————————————
Chris stood. He held up his hands in surrender. Last thing he wanted was for Morris to think he expected a fight.
“Look, I told Jeremy to get in the thick of it and help us out. That’s all. I didn’t think the kid would punch his own ticket like that. He was scared, sure, but that scared? He shouldn’t have been on this trip, Morris. You know that just as much as I do.”
The big man let out a rumbling breath. “But he was on the trip, and it was our job to keep him safe. We’re supposed to look after each other, make sure we all get back in one piece.”
“So why wasn’t he in the cab with you? He would’ve been a hell of a lot safer in there.”
Morris breathed harder. Air left his nose in harsh, angry blasts. Chris wondered if he’d pushed the guy a little too far. Not like he had a lot of room to dodge a punch in the cramped bathroom.
“I’m just saying, Morris. I don’t mean anything by it.”
The big man nodded. He closed his eyes for a second, and Chris saw pain and anger etched across his skin like a story. Good, as long as Morris was pissed at himself and nobody else, that worked just fine.
“So can I go now?”
“Yeah,” Morris said. “Just stay away from Blake for a bit.”
“Yeah. Won’t be a problem, boss.”
He cocked an eyebrow and waited for the lug to step out of the way. When Morris finally cleared the path he jerked open the door and stomped through into the hall. He needed to find someplace quiet before he killed one of these assholes.
————————————
“Oh, thank the Good Lord.”
Blake looked up from the chipped Formica tabletop and found Eric waving a bottle of Jim Beam at him.
“Want something that’ll hit the spot?”
“We need to be getting drunk right now?”
“I never said we’d be getting drunk. I don’t know about you, but I just need something to take the edge off a little. Things have been awful a bit too long, you ask me.”
Blake nodded. He couldn’t find any way to argue with Eric’s statement. The whole world smelled like old garbage, and the things responsible for that smell wanted to kill and eat everything else. Tough to see the bright side in that little scenario. Holly remained his sole reason for sticking around and trying to make some kind of life for himself. Without her, he would have left town already, struck out on his own to see what the world had in store for him.
He heard clinking cups. Eric had placed two glasses on the table, poured an inch of the brown liquor into each. He carried both glasses and the bottle over to the table and sat down.
“Here we go.”
Blake took the glass that was offered, tapped it against Eric’s, and downed the contents. He coughed as the whiskey burned his throat. How long had it been since his last drink? A few months, at the very least.
“Goddamn.”
“Yeah, it’ll cure what ails you,” Eric said, a smile stretched across his face. “You know this is the first drink I’ve had in fourteen years?”
He shook his head. He tried to speak, but his throat still felt like he’d poured gasoline down it.
“Yes, indeed. I used to work in this bistro up in Chicago, back before I opened the diner. I won’t say it was some five star place, but we did good food, expensive food.”
Eric lifted the bottle of Beam, admired its contents. “Man, I use to drink a bottle of bourbon a shift, sometimes two if I was really feeling it. Little for the sauce, lot for me. Good stuff, too: Knob Creek and Makers, once or twice even some Bookers. You work six days a week sweating over a stove, you can afford the good stuff. Didn’t affect the work, either. Whiskey starts making you drowsy, you go in the walk-in and snort a line or two, pick you right up.
“Aw, hell. You think tough guys and athletes get the pussy? Try being a chef. Waitresses, runners, and patrons, man. You give them a little flair, a little bit of extra effort on their food, they’ll give you anything you want. I had a pair of twins work my johnson like a lollipop just because I cooked the best sea bass they’d ever tasted.”
Blake stared in wonder as Eric refilled their glasses. This guy did all that? Eric was a skinny man with black hair the texture of straw and ears that stuck straight out from his head. He liked the guy, sure, but he couldn’t deny the man was a dork of the highest order. He could barely believe the man had ever received a blowjob, let alone one from twins. As if the world hadn’t gone crazy enough with all the dead people running around.
“You’re joking, right?”
Eric downed a second glass and shook his head. “I kid you not, Blake. You don’t believe me, let me teach you how to cook up something nice for Holly. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You show her you made the effort though, and you won’t know what hit ya. She’ll blow your mind. Y’know, among other things.”
He smiled. Maybe he didn’t believe Eric, but he sure liked the way the man was talking. He held out his glass for a refill, and Eric obliged him.
“So why on earth did you leave Chicago?”
Eric paused, examining his glass like it held an answer. Then he said, “You don’t think I did the smart thing?”
“Sounds like you had hot and cold running ass surrounding you. I don’t know about every guy out there, but I can imagine it would be a dream come true for most.”
Eric chuckled. “Yeah, it kind of was. I’m not a city guy, though. I figured that out the hard way. If I hadn’t come back here, got myself cleaned up, I’d probably be dead by now.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I am. They would have found me with a meat cleaver in one hand and coke all over my nose, maybe a hooker tied up to the bed.”
“Jesus!”
“I never said it was pretty. Chefs are screwed up people, by and large. We work hard, and we play harder. Thing is, we tend to do them both at the same time. Sooner or later, it catches up with you. I saw it coming, and somehow I managed to get out of the way before it ran me over. Lucky me. I might have missed all this.”
Blake nodded. He downed his second drink, and it was a little easier than the first. It only felt like kerosene.
“But if you were doing what you loved-”
“I love food,” Eric said. “I love cooking it, and I love eating it. I can do that anywhere. At least, I could.”
“I wonder if there’s still plenty of food in Chicago.”
“Wouldn’t matter. We’d all be dead by now if we lived up there.”
“Maybe.”
“No maybe to it, Blake. You’ve heard how bad Cincinnati was when all this started. Chicago’s bigger than that, more condensed. The place had to be a damn sausage mill. Hell, look at what we just went through, and Rundberg’s a small town. That’s part of the whole reason I moved out this way-to escape big city problems. Well guess what? Shit always rolls downhill, and the small towns are at the bottom.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I hope so.”
“No, I do.” Blake felt the whiskey working on him, lightening his head and loosening his lips. “I remember when I was in high school I thought the hardest thing anybody ever did was a little skunk weed. Yeah, we were out drinking on the weekends, but that was it for the most part.
“Then one day the county cops brought in a drug-sniffing dog. They opened something like forty lockers. I figured they’d maybe find a few of the burnouts with pot. No, they found acid, coke, and meth. They even found a little heroin. This is in small town Indiana, and some asshole’s got heroin!”
Eric gave him a shrug, his face more amused than concerned.
He shook his head. “Fuck, I sound like such a tightass.”
Eric waved him off. “Don’t worry about it. That Republican and Democrat stuff is all nonsense anyway. It’s all just people and the world, and it was all going to hell long before hell knocked on the door and said, ‘Howdy.’ Think political parties exist anymore? You think pol
itics do? The dead people run the world now. At least they’re honest about what they want.”
“I hear that.” Blake held out his glass for a refill. Eric gave them both a few fingers.
“How many is this?”
“Not sure,” Blake said. “Don’t think I care.”
“Then that’s enough.” Eric picked up both glasses and stood up from the table.
“Hey!”
“Hey is for horses, amigo. We don’t need to be getting sloppy.”
“Then let me have it,” a voice said.
Blake turned. Morris stood in the kitchen’s doorway. He looked a little pale, but at least he was still up and moving.
“You want it?” Eric asked.
“Shoulder hurts like a bitch. Figure that’ll do better than aspirin.”
“You’re probably right.” The cook poured one glass into the other and handed the entire thing to Morris.
“Cheers, fellas.” The big man took it all in a single drink, gave a little gasp. “That oughta do it.”
Blake watched in something like awe. He’d thought he was an accomplished drinker, but now he saw he was little more than a novice. He had no doubts that Morris or Eric could drink him under the table without breaking a sweat.
“Want to pour some of that over my shoulder?” Morris asked Eric.
“Sure.”
Morris hiked up his shirt and let the cook use the last of the bourbon on his wound. At least he winced at the pain it had to cause. Blake had begun to think he was dealing with superhumans.
“Should we stitch that up?” Eric asked.
“Naw,” Morris said as pulled his shirt back down. “Bleeding’s just about stopped, and we don’t need to be wasting the time. Anybody looked at the truck yet?”
Eric shook his head in reply. Blake thought about saying something, but decided Eric’s gesture summed up all of it.
Morris sighed. He reached up and pinched his sinuses with the fingers of his left hand. His right hung at his side.
“We should go have a look, see how fucked we are.”
Blake pushed himself up from the table. He felt a little wobbly, but he managed to make it the first ten feet without stumbling. He figured that meant he could make it the rest of the way.
Morris opened the door to the garage and led them through. Time to find out how bad things had gotten.
NINE
Chris climbed the steps slowly. He didn’t want to make a lot of noise, tell the others where he was headed. It wasn’t their business, and he didn’t particularly feel like hanging out with any of them at the moment. They could sit downstairs and talk about stock car racing or whatever the fuck a bunch of hicks discussed. He’d do fine on his own.
The home’s second story was still, so quiet it reminded him of sleep. Light flooded into the hallway from two open doors on the left. Two more doors stood open on the right. Chris watched motes of dust dance in the rays of sunlight. The musty stink of mildew tickled his nose.
He didn’t know who’d lived here before, but looking at the walls told him all he needed to know. Framed photos covered almost every inch of the upstairs hallway. Those near the steps were weathered black and whites and sepias. Posed studio shots hung next to pictures that looked like they’d been cut out of the newspaper. As he walked down the hallway, the faces in the photos grew older. New faces appeared, no doubt the next generation. They too grew older. Snapshots mixed in with portraits. Pictures of family reunions and school plays told a story of the owners’ history.
At the end of the hall he found a photo from a high school graduation. Two parents in their mid-forties wrapped their arms around the shoulders of a chubby girl in a blue graduation gown and hat. All three smiled as if it were the happiest day of their lives. The look of pride in the parents’ eyes shined just as bright as the accomplishment in their daughter’s.
He wondered how long ago the picture had been snapped. A year before the end of the world? Two? Was their daughter away at college when the killbillies started jumping up and biting into folks? Had they called each other before the phone lines went dead? Had they maybe tried to find each other? Maybe they had watched her get bitten like he had Danielle?
Chris turned away from the picture.
The nearest door led to a study. A long-dormant computer sat under a thick layer of dust. Stacks of bills and letters cluttered the desk. An instruction book for some accounting software sat open to page 237.
He searched a row of nearby bookshelves for any good paperbacks, but reference books practically choked the damn things. If these folks had read for pleasure, they kept those books elsewhere.
He found the home’s owners in the next room.
They must have decided it was hopeless despite the boarded windows below. They sat side by side on a queen-sized bed, their backs against the headboard. Their bodies had withered into husks, their memories stains on the wall behind them. The husband’s desiccated fist remained wrapped around a revolver’s grip. His other hand held his wife’s.
Chris nodded and leaned against the doorframe. Finally, somebody in this backwoods trash heap had done something commendable. These two had decided to go out on their own terms, and they’d made sure they wouldn’t come back, either.
He paused. Did he really believe that? He couldn’t decide.
He took a step into the bedroom, feeling a little like an intruder. These people had come here to die. They hadn’t left the car running in the garage or poisoned themselves at the breakfast table. They’d decided to sit down in their bed and blow their brains out beside each other.
“And they say romance is dead,” he whispered. He stepped around the bed and opened the closet. Again, that feeling that he was intruding reared its head, but he might find something they needed in the closet. You never knew what these folks kept in their bedrooms.
Poking around, Chris found clothes and shoes, shoeboxes full of tissue paper and old photographs. He pulled out a pair of coats: a heavy winter parka and brown leather aviator jacket with a wool collar. He tossed them into the doorway and shut the closet.
He turned to face the dead couple on the bed. They looked like somebody’s strange idea of a human made out of leather and old paper. How long did it take to dry out like that? He wondered if the killbillies had smelled the couple decomposing, how long the dead things might have battered at the door and windows downstairs trying to get at an easy meal. Or maybe they didn’t want to eat cold meat. There was so much he didn’t know about the killbillies, and he realized after a second that he didn’t care. He just wanted to stay away from them.
He eyed the revolver in the man’s hand. He’d be crazy to try to fire the gun. The damn thing could explode in his hand, for all he knew. They might be able to use the remaining bullets, though. He pondered the odds of getting into the revolver’s cylinder without touching the withered flesh of the man’s fingers. It didn’t matter how long the man had cured; he still didn’t want to come into contact with him.
So he turned to the nightstand. Two drawers stood shut above a cubby hole stuffed with old newspapers. He started at the bottom, found a collection of buttons, an ashtray, and a book of matches. No cigarettes, so it was kind of a tease.
“Asshole,” Chris muttered.
He pulled the top drawer open and saw the box of ammunition. The .38 shells wouldn’t do him any good, but maybe somebody else could use them. God knew they needed all the rounds they could find. He stuffed the box into his jacket pocket, making sure it went in deep enough that he didn’t have to worry about dropping it.
He turned to shut the drawer and saw a leather wallet. He glanced at the dead man. Empty eye sockets stared at nothing. The jaw sagged without expression. Dust settled on the collar of the man’s Purdue University sweatshirt. Is that where the daughter had gone to school?
“You mind?” Chris asked, gesturing at the wallet. “I just want to get some idea.” He decided the man’s silence counted as permission.
He nodded a
nd pulled the billfold from the drawer. He turned it over in his hands, eyeing the cracked leather. The wallet had seen a lot of miles, no doubt collected a lot of history. He opened it and found an Indiana driver’s license. The plastic card belonged to Patrick Kling. The photo was an ugly thing, just like every other license photo, but it showed a man who was healthy, someone able to muster a smile despite what had probably been a long line at the DMV. It was the look of a man who had made it another year passing the eye exam, a man who could drive home to his family without restrictions.
“Little things,” he whispered.
He returned the license and flipped through the plastic picture windows. Not much there. Apparently, the man didn’t have any grandkids. He did find a photo of Patrick and his wife dressed up for some kind of holiday party, another picture of their daughter in a volleyball uniform, the white ball resting on her knee. He liked her smile. It was pretty, and it reminded him of Danielle. He found himself hoping the girl hadn’t suffered, that she’d died peacefully and of her own will. He didn’t hope she’d survived, though. In many ways, that was the same as suffering.
Chris snapped the wallet shut. “Sleep tight, Patrick,” he said. “Trust me, you’re not missing anything.” He tossed the wallet into the nightstand, slid the drawer shut. The bottom drawer followed the top’s example. He gave Patrick and his wife a final look and found himself wanting to cry. He fought the urge. Last thing he needed was one of the local yokels catching him.
The sunlight caught his eye as he turned from the bed, and he approached the bedroom’s single window. He made his way around the queen and approached the glass. He wanted to see if the killbillies had found them yet, if they’d started congregating outside.
Nope. The dead bastards had all but disappeared. A single corpse moved through a far off field as if lost, but the rest of the area remained clear. Maybe their luck had reset itself. In a world where dead people came back as cannibals, surely anything was possible.
Scavengers Page 7
