She had been released by the River King in the trade that freed the renegades. Because she hadn’t been with the others, she had almost been forgotten and only at the last minute did Deanna remember her. She had good reason to be happy with her new-found freedom, right up until that morning.
The pain in her gut was horrendous, but one look at the mess in the commodes had her spinning away with sweat across her forehead. She turned to the ancient sinks, which were supported by metaled alphabets of exposed plumbing, and considered using the basins to evacuate the steaming mess in her bowels.
The thought lasted no more than a second. The sinks were no use since the smell had her stomach heaving and she knew she was going to explode both fore and aft.
Melanie ran from the room and out the front door, hurrying past a startled Joslyn Hennesy who was yawning away the final few minutes of her two-hour guard shift. In front of Melanie was the dinky two-lane highway they had been traveling on and beyond that a tall growth of winter wheat that stood higher than her head.
“Where are you going?” Joslyn hissed, as Melanie started for the wheat. Melanie did not answer; she had one hand across her mouth and another clenching her bottom. Before the black top was a drainage ditch which she leapt. Then she was on the asphalt and for just a moment, she stopped in the middle of the road where all the world could see her.
She had forgotten to grab toilet paper and she knew she was going to need an entire roll. The pause was for seconds only. It was obvious she wouldn’t be able make it back before her bowels let go. She wondered if she could even make it across the street, and yet the pause drew out for a second longer.
At one end of that endless road, was the sun blasting into her face, turning the world gold. At the other end was the moon. It was resting on the horizon, looking to have landed somewhere at the very far end of Kansas. All around it, the air was a soft, cool denim blue.
Melanie was standing, seemingly right between these two celestial opposites.
It was marvelous, perhaps the most perfect moment in her otherwise dismal life. She wished she could stay and see the pendulum of God swinging around her but her intestines spasmed, reminding her how insignificant she really was.
With a grunt and an: “Oh, my God!” she leapt the drainage ditch on the far side of the road and then she was among the tall grasses of the plains. “Keep going. Just keep going!” She was too close. When she looked back, she could still see Joslyn too clearly and she wanted to put a little distance between them. So she hurried another twenty yards, yanked down her pants, squatted and let go. Despite the pain knifing through her guts, she felt the most immense sense of relief—she hadn’t crapped her pants. In her book, and it was the saddest book ever written, not crapping her pants was a win.
Now came the acute issue of cleaning herself up. She didn’t relish the idea of running her bottom along the ground after the manner of a dog on shag carpet, however there was precious little in the way of green leafy foliage around her. The closest bit of green to her was a glossy plant with a few wide sprigs. These plants numbered only five or six and they were far enough from each other and from her to warrant her working herself about in a squat-waddle that was as unbecoming as it sounded.
As she came up to the third of these, all hunched over and, for the most part unseen, she heard running steps and a whisper that carried: “Melanie!”
Embarrassed at her predicament she said nothing, silently wishing that whoever was out there would go away and leave her in peace. The footsteps whickered through the tall wheat to her right. Her name was whispered again and was answered this time by a low groan. More moans followed the first and then the sound of the running steps retreated quickly.
Groans were all around her now and her heart was pounding out discordant notes that made her breathing erratic and shrill. She was caught in mid-squat by a host of zombies. Almost all of them were shadowy figures moving through the wheat. Only the ones that passed within a few feet were clear to her: they had sunken, dead eyes that were so emotionless that they looked like they belonged more in a fish’s head than in a person’s. Their mottled and ugly grey skin was covered in sores and scars, dirt and feces. They sometimes wore the tattered remains of dresses and suits, pajamas or attire that was no longer discernable beyond the fact that it had been fabric of some sort at one time, however, for the most part, they were hideously naked.
A dozen passed within feet of the girl squatting in the wheat, while a hundred dozen pressed forward heading for the lonely post office. Melanie would’ve stayed, hunkered down, but there was the sudden blat of engines starting up.
They’re leaving me! The thought struck her like a slap, galvanizing her into action. She leapt to her feet, hoisting her jeans into place and, without giving a second thought to her state of partial cleanliness, she ran. She didn’t run directly to the post office—that would’ve been stupid even by her standards.
The post office sat at a crossroads which had been laid out with a compass in mind. Some altogether useless road ran north-south and another, the one she had paused on not ten minutes earlier, went precisely east to west. She chose this second one and ran parallel to it, hoping to avoid the zombies and at the same time get ahead of the slow rumbling trucks. Never in her life had she run so fast…and all for nothing.
Fifty yards behind her the five-ton trucks crossed the drainage ditches and drove out into the wheat with their horns tooting and guns blasting any zombie that managed to gain a handhold somewhere on the trucks. Immediately, Melanie stopped and, while the wind ran in and out of her, she waved her arms and jumped up and down. She didn’t dare scream, but she did cry, silent, miserable tears.
The three trucks had spread out, though only so much. Like the tines of a fork, they plowed three grooves into the wheat heading north. They were looking for her, but in the wrong place.
Weeping in fright over the idea of being left behind, she ran north waving her hands, praying to be seen. After another fifty yard dash, Melanie was staggering and her chest was heaving. She couldn’t have screamed for help if she wanted to; the tears had never stopped.
Then by some miracle, hands were pointing her way and the truck on the far left heeled far over as it turned as sharply as it could. In the front seat, she could see Neil pointing at her as Captain Grey drove. She waved and for some reason Neil jabbed his finger angrily in her direction.
Was he mad that she had a case of diarrhea? That was ridiculous! As if to give credence to the wild thought that they were angry with her, the five-ton turned slightly, chugging on a course that would cross her front thirty yards ahead of her. She was so surprised that she didn’t move, not even when Neil swung an M4 up to his shoulder and pointed it right at her.
Her eyes bugged and she stared unblinking until Neil started to shoot right at her! She could hear the bullets crease the air as they zipped by, some of them so close she swore they passed through her hair. With a scream, she broke in stark terror away from the truck with more bullets chasing after. She didn’t make it more than thirty yards before exhaustion caught up with her and she staggered, tripping in a chuck-hole and going face first into the dirt.
There was more shooting from all over the field. Alarmed and puzzled, she glanced over her shoulder and saw the truth: Neil hadn’t been shooting at her. There were zombies all over the place; some were charging right down on her, the lead ones falling at her feet and at first she assumed they were stepping in chuck-holes as well, but then she saw the blood. It was skipping off the zombies, hanging like a mist, dimming the morning.
Melanie’s body reacted while she was still cringing and screaming. Her feet dug at the dirt and her legs pistoned; she was up and running. At first she ran for the safety of Neil’s truck, however every zombie within reach was converging on it, making it seem like some great green beast. It shuddered over the zombies, its engine roaring and sparks of fire coming from its windows and out the back. She shied away from it, her mind swept by fear and confusio
n. Nowhere seemed safe to run but just standing there was worse.
More zombies were breaking through the wheat and suddenly Neil’s gun was quiet; he was going through the motions of reloading. She broke to her right. It was no more safe than anywhere else. Zombies charged her and she ran in an arc and always more were in front and the ones behind got closer and closer.
Closer, closer; right behind her. She could hear them moaning excitedly; she could smell the rot and decay wafting from their hungry mouths; she could feel their fingers reaching for her, tangling in her hair. “Neil!” she screeched at the top of her lungs.
The field was all mayhem and death. The three trucks were turning ponderously towards her, but the undead were closer, so close that her shirt was being pulled back, stretching across her throat, slowing her as if she were running in a nightmare.
“Neil!!!!” The scream rose above the chaos in the field. It was everywhere and heard by everyone. Its terror-filled sound engulfed Melanie’s mind as she was dragged down and teeth tore into her flesh. She didn’t fight back. There was no point. She was too weak and there were too many of them. Her only hope was that Neil would rescue her.
He came charging up, half his small body hanging out the square of a window on the passenger side of the truck, a black rifle in his hands.
“Save me,” Melanie begged, one arm outstretched to him, the other was having the long muscle of the bicep being torn off and fought over.
Grimly, Neil saved her. He shot her; her brains blasted out of her head like a stick of butter being struck by a mallet. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Chapter 10
Neil Martin
“I need a drink,” Grey said, gripping the steering wheel with white-knuckled fury.
Neil’s eyes were on the gun he had used to kill Melanie. He was a little surprised to see that the safety was on. Normally, Grey or Sadie had to remind him. “I need to get drunk,” he replied, uncaring that far to their right the sun had barely risen above the edge of the earth. He hadn’t eaten breakfast yet and all he could think was that would make getting drunk easier.
“That doesn’t sound half bad,” Deanna murmured. Her face was red and misty with tears. She sat so close to Grey that no light shone through along the line where their arms and legs warmed each other.
Getting drunk wasn’t just a desire for Neil, it was a need. Just then he needed to turn off his mind and not think about Melanie and how she had screamed his name. Even with the loud rumble of the five-ton’s engine, he could still hear that scream over and over.
But he couldn’t get drunk. People depended on him, people like Melanie.
“Did everyone make it to the trucks?” he asked. “Please tell me that we got everyone out of that damned post office.”
“I was the last out,” Grey assured, but then his brows came down. “Jillybean is the only one I worry about. She was right next to me, but I went on one side of the truck and she went on the other. I called for her, but then you were there and the damned stiffs were everywhere. I’m sure she got in the back.”
“Stop the truck,” Neil ordered, quietly. They were two minutes from the field where he had shot Melanie. The three trucks had left her corpse to be eaten and had driven slowly away with a sudden lack of urgency. “Stop and let’s do a count.”
Again, Grey pulled to the shoulder of the road as he stopped. Neil stood in the door and looked out at the fields before stepping down. The zombies back at the post office had come out of nowhere. The little group had been just waking up when there had been a cry from the guard on duty that someone was in trouble. Unthinkingly, and definitely foolishly, Neil had run out into the field of wheat with the wave of zombies heading right for him.
The fields near them now were empty, save for a few unlimbed stragglers who crawled or pulled themselves along with the use of their arms if they happened to have any, or like inchworms if they didn’t; their desperation to kill was unsettling and Neil’s face took on a sour look.
Fred Trigg had climbed onto the back gate when they stopped. He, too, wore a sour look, though his was of a perpetual nature. “What’s going on? Why’d we stop?”
“Because,” Neil answered, unhelpfully. “Climb up on the canvas and keep watch. Everyone else,” he announced loudly, “get out of the vehicles and line up on the road. I need to get a count.” They did so, barely breaking the natural quiet of the morning. No one spoke, they stood on the side of the road looking glum, all save Jillybean who had struck a pose that suggested she was annoyed with having to stand among the commoners.
Neil was glad she had made it onto the trucks and, at the same time, he wasn’t. It seemed to him that her heart was wicker and all the goodness that had been in her had strained out of it over time, leaving only the sludge of madness and the gristle of hate. He was beginning to feel the same way.
After walking up the line and counting each person with a tap on the head, he stood in the road and stared down at his purple crocs, deciding they would have to go. They were utterly ridiculous. They were comfy and whimsical and showed his good natured side. With a cry of frustration, he pulled the right one off and flung it into the field to their front.
“What the hell happened back there?” he demanded, marching with a quirky limp, managing to appear even more ridiculous with only the one croc on his left foot. His anger was such that no one even cracked a smile. “Who was on watch?”
The renegades refused to look up from the yellow stripe beneath their feet and it was Grey who answered: “Joslyn.”
Immediately, her pert features spun up a look of innocence. “I didn’t do anything wrong. She just came barreling out of the post office and ran across the street. What was I supposed to do? Tackle her?”
“At a minimum, you should’ve alerted someone that there was a problem. What did you do instead?” The spun look of innocence came unwound and she didn’t need to answer for Neil to know she hadn’t done anything. He stood before her and glared, barely able to deal with Joslyn. She was the very picture of laziness; unwilling or unable to move and think on her own initiative. So much like an insolent and spoiled teenager.
Playing the role of disappointed parent, he turned from her and addressed the long line of people. “Does anyone know what was going on with Melanie? Why did she run out of a perfectly safe building?”
He was expecting to hear, as way of rationale, something along the lines of a lover’s quarrel or an argument between friends. Ricky Lewis, who usually spoke for the prisoners that Jillybean and Captain Grey had rescued from Gunner, said: “My guess is she had the shits.” A number of the renegades bobbed their heads in agreement and Ricky added, “I think we ate something bad and it messed with our system, if you know what I mean.”
Three people up from Rick, Jillybean rolled her blue eyes and shook her head with exaggerated sweeps. She acted put out over having to deal with lesser minds. “Wrong,” she said, “We’ve been eating out of cans and unless you shared your can of corn with twenty other people, which you didn’t, then there is clearly something else affecting you.”
She was right. The renegades would usually sit in groups of three or four, each sharing from their individual cans; there was no way twenty people would be simultaneously affected. But if it wasn’t the food…suddenly it clicked in his mind. “It was the water that Brad gave us,” Neil realized. “Damn it!” A second purple croc sailed out into the field leaving him in the pair of clean, white socks he had picked up two day before when the renegades had raided a derelict Walmart. Almost immediately, the bottom of his foot found a sharp rock and he cursed again.
“I don’t get it,” Jillybean said to herself. “Tell me again why you think he’s smart?”
With an effort, given the mood he was in, Neil ignored the little girl. “Everyone back in the trucks!”
Since the trucks would become blazing hot, getting the renegades into them was a process. There were discussions and sometimes arguments over who sat where the day be
fore, and whose turn it was to be near the back where the wind was coolest, and thus, before half of them had seated themselves, fifteen minutes had gone by. Fred, who was still on top of the canvas of the first truck pointed south. “There’s a car. It’s red. I think it’s Brad.”
“Keep your gun ready,” Neil said to Grey. Again, a rock bit his foot and he hopped and cursed. If he’d had a third shoe, he would’ve thrown it as well.
“Maybe you should let me do the talking,” Grey said. “You’re pretty riled up.”
“Good! I want to be riled up. I’m tired of being pushed around and I’m tired of my people dying.”
Grey eyed him evenly, looking the small man up and down. “Do you know what you’re going to say to him?”
Neil squinted at the car kicking up dust in its wake as it blazed its way up to them. High above, a sky loom threaded together white strands of cirrus in long lines. It was pretty and interesting, but the only thing Neil could see was blackness. “I don’t know,” was all he answered.
Brad arrived all smiles over a quizzical countenance. “Where are you going? This isn’t the way. We need to backtrack a bit…because…” The M4 rifle Neil pointed at Brad’s face caused his words to dry up.
“I feel like killing you,” he said, simply. He hadn’t been lying to Grey. He had no idea what he was going to say, but this seemed as appropriate as anything he could think of. “You are my enemy, after all, and what do we do to our enemies but shoot them?”
“Sometimes we blow them up,” Jillybean said.
Neil smirked. “That is very true and if I had a grenade right now, I’d…let’s just say it wouldn’t be pretty.”
Another laugh, this one forced, escaped Brad. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on. Was it those zombies? They weren’t mine, I can assure you. Do you see any of my herders?”
“We lost one of our people this morning,” Neil told him. “She was one of those who drank your dirty water yesterday. Oh, I’m sure you didn’t mean for her to die, but you did mean to make her sick. How much do you want to bet that I will find a case of Pepto-Bismol in your car?”
The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Page 11
