“Don’t cry for him none,” the girl said, blowing out her last match and nodding to the dead man on the table. “He weren’t human no more when he ripped my sister ‘part with his own teeth, leastways not human enough to cry for.”
“You have a sister?” Patrick asked. Upon immediate reflection, he decided perhaps he had worded that question indelicately.
“Ain’t you got no fuckin’ ears?” she snapped. “I had a sister. Now git yer asses over here if ya wanna learn somethin’.” Ben crept back into the shed, wiping his mouth, and together they approached the desecrated corpse. Now that his eyes were adjusting to the dark, Patrick noticed a few more implements of mortal destruction scattered around the shed. Most of the standard tools had indeed been moved inside the house, but there were still plenty of dangerous items to spare. A rubber mallet and chisel lay on the table, near the creature’s ruined head (the apparent cause of death had been a shotgun blast to the face), as did another hunting knife. A fireplace poker rested against the sawhorse beneath the thing’s legs, and on the corner of the plywood table sat an oily old chainsaw. Its blade and guard were thick with dried, yellowish blood. Lumps of the same hard stuff had splattered across the table and onto the floor.
“You cut him open with a chainsaw?” Patrick asked, equal parts impressed and horrified.
The girl nodded. “You gotta. Ain’t hardly no other way to break through. Broke the teeth off two chains cuttin’ this’n open.” She picked up a lantern and swung it over close to the dead man’s sternum. She beckoned them over with her free hand. They slunk over reluctantly, shielding their eyes from the crater that used to be the creature’s head, and peered cautiously down into the crusty maw of his opened chest. She pointed to a section just below the shoulder where a thick layer of skin had been pulled back, revealing rotting muscle and sinews. She took the chisel and pushed some of the muscle aside. “See right there? Them little yellow tubes? Them’s the arteries.”
“They’re yellow,” Patrick said, confused.
“That’s what I jes said, genius. So’s they blood. Take a crack at it.” She held the chisel out toward Patrick. He looked at it uncomfortably. “Go on, take it.” He did, but he only frowned down at the cadaver.
“You want me to cut into it?”
“If ya can,” she leered. Her teeth were broken and a little yellow in the lantern light. Patrick sighed. He reached down and prodded one little yellow tube, expecting it to give like a gelatinous straw. Instead, it held firm. The point of the chisel knocked against it with a soft chink. The artery didn’t budge. He pressed harder. Still, it didn’t give. He hauled back and chipped at the artery with considerable force. He might as well have been chiseling at a mountain. “Hard as diamond. Every one’ve his blood vessels is harder to break ‘n a steel rod. That’s how come yer bat broke in half when you hit it on the head. Lots of blood vessels in the head.”
“How does it happen?” Patrick asked, his natural curiosity eclipsing his horror.
“The evolutionary goddamn zombie virus,” said Ben, whose natural terror refused to be eclipsed by anything.
“I told you, they ain’t no zombies. It’s the dust that does it.”
“What dust?”
“What dust? Fer fuck’s sake, what dust? Open that door,” she demanded. The shed door had swung shut. Ben pushed it open, revealing the soggy yellow mist outside. “That dust, shit brains.”
“How is that possible? I don’t understand,” said Patrick, his mouth screwed up in confusion. “The Monkey chemical causes the exact opposite reaction of hardening. People melt out of their own skin. Plus, we all inhale the vapors, and we’re not rock solid.” He slapped Ben’s arm for reference. Ben yelped in pain. “See? Soft as a baby.”
“Jesus, you two really are a coupla fuckin’ yankees, ain’tcha? Wait here.” She grabbed an old coffee mug from a shelf along the wall and ran out into the rain. A few minutes later she was back, the mug full of murky, brown river water. Yellow Monkey fog particles floated on the surface. She picked up a rag from the floor (it looked like it might have once been the dead man’s flannel shirt), spread it on the table, and dumped the cup onto it. The water seeped through the cotton and dribbled across the plywood and onto the floor. She picked up the shirt by the edges and shook the wet, yellow dust down into the center. Then she poured out the little yellow clumps onto the table, broke them up with her fingers, and arranged the fine powder into a long, thin line.
“You’re kidding me!” Patrick breathed. “They snorted it?”
“This here’s the South, Mr. Lincoln. If it can be snorted, smoked, or shot, it has been.”
“So the concentrated dust hardens the blood vessels over time. Basically giving them an exoskeleton, protecting their vital organs. But you’d think those would shut down. If your arteries turn to stone, your heart must do the same, and every other organ inside. If the heart turns to stone, it can’t possibly pump.” He picked up the girl’s chisel and poked around in the dead thing’s chest. Sure enough, the heart had turned hard and yellow. He slammed the chisel into it like a wooden stake into a vampire heart, but it just flaked off a bit of the outer layer.
The girl shrugged. “I just know what I seen,” she said, nodding at the body. “They’s hard as iron, and when they do bleed, it’s with yellow blood.”
“Maybe they operate at shockingly low blood pressures,” Patrick continued, millions of theories beginning to spin themselves into existence somewhere in his frontal lobe. “It’s fascinating.”
“It’s terrifying,” Ben corrected him. “Invulnerable drug addicts starved for human flesh? How is that not the most horrific thing in the world? And why in God’s name are they starved for human flesh?”
“Ain’t invulnerable,” the girl said. “Can’t git th’ organs, but you sure as shit kin git the brain.” She pointed at the dead man’s eye socket, which was only barely visible amid the ruin of the creature’s face. “It’s near ‘nough the only way to kill ‘em. Skull’s hard as shit, and the blood vessels don’t make it no easier, so the best way is to shoot ‘em through the eye. Yep. Gotta go fer the brain.”
Ben smacked Patrick’s arm. “I told you. Zombies.”
“I seen some duster fuckers stagger ‘round on their legs like they ain’t never used ‘em before,” the girl said, prodding the eye socket with her finger.
“We saw a few of those,” Patrick said, remembering the horde at the ranger station.
“Near as I kin tell, they somehow got their legs broke, bones snapped right in half, but the blood vessels, yer ‘ex-skelton,’ or whatever, it keeps ‘em walkin’ upright, broken bones and all.”
“Jesus,” Patrick and Ben muttered in unison. “A hard enough blow to the leg could shatter the bone,” Patrick nodded. “The sheer force would send a literally bone-shattering shockwave through the leg.”
The girl just shrugged. “Least ways, they’re easy to tell from real people. Stick out like a handfulla sore thumbs. Can’t speak or nothin’. All they can do is run and bite. You boys see a stranger on the road, y’all make him recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and if he can’t do nothin’ but moan, you shoot him right through the eye.”
“Or trample him with your buffalo,” Patrick said.
Leanne locked up the shed, and they dashed back into the house, ducking low to avoid the swinging cutlery. She headed for the kitchen and stirred the fire in the oven. Patrick remembered something their host asked earlier that didn’t sit well. “Why did you ask if we were bitten?”
“Whatever sickness the dust causes, it can catch, if it’s bad enough. Gets in yer bloodstream, and a few hours later, yer a duster yerself, without never snortin’ no dust.”
Ben threw up his hands in frustration, narrowly avoiding an axe blade. “For crying out loud, can they be any more zombie-like? Can we all just take a few seconds to acknowle
dge the fact that I was right? Especially you,” he said, leveling a finger at Patrick.
“They ain’t zombies!” Leanne snapped. “They ain’t dead. They’s still alive. That’s a big diff’rence.”
“For all practical purposes, there’s absolutely no difference at all.”
“If they ain’t dead, they kin be cured.”
Patrick nodded thoughtfully. Was this girl was working on a cure herself, some medicine or salve she kept samples of locked up in the pantry? Not that he expected her to carry a degree in pharmacology, or to be able to spell the word “pharmacology,” but she did show some sort of natural scientific instinct, the way she dissected the runner in the shed. Maybe she was smarter than she looked.
Later that evening, after a meal of charred venison, Leanne asked them about their destination. “Y’all said Disney World, right?”
“That’s correct,” Patrick nodded, wrapping a new dressing around his wound. He winced as he pulled the rag tight.
“Wait here, I think I got somethin’ for ya.” She stood up and disappeared into the back hall. When she returned she was holding a stack of pamphlets. She handed them to Patrick. “I knowed these was somewheres. Found ‘em under my bed. Them’s the maps to Disney World, most of ‘em, anyways. Couldn’t find the Magic Kingdom map, but the rest’re there.”
“Oh, goodness. Thank you. That’s really very nice.”
Leanne shrugged. “I ain’t got no use for ‘em no more. Might as well, right? ‘Course, I can’t imagine what sorta use you might have for ‘em either. Disney World’s a stupid ass place to go.” She crossed into the kitchen and stoked the fire one last time. “Y’all gonna be okay in here?”
“Sure. Sleeping under a canopoy of knives, what could go wrong?” Ben muttered.
“We’re fine,” Patrick said.
“All right, then. I’ll lock the door behind me, so’s you know I ain’t gonna murder y’all in your sleep.”
“Why would you say that?” Ben said, alarmed. “Why would you say you weren’t going to murder us in our sleep unless you were going to murder us in our sleep? Why would you say that? Patrick, why would she say that?” But Leanne just gave him a wink and closed the door.
“Well, isn’t she a peach!” Patrick declared, spreading his blanket on the floor. “What a nice young lady she turned out to be.”
“Nice young psychopath,” Ben said in a low tone. “Who cuts up a zombie, then leaves the fucking thing on display? We’re staying in the house of Dr. Moreau!”
“Oh, please. She hunts. She’s a hunter. Huntress. Whatever. She catches deer. And butchers them. It’s natural.”
“No. What’s natural is keeping your body in one unflayed piece. That’s natural.”
“If it’ll help ease your little baby mind, I’ll stay up and keep watch for a while,” Patrick said, stuffing the Disney World maps into his backpack. “Would that make you feel better?”
“Yes, it would,” Ben said indignantly. “Thank you.” He burrowed under his blanket and stamped his head down on his knapsack. As soon as he was out, Patrick laid down on his own pillow and gave in to exhaustion.
•
Ben woke to the sound of a rattling chain. At first he thought it was just part of his weird, Dickensian dream, wherein he was being chased down the streets of Industrial Revolution London by the ghost of a transvestite Jacob Marley. His eyes shot open just as Marley wrapped his fishnet stockinged legs around Ben’s waist, but even awake, now, he could hear the chains. He sat up and peered into the darkness. The fire in the oven had burned down to embers, and the living room was exceptionally dark. The sound was coming from the kitchen. Someone was doing some mighty fierce chain rattling in there. There was another sound too, a snarling, slurping sort of sound. It sounded like a starving wolf tearing at some sort of prey.
All in all, they were sounds that should not be coming from a kitchen in the middle of the night. Ben decided to panic.
He shook his sleeping companion. When Pat gave a confused blurb of sleepy grunts, Ben slapped him in the face to wake him up. It did the trick. “What the hell do you want?” Patrick cried. The rattling stopped, and Ben would be damned if he didn’t hear the sound of something sniffing the air.
“There’s something in here,” he whispered.
Patrick scratched his head. “Say what, now?” But before Ben could respond, the thing in the kitchen, whatever it was, sprang into action. The chains rattled across the floor and into the living room, and the creature’s snarling grew louder. Ben screamed and leapt to his feet, bringing his head right up into the points of a pitchfork. He howled in pain and reached up, yanking the fork down from its moorings. The chains clinked louder, and the creature’s snarling filled the room. Ben could see it now, a figure in the darkness, a thin, bony animal scraping toward them on all fours. He grabbed the pitchfork and struggled with its ceiling hook. With a cry of desperation, he ripped the whole thing down from the ceiling, fork and hook alike, and stabbed the sharp tines down toward the shape of the thing’s head. There was a soft gloosh sound, and the creature screamed in agony. Then, suddenly, everything fell quiet, and the animal dropped to the floor, dead.
“Wuzzat?” Patrick yawned, his hair sticking up at weird angles.
Ben slumped to the floor and tried to catch his breath. “Where’s that lighter?” he asked. Patrick motioned toward his backpack. Ben dug through it and pulled out the little plastic Bic. He held it gingerly out toward the dead creature and flicked it to life.
“Jesus Christ!” Patrick cried, scrabbling away from the heap of flesh on the floor. It was a man, a rail thin, sharply boned man with a thick iron collar around his neck attached to a heavy chain that ran back into the kitchen. The man wore a pair of denim coveralls that hung loosely on his gaunt frame. The second tine on the pitchfork had stabbed right through his eye and deep into the brain.
“It’s a fucking zombie!” Ben cried.
“Why is it on a leash?” Patrick asked, trying to shake the sleep webs from his head.
Just then, the chain pulled taut. Someone had picked it up on the other end. The chain hauled back toward the kitchen, pulling the dead man’s head back up and over his body, twisting his neck grotesquely back over his waist. The person on the other end yanked hard, and the thing’s head and shoulders flew back over its legs so it was dragged backward, belly up, the pitchfork still lodged in its eye socket. Patrick and Ben watched in dumbfounded amazement as the body of the runner disappeared back into the darkness. They stood up and followed it cautiously. They arrived in the kitchen just in time to see the thing’s feet disappear around the corner, into the pantry. They were still standing in front of the oven, baffled, when the sliding door opened from the outside. Ben grabbed Patrick and pulled him to the ground, where they were hidden from the living room by the kitchen counter. They heard the door slide shut again, then the sound of soft footfalls moving through the living room and into the kitchen. Ben pressed flat against the counters, praying the darkness would hide them from the intruder just three feet away, when suddenly the person stepped into the red glow of the oven embers. Ben leapt to his feet.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
If there were hatchets hanging down from the ceiling in front of the stove, Leanne would have sliced her scalp in half when she jumped and screeched. She punched blindly in the air, connecting with Ben’s shoulder and his ribcage. He swatted her hands away. She scrabbled in the darkness, grabbing for the hunting knife in her belt. She pulled it out and stabbed it forward just as Patrick cracked her on the back of the head with the stock of the shotgun he’d picked up from the table. She crumpled to the ground with a whimper.
“I got to pistol whip someone!” he cried excitedly.
“That’s not a pistol, moron.”
“The principle is the same,” Pat insisted.
“What the hell was she doing?” Ben asked. He toed at her forehead to make sure she was really unconscious.
“Dragging rabid politicians around the house, apparently. Bemme lighter.” Ben handed it over. Patrick flicked it on and cautiously poked his head into the pantry. “Yep. Take a look.” Ben craned his head around Patrick’s thin shoulders and peered into the small room. It was completely empty, except for the dead man on the floor. What food had once been stored inside had long since been removed, leaving all the shelves absolutely bare. The chain attached to the dead man snaked out through a hole in the wall, about two feet off the floor.
“Where does it go?”
“Outside, obviously. Probably secured around a tree stump, or an A/C unit, or something. So she could let it out for exercise without being in the house. Pretty smart.”
“Uhh...okay, but...why?”
“To feed, obviously.”
Ben raised an eyebrow. “Hey. I think I found a use for that rope.”
11.
The rain had more or less stopped by the time they finished tying Leanne to the tree. Patrick tugged at the loop around her neck. “Think she can breathe okay?”
Ben shrugged. “She’s not dead yet.”
“Fair enough. I knew this rope was gonna come in handy,” Patrick said proudly, wiping his hands on his jeans.
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