by Thomas Head
“I beg your pardon, fellas,” he said. “What were you saying to Fat Ass?”
“Talk of conquest,” Uncle Jickie said.
“Yeah?”
“Hell yeah, Doc. We’ve have transformed these shado-filled hillsides into a damned playground. Safe enough for fat fucks like this piece of shit.”
“Ha!” Addly laughed. He was, of course, was amused at Tyler’s uncle. Old Jick had been a leading spirit in the Good Fight, and his enthusiasm still knew no bounds.
“We have chopped a path from these outer walls as far south as Bastard Hill.”
Addly paused with a supercilious smile, puffing grandly on his cigarette. “By damn but I’ll give you old fuckers that much.”
The old uncle grimaced, which Doc had to admit, puzzled him somewhat. You could never seem to get a bead on how the old dogs were going to react. Addly agreeing with him, for instance, wasn’t to his taste; it was certainly true that in rare pockets of the world, the Safe Zones were actually spreading, thanks enough to the savagery of ironclad old hunters like the McCarthys. IN places like Fort Campbells it even allowed the lazier young fatasses of the hills to come in afterward, living relatively normal lives, so long as they camped near the outer walls.
“Old fuckers? Pardon me, Mister Addly,” the uncle said, furrowing his brows thoughtfully. “You forget that, technically, the blowjobs your mother gave us all ensured we didn’t have to do too much fucking, so to speak.”
Addly tsked, and his cheeks took on a deeper purplish shade. But Doc had to say this of him, he returned the charge good-humoredly enough.
“Nonsense, old man,” he laughed. “If mama gave such good head, why the frozen hell did so many of my brothers look like you ugly-ass McCarthys?”
Before the laughter subsided, “It was her heart!” interrupted Uncle Jickie. “And I’d thank you not to talk about Miss Fay like that,” he added.
Doc shook his head, grinning, before he decided to leave and let the old men have their time.
Then the uncles all rose as well, and he feared for a moment they were going to follow him out. But it was only to get nearer the bar and sort some other argument out with beer, where Doc heard Tyler’s uncles flinging more verbal fists.
“Now see here, Jick…”
Chapter 23
It was a windy night, and as cold as a corpse’ fraying nipples. A foot of snow covered the ground while a few lonely clouds scooted atop the black pines trees. There was a wolf’s eye moon rimming the naked, twisted girders of the old power plant on the horizon, and it smelled of even more snow, or perhaps sleet, despite the great splash of stars mid-heaven.
Doc looked up the side of Collie-dog Hill to the light of Uncle Jickie’s hall. It was a grand old lodge, built like a cabin designed in the fevered dreams of a lunatic. Spikes jutted from every conceivable angle, like a porcupine. It was there that Doc met Tyler. He had only just arrived, eleven years old and somehow still alive, still wiping tears from his sleeves. Tyler, thirteen, must have noticed the look in his eyes, because he deigned to ask who he had lost. And in less than a moment, Doc had learned that the same thing had happened to him. Tyler had lost his father when he was just a boy, and that after his mom fell to them, too, Jickie had raised him like a son. At that information, Doc’s heart gave a curious, jubilant thud. It was hard to explain. The circumstances were so alike, maybe. He had no idea. All he could feel was a warmth spreading across his chest. Did he just need someone to relate to? As he pondered why he felt so much better, so suddenly, Tyler’s uncle mentally measured him with that stern look he was so good at, interrupting his reverie.
Seemingly undecided, he turned to Tyler.
Young Tyler gave a sort of reserved nod.
It was all the approval Uncle Jickie needed. “You’ll have your smile back, Doc,” he said, calling him Doc for the first time, seeming to decide that the scrubs he was wearing were more doctor-like than nurse-like.
Before that year had passed, Tyler and Doc they were as good companions as two fellows could be. But Tyler had already had a big ripe, fair-haired girlfriend. That did not mean, however, an end to their rides, to their hunting down the Red River, and their long evening talks. Emily was almost as much fun as Tyler, with a laugh that could light up an old coal mine. She made second place feel just fine.
So here Doc was, stepping outside Goback Pub, thinking about Tyler, about the time Emily had shot him a bird while he spied on here bathing, when something odd happened. Peering from the porch, he was calculating how long a man could survive in the jungle he was surprised by the form of a horse beneath the lantern of the arched gateway; and his surprise increased on nearer inspection. As Doc walked up, the creature gave a whinny. Then he recognized it was Tyler’s red horse, lathered with sweat. It was shivering, but he had given it no blanket. The reins were slung over the hitching post, and he heard steps hurrying to the side door of the pub.
“Tyler?”
There was no answer.
Doc led the horse to the stable-man and hurried back to see if Tyler was inside.
His eyes adjusting again, he blinked. The sitting room was deserted, but Tyler’s figure was entering the dining room. He must have seemed a curious figure to the questioning looks of old commandos, who were still arguing: in one hand was his riding whip, in the other, his gloves. He wore Kevlar and in the belt were two axes. One sleeve was torn from wrist to elbow and his boots looked like something had clawed them. His helm was still on, slouched down over his eyes.
“Frozen fuck, it’s Tyler!” Uncle Jickie said, crying as he ran to embrace his long lost nephew.
But he halted.
Not a word came from Tyler.
Doc rushed forward. But Doc quickly checked himself. Tyler turned slowly towards him, offering no greeting but a pair of eyes like frozen little ponds and parched, wordless lips. Even Addly, insufferably honest ass that he was, hadn’t been jowls-deep in beer, would have noticed that there was something terrible written on Tyler’s face.
“Surprised his girlfriend let him out of that ass of hers long enough to come play.” he said, despite Doc’s raised hands and headshaking.
Barely were the words out when Tyler’s teeth clenched behind the newly-bearded lips, giving him a feral expression that was strange to his philosophical face. He spun and took a quick stride towards the fatass.
Then he whirled his whip in one cutting blow, landing it across Addly’s bloated red cheeks.
Chapter 24
The whole thing was so unexpected that for a moment not one soul in the room drew a breath. Then Addly sprang up with the bellow of an enraged bull, overturning the table in his rush.
A dozen guards were pulling him back from Tyler.
“Tyler!” Doc yelled, unsure what to add
But Tyler stood motionless as if he saw none of them. Except for being out of breath now, he wore precisely the same strange, distracted air.
“Hold him back!” Doc implored.
Old Addly was striking every nose and noggin around him to get free from the guards.
“Calm the hell down, there’s a mistake! Something’s fucking wrong!”
“Glad the mistake landed where it did, all the same,” Uncle Jickie whispered in his ear.
“Demon!” Addly roared. “Cowardly fuck, you will pay!”
“Hellfire, but get him out of here,” his uncle said. “Side room—here—lead him in—he’s gone fucking crazy!”
“Never,” Doc said. Doc knew both Tyler and his girlfriend too well; they were stout people with stout minds. But they led the poor, dazed being into a side office, where Jickie promptly turned the key and took up with his back against the door.
“Tyler, what the hell!” Jick broke out sternly, “if it’s not scotch or madness—” There, he stopped because Tyler, utterly unconscious of them, moved automatically across the room. Throwing his Z Company helmet down, he bowed his head over both arms on the mantelpiece.
His uncle and Doc looked at each o
ther. Raising his brows, Jickie touched his forehead and whispered across to him, “Fucking crazy.”
At that, Tyler turned slowly round and faced them with bloodshot, gleaming eyes. “Crazy,” he muttered. His voice had changed. Part of his tongue was gone, giving him a whispery rasp like some Brooklynite Clint Eastwood.
Tyler took a breath, framing his next words with great effort. “Fuck me, boys, you both should know him better than to mouth such rot. Tonight, I’d sell my soul, sell this fucking soul to be crazy, to know that all I think has happened, hadn’t happened at all—” and a sharp intake of breath broke his speech.
“Frozen hell, out with it, boy!” Jickie shouted. “We’ll stand by you! Has that fat ass red-cheeked bastard—”
“Shit, Jick! Spare your fucking curiosity a moment,” Tyler cut in. He put his gloved hand to his forehead.
“What the—what did you strike him for?”
“What? Did I strike somebody?” he asked, speaking with the slow, icy self-possession bred by a lifetime of danger. He almost seemed to chuckle.
Again, his uncle flashed a questioning look at him.
“Did I strike somebody? Wish you’d apologize—”
“Apologize!” thundered his uncle. “Fuck. I’ll do nothing of the kind! Served him right. That was an ugly way, an ugly damn way, to speak of any man’s woman—” But the word “woman” had not been uttered before Tyler threw out his hands in an imploring gesture.
“Don’t! I can’t get away from it! It’s no nightmare. Boys, how can I tell you? There’s no way of saying it! Such things don’t—couldn’t—to her—of all… But she’s…”
“See here, Tyler,” his uncle said, suddenly and utterly beside himself.
“See here, Tyler,” Doc said, stupidly heedless of the brutality of their consol.
But he heard neither of them.
“She was there, Jick—She waved to me from the garden as I rode in. She was waving to me, and then she was gone! The curtain moved and I thought she was being playful or something but it was only the wind. I’ve searched every nook from cellar to attic. I heard her voice everywhere, but no! No—no—I’ve been hunting the house and garden for hours—”
“And the forest?” Jickie asked, the cutter instinct of former days suddenly re-awakening.
“The forest is ankle-deep with snow! I beat through the bush everywhere. There wasn’t a track or a broken twig where she could have passed.”
His torn clothes bore evidence to the thoroughness of that search.
“Nonsense,” his uncle burst out, beginning to bluster. “She’s been driven to town without leaving word!”
“No. No way. For fuck’s sake, boys, suggest something!”
Jick nodded, and in spite of Tyler’s entreaty, the excitable uncle subjected the frenzied soul to a storm of questions, none of which helped. Doc stood back, listening, and pieced the distracted, broken answers into some sort of coherency:
That morning, Tyler had arrived. He had purged a Shado nest, unusually close the Jick’ hall, where Em had been staying. It was so close she actually came out when she heard the shots. He had seen Emily on the porch. She had stood, braced herself, nearly feinting, then had run inside because apparently she thought he was a ghost. He followed. The great hall, Jick’s Bass Pro Shop turned cabin, was deathly still.
He was positive she was amusing herself, hiding, and he reassuringly bustled off to find her in the next room, and then the next, and yet the next, all to discover each was empty. Utterly. Empty. Alarm spread to the corners of his mind. At first there was only was white-faced, blank amazement. But then all the superstitions of hillside lore added to the fear on his anxious face. He began mumbling. Maybe you didn’t see here, his mind whispered. Tyler had torn outside the fortifications, but from the hill in the center of the glade-ne-parking lot to the encircling border of snow-laden barb-wire fencing there was no trace of her. He could see for himself that the snow was too deep and crusty that footprints could be traced from the garden to the bush.
Then, suddenly, Tyler had laughed at his own growing fears. She must be in the house, he had thought. The search of the old hall began again. From the hidden chamber in the vaulted cellar to attic rooms above, not a corner of the hall was unexplored. The alarm now became a panic.
Tyler, half-crazed and unable to believe his own senses, began wondering whether he was in a nightmare. It was as if he thought he might wake up and find the dead weight smothering his chest had been Emily, snuggling too close. He was vaguely conscious that it was strange of him to continue sleeping with the noise of the horse and snapping branches going on in the forest. But the din of the terrified search, rushing through the woods and of echoes rolling eerily back from the whitened hills, called him back to an unendurable reality—that, in broad daylight, his woman had disappeared in seconds. As suddenly and completely as if blotted out of existence… or spirited away by the gods…
“The thing is utterly impossible, Tyler,” Doc said, afraid to give the thought any reins whatsoever.
“Would that it were, dammit!”
“It was daylight, Tyler?” Jickie asked.
He nodded moodily.
“And she couldn’t be lost in the forest?” Doc added, taking up the interrogations.
“No trace—not a footprint!”
“And you’re quite sure she isn’t in the house?” his uncle said.
“Fuck yes! Quite!”
“And there was a zombie nest just a click down the road?” Jickie asked.
“What has that got to do with it?” he asked, springing to his feet. “Shado don’t run off with women. They eat them! Haven’t I spent half this miserable life killing them? I should know their fucking ways!”
“But if she isn’t in the hall, or the woods or in the garden, can’t you see, the nest is the only possible explanation?”
The lines on his face deepened. Then a sort of blackness overcame his brow. He made a noise you might hear in the shadows of a forest, and if ever Doc had ever seen murder written on a face, it was on Tyler’s.
“The fucking blackwaters...”
And they all just stood there a moment.
It might seem like a strange leap in logic, were it not for the fact that the blackwaters were not only mercenaries, but professional kidnappers. They often used old zombie nests as bait, pulling high-ranking officers in, then pulling them out through an alternate entrance before holding them for ransom
Jickie was the first to pull himself together. “Come on,” he said. “Gather up your fucking wits! We have to retrace your steps to the nest.”
The three of them flung through the pub room, much to the astonishment of the gossips who had been gathering around Tyler’s other uncles for developments in the quarrel with Addly.
There was no time to explain themselves.
At the outer porch, Tyler halted.
Slowly, he turned.
“Guys, I’m begging you. Don’t come,” he said, looking them all in the eye for the first time. “There’s a storm blowing. It’s rough weather and a rough road, full of frozen-over drifts.”
“Nonsense!”
“Please, Jick. Make my peace in there with that bastard I struck.”
And with a huff, Jickie nodded.
Then Tyler and Doc whisked out into the blackness of a boisterous, windy night. A moment later, their horses laden with samurai swords and shotguns, the two men were riding over snow-packed broken pavement that resembled cobblestones.
Chapter 25
“It will snow more,” Doc said, already feeling a few flakes driven through the darkness against his face. “The wind’s veered north. After the sleet, it will come thick as feathers. They need to get out to the nest before all the traces are covered. How far by the High Dog Road?”
“One and a half miles,” he said, and Doc knew by the sudden scream and plunge of his horse that heels were dug into raw sides.
They turned down that steep, tortuous street leading from Gobac
k toward the Hill of the Leaf. The wet thaw of midday had frozen and the road was slippery. They reined their horses in tightly, and by zagging and zigging from side to side, they managed to reach the foot of the hill without a single fall.
Here, they again gave them the bit, thundering across the bridge without stopping, which brought the keeper out, cursing and yelling for his toll. Doc tossed an old silver quarter over his shoulder and they galloped up the elm-lined avenue leading to that a fortified compound that Kenzo called home. Turning suddenly to the right, they followed a seldom frequented road, where snow was drifted heavily. Finally, their beasts sinking to their haunches and snorting through the white billows, they had to slacken pace.
Tyler had not spoken a word. Clouds were still massing on the north. Overhead a few stars glittered against the black, but the wind had the most mournful wail Doc had ever heard.
“Doc—listen! Do you hear anything? Do you hear someone calling for help? Is that a woman?”
“I don’t hear nothing but the wind.”
But his hesitancy belied the truth. They both heard sounds that could have easily been wailing. It was impossible to discern anything in the gathering storm. And the wind burst over them again, catching his empty denial in a mean sound, like the howling of a woman.
Then there was a lull, and Doc discerned the noise: It was Tyler.
The stout man by his side, who had held iron grip of himself before other eyes, was now giving in fully to grief.
Doc looked away. For a moment above the ragged edge of a storm cloud, and for a moment all the snow-laden evergreens stood out, spectral and still, like mourners. Snow was beginning to fall in great flakes that obscured the air.
Then they rode, until at last the short journey, which had seemed to take eons, was over. A bit of the moonlight gleamed from the snow on Jick’s roof to their right, just uphill, as they approached the nest.
