This Is Not The End: But I Can See It From Here (The Big Red Z Book 1)

by Thomas Head

  At which the rest of his party had a good chuckle and left his uncle with only “Well!” to say.

  While there was a break in the rollicking, which was perking up the whole pub now, Doc strode quickly out, right behind her, chuckling with the glossy eyes of a new buzz. They ran down to the river, and seeing that their vessel was fine, she took him on a path through the greening willows. They fled along a trail beneath the cliff. The edged along the palisade walls until the shouting of the guards for him to “Watch that one, boy!” could be no longer heard.

  Finally, they stopped in front of a modest old outbuilding. She turned to offer him her arm.

  “Permit me,” she said, offering her damp sleeve to him as formally as if he had been some grand lord of an entire compound.

  “Thank you—but I’m afraid I can’t,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  He showed her the two enormous buckets of ale that he held in each hand. Then he heard a strange noise on the wind, like a low sigh or a silent weeping. He peered up into the dark to find her laughing

  Doc smiled, but did not like that embarrassed feeling that came over him, trying to navigate up the ladder with the buckets. They trudged up through the dark to a quiet place on the roof. The view was nice. He could see down the opposite slope and could see the river plainly.

  “Pretty,” Doc said stupidly, giving her one of the buckets.

  “Do you know, mister, that I am completely unaware of your name?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well then. I suppose it isn’t necessary to name a stray. So long as they come when they’re called.”

  “Feed them well enough, and they may even come back around.”

  Doc was hoping to add some sense of puckish mystery to the night. Instead, there was a sudden, awkward moment.

  He could only shrug.

  “Yep,” she said, with no emphasis on what she meant. And he suddenly realized that he had been silenced by the very game he’d started.

  Doc grunted, then pulled off a plaid blanket from the top of his pack and placed it on the roof.

  “I am not in the least bit inclined to sit,” she said, then went cheeks-deep into her bucket.

  “Oh shit. Please. Forgive me,” Doc said. He went ahead and sat himself down. “I’m such an animal—I assure you, my intentions were purely sexual.”

  At which she spit beer, laughing.

  “A stray dog indeed, sir.”

  “I quite agree with you. Though you should probably at least name me before you offer me any food.”

  She put a finger to her teeth and looked him over. She strode forward and pinched his arm. Ten she bent down and traced his face with her hand, grabbing a handful of check. She pulled back to inspect his teeth.

  “What kind of urine do you brush with?” she asked.

  “Cow.”

  “Hmm. Interesting.” She turned sideways and looked at him, her head tilting.

  “Favorite food?”

  “The brisket.”

  She glanced down at her own chest, then eyed him more sternly than ever. “Odd. I took you for a ham boy.”

  Who doesn’t like hams? Doc was about to ask her as much when she made a motion with her finger.

  “Stand up,” she demanded.

  Doc was awkwardly conscious of himself as she walked around him.

  “Sturdy. Well fed. A bit of pooch here in the middle though. You belonged to somebody once.”

  “Really?” Doc said. He was strangely thrilled at the odd witchery she was making him feel.

  “Oh yes. The body, the posture, the gait, the voice… They all tell an interesting story.”

  “Story?”

  “Don’t you know? You’ve been talking in gushes for the past five minutes?” she asked.

  As she continued her inspection, Doc took a long pull from the bucket. “Well!” he said, the fine ale propelling him into an even better mood. “If you’ll give me a week’s warning, I’ll try to keep up this end of the conversation.”

  “Ah! There! I’ve pulled you enough to break through the ice at last! It’s been such hard work!”

  “And you’ve come up badly wet.”

  “You’re doing well, handsome.”

  “Thanks to my instructor,” Doc said, and he swept her a courtly bow.

  “There! There!” she cried, dropping her blouse to her waist, as she got on her knees.

  “Madam! You’ve never given me my name—”

  “So long as you come when you’re called, I’ll just call you Handsome.”

  “That, my dear, is not going to be a problem.”

  Chapter 32

  “Handsome!” she whispered, interrupting his sleep at some point in the night. “Let’s do it again.”

  With a strange hope in his heart, Doc crawled cautiously down through the silent shadows of his dreams in the waking world.

  But she had not uttered the words.

  Doc smiled anyway. She was curled up next to him, nearly naked on the cold roof, also smiling. Doc pulled her closer. He just stared into the vast wastes of stars, completely content with his place in the wet gray muck of it all. The wind moved through empty solitudes of the forest around them. It brought a warm, aching sigh of unutterable satisfaction. The curves and gentles noises of breath that came from the woman beside him were too flawless for the limitation of speech. Every faint rustling from the gauzy, wavering bodies of heaven brought him peace, a peace as vast and noiseless as the wheeling of planets through the star-speckled black; and any attempts to describe it seemed sacrilege. Perhaps it was.

  And that was purpose enough for his life. For now.

  Reflecting on his experiences in life, on Tyler’s maddening heartache, Doc was starting to think of life as a senseless jumble with no purpose but to get through it. Now, something in the calm of the forest around them, or the certainty of their unerring moment together, quieted his unrest; so let anyone who would hear a fool mutter absurdities, hear this—just like a mother quiets a fretful child, that rowdy woman, so free with her love, calmed and lulled his tumultuous thoughts. And Doc loved her for that alone. He did. He loved her.

  “How much for the blowjob?” he asked.

  She smiled, stirring with the creeping morning light. “On the house.”

  “If you’ll wear this bandana, or maybe put it away somewhere safe, perhaps you’ll remember the stray that came through your compound on the eve of Martin Luther King Day.”

  She yawned, then smiled sleepily.

  “If you’ll keep one end for yourself, handsome, I’ll take the other.”

  “Brilliant,” he whispered, tightening his clasp around her fingers. He gave her a couple of his old Marlboros. “You are just… Shit. I don’t have the words.”

  She laughed a low, mellow laugh that set his heart beating. As she lit her cigarette, he felt another great intoxication of strength, and probably could have conquered a good chunk of known world.

  “Doc!” someone shouted in the distance.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Doc?” she asked.

  “Doc—I mean, yes,” he said, and he gulped down his embarrassment.

  From the river came, “Doc, where the devil are you, boy!”

  “Damn it.”

  “Son of a bitch, that’s it, motherfucker! We’re leaving without you!”

  Struggling to get dressed, Doc was shocked that she was in no rush to do the same. She lie there, naked as the day she came into the world, smiling at him.

  Doc sat to put on his boots and kissed her.

  As he stood, Doc looked down with a questioning look, and he did ask why she did not cover herself. He did not have to. She was allowing him to digest what he was walking away from. No, she was not full of conceit. She was just comfortable, and confident.

  What other absurd things Doc might have said, he cannot tell. But they were at the end of their time together, and he had to go.

  Stooping, Doc picked a bunch of dandelion greens that had t
aken root in the roof’s gutter. He felt foolish as he gave them to her.

  “Doc, you idiot,” came a call from the distance, but it might as well have been her words. “We’ll see you when we get back!”

  Then she blew him a kiss, and it made a dull thud echo through his stomach—it was the most erotic and heart-melting thing he’d ever known.

  “Go on, then. You’ve already slayed your woman… now go rescue your dragons.”

  * * *

  The purple hills were a frost-etched mirror to the morning’s new sunlight. Between their shadows and the forested banks, Doc found the old boys in a circle, their backs to each other, guns up. He could hear the shouts now, shouts of defiance and shouts to give a fellow courage, and then archers, of all things, rose on the city walls loosed their bows. He saw the glitter of the feathers as the arrows slashed down toward his fellows.

  A moment later, another round came arching over the high wall to fall on all around Dale and the McCarthys. Amazingly, at least to him, it seemed that none of their men was struck, though several line of hedgehog spines feathered the dock as the old boys advanced toward the ship.

  And Doc noticed that it was prostitutes that were attacking.

  All of them, nametagged whores.

  Three parties of prostitutes advanced, and now his boys were pointing their guns, none shooting at them.

  “Damnation, boys, we can’t wait! We’ve gotta hurry along now!” his uncle cried nervously.

  Doc saw the closely touching guns vanish along the docks. Then he saw the gun-wedge emerge from a far ditch, and, like a monstrous beast, crawl out closer to the vessel. Doc could see nothing now except the flash of samurai blades rising and falling, and as the maids charged, Doc, for a moment, could only hear that sound, the real music of battle, the chop of steel on gunmetal, steel on steel, yet when he again caught sight of them the gun-wedge was still moving. Like a boar’s razor-sharp tusk, the blades began the swing and lunge until the wedge had pierced the women’s’ formidable ranks along the docks, knocking several of them into the water. Soon after, the Feisty-Uncle heaved upstream by dint of a Mighty Rocco, rowing with two oars, and though the barmaids plunged into the water and tried to wrap around the vessel, his merry boys pressed forward, more of them rowing now, across a small sandbar and into the deep green waters beyond it.

  The boys they suddenly cheered and surged beyond sight.

  “What the devil have they done?” Doc muttered under his breath, realizing the surreal situation they had left him in—in one moment he was quite asleep, and very much naked with a rare beauty, and now they had vanished into the curves of the river.

  The panic and relief mixing in his sternum, Doc charged into town, careful to remain unseen.

  Almost immediately, he spotted a lone woman, walking her horse, leading it by the bridle. He snuck up behind her, swiftly, silently before he grabbed the bottom of her dress by the hem and yanked upward. As she spun around, struggling in vain to cover her buttcks, he tied the hem over her head. He then tied the hem to a tree and leapt atop the horse.

  In the next instant, she was running behind him, nude, crying, “Thief! Rapist devil!”

  Doc was on the large black horse, scrambling through the compound’s streets and alleyway’s ramparts, then down the bank’s farther side through the ramparts beyond. The way led through a side entrance in the city walls. Before he knew it, Doc was cutting through a dense thicket of pines with ferns half the height of a man. Only dim light penetrated the maze of foliage, and the trail led the horse and him at least a mile from the river. Little Fellow, as Doc called the enormous steed, was trotting hard but with controlled glee, and they both glided through the brake without disturbing a fern branch, while Doc—after the manner of the McCarthys—seemed to catch every twig in the forest with his beard. But the horse seemed to know what Doc wanted, as only the finest steeds can do. Twice Doc felt Little Fellow pull up abruptly and look warily through the cedars on one side. Once, the beast even stooped down and peered among the fern stems. Then he silently whinnied back toward the river, galloping through the undergrowth again without explanation. At first Doc could see nothing, and regretted being led so far into the woods. He was about to reign him back onto the trail, when Little Fellow, pricked his ears forward and halted, as if he feared to move.

  For the fourth time, the remarkably smart creature came to a dead stand. Now, Doc, too, heard a rustle, and saw a vague sinuous movement distinctly running abreast of them among the ferns. For a moment, when they stopped, it ceased. Then it wiggled forward like a beast, or serpent in the underbrush.

  It was a lone zombie. He could just make out the stone-colored skin of its back before it leapt like a cat at the horse’s neck. And those dagger-pointed teeth, sharper than a pruning hook, flashed as it licked the air.

  Doc leapt, swinging downward with his samurai sword. The beast called out with a howl, but cut short as its head and right arm fell free from its body.

  He winced, looking down at it. Zombies have a sort of… ionized odor about them, something of a cross between a corpse and a leaky battery. Dead, their stench amplifies in an instant, like squishing a stink bug.

  “Well, shit, Little Fellow. I wish you were mine, dammit! I’ve never seen a horse a smart as you!”

  He kissed the horse between the eyes.

  Little Fellow eased back, and they stood noiseless until by the utter noiselessness of the green, until it was clear that the zombie had been alone.

  Then at last, Doc saw them.

  His merry warband.

  Chapter 33

  Just before the river narrowed to rapids, Doc called out with a series of three bird whistles

  Uncle Jickie, whose cunning eyes seemed to gleam with the malice of a serpent, silently twisted in the vessel and turned to the bank. The swish of waters rushing past, Doc gave the horse a drink and set him on a course back the way they came.

  Then, wrapping his half bandana around his head, Doc propped his ass on the gunwale and slid into his place among his fellow commandos. Not a word was uttered. They just drifted, guns up, and silent.

  When they were in mid-stream again, half dazed by the wonder of his night and half shocked still by the unexpected, unexplained fight his boys had with the prostitutes, Doc just breathed the clear air, and began rowing. All he had seen and heard during the night still floated in his mind like a sigh of wind through the forest. He was only half-conscious that cedars, oaks and cliffs were engaged in a mad race past the sides of the raiding raft—which was more less when his uncle cuffed him across the ear, to an uproar of laughs from the old boys.

  “Bloody taint!” Jick screamed.

  “What? What the fuck was that!”

  “The fuck was that indeed!” Tyler roared, silencing all onboard. “How dare you?”

  Doc turned to look up at him.

  Tyler shook his head.

  “Little brother, you make off with that big apple-shaped ass, and you don’t even share the details?”

  At which Rocco, Kenzo, Gig, Dale, and Jickie laughed with such an uproar that Doc’s cramped limbs ached to catch himself before he fell back-asswards from the rocking vessel.

  * * *

  A dozen times, Doc could have dozed off, but every time his eyelids became heavy, his uncle Jickie turned his grimace into that snake-like gaze and looked at him with a warning in his eyes: fun may indeed be had along the way, sir, but it will certainly not slow the war party.

  Now wide awake, a question fell on Doc’s head like a hammer. He turned toward Dale.

  “What the thundering fuck was the deal with the prostitutes?”

  Not a muscle of the big commando’s face changed, nor did any of the attitudes alter in the least. In fact they all seemed in a sort of stoic oblivion of his existence. Gig’s head was thrown back a little too far though, and the steely, unflinching eyes were fixed on the morning’s growing storm clouds.

  “Gill?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,”
the old man said.

  “What did you do?”

  “Do?! Henceforth, Mister Doc, I’ll thank you to know that a man of my age doesn’t often find himself telling a dozen women ‘no’.”

  “What?”

  “They asked to come,” Dale put in.

  “Come?”

  “With us. And Gig here tells them, ‘You? Ha! You bitches couldn’t put an arrow in a hungover old man, much less a charging Shado.”

  At which the others lost their stoic cool, rollicking again like boys. And Doc asked no more of it.

  Laughing, Doc told him sharply he needed to be more careful with his tongue.

  He gave an evil leer, and muttered, “Pah! Likewise, Mister Doc!”

  “Trust me, Mister Gig, I was.”

  Which set the vessel rocking once more.

  Chapter 34

  Without any more reminiscing, they pushed forward. And they pushed hard. The river’s pace was merciless.

  Logic says that going downstream is easier. Logic, Jick would have you know, is a lying sack of shit. At places, it seemed damned near impossible. It flowed through the remnants of some unknown city, the intact foundations channeling the waters to only five feet across at places. They had to pause to rest, mooring themselves on a stout metal sign post of something called a Cracker Barrel, which Doc assumed once sold Saltines. And it was always in such places the Shado attacked.

  Pulling backwards, just trying not to rush downstream took the strength of three men, and a fourth to steady them. Always, Tyler was left “at gun”. If old Batt, the Chinese guide, had any equal on this Earth in his special sense for the presence of the undead, it was Tyler. The most legendary of the McCarthys, his reputation was not unfounded. Standing in the unsteady raft, sixty yard shots were as natural and easy to him as ten yard shots were to a normal man on level land. Even in the heralded Z Company, where the best of the best had taken the Good Fight across the globe, Tyler had been a legend. Surviving the plane crash in Ecuador, then making his way home to Kentucky, he had quickly turned into something beyond a legend, almost a living myth. Truly, it was a pleasure to see him at work.