“Yeah, you did good, you dillweed.” Leonid shoves him and they both laugh.
But I can tell he’s still upset. I wish I could embrace him to put force behind my words. Instead I use his Russian name, “Pyotr. Look at me.” I set all joking aside, desperate to hold my struggling family together. “It was an amazing shot. You did good.” He crinkles his eyes with the smallest of smiles and they begin to glisten, so he looks away.
Mykola changes the subject. “Are you alright?”
Pyotr regains himself. “Yeah. That thing scratched me up good, but nothing’s broken.” He gestures to his brothers and they pull him to his feet. “Speaking of the devil. What the hell was that, anyway?”
Leonid returns to his normal dispassionate self, “boiler. Tar baby.”
“What? That nonsense Bertie’s always prattling on about?” Pyotr objects as he walks toward the remains of the darkest twitcher I’ve ever seen.
“How else do you explain it? We all saw it. I the least, and only right at the end.” Leonid turns toward me as we follow Pyotr to investigate the corpse. “Papa? Have you ever seen a twitcher move like that?”
I shake my head. “No, son.”
“Six years?” Pyotr kicks the body. The whites of the twitcher’s eyes are larger than half-dollars, its pupils gone. “Boilers really exist, and we haven’t seen one for six years?”
“Most people who see one don’t survive,” Leonid says.
Pyotr straightens. “Well, I guess we’re the dust zone’s new elite.”
I reverse the right tread and spin Leviathan toward the pit. The thing unsetting me from the start comes back to roost. “The real question is why. Why today? Pete, you said it yourself. We haven’t even seen a loner in over a week, and today this.” I stop as close to the pit as I can get and stretch over the armrest to see the bottom. “And how come both of you weren’t sliced to mincemeat rolling around in there?”
Pyotr looks over the edge and shakes his head. “It’s all gone. I sharpened two dozen pieces of sheet metal to put in there.”
Leonid stomps his boot creating a loud clatter. He sweeps away dust revealing a stack of discarded sheet metal just the other side of the hole.
“They knew about the trap?”
I swivel the gyros to scan the surroundings, suddend oings, sly feeling uneasy. “Did you see the way the wife struggled before you killed it?”
Pyotr bends down to take a closer look at the headless twitcher still clinging to the side of the pit. “Yeah, it was stuck on something. That’s why I went for the quick kill.”
“Not something. Someone. Look.” I gesture with a nod and all three boys look further into the pit.
Leonid spots it immediately. “Its legs were bound. They disarmed our trap and tried to use it against us. But if they were coming for us, why not just bring the hunt?”
I finally make the connection myself. “Because we aren’t the prey. This was only an attempt to keep us busy.”
~~~
Within the dust zone there is only one way station known among even outsiders, Bertie’s. When trouble’s coming, Bertha knows about it. Already burning midday heat, I ride the lead in Leviathan with Leonid manning the .50 caliber from the truck bed. He’s a deadlier aim and Leviathan’s undercarriage can withstand improvised explosives better than the truck.
I barrel past a burned out metal hulk in the road, crushing a ruined door with my treads. The glass shatters and I bounce to a stop indicating for Pyotr to drive around before I kick Leviathan back up to cruising speed, around 25mph. At top speed she’ll reach 30 plus, fast enough to outrun most twitchers.
Twice in recent months we’ve seen refugees’ rigs smoldering in the road after tripping explosives set by twitchers—nothing left but burnt hulls and melted rubber. And blood, always blood. I’ve never seen one of the explosives and can’t figure how they set them without fine motor skills. Throwing caution to the wind, I trust Pyotr’s additions to Leviathan to keep her intact. Still, the threat lingers in my mind.
What started as territorial attacks and raids for water and food escalated into full-scale war a couple years ago without explanation. Leonid, as good at interpreting twitcher motives and movements as anyone in the dust zone, thinks the twitchers are dying—that desperation is changing their behavior. Maybe so. Unfortunately, a wounded animal often poses greater threat than a healthy one—whatever healthy is for a twitcher.
Massive fire sign plumes a hundred feet into the air less than a mile northeast of our position, close enough for us to taste the crackle. I open Leviathan’s throttle. The hair on my arms raises and I count the seconds. The cinnabar deposits are getting bigger.
By the time I get to forty-five I start to worry. At fifty I crane my neck to witness the final woof of pale blue flame around the edges of the storm, indicating the end of the burn—less than a few hundred yards away. I let up on the throttle as the hair on my arms settles. Mykola had first asked about the blue flame. Once we deduced it was quicksilver, Pyotr adapted it for our lanterns. I’m damn proud of each of them. I love my boys.
Without warning Leviathan bucks and a deafening wind and scorching heat engulfs me. Careening sideways and bouncing on the right tread, I cut the motor and disengage the transmission just in time to keep the machine from toppling forward. A secondary quicksilver burst plumes, crackle thick in my throat. Less than a second before it burns me to death from the inside out, I slam my on , I slaskull into the crash pad in the head rest, igniting the counter burn and releasing my harness.
A sudden whoosh chokes me and thrusts me from my chair. Blocking my descent with my hands in front of my face, I crash to the asphalt as the pale blue flame licks my back. Just as sudden as it began, the popping ends. Face down in the road, my eyes still closed against the crackle, the first sensation I register is road rash on my right arm—a good sign.
“Papa!”
“Are you o.k., Papa?”
Gentle hands roll me over and I open my eyes to see all three of my sons hovering over me. I give them my best smile. “That was a close one.” I see genuine relief in each of their expressions. They still love their old papa, despite his weaknesses.
Mykola leans close. “Happy Birthday, Papa.” The intimate words startle me.
“Mik!” Pyotr shoves him, but smiles as the two lug me into a sitting position. “We were going to wait until this evening to surprise you.”
The sentiment, as sudden as the explosion, takes a few seconds to settle in. “I didn’t, but I didn’t think—“
“Of course we remembered.” Pyotr mocks offense. “Now let’s get you in your chair.”
I search for Leonid, but he disengages. Turning his back to us, he fiddles with a few levers on Leviathan, lowering my chair to road level.
~~~
“We shouldn’t stay here long. Secondary fire sign is too likely.” Leonid kicks the left tread. “The first storm was too small for complete burn.”
Pyotr grunts. “Not to mention the twitchers that set the explosives. Damn if they aren’t learning my tricks.”
“Papa, your legs.” Mykola gestures with his eyes until the rest of us look down. The backs of my legs are blistered and red. I shrug.
“They’re fine for now. I’ll treat for infection when we get home. Leo’s right. We should keep moving.” I take a moment to inspect Leviathan. “How’s she look?”
Leonid stoops to inspect the transmission box and then swings underneath to check the axle and universals. While Pyotr and Mykola lower me into my chair I praise the three of them. I feel every word of it, struggling to hold back tears. “I’m proud of all of you, the Founder sons. You’ve outdone your old man in almost every way.”
“Almost?” Pyotr grins.
“Your Papa still has a few tricks up his sleeve yet, you whelp.”
Leonid reports, “Solid. The blast might have blown debris into the gear box, but nothing significant. Pete’s blast plate diverted most of it.”
Pyotr swells with p
ride. “Who’s the dillweed now?”
“You are, dillweed.” Leonid turns toward the truck.
“Load up, boys. With this much twitcher attention in the fringes, I’m tonges, Iworried about Bertie’s. We may have more trouble before sun fall.”
Ten minutes later we roll up to Bertie’s and instantly know something is wrong. Bertha isn’t sitting on the roof to welcome us with her rifle. I stop in front of the place and indicate for the boys to drive the loop around, but quietly. Pyotr eases off the main road and starts around the perimeter fence of Bertie’s junk and swap yard. If this place has been overrun, it’ll be a nightmare of the living dead.
Information is often the hair’s breadth between life and death in the isolation of the dust zone, and no one has more information than Bertha—if she’s still breathing to gather it. I need to think. Leaning back, I find the headrest stripped of padding by the explosive counter measure taken minutes earlier. It's frustrating, but a small price to keep my lungs from melting.
Lifting my goggles onto my forehead, I rub the creases left around my eyes. The ruddy coloring of the skin on the back of my hands, combined with the spiderweb of wrinkles, unsettles me. I secure the goggles and scan the horizon before looking more closely at my immediate surroundings. First rule of the dust zone: What’s over the horizon can put you under the ground. Eye’s up before looking down.
This time looking down pays off first. Twitcher tracks. Dozen’s of them. Hundred’s of them. I clutch my chest and slough a chill. The hunt.
Bertha. Only a few uninfected have been known to survive a hunt. I zip fifty yards down the road westward, toward Amarillo. Most of the tracks kick into a lope moving in that direction, but others scatter northward at top speed, lumbering footfalls landing every several feet.
Back at Bertie’s the tracks grow muddled, but at least a hundred twitchers converged here within the hour. Tracks in the dust zone never last longer. But if Bertha had been the target of a hunt they would have burned the place to the ground. They moved on too fast. They were hitting every known human stronghold in the area, but on the way to what?
Revving the engine, the boys careen around the opposite side of the junk loop and jolt across the road ditch before slamming on the breaks a few yards short of Leviathan. “News?”
All three jump out of the truck, but only Leonid speaks. “Fire sign east of Amarillo. Lots of it. More than I’ve ever seen, multiple storms at once.”
“Something strange, Papa.” Mykola speaks.
“Something else?”
“Dust.” Pyotr and Leonid look down as Mykola continues, “hundreds of trailing clouds of dust.”
A tense silence passes, as we pay respects for the soon to be dead. “The hunt.”
~~~
Back on ground level, I test my wheels before hitting a button on the end of the arm rest. With a metallic fwing, a half dozen blades protrude from both wheel hubs.
“Papa, you should stay in Leviathan.”
“Leo, you forget yourself.” I growl under my breath, loud enough to be heard over the creaking floorboards of Bertie’s general store. “I’m still in charge in l in chhere. And I say we don’t do anything—“
“Unless we do it together.” They recite the chorus I’ve beat into them—an empty recitation. For five years I’ve relied on the dust zone to keep my family together. Through discipline and bitter survival I’ve ruled with an iron fist. But we all feel the same need. Whether forty years old or eleven, we need more reason to be together than just to be together. More to fight for than survival. But I don’t know what reason to give them, so I pound my chest and impose my will. It won’t be long though, before the whelps overpower the alpha.
“If Bertha’s still alive we’ve gotta’ find her. If twitchers are still in here, we gotta’ kill ‘em. Questions?”
They fan out, leaving the main walkway for me. Bertie’s is always crowded, but now shelves are tipped over and supplies scattered across the floor. Stealth is useless, so I crunch my way across grains of spilt rice mixed with dark blobs that look suspiciously like blood.
The generator, usually a constant droning at Bertie’s, is eerily quiet. With the windows long since replaced by metal sheeting, the store is blacked out, even at midday. Rolling further from the the front door, it becomes difficult to tell what my wheels are crushing beneath them, and difficult to discern which noises I and my sons are making and which ones we aren’t.
I hear the rhythmic whirring of Bertha’s windmill built into the back wall, the blades that power her generator still turning. Then why are the lights off? My wheels bump against something lying across my path, and the scent of rotting flesh swells in my nostrils.
Quickly I draw my short stick and flick both blades open, gripping it in the middle. A sudden crack disturbs the silence, followed by blood cry. Like a bursting damn the store reverberates with it as the shadows swarm. “Twitchers!”
A smudge against the blackness lunges from a nearby shelf, crashing into the tip of my lance. Rocking onto my back wheels with the impact, I retract the blade faster than the falling body can smother it and spin the opposite end with force enough to remove the twitcher’s head. Still spinning the lance over my head it slices two more twitchers before rebounding off a tipping shelf about to block my retreat.
I click the lance in place horizontally behind my head and whip the wheels in opposite directions. Spinning 180 degrees, I lunge forward in time to smash into the falling shelves and skitter sideways, barely clearing the blockage and managing an open space in the center of the store.
A shotgun roars from less than ten yards away, the flare of the powder revealing a shattered twitcher spraying blood foam. “Mik! Stay clear! Find the lights!” Shadows converge on the blast. Blood soaking the floorboards beneath me, I realize it’s time to get dizzy. A quick flick of my wrists and I start the spin. From the depths of my oily soul I dredge the layers of guilt and shame for the bedrock of rage, for the need to destroy everything and everyone who has ruined me, taken my Rosalyn, my Katerina. Anything that threatens the lives of my sons.
In that place, I find my blood cry. Shattering bones with my hate alone, I scream as twitchers seethe from the darkness. And I spin. Impacting twitchers erratically, I wrench my body in an ocean of movement, lurching onto a single wheel, before slamming back down onto two. Keep the spin. e ap the sI surge every ounce of my poisonous strength into my grip on the wheels. I feel blood trickling down the back of my throat, rage ripping from my lungs. Spinning blades churn the air around me like a blender with my broken body caught in the middle. Keep the spin.
I bounce sideways with a sudden impact and lurch unsteadily up onto a single wheel—the attacker’s eyes close enough for me to see their pupil-less whites. I loop around once and catch the twitcher with a savage head butt before he can tip my chair the rest of the way over. With a yank, I bring the wheel down on his neck. With a second, I rip out his throat as I keep the spin.
But there are too many shattered bodies, mine about to be one of them. Finally the chair catches in a twitcher’s rib cage and pitches sideways. From the darkness a flying demon drives me the rest of the way to the floor, chomping at my throat with his teeth. It takes too long for me to shift my grip from the wheels to the throwing knives in my bandolier, my fingers refusing to unfurl. I count three beats of the twitcher’s heart, the veins of his neck throbbing faster than the pistons in an auto. He lunges forward to end me.
~~~
With a frizzle and jolt the lights burst on. Dazzling bright, they cause the demon to twitch and miss its aim. And Instead of my throat in its teeth it finds my blade crunching through the roof of its mouth.
“Back to hell with da lot of ya’! When you get t’ere say hello to my husband!” Bertha’s gravely voice reverberates through the store followed quickly by dancing lead and burning powder. Multiple guns go off at once, and I remember my .44-40 and 12-gauge, sawed off to fit beneath the arm rests of my chair.
I dr
aw them both and join the party. In the searing light the twitchers seize and pitch erratically, and soon the room is filled with blood foam and smoke. With only two ways in or out, Bertie’s quickly becomes a twitcher mass grave. By the time the gunfire stops I’m buried three bodies deep.
After Mykola and Pyotr pull me from the tangle of twitcher bodies, I comprehend the extent of the slaughter. Bertie’s will never be the same. Flies buzz around our heads, entering and exiting at will through the countless bullet holes puncturing the tin siding. The end of the store closest my position, completely ripped open by fleeing twitchers, floods with waining afternoon sun.
And the bodies—more twitchers than I’ve seen alive all my days in the dust zone—bleed out in heaps.
“This twas only a puncheon of ‘em. Da main column be headed north and west a here more dan tirty beats ago.” In the road Bertha updates the lot of us as Leonid jumps down from the crow’s nest. “I t’ought I was a goner for sure, specially after you guys came along. The twitchers just staked da place out.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Bertha.” Using rags torn from a twitcher’s body, I wipe the stickiest blotches of blood from my chair’s arm rests.
“Oh, I gots a bit more confidence in ya’ now. I ain’t never seen nothing like dat before.” The old, ample lady gives Leonid a squeeze around the shoulder that makes him blush. “Chur boys are something special.” She scowls at me, a look I recognize well from an earlier life. “And you ain’t so bad yourself.” Delivering the nicest words she’s spoken to mize spokene since the outbreak, she winks. “Of course I gots to charge ‘ya for the damage you done to my store.”
Leonid cuts to the chase, “Bertie says Frank and her spotted a group of refugees heading their direction from the northeast about the same time she picked up on signs of the hunt. Frank got off in time to give them warning—“
Reeferpunk Shorts Page 9
