The smell had hit them so bad his eyes had watered. Sadie had murmured uneasily, but the two kids had barely reacted. The girl riding behind him had blinked curiously, and the boy had just stared with dull indifference.
Below, they'd seen three dead crouched around something that was still squirming, and he'd put Circe into a trot until they had several hills between them and Bozeman. In another hour they'd arced around the city and were nearly home.
Later, when they rejoined the pavement, they'd seen something that had rattled Noone. A transport bus, battleship gray and stamped GALLATIN COUNTY CORRECTIONS with its nose bashed against a fallen telephone pole, just outside city limits. There had been a jail not far from here, Noone recalled, and he guessed this had probably been on its way to deposit a fresh batch of inmates – looters, he speculated, from the early days of the outbreak – days of yore when there were still such things as county jails and bus service.
Noone had stopped Circe and handed the reins to the girl and dismounted, thinking he might find weapons on a prison bus.
Sadie had said, “Careful,” in that lecturing tone she sometimes took with him, and he'd thrown her a look that said shut yer yap and moved around the bus, trying to get a look through the meshed windows.
When he did, a slovenly rotter in a prison guard uniform, his bloated, purpled gut popping through the bottom buttons of his shirt, had stumbled from the open bus door and slid to the ground at his feet. Noone had quick-drawn and shot it, and was still slightly amazed that he'd managed a head shot before it was halfway to its feet.
At the sound of the gunshot, the bus had erupted with noise as other dead within began to stir. Circe had started to buck, and Noone had stepped quickly back, grabbed the reins from the frightened girl, and walked the horse away. As he did the bus began to rock back and forth, but by that time he'd climbed back on Circe and urged her into a gallop.
What bothered him most was that neither Circe nor Bluebell had warned him of the dead. Normally they would whinny and champ at the scent, and he'd grown to rely on them as an early warning system. Apparently it wasn't as sharp as he'd thought. He would have to get a new dog, he supposed, something with a good nose on it. A coonhound or maybe a labrador, if he could find a civilized one.
The rest of the trip passed quietly. They saw only one more dead, a young girl not much older than the boy, in a spaghetti-string top that had come apart and left her breasts exposed. She had been wandering listlessly near an overturned tow truck on the edge of Four Corners, and Sadie had taken her with her rifle from far enough away that the rotter never saw them.
The boy stared as they rode past the body. “Her boobs are out,” he'd said, in an awed tone, and then looked around quickly, embarrassed he’d said it.
“Breasts,” Sadie said primly. “Her breasts are out.”
“I never saw a young one,” the boy said. “I mean, a teenager. My age.”
“They're around,” Sadie said. “All ages, old and young. More young.”
“A lot of the old timers just died when they got infected,” Noone said. “You have to be sort of healthy to turn, I think. Strong enough to stay alive until it can get a foothold. If you die too quick, well, you just die.”
“Are there baby ones?” the girl asked suddenly.
“What?”
“You know,” she said quietly, “a baby. Like with diapers.”
Melinda had a baby doll she’d left at the farmhouse. She'd very solemnly tucked it into her own bed and pulled the blanket up to its chin this very morning, recognizing that she couldn't bring it along. At the time she'd thought it quite a grown-up thing to have done, but now she missed it.
“Baby rotters?” Noone said.
“Yes.”
“I don't know, honey,” Sadie said. “I hope not.”
“Quit jabbin,” Noone said, “we’re almost home.”
8
Four Corners was just that. An intersection with a couple of gas stations, a Rite-Aid Pharmacy, and a battered liquor store. A smattering of worn-out houses and a Caterpillar tractor dealership were the only other buildings on the main drag. A lone street signal swayed on a cable above the intersection, and it had blinked its last yellow warning some time ago.
The Tompkins' house was noticeably nicer than the surrounding homes. It had two floors, for one, and was made of brick instead of the cheap wood-and-vinyl siding of most of its neighbors. It had hedges in the front yard that had grown wild, and a rusted-out Toyota pickup with a wooden bed was parked in the driveway. Next to it was a shiny black Mercedes sedan.
“Could never find the keys to that,” Noone said, dismounting and nodding at the luxury car. “We ended up just rolling it out of the garage to make room for the horses. Jake said he could maybe hot wire it but he never figured it out. The truck barely starts anymore.”
He helped the others off the horses and led the animals into the garage. From the driveway Seth could see the concrete floor had been covered with straw.
Noone reemerged a moment later and gave Sadie a look. “Go on, tend 'em.”
Without a word Sadie leaned her rifle against the side of the Mercedes and went inside. Soon she was busy rubbing the two animals down with a brush.
“Are you her boss?” Melinda asked, after a moment.
Noone didn't answer. He had produced a battered pipe from a pocket and was packing it with tobacco from a pouch. He shook the pouch repeatedly but only a few flakes tumbled out.
“Well, something else we run out of,” he said morosely. He put the pipe away, put his hands on his hips, and arched his back until he was looking up at the heavens. The sun was going down and the first stars were fading into view.
“See,” he said to the two children, “not everything changes. The sun still goes down in the west and the stars still come out. And pretty soon the sun’ll come back over the other side, and there’ll be fresh problems for us to sort out.” He sucked in air through his teeth, still gazing up, the walrus mustache under his nose rippling with an evening breeze. “That’s good enough for me, I guess. By God, it’ll have to be.”
Behind him, a screen door banged open and a dwarf with a beard of red fuzz stomped out of the house. His skin was pale and bumpy, and he spared the children only cursory glances – his eyes pitching slightly up for Seth, slightly down for Melinda. A ball-peen hammer, browned with old blood, dangled loosely in one hand, and he waved it accusingly at Noone.
“You find me a gun?” the dwarf asked. His voice was deep and wise, like a singer of mournful country ballads should sound. It lent him an air of mystery to Seth, who had presumed by his size that he’d squeak.
“No, Jake, I did not,” Noone said, still watching the heavens. “Kids, this is Jake. Say hello, Jake.”
Jake glanced at them again but said nothing. Melinda was staring at him with wide-eyed wonder – she'd never seen a dwarf before, and she'd yet to learn any sense of tact. He curled his lip at her and looked back at Noone.
“There were four of them while you were gone,” he said, sounding reproachful. “And me without a gun and half their size. I got two of them with the hammer, and another one I busted its knees with a shovel and beat it over the head when it fell over. I was too tired for the last one, so I let it go.”
“We got it,” Noone said. “It was out by the Cenex station.”
“All this so you can go avenge a mutt,” Jake said. “Stupidest fool thing I ever heard of.”
“I told you before,” Noone said, “it's the principle.”
“Well the point is they're getting more common. Four in two days is a new record. We used to barely see one a week. If you and your lady are gonna run off on adventures, I'll need more than fuckin' garden tools to watch the house.”
Rueful, Noone straightened his posture and brought his eyes back down to earth. He looked at Jake, then at Seth, and waved a hand at him. “Well, take the boy's rifle. No sense giving a boy a gun anyway.”
Jake's eyes swiveled and settled on
the carbine hanging from Seth's shoulder. He took a step toward him. “Let me see that, boy.”
“It's mine,” Seth said. His hand dropped over the stock and gave it a squeeze.
“We'll get you a new one, soon as we can,” Jake said, moving towards him. “There's a gun store in Bozeman but it was full of them things last time we checked. They'll clear out eventually – or someone else will come along and clear them out – and I'll grab you one, promise.” He held out a hand. His eyes seemed overly large and perfectly round, and Seth found himself staring into them, and at the white bumps on the tip of his nose.
“Well, what if I need it, though?” he managed. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You call one of us. Me and Noone and Sadie have put down hundreds of them fuckers.” Jake was smiling but his big eyes were hard and unblinking. “And we're the grown-ups here, so don't backtalk me.”
Seth looked at Noone, but Noone had gone back to the stars and wasn't watching. Sadie had come out of the garage and was silently staring at her husband's back.
“Okay,” Seth said finally, and unslung the weapon from his shoulder. He didn’t want to give it up, but he sensed the dwarf was right, that he must be right. Noone and Sadie and Jake were adults with purpose, with security at their backs and ambition lighting their paths. They were ominous and godly to him, in a silly, instinctive way that he probably would have been too embarrassed to admit. They were authority figures, and he didn’t know how to go against them. Not really, and not yet.
He was afraid.
He handed the gun over.
Jake took it, turned it over in his hands, and put it over his shoulder without another word. The odd smile dropped from his face as he turned back to Noone.
“You get the dog-eater?”
“Yep.”
“You find any rye like I asked?”
Noone shook his head. “Didn't come across a liquor store.”
“Well, that sucks,” Jake said, and kicked dirt.
9
Dinner was canned beef that Jake smothered in olive oil and fried in a pan over a gas camping stove. Jake was in the habit of talking to himself, and did so compulsively while he cooked. Cooking tips (“add garlic, plenty of garlic”) in his gravelly old narrator’s voice and the sizzle of frying meat soon emanated from the kitchen.
“Don't worry about him,” Noone said, seeing Seth stare at the kitchen door. “Jake's always been a talker, even before the rotters came.”
They were seated around a mahogany dining room table. Real silverware and fine china plates were set out before them, all of which looked semi-dirty to Seth, as though given only the most perfunctory wipe-down after their last use. Noone had reclined in his chair, balancing it on the rear legs, and Sadie sat next to him, sipping liberally from a wine glass and staring at a butter dish. The bun in the back of her head was coming loose, and gray-brown hairs were frizzing out in all directions.
Night had fallen and Sadie had gone around the house lighting candles and drawing heavy drapes over the windows, which had been boarded over with old wooden shipping pallets. The curtains would keep the light inside, which might otherwise draw the dead.
“We got it pretty nice here,” Noone said to the children, who were sitting next to each other on the opposite side of the table. “Much nicer than before. We used to live in a trailer up on the Gallatin. We could barely pay the water bill most months. And now here we are in the nicest damn house in town, with a midget butler making our dinner. We come out pretty good in all this, I'd say.”
“I'm not your goddamn butler, and don't call me midget,” Jake said from the kitchen. When no one answered, his voice dropped back into repetitive muttering.
“Dwarf butler,” Noone amended quietly.
Jake came out minutes later, carrying a platter of chopped meat floating in some kind of red sauce. It was gristly and strongly alcoholic, but Seth and Melinda enjoyed it just the same. It was the first meat they'd tasted since slaughtering the cow.
“That's the last of the red wine in the sauce,” Jake said, as they ate. “That leaves us with just rum and gin, and there's only three bottles of the rum left. And it's the cheap stuff. We went through all the Captain and the Bacardi.”
When Noone only grunted a response, Jake turned his gaze on Seth, who was eating quietly. “Any liquor stores over your way, boy? Maybe close to Bozeman? Huh?”
Seth thought it over before answering. “There's one near the Safeway, but the glass was shattered and it looked like it was picked clean.”
“Yeah, great,” Jake said, instantly depressed. “We're just going to have to move on, sooner or later. If not for the booze, then for the dead. More of them around lately.”
“Probably see more tomorrow,” Noone agreed, and he told Jake about the crashed prison bus they'd seen this afternoon. “The rotters don't ever really stop coming, anyway.”
“That's a fool name you've got for them – rotters,” Jake said. “They don't do much rotting at all, if you look at them. If they rotted same as a regular corpse, they'd all been gone in six weeks. You know how it was with the beefs – if we didn't salt them or stick them in the freezer, they were all bones and jelly inside a month.”
“They're more rotten than us,” Noone said.
Sadie muttered something, but they ignored her.
“Call 'em what they are, I say,” Jake said. “They're zombies, just like in the movies, plain and simple. None of the news people would call it that, when it was first starting up, did you notice? They'd bend over backwards looking for other words for the same damn thing we've been seeing in movies since Night of the Living Dead. I heard 'deceased' and 'dead' a whole lot, and early on they were calling them 'the sick' or 'the afflicted,' but never zombies. That would be way too easy. Can you believe that?”
“Yes I can, Jake,” Noone replied with mock gravitas.
“Ah, whatever. Never mind all that – what about that bus? How many do you think are in there?”
“Couldn't see inside, but sounded like twenty, thirty. We'll go back tomorrow and light it on fire if you want. One got out and came at me, but I think the rest are still trapped. Been in there a long time. Months at least.”
“You got them talking, and that's bad,” Jake said. “Now that they've seen you they'll be making noise, and that's what draws others. The noise they make in that bus might bring all the dead in ten miles.” He waved a fork at Seth and Melinda. “We'll bring the kids. They can help.”
Melinda had been picking at her food, but looked up curiously at Jake's words. “They don't talk,” she said.
“But they do, if you listen.” Jake grinned widely, pleased to expound on one of his favorite subjects. When he did, his red goatee fluffed out and lent him the appearance of a croaking bullfrog. He had taken a liking to the girl, and thought she had potential. She was just a kid now, but he thought she'd be a real looker someday, and Jake wanted a wife. He'd never been able to find one before the world ended, because most women didn't want anything to do with a dwarf. But now things had changed, and he thought himself a highly desirable bachelor by virtue of being alive.
He looked at her ponderously for a moment and said, “Your hair's real pretty. Like fancy cheese.”
Melinda giggled uncertainly.
“They talk, the dead,” Jake continued. “They do. One sees you and he lets out a wail, and starts coming towards you. And maybe there's one a mile down the road, and he hears the wail and makes a noise of his own, and starts going toward the sound. So a mile away from that one, another might hear it and do the same thing. And so on and so forth, until you've got a whole city coming your way.”
He took another bite of his dinner and nodded emphatically, in thorough agreement with himself. “It's just how they roll.”
“So how come they haven't come here yet?” Seth asked. “You've been living here a long time, right, and killed a whole bunch of them. They must've made plenty of noise.” He was thinking about the dead from Seattle –
that vast column of shambling bodies winding east from the Pacific that Kevin had warned might exist, and might be coming this way.
Sadie, still staring at the butter dish, let out an abrupt bray of a laugh. Noone turned his head and threw her a quizzical look, but she didn't return it or offer an explanation.
Jake went on as though she hadn't interrupted. “They were easier to avoid when there were more people alive. More to distract them. I lived in Bozeman before everything went down, and I strolled right out of town in the first few weeks, when the police and the army were running around shooting people and making a mess of everything. Now, though, things are quieter and their game is getting scarce. I think they'll pay more attention to their ears. I think we might be seeing more of them, and maybe pretty soon. That's why we got to take care of that prison bus first thing.”
Seth thought again about Kevin, and the website for New Mexico. He thought about telling Noone and the others about it. He still had the printout, neatly folded in the back pocket of his jeans, but he wasn't sure how they’d react. He wondered if they might be angry with him for not warning them right away. Or maybe they’d laugh at him; tell him to stop telling stories. There was no internet anymore, and there hadn’t been any soldiers around in months.
“Are you a cook, Jake?” Melinda asked, taking her last bite and smacking her lips.
“Me? Nah,” Jake offered another smile. “I worked in a slaughterhouse with Noone here. That's how I knew him.”
“That's right,” Noone said. “You're talking to world-class beefers right here.”
“Did Sadie work there too?” Melinda asked. Noone's wife was staring glumly at the table and hardly touching her food.
“No, she stayed home. Sometimes she shot deer but mostly she stayed in and kept our place clean.” He nudged her with an elbow. “Remember that, sweetheart?”
“Three times,” she said suddenly, not looking up.
Noone didn't look at her, but said mildly, “Shut your pie-hole, hon.”
“Three times. Hope they're all dead.”
The Remnants (Book 2): Dead Wrong Page 3
