“We’ll find it, Zeke,” Buddy protested. “Let’s just lose the bodies and then figure it out.”
“You’re dumb and getting dumber every day,” Zeke castigated. “You want to hack up those bodies, get the blood scent in the air, and then pore over these maps? That’s a good idea in your head? Seriously? There it is, Sandalwood. All right then, go here . . . and then turn right here . . . here’s where we always fuck it up . . . pull down the gate . . .”
Metal scraped. The grate on the ceiling was moving. Everyone looked up nervously as it traveled toward the back of the truck. Several feet away from the door, it peeled away from the ceiling and came down. The old man watched it placidly; the younger man and nurse backed away. Xan got up hastily but the gate moved faster. By the time he got to it, having to track through the shot woman’s blood to get there, it was past his knees. He dropped as it banged down to the floor on the right side. On the left, it struck the ankle of a wrapped corpse and stopped there with a crinkle. It was an odd gate, the bars thick yet doubled up like just one line of them wasn’t enough.
He wrapped his fingers under the lowest bar and heaved. The gate was viciously heavy and didn’t move. The cab doors slammed one after another as Xan fought to lift it, whispering to the young man, “Help me!”
The guy gauged the gate and shook his head. “It’s too heavy.”
Light crept in as the back door was lifted. Buddy was the one raising it; Zeke had his gun trained on them. As soon as he ascertained that only the dead were on the side closest to the bait men, the gun lowered. It was on a sling, and he pushed it out of his way to deal with the bodies.
They were parked in the dead center of a residential road. Homes trailed away to the corner. The grass had gone wild on the lawns. The only one still under control was the home with a decorative rock garden. By and large, the houses were undamaged. But no one lived here anymore.
“Three.”
“Four.”
“Just three! How many do you think we have?”
Zeke had lifted into the back of the truck and was shoving out the body of an adult. It fell to the street with a thump and Buddy bent down to undo the plastic. His rifle wasn’t on a sling, so his movements were awkward with the gun tucked in his armpit. Hanging from his belt was a steel camp axe.
“Give me the plastic,” Zeke said.
“Can’t we just leave it here?”
“That’s wasteful, man. They can reuse this shit.” Zeke took the sheet of plastic from him and pushed out the body of the old woman.
Buddy cackled while wrestling with the plastic. “You see this old biddy? She got a flower tattoo on her ass. What else, you get yourself a navel ring or nipple piercing or something, Gramma?” He grunted. “No, just the tattoo.”
Zeke was surveying the bodies. “Fucking mess back here. You didn’t tie ’em in so good.”
“Not my fault if they squirt out of those stupid belts. They got gas.”
“Excuse me? They’re dead. They aren’t farting back here.” Zeke reached down and parted plastic to examine a corpse.
“Gas, you moron. From bacteria. It makes them puff up and blow. So they squirt out.” Buddy pushed in more plastic and looked up for the next body. But Zeke was checking out the road a little nervously. Leaning in, Buddy pulled out the tiny wrapped form of the baby. Xan’s stomach roiled at the careless hold. The plastic was stripped away and the corpse dropped to the ground like a doll.
“Buddy, I think we got movement,” Zeke said.
The second bait man looked around casually. “Naw.”
Xan looked through the bars to the street. Nothing was there that hadn’t been before . . . Then he saw where Zeke was looking. A walled alley ran between two of the homes, and a piece of red was moving along the top. The red could only be the top of someone’s head. The person wasn’t coming along too quickly. After each step, it paused.
The axe rose and fell, punching through meat. Xan almost vomited. Zeke piled all the plastic to the side and started to pull down the door in a hurry. Oblivious to the danger, Buddy said, “Thought I would be a chef when I was little. Guess I am now, a zombie chef. Funny, huh?”
The door halfway down, Zeke stopped and looked around the side of the truck. Then he let go of the door and jumped down in panic. “Buddy, get in the cab!”
Buddy lifted the dripping axe and peeked around. Whatever he could see wiped away his mildness. Zeke’s heavy footsteps pounded on the asphalt on his run to the cab. “The door!” Buddy called after him.
“Forget the door!”
Buddy vanished. The spot of red was still easing along in the alley, and far enough away to not be the cause for alarm. Car doors opened and slammed. The truck started and instantly jerked into movement, revealing the dumped bodies. The axe had left deep gashes in them, and blood was leaking out into the road. The adult bodies blocked most of the view of the infant’s. Only a tiny foot showed, connected or unconnected now, Xan thankfully couldn’t tell.
“Lock the doors!” Snap. “Go! Go! Go!” “No, turn! We can’t drive over that many!” The two in the cab were shouting at each other. Xan started for the panel, but the truck swerved so hard that it threw him into the old man. Something scraped and the truck lifted like they were going into a driveway. A body on the far side of the gate slid toward the open door.
Brakes squealed and Buddy screamed, “REVERSE!” Xan got off the man and returned to the gate, where he wrapped his fingers tightly around the bars in preparation for the swerving to come.
There were people in the road. Dressed in ragged clothes, with straggling hair and bare feet, men and women and children were scuffling along in a pack. All were excruciatingly thin. They looked barely aware of each other’s presence and Xan . . . Xan remembered that. He hadn’t remembered that in a long time. He had been aware of meat and only meat when he was a zombie. There had to have been tons of zombies all around him because he had been changed in the middle of a city, not out in the country. But to Xan, there had been no one but his prey. He literally did not see the zombies, or he saw them but they were irrelevant, and so his brain did not record them. Even his daughter, should they have crossed paths, would have stirred nothing within him.
That was how these zombies were walking, bumping into one another, treading on each other’s heels, never acknowledging the knocks. Their heads only moved from the bodies farther down the road to the truck, back and back again.
“Why aren’t you putting us in reverse?” Buddy exclaimed, his voice carrying through the panel and out into the road. More heads turned.
“Shhhh,” Zeke scolded.
Everyone was silent. Some of the heads turned away. The blood was luring them on far more than something that had gone motionless, and didn’t smell quite as strongly. Zeke was letting them pass by before he pulled out of the driveway and roared off. In a furious whisper that just reached Xan’s ears, Buddy said, “This ain’t going to work! There are just going to be more and more of them coming!”
“You shut the hell up and watch out your mirrors like I am,” Zeke hissed.
A girl trailed by at the back end of the group. She was about ten, the same age that Katie would be now. Matted black hair hung down over a school uniform caked with filth. Her head didn’t turn from the bodies up ahead, her hollow eyes fixed on the promise of meat.
“Do it now,” Buddy ordered.
“Not yet.”
“Do it now!”
“Not yet!”
A man turned to the truck. His cheek was a mottled mess of pus and raw flesh and scabs from a burst abscess. Crust was caked beneath it all the way down his neck. The voices, although kept low, had gotten his attention. Or it was the blood from the dead woman, and the blood on Xan’s head. The zombie shuffled over the street, tripping on a loose flap of the one shoe he was wearing, and had been wearing, for over two years now.
He was coming to the truck in a steady rhythm of staggers and scuffles. Buddy’s face was pressed to the bars in th
e panel. “Be still,” he whispered to the occupants of the back. “Be very fucking still.”
“So we can die later instead of right now, huh? So we can save your lives?” the nurse asked dryly. “Fuck you. Hey, zombie man! Come a little closer!” Buddy hissed at her to be quiet.
Scuffle. Stagger. Scuffle. Stagger.
“Weren’t you telling us about some boatyard?” the nurse asked the old man.
He beamed. “Over in Filippa. It isn’t that far. You just gotta head for-”
“Shut up!” the gum-chewing murderer whispered to them.
“This crazy woman is going to get us killed!” Buddy said. “Zeke, move!”
The zombie sped up to the back of the truck and looked in. Xan stood stock-still. His head wound wasn’t bleeding anymore, but the smell was in the air. The angle of the driveway was also drawing the blood of the dead woman through the corrugated floor. Slipping under the gate, it oozed nearer to the open door.
Zeke hit the gas. The zombie man had no time to register their movement before he was knocked down. The truck rocketed down the driveway and bounced wildly when it hit bottom. It was turning as it did so, and an off-kilter jounce told Xan that a tire had gone over the zombie.
The body on the very edge of the open bed fell out. Xan had a full view now of the street behind them. The corpses of the two adults and infant were invisible in the crouching throng of zombies, many of who interrupted their feast to stare at the truck. Blood was running down their chins and covering their hands. Some struggled up to their feet to give chase, but the truck peeled down the street.
Buddy was hooting in the cab. “Did you see them all? Christ, I thought we were done for back there!”
“We’ve cut it closer,” Zeke said nonchalantly. “You gotta drag them farther away before you start hacking. Gets blood all over the outside of the truck.”
“Just a few drops.”
“That’s all it takes. You know that. Remember that time the freeway got blocked outside Fueltown? That fallen tree? We were sitting ducks there until Power Rangers shoved it over and those spots of blood could have lured a million zombies in the meantime. They’re like sharks. Hell, they probably got shark genes in them from those parasites. Sharks can smell blood in the water a mile away. And you fucking shot a woman back there! That’s why I tell you not to do that shit! We’re a shark magnet now.”
“This isn’t the way to Sandalwood.”
“Goddammit. Get that map back out.”
Xan returned to the front of the truck. In the crazy swerving and jouncing, Selena had fallen over. Her legs were tangled in the sheet. He picked her up, shocked at how light she was, and set her in the corner. Then he put the sheet back over her waist. The hem was spotted in the dead woman’s blood.
“Go left. Go left and take that road.” Zeke and Buddy were debating the fastest way to get to Sandalwood. Xan braced Selena in with his body and looked out the back. The sky was lightening. The rows of single-family homes became a business area, cars parked in lots like they had been since the day everything changed. Others were parked in the lanes themselves, one with a skeleton still belted into the driver’s seat. It looked like zombies had broken through the windows and stripped him of flesh right there.
The businesses became apartment complexes. A moving van was half-full at the curb, a dolly resting on the metal ramp and molding boxes spilled in the street. On a telephone pole waved a bleached-out garage sale sign. The truck swerved, and a second later, Xan saw the body of a zombie decaying in the road. Wasted meat. They didn’t eat each other. If they couldn’t find uninfected human flesh to devour, they’d move on to animals.
“One of my nurses came from Bright Beginnings,” Selena whispered hopelessly. “That was Burt. Only six made it out of there alive. Six people . . . out of four hundred. Did you hear about that?”
“No, I never heard of it,” Xan said. “Was that a settlement?”
“Yeah. It was, a real little one. They were religious, he said, not the regular kind but the crazy kind. He was telling another nurse about it. I was supposed to be asleep. I stayed quiet . . . so I could listen. Some of them thought it was the Rapture . . . others thought they could just pray away the zombies. Either way, they were sure that God was going to save them before too long. So they didn’t . . . put in a moat. They lived behind a fence that had been up since before . . . and just had guards doing rounds to shoot zombies that tried to climb over it. They were running out of ammo. They were running out of food. It was before . . . the convoys. There wasn’t enough space to plant as much as they needed . . . and the plants they were growing weren’t coming up fast enough to feed everyone. So they . . . just prayed harder.”
She paused to breathe, the exertion of speaking having gotten to this frail, cancer-ridden girl. Then she kept going in whispers, her eyes sliding to the murderer and sliding away when he was looking out the back. “My nurse Burt wanted to leave, but they wouldn’t let him go. Trust in God, they told him. He said trust in God, yes, but trust in bullets and bodies of water, too. He told their council . . . that the zombies were going to break in eventually, and even if they didn’t, these people were going . . . to starve to death. They didn’t believe him, and they still wouldn’t let him go. They told him to pray harder. That God wasn’t coming . . . because of his lack of faith. He wanted to bust out of there so bad . . . but he didn’t have a gun to make them open the gate. Guards stood there . . . twenty-four hours a day . . . to stop anyone who tried.” She had to stop for breath again.
Xan had heard half a dozen similar stories, if not all the names of the extinct settlements. The others had perished because they couldn’t put a moat in fast enough, or put it in but were careless about the bridge. In one settlement, the bridge had fallen open in a fierce windstorm. A single zombie made it over, and a single zombie was all it took. They had done everything right and just had bad luck.
Out the back, the apartments had turned into a bedroom community of condos. They were squashed closely together. Sandalwood had to be part of this complex, as the street names of the cul-de-sacs they were going by were Rosewood and Cedarwood. Then they passed Rosemary and Myrrh. Everything had an essential oil theme down to a tiny park with a playground called Pennyroyal Corner. One blue slide was stained brown.
“But he found a car,” Selena said at last, her voice even tinier than before. “A car with fuel. After the council told him that . . . he lived in it instead of his house. Put boards and bars over the windows he didn’t need to see out from, slicked the sides with grease. He was waiting for his chance . . . however it came. A few people thought that that was a good idea and . . . did the same. They weren’t so crazy. They could see that God wasn’t coming. They lived in those cars for over a month, the crazy ones praying right outside for them . . . just to believe. Throwing things at them even. Then it happened. Some guy . . . smashed up his leg somehow. Blood everywhere. And the zombies came and broke in. That was how Burt . . . and the others got out, everyone getting eaten up in Bright Beginnings . . . as they drove past and crashed through the gate.”
The truck slowed. Everyone in back had been quiet for the last few minutes, except for Selena and Xan’s whispers, and now they grew quieter still.
Buddy and Zeke had calmed down, and were commenting on what nice cars had gotten left behind. “Just makes me sad,” Buddy said amiably. “Would have killed for one of these cars back in high school. We called them panty droppers. My piece of shit was a panty nailer. Nailed those panties on tight. And look at them all around here! That’s a ’12 Torrid in that driveway. There’s an Onaco truck, leather seats. Clean off the blood and good as new.”
“I want that one,” Zeke said.
“What the hell is wrong with you? That’s a mom van. You need Gramma’s thyroid drugs and you want Mom’s van.”
“I like the color.”
“Color’s good; van’s not.”
“No zombies around.”
“Never are here. But ther
e will be once we’re gone!”
The truck stopped. Doors slammed. Xan stayed put. The bait men came around and pulled out bodies, Buddy dragging them farther away with a grumble as Zeke collected plastic and kept watch. Evidence of their previous visits was visible in a piece of bloodstained plastic trapped in hedges between two houses.
The camp axe went up and down, chopping into bodies. There was none of the excitement of last time, no zombies on the horizon, and Zeke lowered the back of the truck all the way down when it was done. The men climbed into the cab and one said, “Lock the doors!” Snap.
As the truck started up, so did the gate. With a clatter and clang, it went to the ceiling and slid along until it had returned to its previous position. People looked warily at the lifted gate and moved away from the back of the truck. Only the old man stayed where he was, holding onto the belt for balance as the truck moved. The sleeping woman rolled over and got tangled in the discarded plastic. She was still oblivious to the world, and it seemed to Xan that her breathing had gotten shallower. They had given her enough at the hospital to kill her.
“Give me some of that plastic.”
“No.”
“Let me tie it around my head and suffocate!”
“No! I’m fucking chained to you! I can’t drag your body around!”
The murderers had a furious, whispered conversation about it. In the cab, Zeke said, “Oh, there they go. Down that street there. Good eating, guys!”
“One coming up front and center,” Buddy warned. The tires bumped up and down. As the murderers scuffled, the thief slid over to the back and picked up a sheet of plastic. He turned it this way and that, squinting in the poor lighting, and tried to fashion it into a bag for his head. His hands were cuffed, as were his ankles, making everything he did more difficult.
“Can’t breathe in that,” said the crazy old man.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 29
