by Thomas Head
Doc had forgotten time, place, and even the danger of it—everything in the mad chase was noise and fire and the sheer fucking strangeness of a living machine as a foe. As he thought to fire his shotgun into the tires, it did nothing. His horse was blowing, almost spent, but still Doc dug the spurs into him, and was only a few lengths behind the machine again when the “head” turned.
Eyes narrowing, he pulled back on the reigns.
The gun leaking fire, it bore down, straight at him.
His horse reared, then sprang and aside. Leaning over to take sure aim, Doc fired into the barrel, but a side jerk unbalanced him. Instead he fired into a smaller gun, which blew the top of the tank’s head off.
Doc lost his stirrup and sprawled in the dust. When he got to his feet, the tank was spinning , spewing fire in every direction with his shotgun resting on the front of it. His horse was trotting away on three legs. Hunters were still tearing after the languishing machine as it spun. Riderless horses, mad with the smell of blood and snorting at every flash of fire, kept circling the dying tank. Jickie, Rocco, Kenzo, Dale and Tyler had evidently been left in the rear. They roared and into the open top as they caught up with it.
Doc looked everywhere for Gig and could not see him.
Near him, two Mexicans were righting their saddles. Doc was tightening the girths on a loose horse, which was not an easy matter.
Suddenly, there was the whistle of something through the air overhead. It was a roar. The same instant, a zombie gave an upward toss of both arms with a piercing shriek.
Even as the tank rolled over, dead and flaming, zombies poured out of the crater created by the blast.
Doc heard his terrified companion shout, “Shado! Shado!”
Then he fled in a panic, not knowing where he was going and staggering as he ran.
Then Doc saw a Mexican pitch forward face downwards. The back of his head was gone, hollowed out in a single bite. Doc had barely realized what had happened, or what it all meant, before an enormous roar broke from the high grass above the embankment. At that, he saw Rocco’s horse give a plunge and, wrenching the rein from his grasp, galloped off, leaving on the ground him to face the machine. Half a score of zombies scrambled down the cliff, and as Doc looked up, he saw Rocco firing, his M4 blasts taking the head of the first one. It bought him a split second to run as the rest of the beasts began circling back, their open mouths devouring their leader.
But there was something else, a sight almost as dreadful. It was the living body of his dead father. He was among the creatures, feasting; only this time, he was no ghost. His flesh was rotten, and he was soaked in blood.
Doc was looking hopelessly about for his shotgun. He wanted to end this perversion of his father, quickly. But more of the zombies appeared not a hundred yards away. Brandishing his own M4 with both hands, he stood ready. They came towards him at furious speed without pausing to kill the horses beside them.
Doc crouched as they approached.
White shards of teeth glistened, and it shrieked with the hideous scream of a devil. Doc knew that sound. He had grown to love it.
The demon came. With a jerk of his finger, he ended the first wave. Shado after shado fell headless back on its haunches. When another rose to eat him, just behind him, Doc sent his blade to its mouth. It lurched sideways, reared straight back, and with another swing, it too fell backwards without a head. The evil eyes that came next glared with a fixed look of pure hatred, and Doc’s hands tightened and sent a spray of bullet in to the head. The head did not come off well though, and the gun was nearly torn from his grasp as the zombie lunged at him again, nearly headless. Doc stepped back and ended it. As it rolled over in a final spasm, they were instantly set up by the group that Rocco had halted.
The demon that was his father lead them. When the cries of the macabre pack rang out, close at hand, their coming seemed to renew Doc’s strength. With his full weight, he swung at his father willowy, yet enormous form. But the rest of them dashed up, and he was so focused, one nearly bit off his face before Doc fell to the side and removed its head with the last bullets in his clip.
His hands bloody and slick, Doc lost his second clip.
His father’s form pounced at him, but Uncle Jickie, with blood lust on his face, axed off its head with a single blow from his samurai sword. Grabbing at its own neck, his father’s former body squirmed first on its knees, then went to its belly.
Doc nodded, panting.
The Mexicans had disappeared. Smoke was rising from the grass still.
Some of the Zombies were still alive, but had taken to chasing the horses now.
“Where the devil is Gig?” Doc asked.
Chapter 43
Mounting the horses, they rode up to the level prairie. Against the eastern horizon shone a blaze of orange. They whipped their horses to a gallop, knowing that Gig must have fallen from his steed.
The gathering smoke was obscuring their view, but they dashed back along the flattened trail of the dead tank, spurring their hard-ridden horses without mercy. Each of the old boys gave his horse the bit. Beating them over the head, they craned flat over the horses’ necks to lessen resistance to the air.
A boisterous wind was fanning the burning grass now. Great tides of fire rolled upward with forked tongues. Before long, cinders rained on them like liquid fire, scorching and maddening their horses; but they never paused.
The billowy clouds of smoke that rolled to meet them were blinding, and the very atmosphere, quivering with heat, seemed to become a fiery fluid that enveloped and tortured them. Doc’s hand was across his mouth to shut out the hot burning air. Their beasts whinnied pitiful screams and became wild with fear. Still they did not slow. They tied strips torn from their clothing across their mouths and beat the frantic creatures forward.
The fire wave was crackling and licking up everything within a few paces of them. The flames were not crawling in one insidious line, but the very heat of the air generated red waves and pillars, which came forward in leaps and bounds, reaching out with cloven fangs that hissed at them like an army of serpents. Doc remembered wondering in a half delirium whether he was already dead, and with the instinctive cry to heaven for help, he looked above. There was only a great pitchy dome with glowing clouds rolling, heaving and tossing. It made a body want to get on the ground and bury themselves, but Doc knew at that point they must choose one of two things, dash through the flames—or die.
They all paused, facing death, the Mexicans around them now, some of them huddling so close Doc felt the burn of hot stirrups against both ankles. Their clothing was smoking in a dozen places.
Suddenly, there was a lull of the wind.
Uncle Jickie cried out through his muffle, “The calm before the end, boys! The next burst and those red demon claws will have us”
But in the momentary lull, a place appeared through the trough of smoke. The grass was green and the fire-barrier breached.
“Not this day, uncle! Follow me, you sorry fucks!”
With a shout, they dashed heads down towards the green grass, their horses vaulting across the flaming wall, snorting and screaming with pain as they landed on the smoking turf of the other side. Doc gulped a great breath of the fresh air into his suffocating lungs.
As he tore the covering from his mouth, they raced on until they had cleared the flames.
Looking back, Doc saw a horse sinking on the blackened patch, a Mexican atop it. Both were screaming, aflame. There was a whiff of singed hair, and Doc understood that if Gig had somehow survived the blitz on the tank, the flames had him now.
Chapter 44
It was unusually cold when they brought their horses back away from the flames. Their old friend was gone, and the fire that had taken him was just a black scar on the grassland. They all stood and bundled themselves against a patina of spring rain, which began to fall sideways out of the white sky. They looked at one another, each red-faced from the flames and each one’s hair in singed gnarls.<
br />
Then Mighty Kenzo snorted, crying.
Twisting away with their thirsty horses, hunkering, they paused before the lip of a small stream that bore thought the grass as if burrowing. They shared a moment, hands on shoulders, and trudged down into the spongy creek they stood crested its rocky ledge. Bent and low in a surprising cold breeze, they stood staring down into the water as the horses drank.
“Where the old fart is now, they’re celebrating his return,” Doc whispered.
His uncle smiled.
Knowing they needed time, Doc decided to go gather the packhorses and supplies.
Chapter 45
The path the tank had left curled east, falling away to blackened, bald earth.
Gig’s burnt frame was not far off, maybe two miles. Doc could see eternity in his smile—his hearty face broken against the rock that had killed him. Beyond that, the sullen murk of the wide, grim marsh flattened, butting up against the forested hillside were they hid upon seeing it.
He again looked at old Uncle Gill, wincing this time at his flame-cracked skin. From the small grove of trees past the marsh spilled the mournful wails of wild folk, rising and falling out of tune with the wind. There was something happy and tiresome about it at the same time, something that let him know that the people singing it felt something of their pain.
Doc smiled, wishing Gig farewell.
The wind blew the grass around his horse’s hooves as it whinnied, as if in mourning.
Then Doc once more smelled the unpleasant stink of burnt flesh on the wind, and Doc heard the bittersweet clamor of the Zombies’ wailing cease.
With quick, thirsty carelessness, Doc went to chopping him up and burying him. Then, without words, he nodded and turned to find that their packhorses had already been strung together. A pair of thin gray figures stood outside the trees, staring at him.
It was the chief and the old river rat.
There was an odd stillness in their silence. And there was something lonely and menacing in their frozen, small eyes, contrasted the eager horses behind them. Doc shivered and thought to nod, but instead rode to them wordlessly, gathered their supplies, and left before they told him they were no longer welcome there.
* * *
It was a shock to see the fellows ready to travel on so soon. Such hardiness could only have come with the hardships The Good Fight had blunted them to, or perhaps it was solely because this place reminded them of Gig.
In either case, Tyler spat.
He pulled some silver pennies from his shirt. Throwing them over his shoulder, he said, “For ye parties in Heaven, Uncle Gig!”
Chapter 46
So they rode out, making their way south as hurriedly as possible, often with an unexpected happiness in their conversations. But not once, ever, did anyone discuss the fact that they had just encountered a living machine.
In his youth, it was oftentimes amazing to him what the Commando heart can endure. Frankly, it was still a stunning thing to see in person: the way they laughed and cajoled when talking about Gig, it was as if he’d been dead for years, and someone had brought his name in conversation. But there was a part of him all through the week-long trek across those grasslands and thinning forests that began to see the wisdom of this. Poets and bards with often compare sorrow or grief to a heavy heart, and anyone who has been amidst unfriendly enemies knows the danger of this.
But just when Doc had come to expect a certain happy, subdued undercurrent to his fellows’ exuberance, a shocked silence rippled through their party as they once again met with rolling hills.
His uncle made a motion with his hand for them to stop.
It was unnerving. Each man, stout as stone, sat atop their mounts at the last of the grasses, and looked without words into the vast and stony way before them.
Mighty Kenzo harrumphed.
“Fuuuck me,” Rocco said.
They had reached Nashville.
But it wasn’t there.
What remained of it was like a fairy land in an epic told by a gloomy poet; everything they had imagined about it was wrong. The wind reeked of utter annihilation. Blue and cold, barren as a sandbar, the wrinkled landscape was all but devoid of life. It was sharp with loose and flaky shale, as is if pounded by some monstrous hammer of the gods. The ground was blackish, but oddly reflective, and under a sky that grew gray by degrees, the land undulated away to the west like a glacier made of steel and rock.
Ever widening, the glassy desolation was consumed by the dreamscape of the bleak night that fell on them. Doc breathed. The difference in the land was so stark, so utterly unreal, he felt like he was staring at a different planet.
They were not far from Longmonger’s Lair, the hole in the center of Nashville. Maybe three days... There was just three days left to see if all the trek and trouble had been just to come and kill the woman and child again as shado, or to becomes zombies themselves.
“We know what we need to do, boys,” Rocco said glumly, at which he dismounted and unburdened his packhorse of its dwindling load.
“Indeed, Mister Rocco,” said Uncle Jickie. “Hooves won’t do. The beasts will slip and prove the fucking death of us.”
Than at last, someone at least hinted at discussing the living machine.
“No guns,” Tyler said.
No one argued, perhaps for fear of having to discuss what they had seen.
Tyler spared them the need, saying: “Something’s here. Something that’s turning our machines against us.”
* * *
On foot now, their backs laden with gear, food, and only their most weapons---axes they had gained from the Mexicans, riot shields, and swords.
They meandered cautiously downs into the stony hills before them. Their movements in the dark were hunkered and slow as they labored down the first slope. The blue-gray land was already a nightmare of knolls and pits, and here, strangely, the horizon seemed as though it closed in around them. The blanket of clouds was thinning, and the night sky swept itself clean to offer a better view of the hellish terrain before them.
They padded quickly together down through a long finger of burnt forest that reached up almost to the grassy slopes. To travel the hillsides in these reaches, one would do better to have walked for days beforehand, for the plunging, loose stone was already taxing the strength in his legs.
Doc would confess, though, that after so much riding, he found walking oddly pleasurable. It was always strange to him how much less tiring it is than riding.
But Doc was far from comfortable. Fortunately, he was not alone.
By morning, they had to stop. Under the fabric of low clouds, they halted. There was a thin grove of ruined cedar at the edge of a wild stream, which spilled from the earth near the pinnacle of two hilltops. The water falling wildly past their feet, they edged alongside a cool, blue wall of rock and drank.
They were each exhausted, utterly, and as a vigorous rain began to fall, Doc heard snoring.
He turned to find every one of his fellows asleep, sitting up.
* * *
As the morning passed away to a cold, dim afternoon, Doc let the boys sleep and cooked them a breakfast of their last smoked sausages, surprised to find that Tyler had woken up to help him.
“I’m sorry, Doc.”
“What?.. Why?”
“I don’t….. everything,” he said, but that was not at all that seemed to be on his min.”
“Tyler... There’s nothing to apologize for. An especially clever wise-ass once advised me that for everything there is cost.”
“Yes,” he conceded with a small grunt of a laugh. “Words like that lip out easier under a pleasant sun.”
Doc looked eastward. “I feel like I should be doing the apologizing, Tyler. You know, this trip hasn’t been with its losses…”
He laughed again. “Do you know that when ol’ Rocco, Jick, Gill, Kenzo and myself left out for Bowling Green, we were in a company of fifty.”
Doc cocked an eyebrow.
&
nbsp; “Twelve of us came home.”
Doc remembered. Jick had led that expedition. They had lost so many. He looked at Tyler with a look that told him he wanted to know if he was being honest, and not just making an old friend feel more confident.
He looked at him and clasped his shoulder, a tear forming, then curving down his sweaty cheek .
“Dangerous business, adventuring. Not in score of lifetimes could I thank you for all this. You have no idea what you have done for an old man.”
“Perhaps, soon enough some wayward whore of woman will have me for good, and I will have an idea,” Doc said and clasped his shoulder back. “The meat is done,” he added, seeing him smile. It was a sturdier smile than Doc had seen him wear in some months now, as if it might stay there for more than a moment.
It did not.
Doc asked him, “Won’t you wake those cantankerous old bastards up for me?”
* * *
The moon still hung low over a distant ripple of hills, shining vaguely through a new rain in the west.
They began to trek once again the slope of a long, low meadow of stone and oily grass. The long, sloping field was lined with a single high brake of evergreens, shaking in the breeze and dotted at their feet with a dull blaze of young yellow flowers. Beyond it, the hills were less grassy, and some were grassless altogether, just bald hilltops of blunt and rounded rock.
