by Nick Cole
“It’s not a “bad” idea,” said Ritter, actually using air quotes.
“C’mon!” barked Frank suddenly.
“No, wait boss. Listen... it’s a backup plan. An ace in the hole. Right now we’ve got the one plan. Hide. Well, Homes, what if that isn’t as copacetic as we’d like it to be? What if we need to get outta here? Fast. What if all we need to do is get them off the walls but we can’t accomplish it all from inside these walls. Havin’ a man in the field ain’t a bad idea. Like I said... it’s an ace in the hole. A just in case kinda thang.”
Frank slapped his pen down. He folded his arms and stared at the map.
“No,” he began.
“Let’s vote,” interrupted Ash. “And by the way... what building did you find out there?”
A sudden summer storm passed between Ash and Frank.
“We’ll vote,” continued Ash, seizing the momentum. “We’re in this together and we should all have a say. Everybody in favor of sending Holiday out for help... raise your hand.”
Ritter.
Dante.
Then Skully.
And Ash.
And when Ash raised her hand, Cory did so too, but had no idea why he was actually raising his hand. He just knew Ash had raised hers, and that must be the game.
Cory felt safe with Ash.
“Thanks,” Holiday said softly as though he and Ash were completely alone. As alone as they’d been that night in the pool. The night before everything changed.
“If you don’t come back this time,” she said without emotion, or even looking away. Looking right through him as though he weren’t even there. “Then it’s really no loss.”
Frank looked around at every raised hand.
Only Candace, up on the roofs of the townhomes along the walls, rifle and binoculars, watching the coming horde, was absent. Everyone else besides Frank had raised their hand.
“All right then, kid,” said Frank with unconcealed contempt. “You got your way. Go out there and get yourself killed... one way...”
Pause.
“... or another.”
Part Two
Every day
Chapter Five
Holiday is running.
The air is hot and dry and he sucks in lungfuls of it. It tastes of smoke and dust. He’s trying to put as much distance as he can between himself and the castle before the horde passes by. Except in his head, he knows they’re not going to pass by. He knows it’ll be a direct hit and he has no idea why he knows this.
He just knows.
He hadn’t even looked back when he’d slipped out the bare opening they’d made in the gate. Ritter had made him take the other walkie-talkie. He’d just started running because you could smell them already. Smell them on the hot fetid morning air that didn’t seem to move in the least.
I guess, thought Holiday, you can smell three to four thousand dead from miles away.
Now he runs south through the neighborhood where he and Ash were almost trapped the day they’d met, then hops a low fence and climbs an embankment covered in dry thorny weeds. At the top, he finds the wide and silent toll road that seems so empty, it’s almost alien. As though it were a thing built by aliens to divide the lands turning back to wild and dark now that the world has ended. That’s when he turns and sees them.
Ritter had called them a horde.
A horde is what they are. Literally.
A long mass that never seems right, no matter how many times he tries to tell himself they were once human. Just like him.
They are monsters now.
Dead eyed.
Mindless.
Vicious.
Monsters.
Holiday ducks behind the low concrete barrier of the top of an overpass and watches the distant mob. If they pass by, he tells himself, he’ll go back. Even though there’s a part of him that really does want to go check out whatever’s been built down at the old Marine base. He’ll go back and prove to Frank he’s not a loose cannon. That he really did come out here to try and help. Either to find help, or draw off the dead if they start clustering around the walls.
He sinks down to the concrete and shakes out a cigarette from the half pack he’s carrying. He places the walkie-talkie on the ground between his legs. He lights and smokes, occasionally casting a quick glance over the barrier to see what the horde is doing. Will they pass on by?
Or won’t they?
I should’ve brought my Guy Fieri flame knife, thinks Holiday.
The Man in Black Finds a Friend
Later, when the night winds were howling down by the coast, after the Man in Black had spent the day watching a bonfire he’d made of some survivors and their ramshackle defenses in a high-end Newport Beach gated luxury community...
Later.
As he watched the coast and saw the young girl who’d been away, picking wild strawberries when he’d tossed the Molotov cocktail over a stucco wall at the top of a landscaped hill, landing it on the roof of someone’s Tudor-style tower they’d had the architect shoehorn into the plans for their uber-crass hacienda.
Later.
He watched her now, downslope on a sandy dry trail that led off into the coastal foothills and wound by various sage-scrub mazes and chalky paths all the way down to the beach and even south on toward Laguna. She was sitting amidst the heavy scent of sage, sobbing in the buffeting wind.
Sobbing about all that was lost to her now.
The Man in Black had run around the outside of the perimeter, her family’s hacienda McMansion, firing the rifle of a soldier who’d been sucked into that other awful horrible wonderful reality over in the Magic Kingdom. A kid he’d met and tormented and led as a sacrifice for a door that needed to be opened so dark things could begin to wander in all proper-like. Now the Man in Black only had a magazine’s worth of bullets, or rounds as the soldierboys called them. He laughed to himself and began to drink some hooch he’d brewed up in an abandoned diner, using things that should not be used, and a little bit of apricot to sweeten and make it sippable.
“I love me some apricot brandy,” he hooted, and drank again as he listened to the sobbing girl’s distant pain on the coastal breeze. The real estate atop the “Location! Location! Location!” hill was now fully engulfed in flames. Black smoke piled out from windows and Tuscan tile-clad rooftops. They’d all been burned alive, those Richie-riches, he sneered to himself and the hooch. Too afraid to come out and face him and the sound of his popgun a’poppin’.
He’d tossed it off in the bushes after he’d fired enough rounds to convince them they were surrounded.
He didn’t need popguns to defend himself. He just used them to make other people afraid.
He swallowed more of the ripe apricot “brandy” and coughed at its harshness. It was so raw it almost choked even him.
Now, eyes watering... he finally saw it. The sign he’d been waiting for.
He saw it as he gasped for breath.
It was, for him, a religious experience billowing in the black smoke above. Or as close to one as he could come, for he worshipped only destruction. Which meant to say... he worshipped only himself.
He saw it and it took what little breath he had left completely away from him.
The dark smoke curled and roiled above the angry flames in the short distance. Someone’s glass postmodern monstrosity exploded and folded in on itself all of a sudden, releasing hot air up into the conflagration that caused the great chest of the wyrm, the black wyrm that revealed itself to him above, to expand and heave like a bellows within the piling smoke and roaring flames.
“It’s a sign!” He leapt to his feet and tossed the “brandy” away from him off into the heady sage. The Clorox bleach bottle he’d brewed it in split, and the hot liquor soaked out into the thirsty chalk which drank up the poison greedily.
He jumped up in the last of the daylight and spun his hands about in some sort of shamanic ecstasy.
“This is the place,” he cried reverently, falling to the dirt and worshipping himself and his faith in himself alone.
He cried.
He laughed.
He slobbered.
He spit the dirt out of his mouth and crowed like a wild animal, or man out of his mind.
Over and over again he reminded no one but himself that “this was it.”
This was the knot.
Later...
Later he walked downhill to the lonely girl and comforted her. She was just a teen. A bad one, he could tell. She’d had everything a spoiled rich brat could want. He knew the type.
He spoke in soothing tones and told her he was with the government.
He told her there was a place where they would be safe. All would be provided for.
She said nothing and watched him. Wanting to believe. Wanting so desperately to believe in something, anything, again.
Tears streaked across her dusty and smoke-stained face.
She wanted to believe.
Now.
Now that it was all gone.
She needed to believe. In something. Anything.
And so he led her away from there and gave her something, himself really, to believe in.
“There are people. People we must find now, my little darling. I’ll take care of you, but we must find them.”
“What about my family?” she moaned.
“They’re all dead, little darlin.’ Dead and gone to hell. Now don’t you cry.” Which was the song he heard in his head as he spoke other lies to her and led her away from that place, looking for the sign of the dark wyrm and the eighty-eight.
They would be here.
He would find them. Find them a’gathering.
He would bring her to them as he knew he must.
Later...
He would bring her as a gift and make a little mischief along the way for any survivors he found out there. This was all days before he found Frank’s Castle and sent as many of his children as he could gather straight at the walls and the survivors behind them. All that shortly after he found the Temple of the Black Dragon.
Chapter Six
They’re coming down the slopes. The horde. The dead. Zekes. Falling, scrabbling and stumbling. The first few hundred to reach the western wall slam into it like a drunken wave of animated dolls. Life-sized and gray. Blood crusted and raving.
It’s a direct hit.
Frank and Candace feel the rooftop of the townhome they’re standing on begin to shake, as at least twenty of them hit the boarded-up windows and stucco walls below at the same moment, at the end of their long fall down the short slope before the walls.
Candace waves her arms for balance and Frank reaches out to steady her. She shoots him a look that says she doesn’t need his, or anyone’s, help. Frank knows it’s instinctual. It’s hardwired into her. He’s worked with her enough over the past few days to get a good read on her. So he dismisses it and holds onto her so she doesn’t slip off the roof and into the crowd three stories below.
But the look on her face, as more and more of the living dead stream down from the road above and begin to pile up at the foot of the wall, is the opposite of that look she gave everyone and the world all the time. The I don’t need your help glare.
This looks says... “I think we’re in big trouble now.”
“Don’t worry,” whispers Frank. “This is California. The frames of these buildings are built to withstand earthquakes. They’ll bend... a whole bunch, in fact, but they won’t break.”
There’s a loud snap of splintering wood. Probably one of the boarded-up windows shattering.
Which feels, deep down inside Frank’s bones, to be the opposite of everything he’s just said.
“Stay here and keep giving us status reports and...”
“What do you mean by “status reports”... they’re coming through the walls!” shrieks Candace suddenly.
Frank checks the parking courtyard below and sees Ritter, Dante, Skully and Ash staring up at them, their hands shielding their eyes from the hot blaze of late morning.
“Candace, just tell us where they’re piling up.”
Frank reaches the ladder that will lead him down onto the wall of cargo containers where another ladder will lead down to the ground. He signals for everyone to meet him over there.
“Frank!” pleaded Candace.
“You can do this,” Frank tells her. “Let us know how high they’re stacking up. And where. We’re going to need to take them out if they start getting through the walls. Or over them.”
“Frank...”
“Candace! We’re figuring this out as we go. You’re our eyes on this. Just tell us what you see. That’s it. That’s your job. That’s how we get through this. Together. Do you understand me?”
Candace nods.
Sweat is running down into Frank’s eyes. It’s still morning but it feels like noon.
“We’ll take care of the rest. Okay?”
And Candace holds his look for a moment longer. He can see she’s frightened to death. That she’s been frightened most of her life. Except she’s been hiding it. But he can see that she’s set her jaw. Just as she’s always done every time she was afraid to do that thing in her life that needed doing. That frightening thing. That walking out the door thing. Fear was something that never stopped her even though it was always with her.
She nods once and it’s not to him.
It’s to some girl she once was who ran away in the dead of night from wherever it was that she needed to get away from. It’s a nod of the knowing of late night bus stations and strange places and stranger people. A nod that says anything but here must be better.
Frank knows. Knows that look.
“We’ll get through this together, okay?” he tells her one last time, and then he’s down the ladder and trying to be careful and fast at the same time because that sound of splintering wood is a really big problem.
We’ll get through this together...
***
Together.
Frank. Younger Frank, that is. After ‘Nam and out of the Marines for six months. Young Frank’s got a case of the nerves.
The Eden Rock. Florida. Miami.
Frank is listening to the big band play In the Mood. Swing. Golden-age swing. He’s played some small gigs in smoky Rush Street supper clubs even though Chicago is a blues town through and through. But made guys, mobsters, they still like Frank and Dino, and of course Bobby Darrin.
Other than that, it’s all disco now.
Swing’s dead and so is jazz. “Trumpets,” crowed some Goombah over at the Silver Spike one night, everyone around the dark little bar listening to him hold forth. His thick neck fat shook with rage in the dim red light. “Trumpets ain’t no jazz.”
Not Miles Davis? No one on the Italian side of town counts Miles. But, thinks a very young Frank, who’s seen enough street horror in his short time back on the block to keep his mouth closed when a made guy is holding forth on some particular aspect of jazz. Frank thinks, you’re forgetting Armstrong, Chet Baker, Arturo Sandoval and Clark Terry. Freddy Hubbard even. Guys Frank himself would like to work with someday. You’ve forgotten them, thinks young Frank, and says nothing as the fat mobster pontificates.
Because the Goombah is talking about Chuck Mangione. Chicks dig him.
But that was back in Chicago, the city of big shoulders, and this, this is Miami on a Saturday night. The Eden Rock. And a scout for Reprise is in the audience.
“We’ll get through this together,” says Frank’s manager and agent, Jimmy Valentine.
In the Mood is almost finished. Fading. Frank is too freaked out to hear the crowd. He’s just thinking about some New
York record company scout out there in the audience. Waiting to listen to him do his stuff.
“Listen, kid,” says Jimmy Valentine as he straightens big butterfly lapels on his gray dinner tux. “We’ll get through this just like we have since Chicago. Together. You’re the next big thing, kid. And this is how it starts.” He pauses and licks thick lips. Chews on some mint gum, then checks his pink cuffs and adjusts the links.
Hearts.
Of course.
“I’m going out there to sit with the guy and have a drink. You do your set and wind up with Somewhere Over the Rainbow. That’ll bring the house down. My guess, twenty minutes after that, the ink will be drying on your first big contract. Next stop... kid, listen, are you listening to me? Next stop is the real big time. You’re the next Sinatra and don’t ever tell anyone I said that ‘cause those psychos will...” he draws a hairy finger across his throat and makes the cutting sound with his tongue, teeth and cheek.
Frank nods.
Do the set. Close with the song, arranged especially for Frank’s baritone, and then... the future.
“We can do this together.”
That’s what Jimmy has been telling Frank since Chicago and all the clubs, fairs and, at times, cruddy little hotel gigs in between. A Howard Johnson’s to three people that one time. But that’s all behind them now. All that was to get to this.
And today, thinks Frank back to that moment in ‘Nam, this is just every day. Because every day is just another fight for survival. That’s all this is.
Every day. Nothing special. Not the best and not the worst.
“We’ll get through this together, kid,” says Jimmy one more time as he slaps Frank’s shoulders and pinches his cheeks. And then he’s gone and Frank is alone in the narrow darkness behind the set facade.
And like so many moments, you just go and do your thing. It’s autopilot. Muscle memory. Practice. Training. Adrenaline.
He hits the right notes. Nails the moments and the emotions. A little banter even he knows he could tighten up. But that comes with time, and experience. Jimmy has told him this on many occasions. He opens with Fly me to the Moon and the crowd, old people mostly, probably old Jews by the amount of gems and yarmulkes out there, they’re as into it as it’s ever been, and Frank knows this is good. This is solid. He is solid.
