by Thomas Head
I’m dizzy again. Thirsty and sore all over. No telling how Early feels. Swollen goofball face still.
We don’t complain to each other about it.
He looks off and growls.
Get my binoculars, chewing. A pack of the undead crouch at the edge of the field below. Loud sons of bitches. Maybe it’s the rocky cliffs at our back. They are after some prey, far beneath us. A pack of nine, they scamper up a rocky hillside, their yelps rising like distant hawk screeches as they reached an ivy-etched pole of some sort. Here, they overtake a small troop of monkeys, whose own screeches rival theirs. The dog shifts his weight and gives a low, disapproving noise.
Catch myself half-laughing as I put the binoculars in front of the dog’s eyes.
“Nasty fuckers, aren’t they?”
The fierce German Shepherd licks my thumb and looks up at me for a biscuit.
I again glass the far hillside without giving in to his request. Early gives me a playful bite as the pack settles in, some disappearing to the ground with the unskinned, ungutted meat they carried. Others sniff each other and take dominant or submissive positions in the flattened weeds around the nest.
That semblance of culture. It could be a weakness if it was consistent. But they’re not like wolves or chimps.
I could take them out. Not a problem. It’s not bragging to say I am absurdly accurate with a rifle. Best shot you know. Comes from focus. Pathological focus. My aunt, Slutty Gene, told me my focus was a curse, placed on me at my conception, because my parents had screwed in the fog.
I resist a shiver.
It’s not the thought of mom and dad screwing. It’s Gene. She went through soldiers like tampons. But it’s not exactly that either. Prostitution had not made her an unkind woman. Just weird, I used to think. Nothing typical about her. I quiver to think that she came to live with us a while, busted me jerking off once and didn’t flinch. We’re not talking mid-stride. I mean puckered lips and bared teeth and eyes rolling back.
Gene just shut the door. She waited a second or two and told me to holler when I was done on the toilet.
I felt beneath her for years. Seeing her take it on a pool table in front of crowd didn’t change that. She was a good woman.
I don’t think about her much. Yet.
That’ll come.
***
We get going, following the sounds of distant Shado. I start to smell that muddy fish smell unique to the rivers around here. You can feel the odors. Like a warmth. I hear the water running now.
We start dropping down toward the smell and feel and sound of a river but I can’t see it yet. I feel like we’re on top of it when we start going back uphill again. We get up a little rise and the last bit of daylight cataracts across some water and I see it’s a swift little river. Several flat bottom, aluminum boats protrude, half hidden, from a vine-strewn tin shed.
I’m blessing the boats and looking at Early and asking him if he knows what this means.
He’s right, not much. I feel a little better though. A river will lead us to the coast, and it feels better to have something to follow. Plus there’s the smell of water and the bit of noon sun poking through the clouds, and the tiniest spark of something like hope has me strip-club giddy all the sudden, and we dare to climb down in the shallow edge of the surprisingly cool water.
Running over my ankles is all it takes to cool me off. Early is drinking the hell out of it. Then, me too. It’s stupid to drink it unfiltered, but delicious. We’re looking up as we’re drinking, all around, in case shado come at us while we have our faces stuck in the water. I realize we’re a pack, Early and me, because he’s watching when I’m not, and vice versa, for someone coming for the boats or emerging from the little shed.
Water is dripping down our chins. I was far, far thirstier than I realized. In a quarter hour he and I have drunk much and seen no one. We move slow, full of life now, and come down the water’s long curve.
No one in the shed. I’m looking at a sharper bend where there are rocks. No one. It looks like we might get a boat without a fight. Impossible, I know, so I bring the M4 to my eye. My heart instinctively slows. Breathing steadily, looking down a winding, crumbling snake of a river. It slides to the left, downhill, to an old building with nine or ten lumps of vine that probably had cars underneath.
No death’s head faces looking at us. No people. No glare from a scope. When Early gives the all clear with a kiss on my hand, and I lower the gun. Swallow.
Just plain luck.
Sometimes that’s what it boils down to. That, and one other thing. I cluck my tongue, and me and Early are climbing in a boat. The side of it says Basstracker.
There’s oars. A tank full of gas. Storage compartments full of saltines and canned meat. A full complement of bottled water. We stay looking and watchful before we dare to start it up, the sun ever lowering, the dark closing in. It starts on the fourth try.
Early and I set out. Turn off the engine.
Always looking.
Time and jungle, passing slowly.
Darker now.
Drift sluggishly, ever so slowly down river. The sky is mostly open to the stars and Early is looking up at them occasionally as if a matter of scientific curiosity.
We encounter nothing. No one. No resistance, no price. Just going without having to walk, on my ass, until I’m seeing the ocean. The ocean so soon.
It’s the opposite of my jungle-dreams. A pleasant dream of taking a nap and waking rested with the dawning of the next day; a dream of watching my buddy bark at a dolphin and look at me to make sure I saw it too. It is a moment, and it is something cosmic, more profound than the first time you watched your girlfriend praying.
The rapture of heading home, somehow still alive.
And feeling okay.
Chapter 17
The joyously sad din of human contact comes ten days later, once I’m finally myself, finally, slowly, Tyler McCarthy again. Tyler McCarthy and Big Early. Sniper. Dog. We are further up the coast, in a sheltered bay. The water is a vast, undulating gem. The walls of a city rise before us, perched up on a grassy hill. 300 yards away. Up curls a little path, sown like a stitch in the fabric of grasses, up into the cluster of buildings. Looks as though some child-like force has glued together the fragments of two dozen apartment buildings. Shipping containers. Barbed wire on the walls. Good doses of voice and laughter rise and ebb.
I have come to a certain amount of muscle in life, but places like South America, the body always feels low on fuel. The coastal wind blows it away probably. I pull the boat between two massive trees that have fallen into the bay, instantly breathy. The air is muggier than usual for so late in the day, thicker now with smoke from some manner of meat.
This great, patient dog below me, I perch myself high up and soak in the layout. Can’t see much. I creep a little higher, slowly, confidently. The paws some forty feet under my combat boots beneath make a brief attempt to climb too, almost with a pensive humor about him, and I grunt and turn back to the city.
No traffic in or out.
I turn back to Early. This is the real test, I think. Whether we’ll manage our way back—the way he act when I’m scouting.
He’s my spotter.
Wagging his tail about something, maybe the meat smell, I believe he’ll do fine. I pull the sweaty helmet from my head and watch the dog another moment and climb even higher. Get the binos. Look out between two branches into the gathering afternoon rains.
The tiny city-compound has a feel to it. This is not a safe place. Armed compounds aren’t particularly unusual. But in Central America it’s an art. Has been, even before the outbreak. Given the often bloody manner in which the narco-trafficantes settled their disputes, along with the ever-present danger of kidnapping for the wealthy and their families, Central Americans had grown skilled in making them blend into the zeitgeist of the local culture. They arrange the presence of armed gunmen the way Japanese placed rocks in a garden. Almost a thing of beauty.
But not arrogantly so. Walk by one, give them a salute or a wave, and they will always reciprocate. You could live by one for decades and not ever hear an altercation or even sense any problems. Social camouflage, so to speak. Not here. Something is off. Sinister. I cannot understand why or how I know until I see three naked women travel down a road that narrows to nothing, just a thin squeezeway between five stories of shipping container homes. Doomed. You can see it. Children stare down at them. Anemic cherubs. The other adults are looking away.
They are not being led, which somehow feels more tragic. At a remarkably intact floral shop, the woman step, slower now, to the nice brickwork and steel to a sudden maw in the earth, and plunge to their knees. Their chests are flat against the ground, kind of have their upturned asses facing me at an angle. A sticky, aching sort of sobriety washes over me when a fat man emerges from the ground, his bald head painted or tattooed blue. The soldier in me grips the M4. I count my breaths when I see he has a bullwhip.
He looks them over. Walks around them. No one else nearby. His back to me, he makes them put their hands behind their head, teeth in the dust, then walks behind them and kicks at their inner thighs, making them spread their legs somewhat. Their faces are practically buried now.
Then their backs and the cracks of their asses are spurted with the fatty blood of the man’s brains.
Because I didn’t like the fucking looks of him, that’s why.
Chinga tu madra, puto.
And fuck the fallout too.
As I climb down, I don’t have to tell Early to join me in the boat. He’s more than just a dog. In the field, a good one’ll make you understand that.
Chapter 18
Early and I are back on more open seas in the little boat. About an hour later, he growls at me a few times getting here. Have to suppose it is because we didn’t go after that meat we smelled. The truth, I suspect, might be stranger.
He is not just a dog, after all.
A new rain comes suddenly in sheets across the darkening water. We do not have to halt.
No need to let the ears and eyes adjust.
In New York, it was easy to imagine the Earth overrun with the undead. This is the nonsense of adolescent, anthropic thought processes. Five billion undead, and growing every day, and most of the earth is, in fact, very much devoid of them.
Consider the ocean.
In fact in getting to the Army base in Aculpoco there is only one other incident. It is just a day south of the base. We make camp. We pull the boat on the black gravel of a little beach and hike to a high rocky place and look around a moment.
There is another hill with a better view just beyond, but Early doesn’t want to go.
“I wish you could talk to me, son.”
The shepherd seems to wish it too.
“Okay.”
I slap my hip. Then we freeze.
Just ahead of us, back toward the boat, a new hole forms.
I tell Early to stay.
Chapter 19
Approaching the nest, I sense there may be nothing to this. Just coincidence—which from time to time I still have to convince myself actually exist.
If I can reach the hole without alerting them…
Something howls in the distance behind me—coyote. I approach the hole, which is about three feet wide, ever slowing, softening my footfalls at the edge of what turns out to be a nest. With a breath, I lean over it. I keep the gun trained, forcing myself to urinate at the mouth of nest.
It take three more breaths.
Damn it is impossible to not be shocked at the sight of them. Fungal death masks, peeling away in rotten flakes, the mouth is agape, crying a demon’s song as it rockets upward through the rooty muck. Teeth like shards of marrow. One after the other they come. Unafraid. Unhuman. Their craniums flowering open like meaty poinsettias under my M4.
My breathing quickens once it is over. I do not have to call Early to my side when the firing stops. He comes, and together we look at the hole, stuffed to the top with twitching flesh.
Flawless.
Lucky, but flawless.
Early growls as I scrabble to pull one up out from the nest. Disgusting mottled flesh like Jackson’s tongue, but more bloodbuckled and greasy. Bits of exposed muscled and tendon. It would stain your hands. Stain your eyes. The undead have a hold on the human psyche, no matter how often they are seen. I examine the teeth and cannot decide if there are multiple rows.
What an enigma, these creatures. Blood, with no beating heart. Lungs, but no real breath, just oily red grease within the lung itself, tangled in rosy white muscle. Then bone. The open cranium has bizarre filaments, like threads. I am loathe to imagine its thoughts, whether the thing dreamed. The Shado feel. Something. They react, not to pain, but to each other. The cold doesn’t harm them, and at times I have mused on what drives them into the earth. Was it fear? The remnants of what they were. The only semblance of culture is that females seem to decide where they will dig out their nest. When they rip apart their victims, they often bring the meat back to the nest to eat. The rest of the carcass is left alone. Left to the elements.
I’ve heard once that studying a thing is an act of pity.
I’ve heard lots of dumb shit.
So why here? What about this spot, so near the sea? So far from anything else.
“Let’s go, son.”
Chapter 20
As Early and I get back on the water, it’s morning. The sun is reddening all but the deepest pockets of forest to our right. The nest of Shado, clogged with the rot of their once-again dead, fouls the air some nineteen miles south of us.
We travel along the shore, ever northward, through drifting fog, fog pouring off the ground like smoke, through trees so thick and green they look black against the reddening day.
We reach a spot where fire has come to the shore. A fire, in this wet a gooey place is a difficult thing to imagine. Had to be manmade. We stop. Just ahead in the thinning fog is a set of foot prints in the tar and burnt clay ground. Sore-assed and bleary-eyed, we find a perfect perch on the shore and study them.
That’s when I see the Humvee coming.
One of ours.
Rescued, finally, and all I can think is we’ll be able to catch a little rest soon—real rest. Which of course means I’ll be wide awake.
Hell with that. I’m ready to sit drink away the strange feeling in my head. It just fucking clings.
That, and I need some toilet paper.
I kiss Big Early’s head as they get out and ask if I’m okay. Then I cry. Lick them in the face with every tongue in hell if they didn’t understand that.
Chapter 21
“So that’s it,” the army psychiatrist said. “That’s how you got here?”
Tyler McCarthy stared at his boots a moment. The doc was pretty, he thought, like magazine pretty. “Yeah.”
“You do know about the dog then?”
“Ma’am.”
“You do?”
“Well I think.”
“What do you think,” she said.
“Please, not... Just take care of him.”
“Okay.”
Chapter 22
PART TWO
DOC’S TALE
War would end if the dead could return
-Stanley Baldwin
While the cold air splashed up his back, Doc Ludeman took another step into the bar, then stepped aside, watching a pair of battered hunters leaving, limping, holding each other up. The first brawl of the night was over. For now. Probably some nonsense about money. But he knew they can always take it to a more basic level than that. The victor, he seemed nice. He stood bloodied and depleted at the bar. A guy named Dale, up from Nashville. His smile was the smile of the new ones. It didn’t seemed forced. He was half again as muscular as most hunters. But so were half the old dogs in Outer Fort Campbell—which seemed to attract every manner of roughneck and scumbag that Kentucky had to offer.
Doc threw aside a toothpick, which he had exhauste
d down to a sliver, and strolled across to Tyler McCarthy’s uncle’s. The McCarthys. Gruff, displaced Old New Yorkers, every one. Jickie, Rocco, Gig, and Kenzo. All were retired, so to speak, but each had once been commandos once, fierce pavers of the great Human Way. They were engaged in a heated discussion with some fellows that were Doc’s age. They were from a nearby fortification called Bastard Hill and armored in tattered Kevlar.
“Has any heard anything about Tyler?” Doc asked, uninterested in their dispute.
“That’s the tenth time you’ve asked that question,” Tyler’s Uncle Jickie barked, looking up sharply. “The tenth fucking time, Doc. And you’ve got no more information than the first!”
The rest of the table hushed. Jickie looked to him to for a humble nod of apology. For bringing Tyler’s name up, Doc supposed. Tyler had been a source of both income and pride to his eldest uncle. But that love was buried good, layered under the kind of grizzled face that could have been grafted from the ass end of a rhinoceros.
Doc gave the boobs at the bar a peak, then gave in.
“Sorry.”
“Hold on, Doc,” drawled Fat Addly. He was a squat dude, strong as hell, but the kind of fellow you’d think would have been bred out, seeing as speed was everything. He had friendly eyes and bulging, red cheeks. “You don’t expect Tyler?”
“Here we go…”
“Even if it was his tracks the pararescuers found leaving the site, that fucker’s a pile of anaconda shit by now.”
Doc laughed. Inwardly. Well, what can you do? A pile of Anaconda shit was a funny thing to think about. However, he could tell Addly’s goal was more to get away from Tyler’s uncles’ arguments than to answer him. And Doc couldn’t help himself. He drew up a chair to the esteemed company of McCarthy patriarchs.
