by Chuck Wendig
The older fellow, Jester, was first through the door. He caught the lamp right under his chin and he went down like a stack of teacups. Dope Fiend—the human wall—was close behind but slow to react. Probably, Gil figured, because he was dumb as a wrench.
With the cord pulled taut, Gil stepped in behind the muscle-bound freak and pulled against his throat.
It didn’t go as planned.
Dope Fiend started whirling around, carrying Gil with him—suddenly Kayla’s father felt like he was stuck on the back of a mechanical bull, smashed into the door, into a closet, into a bedside table.
Gil couldn’t hold on. He hit the ground hard on his butt. He reached for Jester’s fallen rifle, but Dope Fiend was already firing his own—the bullets stitched across the floor and juggled the other machine gun out of Gil’s reach.
He saw no choice: as the room filled with machine-gun fire, Gil bolted out of the room, catching a face full of splinters as bullets chewed through the doorframe.
They tried to play nice.
They sent an emissary to talk diplomacy, trade, to make a deal. That emissary—Tom Fichter—came back after having been beaten with phonebooks. They branded a symbol in the meat of his ass: a three-pointed crown.
Fucking animals. Or clowns.
It was time to do something about it. Benjamin Brickert stared out at one of the northern gates of Thuglow’s territory. The Route 54 entrance, coming down out of Goodwell, Oklahoma, with the gate preceding Texhoma. It was the easiest way in—come down out of their own territory in Kansas and hit them from the top. No need to come in from the side. Here, he figured Thuglow would’ve been better protected, figuring that Brickert and his people would stage an attack one day—but, nope, not really. Not much defense at all, and easy enough to remove. Thuglow wasn’t any kind of strategist. Just an idiot king idling time.
His ears were ringing from the shot. He snapped his fingers, told Shonda to hand him the glasses. Benjamin pressed the binoculars to his face, saw in the distance the dead man hanging half-out of a repurposed lifeguard station. Something red dripped from his skull. A crow had already alighted on his chin, was starting to pick at the meat.
Brickert gave the thumbs-up to his sharpshooter: Carlos Gonzalez. Carlos twiddled a toothpick with his tongue and winked. Then he hopped off the top of the moving truck, the Remington 700 slung over his shoulder.
“Chain her up,” Brickert whooped, turning his finger in a circle, telling everyone to move, move, move. At his back waited a small invasion force: pick-up trucks with DIY-mounted armament, armor-plated Cadillacs, a few moving trucks (to reap any loose bounty), and a shitload of the Sons of Man. Capable men. Men who knew what it was to shoot straight, take a life, and thank God for the privilege of being alive.
These were hard times. But they were good times, too.
The men moved heavy gauge chains, looped them around the gate leading into Thuglow’s bullshit kingdom. Shonda—Brickert’s own second-in-command, a tough woman built like a mailbox filled with bricks—went over and supervised. Chains were connected to the back of one of the pick-ups: the diesel (all the vehicles were diesel, as they had to be) gunned it, kicking up a dragon’s plume of dust.
The tires spun at first. But then the gate started to bend and buckle, making a sound like a submarine about to be crushed by the pressure of the sea.
Then: the truck leapt forth like a bull with a burr in its ass, bringing the gate with it. Some of his soldiers hurried through the gate, clambering up over the remaining roadblock. They found the crank-wheel that moved the cars and moved the mechanism aside with the grinding clamor of metal on metal.
Brickert snorted, spat into the dust, gazed out over the long ribbon of highway ahead of them. Noontime sun high above, baking the macadam. Up in Kansas, the sky was blue as his daughter’s eyes, but here, the sky had taken on a bleached, bleary quality. Like someone had taken the whole canvas and dunked it quick in a tub of bleach.
South was Thuglow’s kingdom, then. Brickert pretended like this was a course of action he did not want to take. He had to offer that to his people, to project that sense of gravitas, in order to be a real leader to them. Real leaders did not delight in the conquering of their neighbors: they acted as if it were a burden, a regret, a terrible choice but the best terrible choice.
It was a lie. Brickert wanted to drive this mobile invasion force right up Thuglow’s bony stoner ass. He was a polluted human, impure of thought and body. Not to mention a fucking moron. The Sons of Man took their territory and made something of it: they had working farms. Running water. Electricity in some places. It was clean. Safe. Sane. Sure, it was necessary for folks to make sacrifices. The laws were strict. Disease was not tolerated. Dissent was punished swiftly: there came a time for opposing opinions, for a little bit of revolution, but now was not that time, not as they were just getting a foot-hold on civilization’s rebirth.
But Thuglow? Chaos reigned in the ‘66 States.’ Thing was, they had resources. They had Altus AFB. They had jet fuel. They had a helicopter. And that was just one part of the territory. Abilene? Amarillo? Austin? They had taken those cities but now were squandering what they found. That was how the country fell apart in the first place: mankind had long-forgotten that yes, he was the master of nature, but being its master did not mean being its abuser. Humanity didn’t give a fuck. Trees? Cut them down. Fossil fuels? Burn through it all. Hell with clean skies. Piss in the clean water. The natural world meant nothing.
And when the natural world failed, the supernatural took hold.
That was how Brickert saw it. You tore enough vents in nature’s fabric with careless claws, eventually something would come through. Something sent by God to punish you, or by the Devil to ruin you. They saw it first with the monsters hidden in the shadows: vampires, spirits, the Jersey Devil, the blind troglodytes they found in the tunnels beneath Manhattan.
But those were just the initial wave. Those monsters were only a warning.
And mankind did not pay attention. Did not see the signs.
And so, the zombies came. An emblem of man’s own selfish subversions. Just as man ruined nature and turned it to his will, the zombies ruined man, and made man just like them. It was a second, deeper subversion: a subversion of life, of free will. Zombies were rotten flesh and lizard brains and not much else. They took and they took and they took, never giving anything back. They were, in that way, a perfect expression of man’s worst instincts.
Thuglow was a zombie. Or close enough. Zoned out on drugs. Ready to take, never to give back. That meant he had to go.
That meant the 66 States were now the property of the Sons of Man.
“We ready?” Shonda asked him. Brickert blinked, wondering how long he’d been standing there. All the vehicles—all two-dozen of them—were sitting, engines rumbling. He nodded, and hopped in the back of a Chevy Silverado with an old Vietnam-era .50 cal bolted into the back.
Brickert manned the gun, and whistled for the invasion to begin.
A motor lodge wasn’t like some motels or hotels—its doors opened right to the parking lot. They were a staple of old highway travel. You’d park. Go get your keys. Then walk right from your car to the door of your room. Easy-peasy, Japaneezy. No hassle. Good privacy.
Gil burst out of his room as machine gun bullets gnawed at the frame, darting left out of the door. Across the street was an old Applebee’s, and down the way was a handful of fast food joints and gas stations. But it was all open. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide—soon as he bolted for the highway, Dope Fiend would be emerging into the light like the goddamned Terminator, and it wouldn’t matter how bad a shot he was with that thing. You let fly with enough bullets, one of them is going to hit home.
For a split-second, Gil knew that this was it. It was all over. His escape had failed. Dope Fiend was going to run him through the wringer.
But then he looked back on all the fights he’d ever fought: in bars, in alleys, at work. It was a myth that men fough
t with honor. Honor was for the boxing ring, but when it came time to teach another man a lesson or, even more importantly, just stay alive, you fought however you had to fight. Not like a punch to the face was particularly honorable: you hit the nose, the eyes teared up and stopped your opponent from seeing. Hitting them in the gut wasn’t much different from hitting them in the nuts: pain shot through their middle, they doubled over, they groaned.
You fought how you fought. You fought to win.
And sometimes, that meant using your environment.
Dope Fiend was going to kill that old man.
Dope Fiend was built like an M1 Abrams tank. He wasn’t no pussy. What, he stuck a steroid needle in his ass-meat every couple of days just to let some scrawny old cocksucker get away from him? Oh, hell no.
Dope Fiend was good at beating the shit out of people. Shooting them, not so much, but that was why he had Little Kim, here. His M-16. Fully fucking auto.
Dope Fiend stepped out of the hotel room. Jaw muscles so tight, he could’ve bitten through a steel girder. And just for a lark, he did some kegel exercises, too—keeping his pubococcygeus muscle nice and tight so he could hold in his orgasms and really give the whores the what-for.
Dope Fiend looked around for the old man.
Dope Fiend found him.
A half-second before Gil smashed him in the head with a tricycle.
Gil had no idea why a tricycle was sitting there in the parking lot. He didn’t know that life here in the 66 States grew tedious, and that these clowns—in many cases, literal, actual clowns—resorted increasingly to dumb, Jackass-style stunts to keep themselves from keeling over dead from boredom. Had Gil known this, that would’ve explained why the tricycle had a faint dusting of black carbonization over the frame, and why it smelled a little like burnt vinyl and kerosene: just a few days before, one of Thuglow’s idiot soldiers lit the thing on fire and tried to ride it around the parking lot for as long as he could—some insane variant of rodeo, staying on the bucking beast as long as you could. Except, instead of a thrashing bronco it was a fiery tricycle.
That soldier—‘The Beava Smasha’—now was laid up in an infected hospital bed with third-degree burns up and down his ass and legs. He wasn’t expected to live. Darwinism had proven its mettle yet again.
Gil didn’t know any of that.
What he also didn’t know—but was swift to realize—was that a tricycle was basically a tangle of metal with lots of empty air. That meant, instead of just hitting Dope Fiend in the head, his head actually tangled inside the tricycle, trapping him within the metal frame.
Dope Fiend cried out, fired the gun. Recoil juggled the gun upwards, bullets tossing through open air. The muscle-head was like a giant ape with his head in a bucket, crying out and trying desperately to shake his cranium free from his tricycle prison.
Gil stepped aside, kicked the inside of the man’s leg. The knee popped—it didn’t break, but it didn’t have to. Dope Fiend went down.
And so did the gun. It clattered free of his grip.
“Please,” Dope Fiend said.
Gil picked up the gun and shot the man. Blood blossomed across Dope Fiend’s chest, but still he didn’t fall. He looked up at Gil and spat at him.
“Fuck you,” Dope Fiend hissed, spraying blood and froth.
One more bullet to the head, and Dope Fiend dropped.
It was time to rescue his daughter, his friends.
He just didn’t get it, man. “I’m a good leader,” Thuglow said to Babette, who stood behind him, her breasts pressing into his shoulder blades. She reached over his shoulder and, with two pairs of tweezers, delicately picked purple bong glass out of his head.
Outside, evening had fallen. He’d stayed in the hangar all day, totally bummed out. He’d got his back-up bong. Smoked some vicious medicinal marijuana from California he’d been saving for just such an occasion (so much better than this Texas ditchweed he’d been using). Eventually Loco had come back, told him their new ‘guests’ were lined up at the Friendship Motel on the far side of the base. Then Loco had asked him if he wanted to, uhh, you know, pick the broken glass shards out of his face? “Oh, damn,” Thuglow had told him. “I forgot about that.”
Loco asked him if he wanted one of the nurses. Thuglow told him to get one of the whores instead. Steadier hands, he told him with a wink, but really, the King’s heart wasn’t in it.
Times like this, he didn’t feel much like King Brutha Thuglow of the 66 States.
He felt like Johnny Ludlow, of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He felt like the 30-year-old who was still living in his parents’ basement. Or the helicopter pilot who lost his license because he was stoned. Or the guy who put crazy Youtube videos on the Internet of him rapping or ramping a BMX bike off a Gamestop roof or playing pranks on his other 30-year-old-and-probably-still-living-at-home buddies.
Out here, though, he commanded respect. Turned out, the world was home to any number of miscreants and deviants looking for a guy who could lead them. No, he wasn’t a leader by choice—mostly, he was just dumb enough to forge ahead, no matter the consequences. But to others, that looked like the real deal. And before too long he had a whole host of other weirdos and cast-offs who followed behind him like he had some kind of nutso gravity.
And somewhere in that, Brutha Thuglow was born.
Most of the time, he felt like the King. He could have whatever he wanted. Guns. Ditchweed. A threesome.
But then along came a handful of people who broke a bong over his head, covered him in skunk-water and made him feel less like Brutha Thuglow, King of the 66 States, and more like poor Johnny Ludlow, King of a Big Pile of Dogshit.
“It’s hard out there for a pimp,” he said, forlorn.
Equally forlorn was the dog he’d stolen, some squirmy little terrier who sat leashed over in the corner with a piece of clothesline from one of the residences. The animal’s jaws were muzzled with a belt because, what a surprise, the dog was a biter. Just another hunk of crap on the steaming pile of feculence that Thuglow felt was his life: what the hell was he going to do with a dog? Why did he steal it?
Babette licked the back of his neck just like he liked.
It made him feel a little better.
Well, a whole lot better, really.
He turned around—she still hadn’t gotten the last piece of bong glass out of his forehead, but hell with it, it was time to feel like a king and fuck his queen, or at least the queen of right now—so he pulled the tweezers out of her hand and dropped them to the floor. His spidery fingers snaked along the small of her back and he reached in and started kissing her neck…
And then he looked up.
Emerging from the shadows: a pair of eyes and the whitest teeth he’d ever seen. Not just teeth, though: fangs.
“You took my dog,” Coburn said, grinning.
The girl shrieked and came at him with her painted nails out, but Coburn wasn’t going to be put in his place by some trollop with an amateurish above-the-ass tattoo that looked like an evil clown’s wicked grin— or would do if it hadn’t been drawn by some shaky-handed meth addict. He caught her by both wrists, spun her around, then gave her a little eyeball-to-eyeball voodoo.
“You go now,” he said, patting her on the head. Her lips moistened with saliva. Her empty stare came complete with a numb, game nod. And then the girl tottered off like a scurrying mouse.
Coburn turned around to find Thuglow whimpering, clumsily trying to thumb .44 shells into a big ol’ hand cannon—Smith & Wesson Model 29a, by the looks of it. The vampire didn’t have to do much. He just stomped his foot and said ‘boo’ and the King fumbled the shells. They hit the hangar floor with a metallic tinkle and went rolling away.
Then he grabbed the gun and smacked Thuglow in the face.
“Settle down, your highness,” Coburn said, a growly chuckle in his throat. “I’m not going to eat you.”
It was true. He had no intention of eating this buffoon. Sure, the blood would give him a bit of a �
��contact buzz’ for maybe ten, fifteen minutes, but that wasn’t what he was looking for. Plus, he was full. Blessedly, blissfully full.
Last night, when the three assholes in the Humvee came up, guns out, Coburn slipped into the shadows and crawled under the vehicle when nobody was looking. And it was there he dangled—the bottom of his jacket scraping hard against shattered macadam—as they headed southwest to the airbase. He had to admit, he was starting to feel some deep worry that they were going to be driving too long, that he’d be under the Humvee when the sun started to come up, which meant at some point he’d drop out from underneath the vehicle like a burnt hot dog that got stuck to the underside of the grill.
But then they pulled into the base, and Coburn saw his opportunity. As they passed by rows of brick homes once used to house airmen, the vampire relaxed his fingers and slackened his legs and…
He hit the ground hard as the Humvee kept on going.
At that point, he knew he had maybe an hour, maybe two, before the sun came up. His skin wasn’t tingling yet; the hairs on the back of his neck hadn’t shot up like prairie dogs at the hole. These houses, people lived here. He could smell them. Boy, could he smell them. Booze. Coffee. Pot. The acrid cat-piss tang of methamphetamines. And… greasepaint.
Coburn didn’t know what was up with all this clown makeup. Best he figured was that the apocalypse had really done a number on people’s heads, scrambled their brains like eggs, made it seem that dressing up like Gothy ghetto clown-pimps was a fine idea, indeed.
Normally, he’d be more discerning with his food. But this wasn’t the time to play the picky gastronome, was it?
At first, he thought about just kicking down one of these doors and marching inside like he owned the place—feeding with the aggressive gusto of a man ripping the top off a package of Cheetos and shoving his whole head inside like it was some kind of gratuitous feed-bag. But last thing he needed was to draw undue attention at this wee hour of the morning, so it seemed as if a bit more subtlety was in order.
