by Thomas Head
Had it been the work of the barmaids before they met up?
No.
These had fallen dead with no wounds whatsover but the hideous scars that became theirs on their own becoming.
His hope was so great that Doc did not even care to go have another. Where they lay, Doc could tell only that they were dead; carrion wheeled with wicked cries overhead and there was a vague movement of wolfish shapes along the ground.
Coyotes.
Something else that would never eathem before.
What possessed him to get back to the creek bed, Doc cannot imagine, unless the fear of those creatures returning. But he carried a thing or two to end them easily enough. At any rate, the little and Doc scampered back, and it was in seeking that hidden little way that Doc thought he distinguished the faintest motion of one the zombie’s figures. It was clothed like a man, though, and lying apart from the others.
Then it moved.
The sight riveted him to the spot.
Surely it was a mistake! The form could not have moved. It must have been some error of vision, or trick of the shadowy starlight. But Doc could not take his eyes from the prostrate form. Again the body moved—distinctly moved—beyond possibility of a trick of the eye, the chest heaving up and sinking like a man struggling but unable to rise. With the ghastly dead, and the ravening vultures all about, the movement of that wounded man was strangely terrifying. And though he dared not show it, his heart thudded with fear as he ran to the man’s aid.
The form was Dale. One hand staunched a wound in his head and the other gripped a knife, with which he had been defending himself.
Doc stooped to examine him.
At first, he was unconscious of his presence. Gently, Doc tried to remove the left hand from his forehead, but at the touch, out struck the right hand in vicious thrusts of the hunting-knife, one blind cut barely missing his arm.
“Hold on, bud!” Doc cried, “I’m no foe!” and he caught the right arm tightly.
At the sound of his voice, the left hand swung out, revealing a frightful gash. The next thing Doc knew, his left arm had encircled his neck like the coil of a strangler, five fingers were digging into the flesh of his throat and Dale was making frantic efforts to free his right hand and plunge that dagger into him. The shock of the discovery threw him off guard, and for a moment there was a struggle, but only for a moment. Then the wounded man fell back, writhing in pain, his face contorted with agony and hate. Doc did not think he could see him. He must have been blind from that wound. Doc stood back, but his knife still cut the air.
“Dale!” Doc said.
The right arm fell limp and still.
“Doc?..”
The thin lips moved again. He was saying, or trying to say, something.
“Speak louder!”
The lips were still moving, but Doc could not hear a sound.
Doc put his ear to his lips, fearful that life might slip away before he could hear.
There was a snarl through the glistening set teeth. The prostrate body gave an upward lurch. With one swift, treacherous thrust, he grabbed Doc’s arm.
“Something in them has gone, Doc. It’s over… It is over..”
Chapter 58
Doc supposed there were times in the life of every man, even the strongest—and Doc would never call himself that—when a feather’s weight added to a burden can snap their endurance. Doc had reached that stage before encountering Dale. With the events of the quest south, and the long, hard trek northward still weighing on his head, the past months had been altogether too hard-packed for his wellbeing.
The madness of the Merry Commandos no longer amazed him.
And the lad and Doc wept in each other’s arms.
* * *
It was daylight of their third day out. Doc was no weak-kneed coward, but he physically shook every time he thought about what the child had been through. There was a daze to his eyes, which the overly weary know too well, and in the child’s brain he knew there was a whirling exhaustion that would only let him distinguish two thoughts: whether he was okay or not okay.
For now, he was okay.
Doc faked a smiled shaking his head. He was aware, as he dragged the little fellow and himself out of the ruins of Nashville onto greener pastureland, that the there was a courage in the little guy that was hard to imagine.
He had caught the packhorse again, and after a dozen false plunges at the stirrup, he gave up the attempt, let the little guy ride, and footed it. With the beast at the end of a trailing bridle rein, he saw the boy smiling, just riding along.
Doc got a sudden feeling, like a breeze of a thought, that life was going to get back in tune.
One day.
There was no one around, and there was hardly a sound in the still air. The storm in his mind had driven all concerns away. Perhaps he had broken though the point where the brain counts things either good or evil, which may be that the reason good quests fail so often where evil ventures succeed. That’s thing about life, he mused: the good man blunders forward tirelessly, trusting to the merits of his cause. The evil manipulator proceeds warily as a cat over broken glass.
And so, altogether apart from these random thoughts, another arrived. Doc understood then that they had to kill a deer or a pig, have them a good meal. And just rest for a week or so.
And so they did.
A wind rustled through the foliage as they banked that night, and when Doc came back to their little camp with a deer already skinned, he saw the little fellow laugh as though Doc had brought him a basket of toys.
And he knew, or felt, rather, that he had made the right decision.
* * *
For almost two weeks, they stayed there. It was a small place, tucked away were brushwood gave place to a forest of ferns, which concealed them in their deep foliage. The camp was not a hundred feet away from the river, though you’d never see it from the bank. Doc had only stumbled upon it by accident during his hunt. Doc put up a lashing of fern leaves. He and the little fellow lay in lazy attitudes about the fire. They ate three meals a day out of that deer for two solid weeks. They told stories. They laughed. They never talked about his father or his mother.
“Follow me, little dude,” Doc commanded one day.
And they left out for Beergarden, and Doc tried to think of what he’d say to Dolly. Which was a useless distraction.
“Let’s go, little man,” he said, and took the little fellow’s tiny hand. “Let’s go home.”
Chapter 59
As night fully muted Dolly’s figure beside him, Doc felt half-conscious. It was a strange feeling, almost as if some part of his chest had slipped into the ground.
He was aware of her doting about him and could still feel her attention as she bent and gathered their son, who was more than happy to be called Tyler into her arms. He lit an age-old Marlboro. He pulled a little sip from a plastic cup of whiskey.
For another moment, she and the child ran together, until the darkness surrounded them.
He had started a small fire, and in time they all sat before it.
He looked down at the child. His head was in his mother’s lap, and his eyes were closed. His chest was rising and falling softly. He had thought this would not be possible, and he had not planned for it.
And yet here he was.
“Okay, handsome?” she asked.
Doc nodded.
He was okay.
______________ END _____________
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