Dead Hunger VII_The Reign of Isis

by Eric A. Shelman

  “Yeah,” said Gem. “I guess they could be camped out on the other side of town. Wish Isis and Max could sense us.”

  “Me, too,” said Punch. “They’d find a way to give us a heads up on what they know.”

  “We’ll get near the town limits and see if we can scare ‘em up on the radio,” said Flex.

  Hemp, Charlie and Dave Gammon came out of the building and trotted down the steps. Their shadows were right underneath them now, with the sun directly overhead. Right around noon.

  “Any word on who requested the meeting?” asked Gem.

  “It just says A. Almaraz on the bulletin,” said Hemp. “I wonder where the intended cooperation between these two communities deteriorated, or if it was a ruse on the part of this Almaraz the entire time.”

  “We found an elderly woman we’re coming back to get on the way home,” said Punch. “Irene Danner. She said they came into her house couple of weeks ago. Rotters and humans. Together. Killed her invalid brother with a head shot. We told her we’d bring her some more food and water before we leave.”

  Everyone looked at everyone else, but only Gem spoke. “We need Max and Isis, and we need them like yesterday,” she said.

  “I have a question before we leave,” said Flex. He looked at Hemp, deep in thought.

  “What is it, Flex?” asked Hemp.

  “I’m no mathematician,” he said. “But Miss Irene told us they had around 340 people in town before that meeting. I’m pretty certain there weren’t that many bodies in the town square.”

  Both he and Hemp turned their heads toward the center of town, the distant, stacked bodies readily visible from the City Hall building.

  “As you know, I’m a statistician to a degree,” said Hemp. “My informal count of bodies is around two hundred. Just more than half were consumed, either wholly or in part – save for the bones – and the rest were just killed.”

  So that leaves around 140 people unaccounted for,” said Flex. “Anything unusual about the ones left behind?”

  “While we’ve still got daylight, let’s take a closer look,” said Hemp. “Now you’ve piqued my curiosity. Why all the questions, Flex?”

  Flex shook his head. “Just tryin’ to figure out why they’d kill a couple hundred folks and take over a hundred with ‘em. Makes no sense.”

  “Unless someone’s building an army.”

  “Killin’ people’s friends and family is no way to ingratiate yourself to strangers,” said Flex.

  “Let’s go,” said Hemp, starting to walk. “We’ll just be a minute. If you’d like to stay here, feel free. It is ripe down there. When we’re finished we’ll just whistle, and you can bring the cars down and retrieve us.”

  Only Flex, Gem, and Hemp ended up going back into the town square. As they walked, Hemp said, “You may be onto something, Flex.”

  “I’m thinkin’ I might be.” He took Gem’s hand as they walked and she let him. She said nothing, but she squeezed it and looked at him.

  When they got back down to the square, Hemp reached into his pack and pulled out three packets containing surgical masks. “Here,” he said, holding them out. “Put these on. Don’t do a bloody lot, but they will make you feel better about breathing.”

  Flex and Gem put the masks on.

  Hemp knelt down next to four bodies stacked in the area of those who were not eaten, only killed. He rolled the first body over.

  The bullet hole was cleanly in the center of the forehead. There was a larger circle around the hole itself.

  “See this?” asked Hemp.

  “Yes,” said Gem. “What is it?”

  “That’s where the barrel was pressed against the skin when the gun was fired. There are no defensive wounds, no other sign of trauma to the body. I would say this man might have been unconscious when killed.”

  “He’s older,” said Gem. “Gray hair.”

  “Clothing is consistent with an older man,” said Hemp. He looked up. “Hey. Look at this one.”

  Hemp moved to another body and rolled it over. This one had a cameo broach on her blouse. The hair was wispy, thin and gray.

  “Another senior citizen,” he said, looking around.

  “And there,” he said, standing and walking toward another group of bodies. These were all small.

  He got there, snapped on a quick pair of nitrile gloves from his pack, and rolled the smaller body over onto its back.

  Gem gasped. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “The face … it’s so tiny.”

  “A damned kid,” said Flex. “What, Hemp? Maybe five, six years old?”

  Flex thought back to Trina when he’d found her hiding in her bedroom. She had been that exact age then.

  “There are more,” said Hemp. “Many more, but it seems mostly the elderly.”

  “Just like the fuckin’ Nazis,” said Flex. “Kill all the prisoners too young or too old to pitch in.”

  Gem stood up and said, “Either they’re building an army or collecting slave labor. From what I see here, they’re not looking for the very old and very young, which means they’re looking for muscle mass.”

  Hemp looked at Gem. “That is who I would choose for my army.”

  “Can we go now?” asked Gem.

  *****

  Before heading out of town they huddled for a moment between the vehicles.

  “Wonder if there are any side roads,” said Punch. “Ruthless bastards like that are likely to protect the main access road.”

  “Maybe there are some farming roads,” said Nelson. We might just have to walk the last mile or so if they peter out.”

  Gem tapped the hood of the Crown Vic, impatient. “Let’s go, everyone,” she said. “We can figure that out on the fly. I want to get this over and done and get back home.”

  Flex listened to her words that sounded so simple. Over. Done. Home. He wondered if it would be as easy as that. If he were a gambling man – and he was – he’d bet against it.

  *****

  After dropping the supplies to Irene Danner, the caravan of two cars drove north through town.

  “Slow down,” said Hemp, rolling down his window. “Darling, you’ve got three on that side as well.”

  “I got it,” she said, lowering her window. “Stop for a sec, would ya, Gem?”

  “Sure, babe,” said Gem, easing the Ford to a stop.

  Charlie opened the door and got out, looked at the Taurus 9mm in her hand and said, “Fuck it. Pop the trunk, Gem. I need a bow fix.”

  Flex knew what she meant, and he smiled. Gem looked at him as she stopped the car and put it in park. Charlie was good with a gun – damned good – but if she didn’t use her crossbow for a few kills, she got absolutely depressed.

  “Make it snappy, please,” said Flex.

  Punch, in his cautious way, had stopped perhaps a hundred yards back. Because of his military training, he never liked it when two vehicles were right on top of one another, for they would too easily be taken out by a single IED or mortar shell – not that anyone had been utilizing weapons like those in the last decade or so – but old training was hard to shake.

  Just ask Punch.

  They were only two miles out of the square, but straggler walkers were clearly making their way into the undefended town of Great Bend, and they needed killing like all the rest.

  “May I, brother?” asked Hemp, who had opted to stay in the car.

  “Absolutely,” said Flex, passing Hemp the suppressed Walther PPK.

  “Want me to get those rotters, guys?” asked Nelson, the radio crackling to life.

  Flex grabbed it. “Hemp’s got these guys, and I think you can see Charlie’s got the others.”

  “Cool,” said Nelson. “Guys need a bowl?”

  Nelson was a man who enjoyed his marijuana, but since the birth of his son, he’d cut back a bit. Now he only smoked when he either really needed to focus or he really needed to relax. As for supply, he had gathered up some of the wild pot that grew along the highways in Kansas
, and over the years, had manipulated it into some fine weed that even Flex, Gem and Charlie indulged in with relative regularity.

  Hemp sat in occasionally, and it was always hilarious to mimic his British accent when they were wasted. Flex smiled at the thought.

  Gem took the radio. “Not now, Nel,” she said. “Save me some. That really sounds good.”

  Flex didn’t need to ask why. He could use a little out-of-his-head time, too.

  There were now two rotters on Hemp’s side, and he merely held his arm out the open window and waited until they drew within five feet. Then he put clean holes between their eyes, the hollow points blasting the back of their skulls wide open. Pop! Pop! One down … then the other.

  “Bloody hell,” said Hemp. “See that spray? Lucky the breeze wasn’t coming at us.”

  With the right side of the car clear, everyone turned to watch Charlie. They’d missed the first shot.

  After fourteen years, the rotter population hadn’t seemed to thin very much, unless of course you were talking in the literal sense. Their skin rotted if without fresh meat for too long, and there were plenty of creatures around that fell into that category.

  The skin wrinkled like old leather and shrunk tightly over their skeletons. Hemp had explained that it was no longer the presence of tendons and muscles that allowed them to move. It was, as he had discovered some years before, individual cells that clustered, disbursed, re-gathered, and manipulated the body to move in a certain direction, or to stop altogether.

  No, it didn’t make any sense. The old, human ways of doing things, where the brain sent a signal through the nervous system and a muscle responded, were now joined on the other side by these things that did not need all that complexity to get from point A to point B. Hunger drove each cell within them and seemed to do so very effectively.

  Charlie was not in any danger as she skirted around another of the ragged abnormals and retrieved her arrow from the downed creature’s head. She mounted it back in the crossbow and ran about thirty yards toward Punch and the others waiting in the grape GTO.

  Flex saw Dave wave to her as she ran by his car, and she waved back. Flex smiled. Ever since they had stolen away in the night to find the kidnapped Hemp – in Gem’s stolen car, mind you – they had developed a special bond. Hemp did not mind, because he wasn’t jealous. Charlie loved Dave and so did Hemp.

  Charlie caught the female rotter’s attention, and with no scent coming from her because of the WAT-5, it was clear the zombie was drawn solely by her movement. The jerky corpse turned and shambled unsteadily toward Charlie’s location, even as the crossbow ace raised her weapon, ready to let a bolt fly.

  Something distracted Charlie, and she glanced to her left. A second later, she lowered her crossbow and squinted at something.

  “What the hell is she lookin’ at?” asked Flex.

  “Whatever it is, it’s between those buildings,” said Gem. “I can’t see down that alley from here.”

  The female rotter continued to advance toward Charlie, but still she stared into the alley. She turned and took three slow steps, her eyes still narrowed.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Flex. “Hemp, if the girl needs glasses, you should just tell her.”

  “Her vision is spot on, but I agree, Flex. She should kill it now,” said Hemp. “The other one is right behind it.”

  “Guys, what the hell is she doing?” asked Punch.

  Gem threw the car in park as she and Flex unbuckled their seatbelts at the same time. They both flung the car doors open together, as if choreographed. Gem’s ballistic steel door and bulletproof glass smacked the advancing she-rotter hard in the face. It crumpled backward, landing so awkwardly that its right arm snapped, now caught behind the thing’s back. It had been a very solid impact, and Flex figured if they could be stunned, that one definitely was.

  “Charlie!” yelled Gem. Charlie looked as though she were about to say something, but stopped and just nodded at Gem. Gem jabbed her finger toward the remaining zombie struggling to get back to its feet just three feet in front of her.

  She held up one finger as she stood aside and closed the Crown Vic’s door. She stepped around the Ford and returned Charlie’s nod.

  As the rotter got back to her feet, the severed arm held there only by the shriveled skin, she resumed her forward movement. Charlie finally focused on the kill at hand and brought the crossbow up to her eye. She fired from ten yards distant, hitting the creature squarely in the dark spot its nose had once occupied.

  The abnormal dropped to her knees and collapsed forward, face down, hammering the arrow clean through her skull as she smacked the cracked asphalt hard.

  “Nice shot, darling, but don’t cut it so close next time,” called Hemp.

  “Guys!” Charlie called, pointing. “If that is not Isis’ Hummer in that alley, then I’m going crazy.”

  They all ran. Gem passed both men, her feet laced into a pair of new Nike running shoes. The leather on the millions of pairs of shoes that could be found in any number of shoe stores was still in good shape, but the glue on all of the aged Chinese footwear had dried and cracked.

  Hemp fixed that by formulating a strong, pliable glue that he gave over to the only cobbler in Kingman, a thin, jovial man who had changed his name to Daryl Shoemaker. Nobody was sure what he went by before, and it didn’t matter.

  Gem looked down the alley as Flex and Hemp reached them and said, “If the roof-mount machine gun wasn’t your first clue, I don’t know what was, kiddo.”

  Charlie remembered the last rotter, which had been behind the one she’d just taken out. “Hold on,” she said, mounting an arrow, raising her bow and firing it unceremoniously. The bolt tore through the eye socket and the zombie’s head flipped backward before it dropped like a stone.

  “How we doing on our current dose of WAT-5?” asked Charlie, looking at Hemp.

  “We’ve got a couple of hours of protection remaining.”

  “If they were in the vehicle they’d have seen us and let us know they did, so let’s go see what we’re up against.”

  *****

  Punch, Dave, and Nelson joined them, but not before Nelson pulled Gem’s car into the alley right behind Punch’s GTO.

  Good thinking, Flex thought. There was no sense in leaving vehicles as unusual as the Ford and the Pontiac in obvious places in case the perpetrators of the slaughter returned to Great Bend.

  As they approached the black H3, they could see it appeared normal. No blood sprays on the glass, nothing shattered. It had clearly been parked there, tucked beside the building.

  Nelson approached it and peered through the passenger side window, his hands cupped around his face. “There’s a note on the seat,” he said, turning toward the others.

  Charlie was there before he could move out of the way. “Excuse me, Nel,” she said, pulling the door open.

  She retrieved the note and read it aloud:

  We left without telling you because Max and I felt a sense of urgency. We knew you had enough experience that you did not need us along on your run to Wichita.

  We rested in this warehouse for the night, so if you stopped as well, you will not be far behind us. There was no planning to do because it is unclear what we will face once there.

  We thought it best to stash the car here and hike the rest of the way. We found some flyers in the City Hall building that said the meeting in the middle of town was with people from Hoisington, about seven or so miles north of here. As you no doubt saw, the intent of their guests does not appear to have been what the people of Great Bend expected.

  Max and I are not sure what it is, but we feel something. There’s the constant push and pull of the Mothers and Hungerers, but there’s something else. It is at once familiar and strange and something that feels dark. I mean that in the evil sense, not the opposite of light.

  We are not going into Hoisington today; rather we are waiting at the edge of town until nightfall. We intend to stop once we see lights
from the town.

  It feels as though that will be the better plan. If you make it here today, we will be walking north on the road you were just on.

  We will wait until an hour after dark. We should be in radio contact when you are two or three miles out. Use channel 12. Safe travels. We love you.

  Isis, Max, Trina & Taylor

  Charlie looked up. “Backpacks. Guns, crossbow, ammo, lots of it. Now I’m glad we’ve got so many pack mules.”

  “Is that what we are to you, Charlie?” asked Punch. “You got a ball buster there, Hemp, old buddy.”

  “She’s been busting balls since the day I met her,” he said. “What should change after a dozen years or so?”

  As they walked briskly to the Crown Vic and GTO, Gem hit the remote, popping the trunk latch. She got to it, reached in, and pulled out her backpack.

  The high-quality pack had been custom sewn to handle every weapon any of them could ever need. It had two separate slots for high-end water guns filled with urushiol blend, a lined, waterproof zipper pouch for WAT-5 wafers, and another compartment for sealed canisters of pure urushiol oil. This was enough to make gallons of the blended mix. There were other compartments for loaded ammo magazines and two for 50-round boxes.

  Her Uzi was secured to the side, almost in firing position, with a rear bungee holding the butt and a quick-pull Velcro strap to free the barrel. She had it down so that she could go from empty hands to up and firing in under three seconds.

  Nelson, as usual, configured his pack differently, as his weapons of choice were unique, and of course, he had to have a little compartment for weed. And a lighter, which they all carried.

  Most of the Bics had leaked out all the butane, but some of them still held it. They now resorted to Zippos and Ronson lighter fluid refill cans.