Dead Lands Pass the Ammunition

by Aaron Polson

  Five yards.

  Why didn’t anyone else shoot?

  Chapter 6

  Guilt belonged to a different time.

  It belonged to a place where people hurt each other out of malice, need for vengeance, or selfishness. Human beings wrought unmentionable cruelty upon one another long before the dead rose and the world went to shit. We hurt each other and then, later, in the comfort of our beds, our homes, our churches, we prostrated ourselves and begged for forgiveness. Some never knew guilt. Some reveled in the shit storm we’d made. Some thrived on adventure and risk and lawlessness.

  I was not one of them.

  ~

  The thing which had been Big D jerked as my shot tore through its lower jaw and neck. Even from five yards—especially with my shaking hands—I hadn’t made a clean hit. The body lurched and stumbled, collapsing on the packed earth at the camp’s threshold. It hit with a solid sound, the whump of something big and heavy and wet. One arm curled and uncurled in swift, involuntary spasm. A thick, black goo oozed from the remnants of its neck. Two cataract covered eyes spun lazy orbits.

  Was it looking at the crowd gathered, searching for old friends’ faces?

  “Jesus, Peter.” A man put a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t recognize his voice. Less than thirty live bodies in camp, and I didn’t recognize the voice. “You blew that bastard to hell.”

  The crowd shuffled and shifted behind me. A couple of folks whistled.

  My mouth dried like a slug under a shake of salt. My tongue wouldn’t move.

  The guys who had worked the gate open hurriedly started to shut it. Several members of the camp lifted Big D’s corpse from the entry and carried it inside. The tide swept me as well. Moments later, with the gate shut, they dropped him and we stood in a ring around the body. My tongue became stone.

  “Mack was right,” someone on my left said. “They got him.”

  “Damn straight he was. Look what the rotten sons-of-bitches did to Big D. Poor bastard.”

  Several voices muttered agreement. Whispers skittered around the fringe of the crowd. The acrid burn of gunpowder still hung in my nostrils. I took a step forward, toward the thing.

  Big D’s jacket—the green Army surplus coat he always wore on a hunt—had a funny tear in the back, a hole no bigger than a thumb. My gaze flicked to the near-black barrel of my gun and back to the back of the corpse. I moved forward, knelt next to the body, and lay my gun on the ground. The eyes of the crowd leaned on my shoulders; their hot breath tickled my neck. Their stares cut like razors.

  “What is it?” a woman asked in a whisper.

  My tongue thawed.

  “Looks like something happened to his coat,” I said. My hand worked without conscious thought. It found the folding buck knife in my pocket and flipped open the blade. The sun crested the eastern wall, and its light glinted on the metal as I worked the knife back and forth, sawing through the jacket.

  Beneath, in the grey-putty undead flesh, I found a bullet wound, a tiny hole in the flesh puckered around the edges. Not a big one, just enough for my index finger. Somebody had shot Big D in the back. Shot him with a small caliber gun. Somebody shot Big D in the back long before I ripped open the side of his face. The words caught in my dry, sticky mouth.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. “Looks like he tore it or something.” The other thing I noticed—the other inscrutable fact which didn’t leave my lips—was that Big D’s ammo was missing. Mack hadn’t brought any of the weapons or ammo when he’d run for his life. Somebody—not Mack—must have stripped them from his body.

  My eyes lifted from the corpse.

  Who would shoot Big D in the back?

  A man shifted away in the crowd.

  Mack.

  Part 3: Heavy Burdens

  Chapter 7

  After shooting Big D in face, I had twenty-eight shells left.

  ~

  The undead had to eat. It’s about all they had to do.

  Even those of us resigned to a life of waiting to die had to eat, too.

  To stay as part of the compound, you worked as part of the compound. On off mornings, on those days I didn’t watch from the south tower, I played farm. I mucked chicken coops and the yard while others collected eggs. I then spent part of the morning on my knees plucking weeds from our garden. Flat-bladed water-grass sprouted between our peas, beans, and carrots each time it rained, and spring unloaded a holy deluge on us. None of us were farmers—we did the best we could with our meager abilities, stumbling along with trial and error and hoping more success came with experience. Canned goods collected from nearby towns and farmhouses wouldn’t take us to the crack of doom.

  The choice held us in its cold grip: become self-sufficient or die.

  I was rooting around on my hands and knees, plucking weeds from a row of beets when something blotted the sun. My head lifted from the work, and I found Ellen. She made a dark, angular shadow at mid-morning.

  “Praying, Peter?”

  Mud covered my hands. I wiped them on my tattered jeans. “Just that I don’t have to eat these beets.”

  “Better than starving.” Ellen’s eyes wouldn’t meet mine. Her head shifted from one side to the other. “I’d like to talk again.”

  I lurched to my feet. The muddy knees and thighs of my pants sagged under the weight. “Talk.”

  Her head shook. “Not here. Not now.”

  I squinted, focusing on her face. Damn me, but I wanted to kiss her—I wanted to smash her lips with mine just to feel something other than the bitter rot in my gut.

  “Tomorrow morning, I’m on duty,” I said. “South tower.”

  She nodded. “Before dawn. Be safe.”

  I watched her walk away, her baggy shirt shifting over her lean shoulders. I watched until she disappeared behind the buildings on the opposite edge of the fields.

  ~

  I held my guard vigil alone after Big D’s less-than-triumphant return. From around three in the morning until well after dawn every other day, I sat on the south tower and waited for something to happen. I hoped for something. I would have prayed if believing in God was still an option.

  Mack had become Donnie’s right hand. He was the one with an arm shoved up the head man’s ass. Some part of me felt surprised Mack didn’t take the rule of the place straight away. I figured it made sense, what with Donnie being the slick second in command bastard he’d always been.

  Sitting on my platform, I puzzled through that hole in Big D’s back more times than I can recount.

  Mack acted as guilty as anyone.

  Mack never carried anything small caliber. He had his old man’s thirty-ought-six and a snub nosed .38 nobody but me and I’m sure Sasha knew about. The pistol was half worthless because he only had three rounds. Damn fool kept it tucked in his pants under his shirt as much as possible. The hunting rifle hung on his back like a newborn in a papoose. He jumped into the gang of meatwads that one fateful morning with the gun on his back. He probably fucked Sasha with the gun hanging back there. Whoever plugged Big D had used something smaller—a .22 maybe.

  The thought made my stomach turn over. A .22 to the back, at least where it struck Big D, wasn’t going to kill a man. Not a guy as beefy as Big D. No, the bullet would have wounded him. A flesh bag must have finished him off, and judging by the lack of wounds, I’d say it had only been one of those monsters.

  Their hunger might not go away, but their stomachs could only hold so much.

  These thoughts echoed in my head while I sat with my shotgun and twenty-eight shells, waiting for the sun or grey death, whichever found me first.

  These thoughts played an endless loop until Ellen climbed up.

  The platform shook, announcing somebody’s presence. I tensed, sure the meatwads couldn’t be climbing to my perch, but wary of any one who might.

  “Don’t shoot me,” she said. A moment later, her brown hair appeared. “That wouldn’t be friendly.”

  I
smiled. A breeze drifted over the platform.

  “Damn it’s cold up here,” she said, patting her arms. She wore the same baggy clothing, a shirt which looked like it must have belonged to her brother and a pair of rolled-up jeans. “But look at the view.”

  “It’s best without worrying about any unwelcome visitors.”

  “I can go,” she said. “I just couldn’t sleep.” Her big eyes hung like a whipped puppy.

  I didn’t buy the look for long. Ellen was too tough. Too savvy. She’d already shown me that hand. I leaned back on one hand.

  “Couldn’t sleep? But yesterday you said—”

  “Yesterday. Yes.” She shook her head, settled on her backside, and pulled her knees to her chest. Moonlight glowed in a strip of naked flesh at her ankle above a pair of ill-fitting black boots. “Thinking too much. It’s too damn easy to think too much in this damn world.”

  I grunted.

  She locked onto me with her eyes. “Thinking about you.”

  I pressed my lips together. I hadn’t heard a woman say something nearly as nice since Amanda Gant at junior prom. Even if I was misreading her, it still felt like a heavy compliment.

  We passed a long minute, both of us pale and blue under the moon.

  “Another premonition.”

  She shook her head. “I hope not.”

  Her words didn’t comfort. I glanced toward the tree line. “How’d you know about Big D?”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep that night, either.”

  I rubbed a thumb against the polished stock of my shotgun. “Sometimes, I’m worried that… Fuck.”

  “Fuck what?” She scooted closer. “You’re worried?”

  “I’m not this guy. This gun. This watch shift. Even that bit with Big D when he came back to us. I peed myself a little when I shot him.”

  She didn’t move. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t say anything.

  “I’d never really shot anyone before, alive or dead. I just carried on with Mack.”

  “Never really?”

  “I never did. I never shot this gun except when Dad and I would tag cans of cheap cola for the hell of it. He’d buy a case for a couple of bucks and we’d drive out to the river… Oh, fuck it.”

  Ellen turned away.

  “What?”

  “Mack. Sasha. The whole dirty thing.”

  The conversation I’d overheard a week before floated to the surface. I could make out its edges. I played their words in a loop, trying to remember the juiciest bits, the parts which had rankled me the most. “What about it?”

  “Sasha’s different. I’ve known her for a long time. A long time. She’s always been a bit of a slut, so I don’t think that’s it. Not that a girl’s going to stop sleeping around because it’s the end of the world or anything. Fucking Armageddon.” Ellen shook her head. “She’s just different now that she’s got her claws sunk into your buddy.”

  “Claws… Yeah.” Hadn’t I said the same thing to Mack?

  And what had Mack said about growing up? That we all needed to grow up? The world had gone to shit. The countryside was loaded with living dead monsters who wanted to make ol’ Pete into a snack. I shot a man—what once was a man—in the face, and I still wasn’t grown up. My guts were a stew. Was Mack growing up? Did he really understand? All that shit he told me about women like Sasha… I hated how logical it sounded, even after replaying it dozens of times.

  “What’s eating you?” Ellen asked.

  “Mack.”

  “He’s not dead yet.”

  “Great joke. Really. Do you ever think about it? Think about what it would be like to be bitten?”

  “By one of them?” Ellen’s nose wrinkled. “Hurt like hell, wouldn’t it? I figure it’s got to be a lousy way to go. But you’re armed. You can either knock a few heads off those bastards or take one for yourself.” She opened her mouth and stuck an index finger inside, mimicking a gun. “Pow.”

  “Great. Sounds like a helluva way to go. But I’ve seen someone bitten. Bled like hell.”

  “What happened to him?”

  I closed my eyes, trying to push down the memory of my brother. I should have never mentioned it. My brain grabbed the nearest memory which might lead away. “His name was Ghost. A nickname. Mack left him on the side of the highway a few days before we landed here.”

  “Had he turned?”

  I shook my head. “We just left him. I thought about…” The words shooting him died in my throat.

  She nodded, slow and easy. “I’m worried about you, Peter. Look, Sasha was telling me something the other day. Mack’s going to ask you to go out with him. To go hunting like Big D used to, but not quite. Something about food.”

  My intestines twisted. “I haven’t been out of the compound for months. Not since we got here. Mack knows more about me than anybody else in this whole fucked up world. Anybody left alive, that is. He knows I’m a chicken shit. Why would he want me to go with him?”

  “Good question.” She held out a hand and grabbed my wrist. “I was asking myself the same thing.”

  The blood throbbed in my head. I rubbed one temple. Her fingers tightened against my skin.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, not pulling my hand away.

  She lifted her shirt and slid my hand across her naked belly and underneath her tattered bra. Her breast felt small and warm and smooth against my skin.

  “Just feeling you, Peter. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt much of anything.”

  I squirmed. My dick stiffened in my pants.

  “Shhh…” She held a finger to her lips. “Just enjoy the sunrise.”

  ~

  Three days later, I woke to a crisp cold dawn.

  Had I known—really known—I’d be shot in the back, I might have stayed in my bunk.

  Chapter 8

  The plan, Mack explained, was to catch a couple of the wild boars some of the expeditions had seen. We’d catch them and bring them back to the camp, build an enclosure, and hopefully have roast pork on some invented feast day. It would have to be an invented holiday because truthfully, dates meant nothing. In two years, we’d regressed to a system governed by seasons and little else.

  The camp would raises its own pigs, one of Big D’s ideas before D became dead.

  The plan, Mack explained, required some of the best guys. Fighters. If we didn’t come against any flesh bags, the boars might give us problems.

  He asked me to go.

  Ellen’s warning itched like a mosquito bite in mid-August.

  But what was I going to do, say no? How could I say no to Mack? How could I say no without rousing suspicion? I was going to risk my ass for some barbeque and middle school memories.

  I cleaned my shotgun one more time before leaving the bunk house for the gate. My gaze climbed to the south tower, my tower, and held there for a moment. The silhouette of another guy, maybe Rex or Lennie, waved back. Water splashed around my boots. Rain had come in the night, and puddles dotted the packed camp paths. Mack and Donnie and another guy, a fidgety prick we called Rabbit, waited at the gate. He stood to Mack’s shoulder, but was as thin as one of his thighs in the middle of his chest. If he was a rabbit, he’d be one of those skinny, freaked-out bastard’s Aunt Penny had in her backyard.

  When I saw Rabbit, Ellen’s warning gave me an extra kick. Best guys? Rabbit could hardly take a shit without losing his cool. Now, he was covering my ass? Outside the walls, the undead waited. Outside the walls, death would mock our strides and howl in our ears as Coach Freeman did at Manhattan High. Gutless, it might call me. Chicken shit. Afraid.

  Yes, afraid.

  Ellen’s warning, coupled with the tiny hole in Big D’s big dead back, had moved me action. I’d taken a detour through the armory the night before. I gathered a little something I never thought I’d need… It proved the smartest thing I done since the world came to an end.

  ~

  “All right. This is what we’re going to do,” Mack said before we pu
shed back the gates and let the wider world swallow us whole. He spoke like a playground quarterback, like he was drawing up plays like we used to on Saturday afternoons. “Donnie and Rabbit have this net. I figure those pigs live in the thickets down around the creek bottom. They’ll come around on the creek side with the net, and we force one of those little squealers downhill into the trap.”

  “The woods?” I asked. Yes, the woods. Yes, I knew. I felt like it was a last second plea bargain for life without parole instead of… What? Was Mack going to leave me out there for the flesh bags? I shook my head, trying to dislodge some of the more stubborn cobwebs. Maybe Ellen was wrong… Maybe jealousy drove her to confide in me. Maybe…

  “Yes, the woods.” Mack straightened, standing tall. “You have a better plan?”

  No, I didn’t. I wasn’t trying to play for position, but I figured Mack was showing his behavior for what it was—a power grab. A simple power grab. Politics of the apocalypse… What would one want with the leadership of a dysfunctional band of apocalypse survivors?

  Nothing, of course.

  I had no expectations. I didn’t even have an expectation I’d live until sundown.

  “No,” I said.

  Rabbit scratched the stubble on his chin. “You really think we’re gonna to run a hog farm up in here? Stink to heaven. Hogs don’t lay no eggs. They ain’t good for much other than barbeque.”

  Mack cast a crooked glance at Rabbit. For a moment, I thought maybe both of us were food for the worms. “But we need to eat. A handful of vegetables won’t keep us fed and prosperous. The dry provisions—canned goods and boxes—are running low and we’ve stripped every house and store within a day’s travel. Once we get a couple of cars up and ready—”

  “Cars?” I asked. “What cars?”

  “That heap you and I drove in with, for one. A couple trucks parked near the old house. We’re going to modify them.”