No, I didn't hate Westfield. Not then. But I didn't particularly like him, either. Worse yet, I didn't trust him. The longer we zig-zagged back and forth across the Mexican outlands, seeking out more of these abandoned villages and shantytowns, the more I believed that Westfield didn't want to find anybody else. What other reason could there be for him to keep avoiding the cities, where there might still be survivors holding out? Might be places left where everything hadn't been looted. Where some semblance of order still existed. No, as the days passed and we raided one ghost town after another, keeping well away from civilization as the Mexicans had known it, the more I grew certain. Either Westfield didn't want to give up control of his little fiefdom, or he did know what it was like in the cities, and it frightened even him.
Benny nosed his way inside. Once upon a time, there had been a sign above the door. All that remained now were scarred, sun-faded boards, the name of the place unreadable.
I shot a look at Greg. It was obvious he was anxious to get back to the trailer where his wife and daughter were waiting, guarded by Nunez. The Mexican was fast with a gun, but gimped around on a leg he’d broken as a child that had never been set right. Nunez always stayed behind when we made a raid, tasked with guarding camp and our dwindling supplies. He didn’t feel sorry for himself, and took his responsibility seriously. Nunez? He was the kind of guy I could trust.
Greg looked back, gnawing the inside of his lip. Sweat ran dark along the collar of his shirt. This dump was even worse than the last. His eyes said it all: one of these days, the shit’s really gonna hit the fan.
Another thirty seconds. No whistle. No signal to follow and secure the place. Westfield stood stone-faced, Uzi in hand, ready to shoot or throw the Suburban in gear. Benny came out a moment later. He spat in disgust and hurled a drained bottle of tequila onto the pavement, where it exploded into a thousand pieces.
"Fucking nothing!" he called to Westfield, ignoring the rest of us. "Place is totally cleaned out. Motherfuckers took everything, even the goddamn bubblegum machi—"
Benny was a dead man before he hit the ground. By the time anyone, even Westfield, could get a shot off, the right side of Benny's neck had been peeled open like a ripe piece of fruit. He howled as the walker drove him to his knees, one of which smacked the pavement with a sickening crunch. Benny went a good two-hundred thirty on a five-seven frame, with a belly that hung over his belt like rising dough spilling out of a bread pan.
The zombie had launched itself out a second floor window, mindless in its pursuit of food. To the walker, Benny was a blood engorged sack of flesh, nothing more. It chewed noisily in the seconds it had before we opened fire on it. A tendon wiggled, caught in the rotten thing’s teeth. I don't think it had time to swallow. Its head simply evaporated into a cloud of grey mist.
The gunfire flung it away from Benny, a few useless rounds making it twitch where it landed, but it was no longer a threat. The sun would do the rest. A day and a half in the heat with the spiders and scorpions and rats would leave nothing but chalky bones, wrapped in fading cotton.
Greg was standing closest to Benny, but he quickly backed away. The ex-Federale was trying to stand, hobbled by his shattered kneecap, clutching the gaping wound in his throat. If he was trying to talk, it was unintelligible gurgling. If he was trying to breathe, he was failing.
Franco cursed and tried to hold it together. Benny was his friend, the two of them had survived this long largely by watching out for each other. That was all over now. Westfield gave him a second to see if he would do what needed to be done. Franco's gun hand trembled as he leveled the pistol at Benny, whose grimy face was streaked with tears. When he lifted his head to look at us, shredded vessels tore. Blood spurted through his fingers. Like a war casualty trying to staunch the flow of blood from a severed limb, Benny couldn’t do a thing about the ragged hole below his chin. Franco opened his mouth, looked like he was about to say something. Maybe, "I'm sorry." Or "Good-bye, my friend," but two gunshots broke the silence.
I didn't have to look. Westfield put a hand on Franco's shoulder, turning him away. Benny tumbled over backwards, the top of his head hitting the wall like an egg hurled on Halloween. His body spasmed once, then it was over. It reminded me of seeing my old man put down a rabid dog. Bang bang, lights out.
Westfield told Gus to get Benny's ammo and guns. Nobody wanted to scavenge the dead man, but there was no sense leaving anything valuable behind. He eyed each of us in turn, taking stock of our reactions. Anger, shock and resentment in equal measure. Probably guilt, too, for not paying attention to the upper story windows. A mistake we wouldn't make next time. Couldn't afford to.
We rode back in silence. There had been more shooting; the incident with Benny had stirred other shambling pusbags, but there wasn't much left here to worry about. Nor was there much booty to pillage. A few gallons of bottled water in sealed plastic jugs. A shotgun and a few boxes of shells. Some canned goods we took from a couple of collapsing trailers. Mostly beans and vegetables, nothing with a label I recognized. Benny was dead, and this was all we had to show for it.
I blamed Westfield. True, it had been Benny's idea to raid this particular village, but it had been Westfield who’d made it happen. Suggestions of heading further South, hitting Palocitos or Punta Verde had been ignored in favor of this mission. I started, not for the first time, to seriously think about splitting off and striking out on our own again. Just me, Greg, his wife and their daughter, like we’d done after Dallas. It was becoming evident that sticking with Westfield and his ex-Federale posse didn’t have a lot of upside. The best they had to offer was firepower and numbers. But in ten days those numbers had been reduced by two, and we hadn't found a single survivor, hadn't found any troops, hadn't found any oasis in this wasteland even though we’d heard some spotty transmissions on Marco’s ancient CB radio. Somewhere out there were more survivors, but Westfield hadn't done a thing to try and reach them.
Nunez made the sign of the cross and bowed his head seeing us exit the Suburban. He knew what Benny’s absence meant and didn't ask for an explanation. Looking at the measly haul, he shook his head in frustration. I heard my thoughts echoed in his raspy voice. "For this, we lost Benny?"
Greg and I made our way back to the tin can—the nickname we’d given his old Airstream—after Westfield determined we should grab some grub and plan for tomorrow. It was time to move again, though I was betting he wasn't about to suggest Juarez or Cancun. I followed Greg into the mobile home and shut the door, letting him give Madelyn and Heather a hug before sagging into one of the fold-out seats that doubled as bunks. Madelyn put Heather up front and gave the four-year-old a pair of Barbies to play with. She’d been watching for the Suburban’s return, probably for hours. She didn’t bother to ask about Benny. Small favors.
Maddy poured each of us a cup of water. My throat was parched, but I couldn’t bring myself to drink it just yet. Greg gulped his down and eyed me over the rim of his glass. My expression must’ve been easier to read than Penthouse.
"Not what we planned on after Dallas, huh?" he asked. I could only nod in agreement, thinking about the way things had gone down.
Dallas...
Shit.
The call had come eleven days ago. When I heard Greg's voice, processed what he was telling me, I told him to get rolling. We were looking at two hours. But he surprised me.
"You got forty five minutes," he said, his voice tight. "I’ve been trying to reach you since I heard the news. Caravan is a' rolling."
“...and time is a runnin' out,” I answered, finishing the lyric. But the line was already dead. Greg and I had written the tune back in college, during our beer drinking and skirt-chasing days. He was already steamrolling south, and had been for some time. Dallas had set things in motion, just as we’d planned for. The proverbial worst-case-scenario. I don't know that in those final few days leading up to Dallas if we ever admitted to one another that we'd never really intended to follow through on the t
hings we’d talked out, but Dallas had been taken, and we were glad we'd had the foresight to plan something.
Back in 1934, Oklahoma Governor E.W. Marland bragged that, "Oklahoma can make it without the United States, but the United States can't make it without Oklahoma!" But if you'd asked anybody in Texas the morning Dallas fell, they’d have happily melted down old ladies' wheelchairs to forge a scalpel big enough to cut Oklahoma off our border like a cancer. Oklahoma City was riddled with corpses. The streets were overrun with them, and their reservists and guard had been woefully unprepared. By the time soldiers caught on to the fact that any casualty that wasn't properly disposed of would just get back up and keep coming, it was too late. They adjusted to this homefront urban warfare the way the redcoats had during the Revolutionary War. They got slaughtered.
Oklahoma City, and gradually, the rest of the state, joined Iowa, Indiana, Idaho and Kentucky—where some reports suggested all this shit had started—as property of the dead. Nobody who’d survived the initial onslaught was going to get out without a tank or Gatling gun, and none of those were readily available to scattered survivors marooned in their homes, their apartment buildings…their dying cities.
The dead had claimed Oklahoma and were gradually moving South, coming down I235, headed towards Dallas. Greg and I had discussed what we’d do if they got there before the troops could get things under control. We never imagined that they wouldn't. But we stayed in touch and watched the news, while the news was still being broadcast. Greg's Dad started grumbling about it being Viet Nam all over again—except in our own fucking backyard. Ten days before Dallas fell, Greg's old man had gone north, to Utah, to try and drag his only living relative, a sister, out of the path of the dead.
Greg hadn't heard from him since.
We’d considered Amarillo, first. Amarillo had a garrison of troops stationed there, but nobody had heard much out of Amarillo before communications really started breaking down, and rumors, of course, started to fly. There were a lot more rumors than facts going around in the days leading up to Dallas, and every one of them seemed as unimaginable as it was believable.
So we decided to head South, towards the Mexican border, joking in our best black humor that we were about to become drybacks, trying to keep the tension from twisting us into knots. We prepared for whatever might await us: Mexican troops, determined to turn us back. A new brand of pirates, looking to commandeer the Airstream and my truck, looting the supplies Greg and I had been stockpiling for weeks. Cases of dry goods, canned soups, cereal. A healthy amount of chocolate Pop Tarts. Thousands of rounds of ammo, which filled the Airstream’s narrow closet floor to ceiling. Between us, Greg and I had five rifles, a shotgun and four handguns. And still, it didn’t seem like enough.
We met no resistance at the border, or anywhere else. The small towns we passed through had been abandoned, the only signs of life the occasional pack of dogs scrounging for food—or a solitary walker, doing the same.
We’d been going from town to town, searching for fellow survivors. Three days into our exodus, outside Morellios, we’d crossed paths with Westfield and his crew. It made sense, joining up and pooling our resources. Initially, raiding shantytowns and places most maps ignored seemed a sound strategy. There were no soldiers to turn us away, and it was far less risky than driving into a city swarming with the dead. But in ten days of raids, we’d lost two men and our biggest haul had been a case of scotch and bottles of seltzer scrounged from a burnt out bar, a drum filled with gasoline from a service station, and a couple of cases of canned goods liberated from a market we’d had to blow the crash gates off. Why the shopkeep had bothered to lock up a largely empty building I didn’t know, but a lack of clear thinking while the dead walked the streets looking to feed on the living was the kind of thing I could overlook.
I drummed my fingers on the table, the past two weeks blurring like a DVD played on fast forward. The images were distorted, the action stretched and skewed. Things looked vastly different through this prism. Far different than either of us had planned for.
"You wanna cut and run, don't you, Hoss?" he asked, like he could see right into my head. Madelyn came to sit down at his side.
"I don't think Westfield knows what the fuck he's doing,” I said, expressing my concerns. “That scares me. Or, he just wants to keep playing Robin Hood and his merry men. That scares me even more.”
"But if we split up, it's just the four of us again," Madelyn chimed in. "Isn't it safer to stick together?"
I couldn't argue with her reasoning. On the surface, it was sound. But she hadn't been on the raids, she hadn't seen the targets we’d been hitting. Madelyn knew only what Greg told her, and that wasn’t much. He hardly ever talked about the raids, and never in front of Heather. The two of us knew that Westfield was playing a real-life game of soldier of fortune, but I had no way to prove it to Madelyn.
"I think we need to find a city. If not a city, then a town, a decent sized one. Marco’s been picking up things on the CB. That means somebody’s broadcasting from somewhere. Wherever it's coming from, I don't think Westfield wants to go."
"Why wouldn't he?" Madelyn asked, sounding unconvinced. "Why would he want to stay out here like this? Isolated? Why wouldn't he want to find others?"
"Who knows," Greg said softly, looking at me and not Madelyn. I knew he didn't want to scare her, not with the truth. "But I think Carl's right. Westfield wants to stay out here in the wastelands, which isn’t accomplishing anything."
Madelyn stood up, shaking her head. She was having trouble wrapping her mind around it all.
"I don't know why you think so, but we have to be better off together. More people, more eyes, more guns. What about strength in numbers?"
Greg and I exchanged a look. Maddy wasn't going to be swayed easily, and it was getting close to dinner. This wasn't the time to hash out our plan to part ways with the merry men of Rottingham.
"We can give it a couple more days," Greg offered, supplying the voice of reason. "Let's see how it goes. If he's still running around in circles, then we pick a time and head south, like we planned. Maybe we can still outrun this thing, whatever it is."
That seemed to put Madelyn at ease, at least for the time being. Her reluctance was understandable. It wasn’t just her and Greg she was worried about. No, her overriding concern was Heather. The more people around with guns, the more secure she felt.
Because she hasn't gone on the raids, I thought. Because she didn't see Rodolfo or Benny buy it for nothing… or watch Westfield finish the raids anyway, even after it was obvious there wasn’t anything worth sticking around for.
I watched Greg. He was staring at the most precious things he had in the whole world—his wife and daughter. But his face looked ready to collapse. I knew why, same as I knew the reasons behind his willingness to appease Madelyn. The two of us had talked long into the night over the past several days. He agreed with me about the futility of Westfield’s approach, and saw in him the same flaws, the same red flags. But if there was even the slightest chance that Madelyn was right, that maybe we were safer sticking together, he’d make a go of it. He and Maddy had gone through three miscarriages before Heather had been born, and now the world they’d wanted to hand over to her had been turned into a nightmarish game of Survivor.
I wanted to add something, but there was a rap at the door. Greg and I grabbed our guns and checked the windows. Franco stood outside.
"Five minutes, eh friends? Much to do tonight..."
Same old Franco, though his voice sounded hollow. There was no fire in his belly tonight, no pleasure in having made it another day. I gave him a thumbs up, and watched him walk off. He looked wholly defeated.
Greg left to walk Madelyn and Heather back to the tin can, the sun sinking low behind Westfield and Esteban. Both men smelled of alcohol, though only Esteban was slurring his words. Marco stoked the fire.
"Anything on the CB?" I asked him, though my eyes remained on Westfield. Marco spat i
nto the ashes and shook his head, using a steel rod to roll fresh wood into the fire.
"A word or two here and there, nothing more," he replied, frustrated. He shrugged his shoulders. Late afternoon shadows crept across his sullen face.
"Probably not coming from anyplace like we were today," I said. Westfield's eyes keened as he took a swig from the bottle he and Esteban had been working on.
"You still think the city offers hope, Carl? You still think that you'd be better off driving into hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of walkers? That your plan?"
"Those voices on the CB aren't walkers," I said. "Somebody out there is still up and running, and it isn't back where we were today."
Westfield laughed. "World is dying out, Carl. You finding us was just dumb luck. You go off chasing a voice you hear on the CB, you're gonna wind up a walker yourself."
"We've been hearing those voices for days now," I reminded him. "Doesn't seem to me like the world is dying out just yet."
"Maybe not," Westfield conceded, grinning at me. "But you and I both know it’s coming. Might be time to forget about those voices on the radio and just start over...do the repopulating ourselves."
My blood chilled and boiled in the span of a single heartbeat. There was no mistaking the malice in Westfield's tone, or what his intentions were. What he’d said confirmed everything I’d feared, and more. Westfield didn't want to reconnect with society. The mercenary was perfectly happy letting the world—the old world—die out. And now, I knew why. He intended to replace it with a different one. One of his own creation.
I thought of Madelyn, reluctant to leave because of Westfield and his rag-tag group of followers. Of Heather, playing dress-up with her Barbie dolls. Westfield's words pounded against the inside of my skull like a jackhammer. He had left me speechless, and as Greg approached, unaware of the exchange, Westfield offered him the bottle. When Greg took a pull, it was like he’d consecrated the whole, rotten deal.
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