by L. ROY AIKEN
We have to draw this new flow of undead off. I slow down. Mr. Paulson does likewise; he’s already a few car-lengths back. From what I see in the side-view mirror the masses are turning towards us. But we have to keep them with us. There are way too many former citizens for the wide avenue to contain. A few will find themselves pushed uphill into the yards and driveways by simple physics, where they will find the windows with the smell of living flesh behind them. They will find that the glass breaks easily beneath their numb fists….
“A little help, Marta?” My left arm is killing me.
She powers down her window and braces her spear. “This ain’t as easy as it looks—oh!” The spear recoils with the force employed to crush a fat woman’s face.
We’re coming out of the trees. The dead are very few and far between in the bright sunlight. The boys on the truck are doing their job, though. The dead are following them into the blistering early summer Kansas sun. We might very well be winning.
“Turn left when you get down to the intersection,” says Marta.
“Yes, ma’am.”
We’re free and clear in the punishing sunshine. We pull our weapons back inside the cab and wave at Mr. Paulson in the fire truck behind us. He leans on the air horn. The ahhhhnnnnnn! of the walkers in response makes Marta and me laugh.
I make the left and pull away towards the heart of Natalia. I slow, then stop. In my side view mirror I see the fire truck stopped, as if waiting for traffic at the turn. But the only traffic to speak of are the platoons of dead piling up behind him. And given the way they’re clustering it’s apparent the front line has finally caught up to the morsels duct-taped to the rear of the fire truck.
“No!” cries Marta.
Meanwhile, Mr. Paulson composes a text on his phone. Like an ordinary jerk in ordinary traffic. And that’s an ordinary crowd gathered behind the big red lunch wagon, jostling for a taste of what’s on the counter….
“Let’s just get out of here!” says Marta.
The air horn blatts as we pull away into town.
The most obvious thing we see on the way in isn’t the lurkers detaching themselves from the shadows to follow our vibrations as we go by. “You sure we want to be driving into this?” I say as we approach the nearest fat column of smoke over Natalia. “We could be on the Interstate now and hauling ass. In fact, I’ll be that’s where Paulson leads his herd off to. I can only hope he doesn’t point them west.”
“Turn right,” she says.
The cloud of smoke is blocking the sun. We drive on through a sickly brown light, making the squat little clapboard houses in this neighborhood look even uglier than they are where they squat on flat, packed brown dirt. The fire is very close.
The little houses, each and every one of them, have sine-wave patterns of holes across them. All the way across them. High caliber rounds that pierced the walls, maybe all the way through the backs of the houses.
“Stop here.”
We pull up in front of a house, one with a small cyclone fence with a gate at the front walk. “Wait,” she says, and jumps out of the truck.
She’s no sooner inside the door than I’m surrounded by some hard-faced cholos pointing their assorted pistols at me. I raise my hands. The door is opened and I’m yanked out by the sleeve.
“Take it easy with him!” I hear as I stumble to the asphalt. “He’s a cold-blooded killer, this one!”
Amid ugly laughter I push myself up from the street and look up into the hard brown eyes of Gitmo.
22
Hands reach under my arms and yank me to my feet. I feel them groping for my panga, hammer and pistol. My fists go out, catching one of Gitmo’s people alongside his head. I lash out and the second one drops.
A third comes rushing out and my panga is out. I’m about to relieve someone of his gun fast and sloppy for the second time this morning when Gitmo shouts, “Alto!”
I can sense people backing down from 20 feet away. If they didn’t swarm me they could have dropped me. As I’d rather be shot than suffer any number of horrors sure to happen should anyone lay hands on me, I raise my panga. Bring on that final hail of bullets. I’m past sick of this.
“That’s enough! Mr. Dead Silencer, you can keep your weapons! So long as you keep your hands to yourself.”
“What about my food?” I nod towards the crew unloading the Tupperware stacks from the Big Yellow Truck.
“If Marta told you any of that was for you she lied. This was lunch for the crew. We’ve had a busy morning.”
“Great,” I say. I put my panga back on my belt and begin brushing myself off under the watchful eyes of the gunmen.
“Ah, but you’ve been busy, too! Marta told me all about it!” Gitmo calls out to everyone around him. “Hermanos! I heard you laughing when I told you this man is a killer. Remember those silly white boys who couldn’t hold their cerveza?” He reaches up to clap me on the shoulder and pull me close: “This man you see here personally took out the stupid filth that was Brandon and threw him to the muertos. Drove down into the thick of them and threw him into their midst!” Gitmo tugs at me with his arm. “Tell me, my friend, what happened to the others?”
“Dead.”
“Shot?”
“A couple got lucky.”
“Lucky. Huh. Did they start the fires?”
“They did.”
“Of course! I sent them to you in a fire truck! All you had to do was get the fire truck away from them. And el jefe Paulson will organize everyone to put it out. You see what I did there? I, too, appreciate the finer things. Especially fine homes! Marta is just a silly puta, she can’t understand. A man who would be king should live like one!”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I just like a nice house in the shade. As it is, I wasn’t planning on staying.”
Gitmo laughs. “Yes, yes! Just a man trying to get back to his family! Brought down by spike strips! Set up to take the fall for that pendejo Evans while that coward and his master hunkered down in their castle! You see, he knew. Kerch knew! He knew there would be blowback from killing DeShaun and Tavon—you know, Amos and Andy?—but what he didn’t count on was how much bite el jefe Paulson still has. My people have known that mean old police dog for many, many years. You don’t even think of threatening someone like that unless you’ve already killed him. That stunt Kerch pulled with the parade, he opened up the war on a whole new front, know what I’m sayin’?”
“I’ve got an idea.”
“You’re lucky he didn’t kill you for being associated with Kerch! Of course, it’s obvious you were set up. You don’t want anything to do with this. You’re just trying to get home. El Silenciador de los Muertos, I respect that!”
Gitmo turns to speak to the others. “For that matter—everyone, listen!—I also respect how you got Marta and those others out of Wal-Mart. We cut into that mob for you. Did you know that? We cut that mob to one hundred from one thousand! Even then we weren’t sure you would make it but you pulled through for everybody. That was brave. You’re braver than any other white man in this sad little village!
“But for some, that is not an excuse. These are all I know of my people from my old barrio. There are others.”
“Did the Flu hit you guys that badly here?” I say.
“The flu?” Gitmo’s face changes for the uglier. “The flu?”
“All right, apparently I missed some stuff when I was out….”
“Yes!” Gitmo nods vigorously. “Yes! You were out! But did you not see or hear anything while you were in Kansas City? I got word from my people there were black ops going on all over!”
“Gitmo, I got a feeling I’m going to regret the answer, but what the hell happened while I was out?”
“Not even a week ago. Sunday. You crashed Saturday. Okay, okay…you never seen anything like it. Not in this country. I imagine anyone or anything on the road either got out of the way or they got run over. A mile-thick wall of men and materiel rolling west across all lanes of the Inters
tate. Hummers and tanks. Blackhawks in the air. Behind them were the fuel trucks. Lots of fuel trucks, one tanker after another. Then more Hummers and tanks. You know there’s a lot of ‘em there at Fort Riley outside of Topeka. I’m still trying to figure out how they found all the personnel to move all that hardware. I noticed not everyone driving was in uniform. In fact, most of them weren’t, come to think of it.
“No, they had all their dogfaces out on the perimeter. And they decided to stop here. And you know, it’s the strangest thing. You know how blacks and Latinos are generally overrepresented the enlisted ranks, right? These grunts were white to a man. To a man! No women. People thought, We are saved! Here comes the U.S. Army! But me and everyone else who ever served, we knew right away these aren’t the same kind of people we served with.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, you know what happens next! At first people thought, What are they doing? You see them running from building to building. So maybe they’re going to try and take out the muertos, right? They’re shooting every one they see, we figure, yes, good!
“No. They are also surrounding all exits. They are shooting tear gas canisters through the windows. The kind the cops like. The kind that sets the room on fire. Women and children are the first to run out the door. And you know what’s really messed up about that, Mr. Grace?”
“Aside from shooting the women and children?”
“Everyone who saw this, they say they let the first ones out the door run for a bit. They led them so they could draw more out before they started mowing them down. One line of fire across the adults’ faces, another across the children’s! They had people assigned! And they did the same in every apartment building, every house. They trained for this, Mr. Grace. They trained for this!”
“I was kind of in a bubble in Kansas City. I heard gunfire when the Flu victims started coming back, but I figured that was…well, natural.” Of course, being a white guy with the slightest idea what’s going on is liable to make me complicit in the eyes of seriously pissed off people looking for someone to hurt. Honestly, though, I wasn’t sure what that gunfire was about at the time. Tanner said it was because some black families were resistant to giving up their dead. I could kick myself now for not appreciating the obvious absurdity of this notion when he told me this. Of course, things were getting so weird so fast it was just one more weirdness among legions.
I’m also having trouble with the idea of the U.S. military working to ethnically scrub the cities and towns while a more universal apocalypse was already in progress. That’s some boss-level multitasking. Not something I’d credit any government agency with, let alone the Army. And as Gitmo asks, where the hell did they get the personnel when one person out of every three was out with the Final Flu?
Fortunately, Gitmo seems satisfied with my reaction. “Yes. Yes, we are all guilty of living in the bubble. We live our lives, just trying to pay our bills, you know? Other men you never see are pulling strings, and they pit us against each other, brown versus white, man against woman, gay and straight, while they sit back and laugh. I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Grace. I look at the muertos and I realize even they are victims. They were once people, our people! But whoever came up with the Final Flu denies us even the peace of the grave! And, as always, turns us against each other!”
This from the man who got a bunch of white kids drunk and sent them off to get killed by their social betters. “All right, then,” I say carefully. “What do we do now? You realize we can’t hang around here.”
“No,” says Gitmo, “we can’t. I tell you, I understand one more thing Kerch did not. You can’t take on thirty to fifty thousand of the dead with a few dozen people. Not at a hundred per day, and sure as hell not at a thousand a day! We can run and cull herds here and there, sure, but you are always losing people doing this. Always! There are simply too many! We will run out of people before you put all the muertos down. This all belongs to them at last. All of it!”
“So what do you need from me? You know I don’t mean harm or disrespect. I just want to be on my way.”
“So do we, Mr. Grace! So do we! We need your help to—wait.” Gitmo holds up a hand for everyone to be quiet.
Holy shit, I hear it, too.
Gitmo says, “Did you see which way el jefe Paulson was turning we he came out of Oak Blossom Lane?”
“No. But it is funny how he waited to make his move after we’d made our first turn out of sight.”
“We gotta get outta here!”
“It’s what I’ve been trying to do all along!”
“We need a fighter to help us get our families out!”
“Oh, goddamn it. Explain it to me on the way!”
We run to the Big Yellow Truck. Gitmo and his right hand man slide in the passenger side. These are smaller men, thank God, so it’s not so crowded.
The flatbed thumps and rocks as half a dozen young Latinos jump in. “Don’t you guys have your own cars and stuff?” I ask.
“We keep a lower profile if we don’t drive so much. Everybody sneaks around like ninja commandos. And again, I tell you, it’s the problem—we need to move houses out of here!”
“Houses?” I start the truck. “Where am I going, by the way?”
“Go straight, take a left at the second light,” says Gitmo. “We got entire families of people—well, not entire, everybody’s lost somebody—but we got little kids, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, grandmothers. They can’t stay here. Nobody can stay in the cities and towns. If the muertos don’t get them, those people in Army BDUs—I can’t call them real Army!—will come back and clear it out all over again.”
“Again? These people haven’t been back, have they?”
“I was talking to my cousin in San Ysidro, in Cali. He says they came through the barrio three times already. That was before I stopped hearing from him.”
I make the left. “Keep going,” says Gitmo.
“By ‘clear it out,’ I guess you mean they got the muertos, too? I can’t get over how empty these streets are.” As far as Dr. Hearn was concerned, that’s what they were here for, but I don’t dare mention that.
“Turn right here. Yes, they took out all the muertos, too. I dunno ‘bout you, man, but it makes me wonder if they couldn‘t have done this in the first place. How hard could it have been? Shoot them as they rise and be done! But you notice at the mass burials how they had these young kids—the real Army, black and Latino and poor white—running the show. They were told there ‘might be trouble’ and nothing more, and when our people started coming back they just freaked out. Meanwhile you had these squads putting down the ghettos, the barrios. Even trailer parks. Section 8 houses. These chingados took class warfare to the next level!”
Up ahead I see two tractor trailers standing nose to nose as they straddle the lane street. Cars of various makes and models stand parked in front of the trailers and various heavy items put in front of the cars—an old clothes dryer, a refrigerator, etc.—against the hungrier dead who would crawl under those. I see a few desiccated corpses on the sidewalk. Funny how the scavengers, even the bugs, avoid human bodies now. “So who set this up?” I ask.
“Building on the work of the Big Red 1, or whoever that was who came through here. We packed in most of the stuff at the bottom. They got it like this on the other side, too. It’s just a channel they’ve worked out. I’m thinking they might close it off soon and burn them out, like with that fire they got going now, but there’s still a lot out there in town walking around. Forty-nine thousand people might not make a big city, but it’s still a lot of people. They’re lucky if they got half of that in the street on the other side.”
And half of them would still be too much, I think. I take a right and drive on, giant abandoned warehouses to my left, Section 8 projects to my right. Three blocks later: “Stop here,” says Gitmo.
We stop in front of a five-story building with wide black streaks tapering out of the first-story windows. It looks burned out and uninhabitab
le. Gitmo has his phone out. “One of the boys should have called ahead. They all understand we have to move today.”
“That fire to the east will get you if the dead don’t.” I look over the building. “You got your people living here?”
“They burned it once,” Gitmo says, phone to his ear. “Figure they won’t come back. Besides, it’s only bad on the first floor and we don’t have—hola!”
Gitmo speaks rapid-fire Spanish into his phone. He begins to ease his way out of the truck as he talks. When he and his henchman are out, I lean into the back cab to see what’s left. All the food is gone, along with my crossbow. At least they left my suitcase and clothes, but not before someone opened it and went through it. I put the suitcase up on the back seat, settle everything in as best I can. I had stuff packed in pretty tightly to begin with, though, and I’d have to repack altogether if I’m going to get it.
It’s one thing to take my weapons, my ammo, even my bag of vitamin supplements and over-the-counter meds—but to put your grubby hands all over my clothes? I back out of the truck. I slam the door and lock it with the remote.
“Why you locking that?” Gitmo laughs. “We’re—“
I reach down and grab him by the hair and pull him to me. I’ve got the barrel of my 9mm jammed beneath his chin. “I want my crossbow. I want my ammo. And I want Marta. Now!”
I hear the clicking and sliding of many a firearm around me. “Nice to know you’re all armed to the teeth,” I say loudly. “You know what else I hear? Listen!”
The knocking of the diesel echoes loudly through the streets. The low moaning of the dead is just becoming audible behind it. Paulson has to drive slowly. But he’ll get here soon enough.
