by Kuhn, Steve
Our approach was exciting in that we expected the complex—Actually, let me back up. It was not really even a ‘complex.’ It was a little, two-level building that looked more like a crappy, roadside motel, complete with green Astroturf and copious amounts of aluminum siding. It was a shit hole, straight up.
Anyway, we were amped because it was so easy to find. It was no surprise that no one wanted to go searching around side streets and shit, especially with D-Prime. Last time we blindly turned down one of those, it turned into a fucking mess. Remember the backup alarm? That sucked so hard.
Murphy drifted D-Prime right up to it in neutral to keep us as quiet as possible while JC surveyed the layout. It was a good effort, but it wouldn’t have mattered.
JC’s jaw dropped, and he murmured, “Fuck.”
Murphy stopped the truck, and the air brakes gave out a loud hisssss. No less than thirty or forty of them, scattered all over the inside of this flimsy, little picket fence that surrounded the building, stopped in their tracks, raised their heads, and looked directly at us.
It began.
Murphy sprang out of the cab with Fart on his heels and jetted to the back of the trailer, where he whipped open the doors and snapped at Rebecca, “Trouble. You comin’ or what?”
I couldn’t hear her response.
Cutty shouted back to Murphy, “Yo! Lock up Lilly!”
JC interjected over his shoulder, “Someone needs to stay with her!” as he took his first shot, exploding the dome of what was once a middle-aged woman. Her decayed head must’ve been soft because even the high-powered round from his bear, which would normally pass through and leave a gaping exit wound, blew the whole thing to shreds, spraying hair and all manner of funk into the air around her.
Cutty shouted back, “No choice, man! We gon’ need e’rybody on dis one! She locked in the traila, though. She be a’ight!”
One of the bernies had already breached the fence, but Cutty stepped up and slashed with his left blade, taking out its leg at the knee. He took another swipe with his right and split its head cleanly in half before the creature hit the ground. Falling back, Cutty stood in front of JC as a human shield while JC snapped his bayonet into place.
I took two shots at a random geek. My first one dragged low left, only tearing its jaw away, but my second snapped its head back, dropping it cleanly.
JC shouted, “Fuckin’ hurry up! Here they come! And bring ammo!”
Boom! Boom! In rapid succession, I dropped two more as Rebecca ran towards us, her pistol already smoking. She tossed a full rifle mag to JC and handed me two pistol mags before tucking one in her own belt. I heard the slam of the trailer door and the clank of the locks just before Murphy and Fart emerged from around the back.
Fart took off on her own, leaping over the fence and clamping her jaws around the neck of one of the heavier-set bernies. They fell to the ground together, and with a violent shake of her head, she tore out its throat. Blood pooled around the bernie’s struggling body as its usual snarl deteriorated into a bubbling gurgle. She left it laying there and latched onto the leg of another, again shaking her head and growling violently to bring it to the ground. With arms outstretched, the throatless one managed to grab her hind legs and pull her off, snapping its jaws at whatever was closest to its mouth. It found her tail and tore it off at the halfway point. Fart yelped and retreated back to Murphy, whining and bleeding.
Murphy drew back his bowstring and said, “Motherfucker!” as he pulled off some sort of Robin Hood shit. He cut loose the first arrow and had the second one drawn back before the first embedded itself deep in the forehead of the heavyset geek. Two more dropped. He knelt down to have a look at Fart’s wound and popped her on the nose. “Too eager, girl! But you’ll live. Now… stick to me.”
Fart’s whining quieted a bit, and she even managed to wag her little half-a-stump tail.
We were holding the fence fairly well with the shooting once we regrouped, but the numbers were only thinning slightly; we were going through ammo like a bitch, too. It goes way faster than you would think. Rebecca called to Cutty over the gunfire, “We need you inside the fence, Uncle Curtis! If you can manage to cripple them, we can cover you and clean up behind!”
Cutty nodded and moved into the group, swinging wildly as JC’s precision rifle work picked off any that posed a threat to our boy. Murphy began taking potshots at some of the ones further into the complex near the apartment doors, ripping his used arrows out of their heads as he went along with that nasty schlocking sound.
Once Cutty had mowed us a path of sorts, we moved up—everyone except for JC, that is. Murphy turned his back on the action and snapped at him, “Let’s go, kid! We need you in here!”
JC raised his weapon over his shoulder like a spear and thrust it right at Murphy’s head. Murphy dodged to the left just in time as JC’s bayonet sunk into the eye socket of a lone geek bearing down on Murphy from behind.
JC told Murphy firmly, “Stop fucking telling me what to do and watch your back, old man. I ain’t leaving Lilly.” With that, he climbed up onto the hood of D-Prime and then to the roof, laying prone in a classic sniper position. “Go! I got you covered.”
It was war. Shit, man, from there on out most of it was just a blur of adrenalin and gunfire.
Cutty hacked and chopped us a path to the line of first-floor doors while the rest of us cleaned up the dead with crowbar and bat strikes as they lay on the ground snapping. Rebecca and I tried our best to conserve ammo, but this shit was thick. We covered each other as we reloaded, but JC was crucial to our success. You will probably never know how relieving it is to miss a shot completely and still see your target drop. You’ll also probably never know how fucking scary it is to have bullets, arrows, and shit whizzing past your head, friendly or not. JC did work, though, for real.
Most of the units were empty, and many of the doors were already busted into on the first floor, so we moved to the second in hopes that we’d find whichever unit Cotton and his crew used to hunker down. We could see the entire line of doors plain as day, and we began working them in teams. Kick the door in, sweep, and get out—quick and to the point.
Cutty and Rebecca were ahead of us slightly when Cutty kicked open the fourth door. It was fucked. There had to be six or eight, and they just overwhelmed him. He dropped one of his blades because the aisle was too narrow to swing as they poured into the corridor and pressed him against the rail, threatening to knock him over the ledge. Rebecca shrieked and backed off, momentarily startled.
With Cutty punching and kicking them back as best he could, he shouted to Rebecca, “Get away! Run, Rebecca. Run!”
She took off down the corridor, leaving us blocked by Cutty and the bernies with no way to get a clean shot. Two of the geeks noticed Rebecca as she dashed down the line of doors and decided to give chase, which eased the pressure on Cutty . I stepped in and ripped two of them off of him, and Fart chomped on a third, which allowed Cutty to gain his composure a bit more.
There was a brief struggle and a whole lot of cursing, but we managed to get off all of them without any serious injuries or bites.
Cutty dusted himself off and turned to talk to Rebecca, but noticed she was nowhere in sight. He started shouting, “Rebecca? Where you at, Rebecca? We comin’ fo’ ya, baby!”
Everyone snapped into battle mode once more and started kicking in doors and shouting for Rebecca. All bets were off. I kicked one in and saw two bernies kneeled over a rat and tearing it to pieces while they ate. I shot them execution style before they even looked up.
I exited to the sound of JC’s weapon discharging and shattering the doorframe of one the units near the end of the line. I knew he could see her and was probably watching her back, so I shouted to Cutty to get his ass down there.
By the time we reached the door, it was too late—just too Goddamn late. Rebecca was spread from one side of the room to the next in a bloody mix of torn clothes and masticated flesh. There were no less than seve
n of them inside the apartment she fled to, and they were now fighting over pieces of her. One sat in the corner holding her head, picking at her eye sockets and… Fuck! They’re so fucking vicious in a pack.
We barely had time to take in the scene before Cutty roared with rage and stepped inside the room, slamming the door shut behind him. I reached for the door to follow him in, but Murphy snatched my hand and told me, “Leave him be, Sally. He needs to do this alone.”
I sent Murphy down to catch up with JC and hear his side of the story as well as to check in on Lilly. As I write this, I’m sitting outside the door, and I can still hear Cutty flipping out.
Sometimes he’s calling her name over and over and saying, “No, not my Rebecca.”
Other times I can hear him talking to the geeks—like, he’s talking shit to ’em and asking them questions. It’s as if he’s got them somehow incapacitated and he’s attempting to torture them or some shit.
He hasn’t stopped yet, and he might not for a good while.
And Kylee was never here.
Entry 103
The rains couldn’t have come at a better time.
I sat for a while longer outside the door until the room got quiet before opening it slowly to check on Cutty and the state of things. He was exhausted, having torn the room and everything in it to complete shreds. In fact, it was a more gruesome scene than when we had first opened the door and discovered Rebecca’s remains strewn all over the interior.
It looked like a bloody slaughterhouse of human entrails and limbs with black and rust-colored smears adorning the walls and soaking the dime-store carpeting. All of the furniture was tossed around, and most of it was in pieces like the former inhabitants. Glass littered the floor, mixing with the gore, lending a bizarre sparkle to the disgusting sight as I stepped inside. The geeks that had torn Rebecca apart were now themselves spread across every inch of the room, but I found it curious that there were none of the signature clean cuts that the machetes are known for. Cutty had torn them apart with his bare hands.
He now sat cross legged in the center of the room, cradling Rebecca’s head in his lap as he gently brushed the hair from her face. I was speechless as I stood over the two of them and saw Rebecca’s face, now pale and grayish, missing an eye and smeared with bloody fingerprints. She looked sad. She looked like the grimace of pain and suffering that she had experienced as she passed away was somehow permanently scarred on her visage. She looked… directly at me with her single, clouded eye as it narrowed and her brow furrowed in the typical hungry fashion of every other awakened corpse we had come across.
Cutty shushed her with a whisper and said, “Eeeeasy, baby girl. Eeeeasy. It’s just Dext.”
Her eye rolled around slightly, but there was no sound from her. With her head torn off at the neck, there was none of the gurgling or snarling we had come to expect—only silence as her eye searched for the source of the whisper. I’m certain she would have been snapping her jaws if Cutty hadn’t wedged the broadside of his blade between her teeth, keeping her mouth pried open and unable to close. She bit down on the metal and began grinding her teeth at it.
I asked Cutty, “You okay, bud?”
I knew he wasn’t, but I had to say something—anything.
He never looked up at me as he replied quietly, “No.”
I was trying to remain focused on him, but I couldn’t help just looking around the room in awe. I told him, “If you need anything, I’m right here for you. Family.”
That was when he broke. I don’t think it was what I said to him that did it, but more the fact that it was over. All of his rage was gone, and he was moving into the grief and despair part of things. I suppose I was feeling pretty fucked up about it all, too, but it wasn’t really about me at that moment. Cutty needed someone to be there for him. He needed someone to help him begin to grieve, and I was… proud to be that person.
I sat down on my butt next to him and told him the ugly truth about what was about to happen here as he continued to cradle Rebecca’s severed head. “We can’t leave her like that, Cut. We gotta set her free.”
He looked over at me finally and told me, “I cain’t do it. I ain’t got the stomach for it no mo’.”
I was curious about what he meant because the comment was so vague. He couldn’t do what? Finish Rebecca? Or go on at all?
He kept his composure and that quiet tone that any unstable individual carries in a time like this as I asked him, “You need me to do it? I mean, none of us would ever want to do it, but if you need me to do it for you, I will. You just gotta tell me what you need, and I’ll see to it.”
He huffed derisively at no one in particular and said, “I want my Rebecca, Dext. Cain’t nobody give me that back.”
I threw my arm around him. Well, I tried to throw my arm around him, but it only made it about halfway across his shoulders because of the size of him. I really didn’t know what to say about that except for, “I know, man.”
Rebecca’s grinding had begun to chip away her teeth, and pieces of them began accumulating on the blade like a fine, white dust. The machete was beginning to loosen its wedge.
Cutty set the head down gently and twisted the steel from its place with a grinding that was worse than nails on a chalkboard. He told me, “Do it quick. And don’t fuck up her face anymore.”
He looked away.
I pulled my knife from its sheath and said a silent good-bye to Rebecca before jamming it down hard into the top of her head. I struggled a little bit to free it from her skull and wiped it off on my pants before telling Cutty, “She’s asleep now.”
He didn’t turn back to face me right away, but his body shook with his quiet sobbing. I heard him sniffling, so I patted him on his back once more and told him, “I’m sorry, Cutty. I really am.”
We sat there a while. Dunno how long and don’t really care. I was just there for him. Kylee would have wanted me to be.
He turned around and opened his mouth to speak as we sat there on that sickening floor, but nothing came out. Instead, he just collapsed on my shoulder, almost knocking me over, and bawled. He cried so fucking hard that it took every ounce of strength I had to stay upright and hold him. When he was done, I helped him to his feet and we walked out of the room, leaving it all behind us.
He looked at me on the way to the stairs as we passed over the bodies of his earlier attackers and said, “You ma Shouldah Nigga now.”
I sort of laughed it off and asked him, “The fuck’s a Shouldah Nigga?”
He told me, “Like a brotha. You lean on a nigga’s shouldah, and they hold you up when you cain’t do it yo’ self. An’ if you eva’ need ta lean on me, I got you. Shouldah Niggas. Dat’s wha’s up.”
There was a loud thunderclap as we approached the truck, and the rain poured down in buckets—a cleansing, refreshing kind of rain that comes with the later days of summer, the kind of rain that passes in a few minutes and leaves the ground steaming and smelling of hot asphalt.
We took the opportunity to call out JC, Murphy, and even Lilly.
They came out and offered solemn nods of apology and hugs of encouragement for Cutty before Murphy tossed us each a bar of soap provided by Cotton before we left town.
Modesty was a thing of the past. We all stripped naked and showered in the rain, scrubbing the blood from our skin and clothes. The runoff from the corpses in the complex and our own filth trailed a red stream down the road to the southwest—southwest to Kylee we hoped.
Seems that’s always the case with our little family. You ever wanna find out where we are, just follow the blood.
Entry 104
“Birds.”
That was Lilly’s first observation this morning as we stood around the newest sign from Kilo. We were on the main route to Albuquerque, where the landscape opens up to dusty fields on either side of the road, broken up by sporadic patches of trees. There was nothing in sight on the ground level for at least a mile. She pointed off to the west, on the other s
ide of one of those tree lines, at an enormous flock of birds that blacked out the sky a few miles from where we stood.
Murphy spat in the grass and squinted from the sun hitting him in his face as he looked up at them. “Must be thousands. They’re just circling.”
Lilly told him, “Mommy used to tell me the ones that fly in circles like dead stuff. We used to see them pecking at deer on the side of the road all the time. That’s a lot of them, huh?”
JC stepped up beside Lilly and ruffled her hair, having a look for himself. He told us all, “Why didn’t we ever think of that before? You’re a smart, little kid, Lil.”
She smiled up at him with an angelic face. I doubt she had any clue what JC meant by that, and I sure as hell didn’t, but the praise made her happy.
Think of what? They’re birds—big whoopity-doo-da-day. It didn’t strike me as something to pay any attention to. In fact, it was my opinion that we should’ve been paying more attention to the sign than the musings of a five-year-old. I shrugged JC off and asked him, “So what? Birds. Whatever.”
JC shook his head. “Not just birds, man. Watch them.”
I stood there and kept an eye on them for a minute or two, but I didn’t see anything astonishing. I looked at JC, then back at the birds, then back to JC again before sarcastically saying, “Amazing, JC. Truly amazing. Oh, the wonders of nature. Absolutely spectacular!”
Cutty interrupted my ballbusting of JC with, “An’ you ’posed to be da smart one, Dext.”
JC winked at me and said, “Watch them now…” He raised his bear to the sky and pulled the trigger.
Boom!
Everyone flinched and took a nervous look around to see if he had drawn us any attention. Luckily nothing changed, and our entire group let out a sigh. I shouted at JC, “You fuckin’ tool! What you do that for?”
He put his finger to his lips and shushed me and then pointed back to the birds.
Murphy exclaimed, “Well, fuck me sideways! Look at that shit!”
