are we doing here?”
“We gotta get all the frozen stuff out of the freezers before it’s all thawed out. So we back up the trucks, I reckon.”
“Out front? That makes no sense. We need to be closer to where the freezers actually are.”
“You the bossman,” he says.
“Is this your first time doing this?”
“Individual runs. Not coordidnated-like.”
“Great. Let’s get these trucks over to the loading dock on the grocery side. You’ve got gear to break locks with, right?”
“Well, duh!”
“Let’s get going, then!”
Trilby hat gets into the white truck with the guy in the Chiefs hat, who drives the white truck over. The lavender lowrider belongs to Russ, one of the herders. “Shit, I don’t even know why they want us out here,” he says. “We cleaned ‘em out of here real good last night.”
“You heard the man. He wants another thousand gone today, another thousand tomorrow, and another thousand the day after that. We gotta clear ‘em all out, no way around it.”
“I saw what happened to Evans’ boy yesterday. They pulled him through the busted window. He was squirtin’ blood all over where he was cut up and those things had their mouths open li
ke they were catchin’ rain. Goddamn, I can’t believe these were people once!”
“I dunno. They make perfect sense to me.”
“Shit, you may be right,” he says, starting his little truck. “Like my boy Marcus used to say, ‘Humanity two-point-motherfuckin’-Oh!’ People minus the polite civilized bullshit. They just step right up and bite your fucking face off.” Russ puts his truck in gear. “Take care, man.” He drives off.
I climb into the Big Yellow Truck. “Hi,” says Krystal from the passenger seat.
“What? Jesus! I take it you rode over with Brandon?”
“You knew we were going to be here! I didn’t expect them to put you in charge so early, though. So sad what happened to Mr. Evans’ boy!
“Yeah. Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but what are you doing here?”
“Someone’s gotta look out for you! You don’t know these people!”
“I’m getting an idea.”
“Besides, they didn’t leave you nearly enough people to clean out that freezer. I’m pretty strong, you know!”
“All right, then. Welcome aboard.”
We drive to the back. I’m almost relieved to see the two deaders coming in the other side of the parking lot. I know we’re not completely alone out here. It’s just a matter of waiting for the party to realize the food trucks (so to speak) have pulled up.
The man walks unsteadily, as if drunk. He sways from side to side, his weight on one leg, then the other. He toddles laboriously behind the thin, intense-looking woman who is hobbled only by the broken stiletto heel on one shoe. She makes a loping, up-down motion as she staggers along, not as awkward as the man following her, but with grim, I-will-have-this purpose. The gore is dried thick and stiff down her power-suit ensemble, with a glistening fresh sheen adding another layer to the man-sized scab accessorizing her white blouse and navy-blue skirt. Her sloppy seconds cake the pastel yellow button-down shirt of her wobbly companion.
I’m wondering whether to back the truck in first or jump out and address this now when the Goth kid comes out with his katana. I stop the truck to let him cross the lot towards the two. He draws his blade from the scabbard along his back, makes a show of whooshing it around over his head.
