by Chuck Wendig
Their tongues elongated, narrowed, hollowed. All the easier to drink. Their teeth multiplied: rows upon rows growing in their widening mouths.
They were learning, too.
The Bitch Beast in the bathrobe—now just a tattered pink scrap draped over her neck and shoulders—was the one who learned things first, and then she taught the others: Ranger, Rain-Slick, Rupture-Tit.
They learned how to lure prey. Bitch Beast made a sound like a wounded fawn, and soon a doe came out of the woods.
They learned how to hold weapons. Ranger had a hunk of conduit. Rupture-Tit cradled a fire ax against her ruined breast. Bitch Beast and Rain-Slick preferred tooth-and-claw.
They learned how to taunt their enemies. Ranger found a lighter. Bitch Beast tore a gas pump off, left a trail of it. They set fire to the gas, let it ripple like a swiftly-squirming snake toward the pump, then—boom. A warning to their target, the one whose blood sated them like nothing else. A warning that said in a burst of fire and a dull roar, we are coming for you.
But most of all, they learned how to lead.
Before, they viewed those other staggering undead as lesser beings—which remained true. But, just like the fire ax or the lighter, that did not mean they could not be used. The zombies wanted to follow them. Once, Bitch Beast demanded they tear the undead limb from limb if only because it satisfied her need to destroy. Now, though, she gathered them to her. The others did the same.
They followed behind. Slowly, but surely. A growing, staggering mass of bodies—as single-minded and stupid as a plague of locusts, but infinitely more destructive. The four hunters had a kind of grim, awful gravity now. They pulled horror behind them in a rippling, putrid wave of undead bodies.
It was a beautiful thing.
And so they hunted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Get Your Kicks
The way the Winnebago died was far from spectacular. It did not put on a show. There came few moments of suspense where they wondered, will it make it? Could we get just… a little bit… further? Instead, it just gave three good shudders like a dog ridding itself of fleas, then died with gas still in the tank. Ebbie tried the key, but the old Suncruiser wouldn’t turn over.
They emptied out of the RV. The sun had set not long before. A sign nearby told them they were in or near a town called Erick, Oklahoma, but far as anybody could see on the map or with their eyes, the town wasn’t so much a town as it was an intersection of highways.
Outside, a deep purple eventide band hung low across the horizon. The sky flashed with faraway lightning. It was good and warm right now, the heat rising up off the highway even in spring. But that would change. Daytime saw temperatures in the low eighties—hot enough to cook a frog on the road if he sat there too long—but at night, that same frog would freeze where he stood as the temperature plummeted into the low thirties.
Moaning nearby alerted them to a pair of rotters jogging up—well, not jogging, really, but maybe more ‘drunkenly lurching.’ Zombies so often seemed to be leaning forward when they walked, as if their movement was ever the product of almost falling face-down, their legs moving just in time to stop that from happening. Coburn didn’t bother wasting any ammo. He met them halfway to the ’Bago and bashed their skulls in with the butt of a shotgun.
“Nice job, Ebbie,” Cecelia said, casting eye-daggers in his direction.
“I’m sorry.”
“Not his fault, Cecelia,” Gil said, but Coburn noticed the old man’s vim and vigor—his cantankerousness, one might say—was gone. As if the vampire had broken his spirit the same time he broke those two fingers. Coburn was mostly pretty pleased with that, and the monstrous part of him was particularly tickled. Still, another part of him couldn’t help but worry. Gil was an asshole, but made of tough stuff. Couldn’t have him wilting like a pissed-on daisy. Needed his head in the game. Kayla went up to her father and rubbed his shoulder. Danny just stood around like he was ready to stick his thumb up his ass.
“Listen up, moo-cows!” Coburn called out, clapping his hands. “We’re going to have to hit the bricks, do some walking. Looking ahead, seems like there’s a town up a ways. How far on foot, Gil?”
Gil perked up, looking surprised anybody was asking him anything. “Uh. Well. Erick the town you’re talking about?”
“See any other towns around here, old man?”
“I’d guess about two, three hours.”
Ebbie went pale. “…Leelee can’t walk that far.”
“Leelee,” Coburn repeated, cocking an eyebrow. “You sure you’re talking about her, Abner?”
“Hey!” Ebbie protested.
“I can do it,” Leelee said.
Coburn frowned. “No, Leelee, you can’t. Ebbie’s right, even if he was talking about himself more than he was talking about you. That foot of yours is still fucked three ways from Sunday and that makes you a bit of a gimp.”
“Coburn the vampire,” Kayla said through gritted teeth, stomping up to him and sticking her finger into his chest. Way she said it like that reminded him of how parents sometimes talked to their children, saying the whole name and all. Good for her. She, like Gil, had lost something over the last several weeks. Maybe if she was getting her stones back, so too would her lame duck Daddy. “You be nice. It’s hard enough out here without you being mean to everyone. Don’t you think you’re leaving Leelee behind, neither.” She thrust her lip out, pouting. “I need a cigarette.”
Cecelia, probably just to be a jerk, lit one up and blew a jet of smoke in the girl’s direction.
“As I was saying,” Coburn continued. “We need to walk but Leelee’s limp is going to put us too far behind. That means I’m carrying her the whole way.”
“What about me?” Ebbie asked.
“What about you? You walk like the rest of us.”
“But I’ve got diabetes.”
“And I’m dead.”
“But I’m… not in great shape.”
“Now’s a good time to start exercising, then. Listen, Abner. You need to decide which you like more: eating, or getting eaten. If it’s the latter, hey, no worries, just roll over here and die. But by the looks of you, I’d say you’re a champion eater. And if you want to keep that going for you, you’re going to have to move your big fucking body from Point A to Point Z because I’m not carrying you. Even my mystical vampire voodoo has limits.”
Ebbie’s face sank, but still, he nodded.
“We’re going to need supplies,” Gil said.
“True. So go get ’em. You’ve got fifteen minutes, my ugly little sheeples. Go forth and scavenge. Canned goods, ammo, guns, whatever you can carry without falling on your asses. If you have jackets and blankets, bring those. Because I suspect it’s going to get cold tonight.”
He clapped his hands again and the monkeys did their dance.
They walked. Out here, wasn’t much to see. Scrub. Dirt. A few scattered trees. Highway here was a busted-up ribbon of concrete. Few cars. Few bodies. The occasional zombie looking lost and separated from his cronies.
The moon above was just a bitten-off fingernail. More light seemed to come from the stars, of which there were many—more than Kayla had ever seen. The sky possessed an infinity of them, it seemed. A million, billion little pinpricks through a black blanket, so many points of light shining through.
It was beautiful, really.
Too bad she was having trouble appreciating it. It was her own fault, but now it was too late to say anything. She told everyone she was a big girl, could handle her share of the load but the fact was, she couldn’t. Her bones ached. Her left hand still wasn’t working right, and in fact seemed to have gotten worse. She had a bag slung over her shoulder full of canned goods and a backpack full of clothes and ammo, and even that felt like her spine was going to snap in half—she half-imagined one of the vertebrae shooting off and hitting someone in the head.
Tears lined the corners of her eyes and her jaw was set so tight the tendons in her neck w
ere starting to feel hot. But she refused to complain. Refused to give into it and show them—the vampire especially, who she had come to resent—her weakness. Her show of faux-strength seemed to be working because nobody, not even her own father, noted her pain.
Nobody, it turned out, except Danny.
Suddenly, her load was lightened—Danny snuck up behind her and scooped the canned food bag right off her shoulder. It lightened not only the physical burden but the emotional one, too. A weird, bubbly laugh rose up out of her. But then she saw Danny was carrying too much already. A gun bag. An ammo bag. And now the food bag. She reached to reclaim it.
He caught her wrist—not hard, but with a gentle twist put her hand back at her side, then smiled. He shook his head and tapped his chest.
“You sure?” she asked.
He nodded.
Gil shot them both a look, but said nothing.
They kept walking.
It bothered Coburn that he hadn’t heard from their friends, the howling keening hell-banshees. It wasn’t that he wanted them on his trail, but somehow, the not-knowing made it worse. Stranger still, he knew they were out there. It was more than just a hunch, moving beyond his normal sense of pervasive paranoia. Rather, it was as if he could feel them back there. Like an indelicate scratching at the back of his brain, the desperation of an animal who wanted to be let in.
They came to the town of Erick around midnight after about three hours’ walking. Wasn’t much of a town, really. Not quite flyspeck, but it looked like a modern version of a dustbowl Okie town out of something written by Steinbeck. It was good they got there when they did, though. Not only was the temperature really starting to bottom out, but Ebbie looked like he was going to shit his pants and fall over, dead.
Erick wasn’t much of a planned community, that was for sure. Everything just kind of sprawled out. Two small houses next to a corner bank made of crumbling brick. Across the street, a rancher next to the Brandin’ Iron Motor Lodge. Dead lawns. Leaning fences. The long-decayed corpse of a dog chained up to a flagpole outside a half-collapsed house, the American flag atop it looking like it had been half-eaten by moths.
To Coburn’s eyes, this was a town that gave itself up long before the zombie apocalypse swept across the country. Somewhere in the last twenty years this town just gave out one last rattling cough as its lungs collapsed.
Thing was, it was quiet here. As the cliché went: too quiet.
“No rotters,” Coburn said. He sniffed the air. Couldn’t find any on the wind, either. He smelled death, but not the zombie kind of death. Zombies were like spoiled meat, but in there was the stink of real human fluids: blood, shit, bile. This wasn’t that. Something about the situation bothered him. It was like with the hunters: he could see they weren’t here, but they were out there somewhere. This felt tweaked. Off-kilter. Some part of the puzzle was missing, and Coburn didn’t care much for puzzles. He was a simple man with simple, almost reptilian needs.
Cecelia asked: “What the hell is a Thug Low?”
Everyone turned, wondering what the hell she was talking about. She pointed to a sign out front of what must’ve been some kind of pre-school. It was one of those signs with the letters you could rearrange. But instead of saying something like See you in the Fall or Bake sale next week, it said something nobody really understood:
Thuglow aint ur bitch.
Below those letters, someone had spray-painted what looked to be a king’s crown with three diadems.
“Anybody know what that means?” Gil asked.
Coburn shrugged. “Guess whoever or whatever Thuglow is, he ain’t our bitch. Good to know. Let’s keep walking. Keep an eye out for supplies and places where I can crash during the day. And stay frosty. I have a bad feeling.”
The town was stripped of supplies. In fact, it wasn’t just stripped of supplies: it was stripped of everything. Furniture was gone. Boards were ripped up out of floors. Pipes were pulled out of walls. Not a single canned item in the general store, and not one pistol, rifle or shotgun to be found. Wasn’t even any ammo, and that was one thing they usually found a lot of—the zombie plague had hit fast and swift. Despite appearances and assumptions otherwise (and despite the propaganda of the NRA), Americans for the most part had long lost their love of firearms, but those that hadn’t were usually sitting on huge stored-up surpluses of ammunition. That left a lot of bullets to be scavenged.
But not here.
As they walked, Gil pointed out a sign. A commemorative historical plaque. “Look at that. Commemorating the Mother Road.”
“Mother Road?” Ebbie asked.
“Route 66,” Gil said. “The quintessential American highway. Motor lodges and hamburger joints and little towns with big drive-in theaters. It was the main route from Chicago to Los Angeles. The second major Westward expansion in American history. Route 66 birthed a whole ecosystem. Towns sprung up just to support it. Then came the age of the superhighway. Pulled most of the traffic away from 66, which pulled most of the traffic from all those towns and businesses. It was like rerouting arteries away from the heart. After a while, a lot of what lay along the old Route 66 just shriveled up and died.”
Gil had kind of a sad look. Coburn couldn’t smell nostalgia, but if he could, he figured it would be coming off the old man in strong waves. Probably would smell like old shoes and bad cologne, the vampire imagined.
“You ever plan on traveling West,” Gil said—or, rather, sang a little. “Travel my way, the highway’s the best. Get your kicks. On Route 66.” He cleared his throat. “Song by Bobby Troup. Late ’forties, early ’fifties. Before my time, really.” He looked to Kayla. “Your grandfather used to sing it.”
Coburn spoke up. “Enough reminiscing. We best keep moving.”
They found more graffiti.
On the side of an old meat market: 66 States fuck yo mutha.
Spraypainted on a tattered banner hanging across the top of the street: You best be down wit da Clown.
Then, on a mailbox, someone had written a handful of phrases in a metallic Sharpie:
Thuglow is King
Nutt in ur pink eye
Satan’s Carousel
Thuglow shank you vato
And, finally, Pussy pussy pussy pussy pussy.
Kayla blanched. “Ew.”
Danny patted her on the shoulder and she melted into him.
Coburn was about to say something making fun of the names around here—after all, the street they were on was named after someone named ‘Sheb Wooley,’ which didn’t even sound like a real name. It sounded like someone’s made-up idea of what corn-pone in-bred hick fucks called each other, but, no, this was real.
But he never got the chance.
Because they found the rotters.
They were piled up in the center of town, at the intersection of Sheb Wooley Avenue and Roger Miller Boulevard. Hundreds of them. Chopped into chunks—legs, heads, arms, torsos—and stacked like cords of firewood. They weren’t fresh. The flies had long given up and moved on. These parts and pieces were desiccated, leathery, like dried-up rolls of rotten leather.
“Oh my god,” Ebbie said, covering his mouth even though the stink was mostly gone. It registered with Coburn, but mostly, the odor was stale.
“Someone did this,” Gil said.
Coburn gave him a look. “You think? Here I figured the zombies just disassembled themselves.”
It was Kayla’s turn to shoot a look, this time at him. He smiled at her like a crass asshole and winked, but she turned away, clearly disgusted. He refused to acknowledge that it stung a little.
“Wherever we set up shop,” Cecelia said, nose wrinkled, “it better not be anywhere near these bodies. This is nasty.”
“We’re not setting up shop,” Coburn said.
Kayla: “What?”
“I don’t like it. Someone owns this town. They took all the food, all the guns. They even stripped the pipes out of the walls. I haven’t even seen a single automobile in this place
. They killed every last rotter in a five mile radius, from the looks of it. Whoever these dipshit psychopaths are, they’ve claimed this rat-fuck ghost town and I don’t feel like being around when they come back. Plus, they can’t spell for shit, and I don’t trust folks who can’t spell. My assumption is they’re far likelier to swing through here during the day.” He grabbed the map from Gil. “Look at the map, here. Another three hour walk will take us into Texola. That’s where we’re headed. We’ll camp there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Welcome to the Wall
The sign read:
Welcome to the 66 States
Please wipe ur dick
The words were cobbled together out of pieces of broken signs, each letter a different font and a different size than the one next to it. Like a ransom note writ large. Coburn and his ‘herd’ stood beneath it, highlighting it in the combined halo cast by their flashlights.
“Looks like it goes on for miles,” Kayla said.
“Cuts right across the highway,” Leelee said. “Pretty impressive.”
“Impressive?” Coburn asked. “‘Please wipe your dick’ is impressive? You people are easily stirred.”
They never got to Texola.
A mile before they got there, they found that they weren’t going to get there—at least, not easily. Because a wall cut the highway in half like a giant cleaver blade smashing down across it. The wall wasn’t just one wall type: it was dozens of different barriers welded together and held up by posts pounded into the dry earth. Over here, a thick-gauge chain-link. Over there, heavy corrugated metal. Between them, thick green metal poles as big as a man’s arm.
It didn’t stop there. Atop it sat coils of barbed and razor wire, and behind it, on the far side, the wall was further bolstered by…
