by L. ROY AIKEN
Rebecca glances towards the approaching helicopter. Black, two rotors. A Chinook? My son Jack could tell me if he were here. “I need to get something from your truck,” Rebecca says, her eyes on the helicopter.
“Sure.” She’s already on her way before the syllable leaves my mouth. The sight of her taut, perfectly rounded backside as she climbs up and leans into the cab is a divine gift in a day full of hella-fugly sights.
Rebecca emerges with the flare gun. She’s hanging off the doorframe with one hand when she fires the gun into the air. A hot pink ball of light ascends into the yellowy air. She tosses the gun back into the cab and swings over into the flatbed of the Big Yellow Truck.
The dual-rotor chopper angles towards us, coming in low. Low enough for me to see the man standing in the open door, in all-black battle-rattle, black aviator glasses, black flak helmet, the works. The chopper slows to hover and the wash is ferocious but Rebecca is signing something to him. She indicates the general direction of the women and children and the young men shepherding them. The man nods, signals to the pilot, and the chopper roars off across the city, towards the brown-black columns of smoke towering from the east.
“They’re coming back to get Tracy and his people?”
Rebecca looks at me as if that’s the dumbest thing she’s ever heard. “I scratched off those punks long before I got to you. There’s no one left but a couple of dozen scared women and children and maybe a handful of teenage boys trembling under the SUVs in the northeast lot over there.”
She swings back around from the flatbed to the cab, reaching through the door for the pistol she’d tossed to the seat while reaching for the flare gun. “It’s going to be a while before this thing cools down,” Rebecca says as she emerges with the chrome beast. “A good thing we’re here because I’m tired of carrying this thing on the bike.” Rebecca looks at me. “You know the snipers in the fields left once the mansion got overrun. Kerch called them back as soon as his back lawn started filling up with the dead Brick sent over. You guys could have left out that north road. You’d be halfway home now.”
“Goddamn it!”
“Oh, calm down. You’re not the one who had to race a mountain bike through toxic fumes to catch up! It’s okay, though. I’ll take the liquor truck back, and be a big hero for the Death’s Head bully boys.”
“Back where?”
Rebecca’s eyes flash. “Where I come from. Anyway, I saved these clowns for last. I knew Brick was going to give me trouble. It was worth it for this sweet custom Desert Eagle of his, though.” She runs a finger down the long barrel. “These 14-inch jobs usually only come in black. I’d have loved to found out where he got it but he wouldn’t stop screaming after I fed his dick and balls to a walker. The look on his face, though…oh, it was just precious!”
“Sorry I missed it.”
“Don’t get me wrong. That was one moment in one long stretch of tedium. Like most wannabe super-badasses Brick was surrounded by wall after wall of goons. I had to come up with different ways to kill them just to keep myself focused.”
“Oh.”
“My favorite was their silly little command center. I shot the hands and legs of eight of those fools, then killed the last one with a shot to the heart. Then I locked the door behind me. I got one of their webcams and set up a video stream to go straight to my phone. I’m curious to see how long it took for the one I killed to turn. Of course, the looks on those poor crippled little boys’ faces—mmm! So hot!”
“So the area’s pacified? We can drive around and not get shot at?” I say, looking towards the stormy horizon.
Rebecca’s eyes follow mine and she nods. “That was the mission. Neutralize Brick, Gitmo. Liquidate their soldiers so they don’t fall in with other wannabe warlords, wherever they are.” She smiles as if laughing at a private joke. “Just honest refugees out here now.”
“How about Kerch?”
“First order of business. You thought he fed some dinner guests last night; well, he had some people over for breakfast. In bed, no less. Of course, I’d tied him to it. Getting the guests up through the garage elevator and into the main part of the house, that was the challenging part.”
“Great. Another mattress ruined.”
“They’ll fly in another. We’ll make a training exercise of it for the junior Death’s Head crew. Find a deluxe mattress place and shoot their way in and out for a king-size luxury pillow-top. I might insist on going with them just to piss them off. Funny you should bring that up, though. I thought you liked your ‘patron.’”
“It’s not a matter of like or don’t-like. I’m just trying to get home.”
“Yeah, like you were driving real hard to get there last night.”
“More than you’d know.”
Her Desert Eagle comes up in my face. I try not to blink at the heat still coming off the suppressor. “What do you think I know?” she says.
And all of a sudden it’s very easy not to blink. I can feel the blood slowing down inside of me. Heating up to match that suppressor just an inch from my right eye:
“That’s it, Rebecca. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. And I don’t care. All I know is that I was jumping through hoops long before this all got started. Now I’m hundreds of miles from my home, my wife’s sick and dead, my children are God knows where—and you want me to jump some more? You’d think a man could catch a break after everything collapses under the weight of its own bullshit! Instead I’m being sucked into crap by total strangers who think their drama is the only drama that matters in a whole planet full of people suffering and dying!
“If this is life after the apocalypse, fine. Be the Queen Bitch of this fucking hell! But don’t expect me to beg for my life. I’ve sat across the desk from many a sadistic little HR cunt who wanted to make the big bad old man who reminds them of Daddy squirm.
“So go ahead, pull your trigger! You’re dealing with another kind of trained professional here. One who sees you as nothing more than a stupid-bitter piece of ass who’s really handy with her substitute penis. Fuck me, then. Fuck me good and hard, you sick whore! Do it!”
Her eyes narrow at me beyond the barrel. She’s got the thing right in my eye but I refuse to look at it. Thunder rolls in the distance, a long rumble culminating in little booms like some drunken giant stomping across the uneasy prairie.
As the rumbling fades, Rebecca pulls back her weapon. That ridiculous 14-inch barrel against her shoulder, she says, “It would seem you and I are a lot alike, Mr. Grace.”
“Like hell! When you kill, you’re killing the same man over and over again. I’m killing all kinds of people!”
The corners of her mouth turn up in a joyless smile. “Yet you wouldn’t kill Kara.”
“Kara who?”
“Kara McConnell. The girl from this morning. Who wouldn’t have looked twice at you if she didn’t need someone, anyone, to save her soft, worthless life. You actually felt bad for her!”
“For God’s sake, she was just a child!”
Rebecca laughs bitterly. “Not quite. Certainly not how the Powers That Be saw her and her girlfriends, which is what got Emory Kerch taken out of the picture.”
“So my hatred isn’t pure. Is that it? You’re shaming me for that?”
“Worse.” Rebecca brings the Desert Eagle away from her shoulder. “Mr. Derek Samuel Grace, for the crime of Gross Sentimentality, I, Queen of Hell, hereby condemn you—to live!” She taps me on either shoulder with the barrel, careful not to touch me with the still-hot suppressor.
“So I’m finally free to go?”
“Silence! For the ancillary crime of Giving a Shit, I, Queen of Hell, curse you with success. That you may suffer for it. Which, for the most part, you already are. Therefore I wish you more success. Lots and lots of success!” After tapping me again on the shoulders Rebecca pulls the muzzle back until the suppressor is level with my cheekbone, as if she might do my face like she did Gitmo’s. I hold her stare. Rebecca once again rests
the Eagle on her shoulder.
“Success for me, right now,” I say, “would be to hit the road and never interact with another living human for the rest of my natural life.”
“And that, Mr. Dead Silencer, is the one thing you will fail at. You can’t escape the world.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Rebecca, the world ended about a week ago!”
“Not at all. It was just born.” She smiles coldly. “It’ll take a while to find its feet but believe me, in one more year or so you might wish I had killed you.”
“If it ever comes to that I’ll be happy to handle it myself.”
“You think you’re free because civilization has collapsed and it’s every man for himself. What if I told you this was all deliberate? That everything is going more or less to plan?”
“I’d say it’s a hell of a plan. Sweeping off the game pieces and setting the board on fire.”
“If I tell you anything more I’ll be under orders to kill you. Just know that the reset has been pressed. If the Powers That Be are taking their time reasserting their authority, it’s because they like the idea of the strong and clever culling the weak before they step back in.”
“Huh. Okay. Can I go now?”
“Just one more thing. You’ll want to go by your crash site one last time. Say goodbye.”
“Okay, sure.”
“I mean it. Get back on the road, take a right. It’ll take you straight there. You’ll be close to the exit, too. It’ll just take you a couple of minutes out of your way.”
I look towards the approaching storm front. “All right. I’ll chance it.”
“You’ll be glad you did,” she says, squatting to lay her Desert Eagle flat on the asphalt. “Closure is a powerful thing. Which brings us to this.”
She rises, threads her arms around my neck. I take her in my arms in time for her open mouth to meet mine. Another roll of thunder rumbles and booms in the far distance.
“Want something out of the back before I take off?” Rebecca asks, nodding at the pickup truck with the liquor in it.
“Sure.”
“You’re not going to have time to browse,” she says, picking up her gun. “Just grab a bottle of something. I’ve got to meet those people from the chopper.”
I follow her to the back of the truck, where she unlocks the topper hatch and I reach in to grab a bottle of Tennessee whiskey. I’ve no sooner got the bottle out of the back and closing the hatch when Rebecca has the truck started and in reverse. I step aside and she takes her foot off the brake and rolls back.
“Take care, Derek,” she says from the open window. “Long live the legend of the Dead Silencer!”
“Right. Long live the Queen!”
She has the surgical mask on already so I can’t see her reaction. Just flashing gray eyes and a hand raised farewell as she drives off. I walk quickly back to the Big Yellow Truck. I’ve got all the room in the world to back out now.
Pulling onto the main road through the auto mall I look for signs of the “honest refugees” but wherever they are they’re keeping their heads down. I think of the signals Rebecca flashed to the man in the chopper. The chopper moved on to wherever it was already going so I can’t imagine what that was about.
I drive as fast as I dare down the road. It comes up alongside the Interstate in due time. Still, I wonder why I’m doing this. I’m finally free, right? But there was something in Rebecca’s voice that would be bothering me all night if I don’t get that “closure” she’s talking about.
The fields rise with the corn, fall with the soybeans. Between the smoke and the approaching storm the sun takes an eerie cast. It’s as if it’s evening at—holy shit! The clock on the dash says 1:30. I check my phone. The dash clock is running fast by all of three minutes.
Lord, what a day.
Even at 80 miles an hour it feels like more than a couple of minutes but eventually I come upon the crash site. It’s hard to miss a wrecked airplane. It looks so much smaller than I remember it. I let my foot off the gas and let inertia bring me alongside.
The hatch is open. No sign of our luggage inside. I guess someone got to eat all that lovely bacon I’d stashed away after all. As for the thing catching fire, it looks like someone threw something burning into the cabin on a goof, maybe to try and make it blow up. It scorched a few chairs, blackened the area above the hatch with smoke. Still, whatever the cause of the fire, it didn’t start with the plane.
To see all this, though, I have to avoid the most obvious feature of the wreck, the one that first catches your eye. Other than the open, smoke-stained hatch, the smashed wing with the chunky dried brown splatter of corpse gravy fanning over the tip.
It’s in the cockpit.
Tanner.
He’s hard to recognize; a week’s constant exposure to the sun has baked his skin to a leathery red-brown. Even the polo shirt I remember him wearing is discolored and disfigured by the wheel column in his chest and the blackened heart’s blood that soaked it. He rocks violently back and forth against the column pinning him to his seat as he senses my presence.
I have to climb the berm leading to the Interstate’s eastbound roadbed to get to him. I can see how it was easier to pull me out of the passenger seat than it was to get to Tanner. Still, I’m surprised no one else took him out, especially after he reanimated. I suppose he was part of the tourist attraction bringing potential new workers to Emory Kerch’s plantation.
I’m about to step down into the tilted cockpit when I’m distracted by the sound of a helicopter. It roars over fast, in the general direction of Kerch’s mansion. Coming in from due north. What the hell?
I look down and realize this may have saved my life. Tanner has somehow worked a big enough hole in his chest cavity where he can slip the wheel behind his open rib cage and swing around to the passenger side. If I’d stepped down there he would have had me. Judging by the blood scabbed on his chin I’m guessing this has worked at least once.
Tanner’s arms are flopping and waving blindly across the empty cockpit seat at me. Ordinarily I’d take my panga, eliminate the threat of those grasping hands, and close the deal with the hammer. I can’t bring myself to mutilate this poor son of a bitch, though. I pull my Glock and edge as close as I dare. Rebecca makes it look so easy. Me, I have to take a full minute to get myself situated just so I can get that bullet right where it needs to go. I’ve only got so many of these things.
Christ. All this for someone like Tanner. Still, who’s to say we’d have gotten this far if we’d made it to the Interstate with an intact Luxury Tank? It took something a lot of people don’t have to fly an actual plane based only on simulator experience. Then there was the hard decision he made when that woman held us up on the runway. Hard, cold, and stone necessary. We would never have lifted off in time to clear the horde with her weight on board.
Yeah, I guess I do owe him.
I squeeze the trigger. The slug catches him over one eye. His movements are jerkier, but he isn’t stilled. I have to fire a second round in the vicinity of his mouth to stop him.
Me and my gross sentimentality. I really need to think things over. It’s a world just getting born, all right, and God knows it’s even more unforgiving than the one whose morbidly obese chest it burst out of to get here.
Okay, Tanner’s down. Closure, and all that. Let’s go home.
25
I don’t bother with the exit. I turn the Big Yellow Truck around and angle it up the berm to the roadbed. I scan the white asphalt ahead, glowing brightly in contrast to the indigo darkness on the horizon. Nothing to suggest spike strips.
I’m in the eastbound lanes pointed west. Let’s floor this bitch.
One mile down the road something catches my eye. I slow to look at a trio of walkers shuffling along the dirt frontage before a wind farm. Like me they’re moving westbound into the storm.
There’s something about this group, and then I realize—it’s not three walkers traveling. It’s two following a
questing alpha. This one’s head is up; he’s walking near normally while the others shuffle and drag after him, hopeful for whatever he might find and eventually toss aside. Or maybe they’ll push him aside and take what he works so hard to catch. Looking at this group, I doubt that latter scenario will happen. But he does seem cursed for his success, doesn’t he?
Another thing that occurs to me is that if they’re out and walking towards their next meal it’s because the alpha missed getting corralled like the others. By avoiding the herd they avoided manipulation and deployment as weapons. Therefore they missed getting shot and burned and blown to pieces for their troubles. No curse to that success, it seems, unless facing into the storm to get whatever’s next is a curse. Like living itself can be a curse. It’s a concept I’m all too familiar with.
Still. They’re on their feet. They’re moving. There’s a chance.
The third lesson isn’t particularly Zen, but it makes me sit up straighter, forces me to mind my surroundings and my speed. That is to say, if I wrecked, and God help me survived…and there I am, pinned in the wreckage…these guys walk up....
Slowing to more or less normal highway speed serves me well when the double-rotored helicopter roars overhead. It all but rakes the roof with its landing gear before rushing ahead to land, straddling the lanes before me.
For a rage-blind moment I imagine putting my foot through the floor and plowing right through them. For God’s sake I’m not even past the auto mall! The men in black battle-rattle are pouring out. Two stand facing the Big Yellow Truck, ready to cut me to ribbons. Others fan towards either end of the Interstate. They’re taking aim and dropping random walkers attracted to the racket of the rotors. Meanwhile a second chopper lands at the auto mall to my left.
When I see Dr. Hearn step into view in the open door of the helicopter, smiling and waving me over, I push the shifter into park and kill the engine.
I emerge carefully from the truck, my hands upraised to show the two on standby at the door I’ve got no quarrel. Dr. Hearn seems to find this amusing. I step up to the helicopter and immediately a black-uniformed man takes my forearm and pulls me up. I’m plopped down into a chair opposite where Dr. Hearn has seated himself. Someone shoves a pair of headphones at me. This is good, I think. As I can’t imagine how else we’re talking over the racket of two churning rotors and men with M4s screaming at each other, I put the headphones on, pull the microphone stem to my mouth.
