“So that’s it?” Xan asked in a tone just shy of hysterical. “You’re allowed to just pick up anyone you want off the streets and dump them out in hell for the convoy?”
“’Course we’re not allowed to do that,” Buddy said comfortably. “We’re only supposed to take the bad apples. Or the sick apples. But I guess that makes them bad.”
“And the old apples,” Zeke put in.
“Yeah, but the old ones are sick. There just aren’t enough this time around. It was real easy in the beginning, wasn’t it? Plenty of people who wouldn’t work or who needed insulin, drugs and shit that don’t exist no more. People who wanted to fight to be in charge, political problems. People who were too depressed to get out of bed. Everyone else isn’t working their butts off so you can hide under your blankie and weep into a hankie.”
He looked at Zeke expectantly. The driver put it together and giggled. “That rhymes.”
“Bad apples, sick apples, dead apples . . .You want to be a sad apple?” Buddy asked Xan. “We’ll give you something to be a sad apple about! Oh, we had this snotty kid once, he was just a little prince who wouldn’t do shit. Remember him, Zeke? Blond hair, those weird, cut-in-stone gray eyes . . .”
“The ambassador’s kid.”
“Yeah, yeah, the kid from some ambassador’s family before the contagion. Went to a ritzy school, drove a brand new car, pushed out twenty-dollar bills every time he took a dump. It was the second brand new car because he crashed the first into a pole two days after he got it. He was a brat. A spoiled brat. He lived in Factory first. He wouldn’t lift a finger to help, and if they made him, he refused to do it twice. He picked fights, stole food, stole beer and got drunk, wouldn’t get out of bed. They got real, real tired of his BS in Factory but they were nice about it, sent him on to the Collection Agency. And then they got real, real tired of his BS, too. Go raid a house or store? He wanted to stay in the truck where it was safe. Sort goods to send out to the settlements? He’d help himself first, chuck it all at random into trucks, take a breather with a naked lady magazine. Same old shit, getting drunk whenever he could, taking pills, picking fights with dudes twice his size, hitting on girls, harassing them, just a little fucker all the way around! We heard all about him. He still thought he was hot shit without his fancy car, his mansion, his money, or his daddy’s job. The Collection Agency finally sent him on to Power Rangers.”
“Didn’t do any better in Power Rangers,” Zeke reminisced.
“No, he didn’t! Whining, drinking, drugging, refusing to learn, went missing when it was time to go out and get some work done. Everyone in Factory and the Collection Agency had been cutting him slack. He was just a kid. But Power Rangers, they don’t cut slack, and they don’t wait to get tired of someone’s BS. The second time he went missing, they told him that there had better not be a third time. He didn’t listen. The third time, they packed him into their little jail. He sat around reading and eating for a solid month, thinking that he was going to be transferred again. The guards told him that. It was their joke on him. He was going to this secret settlement called Palace where they had the nicest stuff and people didn’t have to work. Kid was happy about that. His kind of people. Then the convoy swung by and he was put in the bait truck. We transferred him to hell.”
“Palace,” Zeke corrected. “He ran after the truck screaming his head off. Like a full mile before they took him down.”
“A lot of them do that,” Buddy said fondly. He had forgotten about being mad at Xan. His gaze was nothing but friendly now. “Anyway, there aren’t so many people like that these days. Thinned them out of the herd. So we got our prison apples back there and it’s too small a load. There weren’t too many dead apples at the hospital for us to pick up either. They save them for us. We just got one stack there instead of two or three. There weren’t too many incurably sick or crazy apples either.”
“Crazy apples, prison apples,” Zeke said. “I like that. I’m just going to call them all apples now.”
Buddy was pleased that his term had been a hit. “Just four sick ‘n crazies: that old man, Sleeping Ugly, the Queen of Tears, and the girl. A run of good health lately, happy for Newgreen, sad for the bait truck. Need some flesh! The nurse is supposed to go to Meatfarm, she’s got skills and they don’t got tokens there to tempt her, but we got the okay to just put her in the back with the others. Meatfarm needs the convoy to get through more than it needs an extra nurse with criminal inclinations. But still, still not enough apples! So we grabbed you. Shouldn’t have been out anyway.”
“I was upset,” Xan said. “My little son is in the hospital. He just came out of open-heart surgery. I was taking a walk to cool off. You have any kids?”
“None that I know of,” Zeke said. “Never stayed in one place for long before, and now I just ride the circuit.”
Distracted by a guard, Buddy said, “Are they going to open the gate now?” Then he sank back in disappointment. “No, he’s just going by. Know what I miss? DNA tests. Some chick said my brother Bobby was the dad of her kid, but he was smart. He said you show me the test results and prove it. She couldn’t ’cause the real father was this married guy who wouldn’t leave his wife for her. So she latched onto my brother. He had a good job. Nowadays, what can you do? Chick says you’re the dad and how can you know for sure unless the kid looks like you?”
“Or doesn’t look like you,” Zeke said sagely.
“Exactly! Gives women all the power. The Collection Agency needs to pick up some of those DNA test machines from wherever they are and drop them off in each settlement. Then we can’t get screwed on child support.”
Xan withheld the remark that there was no longer money or paychecks to garnish, and the court system was bare bones. Plastic crinkled behind him, people moving around and mumbling in disgust. The woman was still crying in soft, muted sobs, and the crazy old man was talking to himself about boating through Viet-nom. Then he started saying Viet-nom-nom-nom repeatedly like it was an obsession.
Something was bothering Xan in the list of hospital pick-ups: the old man, the sleeping woman, the Queen of Tears, and the girl. He hadn’t seen a girl on his way to the panel, but then again, the lighting in the back was very dim.
“Do they have a messenger out there? The guards?” he said conversationally. “Ask if they can send a message to my boss. He can help to clear up this mistake.”
“And just who is your boss?” Buddy asked. “Mr. Williams, sir?”
Xan had to make himself more important than a tomato picker. He couldn’t claim to be a doctor, since these guys were likely familiar with the hospital staff, and any pointed scientific questions would reveal his knowledge didn’t extend much farther than his arm bone connected to his wrist bone. “I’m Collin Knight’s undersecretary. I report to him and the Deputy Secretary Marian Cho.” Collin Knight was Newgreen’s Secretary of Power and Water.
“You’re a secretary?” Buddy asked in disbelief. “But you’re a dude.”
Xan released a short, exasperated laugh. “It’s a bad name for what I do. It means I’m a chief operating officer for the Power and Water department.”
“Well, then why didn’t you say so? Why do you call yourself a secretary when you could say chief operating officer? That’s respectable.”
“They really need me to show up tomorrow. Mr. Knight and Ms. Cho have some very important meetings to attend and I’m in charge of their schedules. So if you could get one of them a message, we’ll get this straightened out.” He cleared his voice of all accusation. This had been an honest mistake.
Zeke sniffed the air in displeasure. “It smells.”
“That’s why we need to get the panel fixed!” Buddy exclaimed. “Now we got to drive to Meatfarm smelling bodies. They won’t be able to fix it at the depot.”
“They might,” Zeke said. “We’ll ask. If they can put on fresh tires, they should be able to jimmy it shut.”
Frustrated, Xan pressed his face closer to the bars. “It
shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, and then you can be on your way. Is there a guard nearby? Just call him over. Mr. Knight will be very appreciative of your efforts. It’s crucial that I be in the office tomorrow.”
“They’ll find someone to cover for you,” Buddy said indifferently. He leaned down for the plastic piece and turned it over to see how damaged it was. “You’re just a secretary. Anyone can do that. Even I could do that.” His voice became obsequious and toadying. “Mr. Knight? Mr. Knight, sir? You’ve got a meeting at three o’clock sharp with the president.” His voice lowered. “Oh, thank you. I’ll be on my way now. You file those papers while I’m gone.” The toady nodded vigorously.
“He likes doing voices,” Zeke offered. Swatting the piece away from Buddy, he said, “We’ll just tape it up if we have to. The bodies won’t be in there long anyway. We’ll be dumping some off at Gellen in no time.”
“What’s that?” Xan asked.
“A drop point,” Buddy said. “We’ll hack ’em up a bit so the smell of the blood draws the zombies if they’re not already hanging out there. Zombies are so thick around Newgreen! It’s almost as bad as Big Sugar.”
“Nothing is as bad as Big Sugar,” Zeke said authoritatively.
Buddy conceded the point. “No, not as bad. But there’s still a mess of them out there. Remember that one that walked into a land mine just as we were going past last time we were here? BAM! All those rocks and stuff hitting the side of the truck! The convoy just brought some more land mines for you guys to put in. Those are going in the south side over the next few days if they got any room left between craters. Anyhow, we got to lure them off to keep the convoy from getting swarmed, so we’ll sprinkle you guys around the city at more drop points. Zombies will come from all over to have a bite and the trucks can pass through. We’ll join up behind them. Sometimes we got to keep a couple of people alive in back for the whole trip if we’re going somewhere like Factory, to drop them off there and lure the zombies off again so the convoy can break in. But not for Meatfarm, and the depot takes care of itself. We’ll have this over and done with lickety-split and just hit the road with our tunes.”
“Your tunes,” Zeke said with heartfelt annoyance as Xan was overcome with despair. “Dammit, Buddy, I hate that shit.”
Out of ideas, Xan backed away from the panel. A few dirty looks were tossed his way about the stack of bodies, which was no longer a stack. He hadn’t secured the corpse of the infant as well as it had been before, and his interference had caused the whole pile to dismantle. Bodies were all over the floor near the locked door. Most were still wrapped; the nurse was trying to rewrap the infant, which had been exposed. The belts hung loosely down. Only the base of the stack, a large wrapped body, was still caught in the loops.
“You just get on 84 north,” said the crazy old man conversationally to no one. “Get off at Witterman Bou-le-vard.” He pronounced it boo-lay-vard, emphasis on all three syllables. “You can’t miss the signs to the boatyard, they’re posted all along that hill of ice plants.”
“You aren’t going to make it that far!” someone snapped at him.
The sobbing woman got to her feet and pressed past Xan to the open panel. “Don’t! Please don’t take me out there! I can still work a little while longer.”
“Yeah? Well, they said no! Get the fuck away from the bars!” Buddy yelled.
“Please, oh, please!” She slapped her hand against the bars and began to wrestle with them. Xan backed away as her voice rose hysterically. His eyes caught on what he had mistaken for a pile of sheets in the corner. It was just one sheet, and a human shape was propped up on the wall beneath it. That was the girl. The lump of her leg twitched, but otherwise, she was very still.
“Please, please, please . . . just shoot me! At least just shoot me! Don’t put me out there alive!” The woman battered at the bars.
“Oh, you want us to shoot you?” Buddy yelled, rapping her knuckles with the rifle. She screamed and held on desperately.
“Don’t shoot her. Then it’ll smell worse,” Zeke chided.
This was what had happened to the rowdy college kids and the schizophrenic man who had vanished during Xan’s time in Newgreen. They had all been placed in a bait truck with the dead. But a child! The figure under the sheet appalled him. Kneeling down beside it, he whispered, “Hello?” Maybe she was drugged and just as out of it as the woman who’d been rolling around. That would be for the best.
“Shoot me, just shoot me, for the love of God . . .”
The gun blasted. Everyone screamed again, hands clapping over ears at the noise. Blood arced up and splattered on the lights, turning the yellowish glow red. The body of the woman crumpled to the floor as Zeke bellowed, “Goddammit, Buddy! Can we just get out there without you shooting us to death?”
“She was bugging me.”
“You’re complaining that we don’t have enough rounds but you’re throwing them around like we have tons-” As Zeke lectured, the girl under the sheet flinched and heaved a very tiny sob.
Xan lowered the top of it. She was in her early teens, and he knew without asking that she had cancer. Her hair was thin and brittle and short; her skin was stretched tightly over her bones. Every angle of her was as sharp as a razor. She twitched and her head rolled over her shoulders in a drugged, uncontrolled way. But she was cognizant, and she cringed away from him in fear.
His fright and despair gave way to anger, and he got back to his feet. Stepping over the body of the dead woman, whose blood was running along the corrugated floor in parallel rivulets, he went to the panel. Pop music was playing softly, Buddy tapping his finger to the beat and Zeke bent over the steering wheel to look at the bridge.
“There is a child back here,” Xan hissed furiously. “Do you hear me? A child. She needs to go back to the hospital. Let her die with her parents beside her, for God’s sake! How can you put her out there to be torn apart?”
“Don’t you go shooting him now,” Zeke warned Buddy sternly. “We need a couple of runners to keep the zombies on the go.”
His fingers still drumming, Buddy said, “She don’t got no parents to sit beside her and the hospital’s the one to give her to us. So get your panties out of a wad. We got her fair and square.”
“You cannot-”
“Ain’t no hope for her. They don’t give us people that still have hope, even a little bit. She’s a terminal case. Anything given to her is a waste. She won’t get better and live a long, happy life. So she may as well do her community some good in her death. Living here don’t come for free. You like what the convoys bring, secretary-man? The meat and clothes and solar panels and everything else? Well, here’s the price.”
Zeke sighed and waved to a guard. “We’re going to have to hose it out at the depot ’cause of you. It’ll be all dried and caked by then.”
“Is the bridge about to go down?” Buddy asked, ignoring the comment about the blood. “My butt’s hurting from sitting here so long.”
Xan slapped the bars at their psychopathic nonchalance. The muzzle lifted in warning and Zeke said, “Goddammit, no! Think of the ammo!”
“We got you fair and square, too,” Buddy said in umbrage to Xan. “You don’t want to be in a bait truck, next time don’t go running around past curfew.”
“There won’t be a next time because I’m going to be dead!” Xan almost shouted. “Do you know what kind of stink is going to flare up when I don’t show to work tomorrow? I work for the Secretary of Power and Water. He is one of the most powerful men in all of Newgreen. Is it worth pissing off the entire council of this settlement because you’re short a few people to dump?”
“What’s the council going to do?” Buddy taunted in a pouty voice. “I’ll tell you: they’ll piss and moan about their poor little man-secretary who got eaten up in hell, tell our boss not to send us back, and our boss will tell them who the fuck else wants to drive a bait truck? You? Who wants to be a bait man? You send me your volunteers: all those people y
ou got safe inside this moat who want to go out into hell and dribble reeking corpses, bad and sad and sick apples everywhere while zombies chase after panting. You send them over and I’ll sign them up. They’ll get a lot more people signing up to replace you at your job than they will us at ours.”
He tapped the muzzle on the bars. “But none of that is going to happen. No one knows you’re in this bait truck, do they? You just won’t show up to work tomorrow. How long will they look for you? Isn’t like before when they made an Amber Alert call to your cell phone at three a.m. and woke you up from a dead sleep-”
“Those were for abducted children,” Zeke corrected placidly.
“-plastered your face on every news channel, interrupted the game with updates, had cops and dogs sweeping the neighborhood, posters up at gas stations. No, that don’t happen now! They’ll go out, see your home empty, ask around a little, and go back to work. Tape a NOW HIRING sign to the window and find themselves a new man-secretary.”
“Guard just gave me five,” Zeke said.
It didn’t matter what Xan said. These fools were going to dump him out in hell to die and that was that. He searched his mind for anything else to say that could persuade them, but two dirty fingers were turning up the volume on the music.
He looked into the back. The old man was talking loudly about stopping by a Slicers and Dicers on his way to the boatyard to see if he couldn’t whip up a pizza in the back. The young man and nurse threw him dirty looks as he went on and on, and then he made a nonsensical leap in his one-sided conversation to the time he’d lived in New York City. The murderers were straining to put more space between them, which wasn’t possible with the shackles, and mumbled harshly to one another about who had beat the guy harder. The thief was silent. The girl in the corner whimpered.
Xan leaned against the wall beside the panel, loathing himself for going out for a run. Colette would wake up in the morning to find him gone . . . she’d go to the hospital and learn he wasn’t there . . . she would think the stress had gotten to him and he’d just quit the scene, gone to live somewhere else in Newgreen without so much as a goodbye. When would she put together that he wasn’t deliberately missing? When he never showed up to check on Lucca? When she talked to the people in Potato and Chicken Crossing, the nursery and everywhere else, and discovered he wasn’t working anywhere? It could be when his monthly tokens weren’t collected, and that would be two weeks from now.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 27
