Death and Biker Gangs (Grave New World)

by S. P. Blackmore

  I set the shoe down next to its mate and lifted up a molding chunk of cardboard. Several photo albums rested underneath it, relatively protected from the elements. I should’ve just dropped the damn thing, but instead I reached out, pulling open one of the volumes. Two adults, three kids, and a dog smiled out from one of the photos.

  The faces didn’t look familiar, though that didn’t mean anything. Thousands of people roamed the camp, and I could hardly expect to have met all of them. Just because I hadn’t seen them didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  I let the cardboard fall back into place, half-wondering if it had been left there as a shield. Maybe someone in that family thought they’d be back for their printed memories.

  It probably wasn’t the same guy who owned the zombie books.

  “Any food?” Tony called.

  “No…just stuff.” It’s almost funny, how many of our belongings are utterly useless. Yeah, pictures are nice to look at, but you can’t fight off a ghoul with a picture…although I guess you could bludgeon one with an album. That might have the desired effect.

  The sudden whine in the air sounded almost like the dog, but it was drifting toward us from down the street. I lowered the jar of birdseed I’d picked up and stared into the haze, aware that the asphalt was vibrating slightly under my boots. It didn’t feel like another tremor.

  The whine increased, growing into a mechanical screech.

  “Oh, shit.” Tony did not sound happy. “This is a pretty good place for a trap, isn’t?”

  “The dead are setting traps?” Dax asked, still holding Cab Ride of the Dead.

  I backed away, nearly tripping over the damned stilettos. “No, Dax. Not the fucking dead.”

  SIX

  Tony bolted for the sidewalk and nearly slipped in the ash. “Gray house on the left.”

  “They’re all gray!”

  “That one!” He swung out a hand long enough to gesture vaguely at a house with a trailer overturned in the driveway. We scrambled for the house in a decidedly disorganized fashion, Evie racing after us.

  The whine became a steady hum. They must have been coming from a far-off place if it took them so long to get here—sound carries a lot further when there’s no background noise to dilute it.

  “Dude!” Dax pointed at the ground. “If they use their heads at all, they’ll see our tracks.”

  He dashed back to the piece of cardboard that had concealed the photo albums. “Help him with the gate. I’ll smush up our trail.”

  You’ll what? I darted ahead of Tony to the wooden gate that ran from the garage wall to the unit next door. I stood on my toes and reached over the fence, fumbling around with the latch. I also felt something else: something big and square. My heart sank. “I think there’s a lock…”

  Click. Something gave way, and the padlock slipped off the latch.

  Holy shit, I never got this lucky. I opened the latch and pushed the gate open, swinging into what had probably once been a side yard strewn with tanbark. We had about eight feet of clearance between the side of the house and the fence, and everything looked clear, at least for the moment. Tony and Evie hustled through the gate.

  I looked back toward Dax, then had to stop and blink. “What’s he doing?”

  Tony joined me at the gate, pulling off his gloves. “Looks like an interpretation of Lord of the Dance.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Boy Scout! Quit stomping the yard and get over here!”

  Dax swiped the cardboard against the ground several additional times, then dragged it behind himself, leaping from side to side. Tony and I stood there staring at him as he backed his way to the gate. “You picked a hell of a time to brush up on your dance moves,” Tony said.

  Dax shut the gate behind him, pride evident in his eyes.

  “Nice job,” I said, although I wasn’t quite sure what I was praising.

  Tony nodded in agreement. “So what happens if they realize your little swishy trail leads to the house?”

  Dax’s smile faded slightly as he considered that.

  The motors abruptly cut out. Tony signaled us to silence and peered through the tiny gaps between the slats. A few seconds later, I copied him, getting a halfway decent look at our visitors.

  Six figures strolled through the debris field. Only one of them had a bike with him—a slender vehicle painted black and silver. I could just make out the others at the other bikes beyond it before the slats cut off my field of vision. “What kind of bike is that?” I whispered to Tony.

  “Can’t tell. Looks fancy, though.”

  One of the bikers knocked aside several items, including the box of zombie books. “Looks like they bugged out,” he said.

  “Shit! I told you we should have waited closer.”

  A third man looked around, and for a second I thought he’d spotted us. But his head continued to turn, inspecting each house along the block. “They could be hiding. We should search the place.”

  “You really wanna go through all these houses? They could spring anything on us if they’re inside.” The second man crouched in front of the zombie books and started shuffling through them. I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling or not, but they seemed to be keeping his interest. “Did they have a bike?”

  “I don’t fucking know, dude. I didn’t see one. They might’ve been on foot.”

  “How fucking stupid could they be?”

  Tony huffed quietly.

  Oh, you haven’t seen how stupid we can get, I thought.

  “Then they couldn’t have gotten that far,” the first biker said.

  “Can you hear anything?”

  Silence, presumably as they listened for signs of us. I held my breath.

  “Sound carries,” the third one said. “They could have stopped a street over and killed the damn engine.”

  “Dude, I didn’t see a bike!”

  Evie growled softly.

  “Shut up,” Tony whispered to the fence. “They’ll hear…”

  Evie growled again.

  Tony swung around and made a dismayed sound.

  I turned to look behind me, and Tony’s hand landed over my mouth to stifle my yelp.

  A bow-legged ghoul rested one hand against the side of the house as it leered at us. His teeth gnashed together as he limped forward, and he had died in a checkered shirt over ratty black jeans.

  Something had chewed his lips away before we got there.

  “What do we do?” I whispered through Tony’s fingers.

  “Ask it to come back later?”

  Oh, sure. The dead were nothing if not courteous attackers.

  “Shut the dog up,” Tony whispered to Dax. “Tape her mouth shut if you have to. Vibby, stand guard.”

  “Me?” I seemed to get nominated to a lot of posts I wasn’t qualified for.

  Dax crouched down beside the dog, pressing her jaws together to keep her from howling.

  Tony snatched up his Winchester and stormed toward the ghoul. Rather than blow its head off, he jammed the muzzle into the revenant’s mouth, effectively stifling its moans and growls.

  Nice work, Tony, I thought. Points for inventiveness.

  He managed to shove the dead man up against the wall of the house. The thing grabbed at him, and he slapped its hands aside. It might have been comical if it hadn’t been real.

  Once he had the dead guy suitably restrained, I turned back to the gate.

  “We should search the houses,” one of the bikers said.

  “Blow me, bro, you can search them. We didn’t check all these places. Might be some dead fucks running around.”

  I glanced back at Tony. He was leaning as far away from the dead man as he could manage without actually letting the revenant go. Dax and Evie sat silently together, the dog staring at the ghoul and straining toward it.

  “What’re we gonna tell Root Canal?”

  Root Canal? Of all the biker names one could choose…

  “We’ll tell him we saw a few strays on foot and to keep his
eyes open. That’s all we can do.”

  Their voices faded away, but I stayed pinned to the gate until the engines started, revved, and howled off down the street. I lingered a little longer, waiting for one of them to come wandering back to pick up his dropped water bottle or one of the zombie books.

  “Vibeke,” Dax murmured, “turn around.”

  You can do all kinds of things with a walking dead guy, provided you move fast enough to evade its crushing embrace, but Tony seemed determined to push things to the limit, swinging the ghoul around in a staggering sort of dance. “Tony, I didn’t know you could…is that the salsa?”

  “More of a cha-cha mixed in with the electric slide, but thanks.” He pulled the Winchester out of its mouth and slid under the revenant’s arm, and the thing lurched around behind him. I guess it qualified as a twirl.

  “They gone?” Tony asked.

  “Seems like.”

  “Praise Ezekiel.” He hurried back to us, then crouched in front of his backpack to paw through it.

  The dead guy regained his bearings and shuffled after him, jaw hanging open. His teeth had turned brown and black, and as he got closer, I realized half his face had turned a mottled purple color. Decomposition really doesn’t do anyone any favors.

  Tony found the gun he wanted—a silenced pistol—and turned around. “Sorry, I can’t date a guy who won’t dance.”

  POP.

  Down went the dead man.

  Dax finally let go of the dog’s muzzle, and she responded by shaking her head vigorously. “How long did it take you to come up with that one-liner?”

  Tony peered at the entry wound. “Not much of a splatter on this one. Looks like everything kind of congealed in there.”

  I leaned back against the gate. “You see any bite marks on him?”

  Tony gave the corpse a cursory inspection. “No. Doesn’t mean they aren’t there, though.”

  Or it meant he’d died a natural death—well, as natural a death as one could get these days—and came back anyway.

  Tony must have seen the thought written on my face. “Doctor Samuels would be tickled pink to hear it, wouldn’t he?”

  “Probably.”

  “More importantly,” Dax said, “where’d those bikers go?”

  “Back the way they came. They were talking about getting into trouble with someone named Root Canal.”

  Tony stuck out a hand and tugged on the back door, and after a few seconds it slid open. “Must be their boss.” He slipped inside, then tapped his gun against the glass.“Anybody home?”

  After several moments of utter silence, he beckoned us in. “We’ll stay here for the day. They’ll be watching this area, and I don’t think we have enough ammo for a gun battle.”

  We don’t really have the fortitude for one, either. I kept that thought to myself as we crept into the house, which seemed pretty much deserted. After a few moments of poking around on the ground floor, we decided we were safe enough to relax a little bit.

  Tony spilled the contents of his backpack on the dusty countertop, while Dax inspected the cabinets for any leftover food. I deposited my rifle and backpack on the kitchen table. “Do you think these are the same guys that attacked the camp?”

  “No. Hammond was having trouble with two gangs in particular in Elderwood. These guys seem like they’ve got a few streets. I wonder how many of them there are.”

  Seriously, God? Biker gangs? Zombies aren’t enough? “I guess if I survived the endtimes, I’d join a biker gang, too…oh, wait.” I tugged at the sleeves of my riding jacket. “I guess I did.”

  Tony pushed the guns to one side and our meager food supply to the other. “See? Survive the endtimes, join a biker gang. It all makes sense.”

  “If only we had an actual bike,” I said.

  Tony glared at me, then went back to taking stock. “If you hadn’t insisted on taking the damn dog…”

  “Cabinets are cleared out,” Dax announced, breaking up what might have turned into an actual tense moment.

  My stomach chose that moment to make a most unladylike sound. I covered it, trying not to imagine going the next sixteen or eighteen hours without any food at all.

  I’d never known real hunger before this. Oh, sure, there were the days when I worked late and skipped dinner, but I’d always had access to food, whether it was a trip to Denny’s or a snack machine. We’d been on reduced rations in Elderwood, and my clothes were starting to sag, but even then, there had been food.

  And now there wasn’t any.

  We split up to scavenge, just in case the previous owners had squirreled emergency supplies away in weird places, like the upstairs linen closet. I found a bottle of ibuprofen sitting on a bathroom counter, and after determining it was almost full, I stuck it into a pocket. After a moment’s hesitation, I gathered my nerves and looked in the mirror.

  I ran out immediately afterward. It’s probably a sad commentary that I could stare down the undead, but not my own deteriorating appearance.

  Human beings aren’t meant to go without sunshine, even naturally pale Norwegian types like me. Over the last few weeks, my pallor had started to resemble deathbed illness—to say nothing of those hive-like marks on my face—and now I had giant dark circles under my eyes. I half-heartedly pushed my black hair back into a slightly neater ponytail. If I couldn’t look good, I could at least look tidy.

  Whatever. It wasn’t like I was participating in any post-apocalyptic beauty contests, anyway.

  I came back downstairs empty-handed, but Dax had turned up a box of cereal that had probably been purchased during the Clinton administration. We ate it sparingly, trying to make it last the night.

  Is this the way it’s always going to be? I was pretty sure I wasn’t cut out for running and hiding from one foe or another, then scavenging for leftovers from the world before. I used to wear spike boots and dark eyeliner, dammit. Shoot ’em ups weren’t my thing.

  When the sun finally went down, plunging the Cluster into a moonless, starless void, Dax pulled out his little transistor radio and switched it on. Gloria Fey no longer started her show at specific times, since no one really seemed to know what time it was anymore, anyway, and had resorted to “Every morning when it’s light gray, and every evening when it’s darker gray.”

  It seemed to work.

  Soon enough, her voice rang out of the speaker. “Good evening, Midlands Cluster,” she chirped, still sounding entirely too perky for the whole endtimes situation we had going on. Dax fiddled with the dial, but I suspected the reception was about as good as it was going to get. Some days she came through loud and clear, other days she battled static. I figured it had something to do with the crap in the air.

  “I hope your day went well,” Gloria went on.

  “It was shit, Gloria, but thanks for asking.” I lay on my stomach, using my rolled-up jacket as a pillow. Evie stretched out on my other side, snoring lightly. I hoped we weren’t inadvertently poisoning her with our out-of-date cereal.

  Gloria went through her usual list of bad news. “Nothing from Bogman today. I did hear from Calcutta George, and he says things up in Kansas are going as well as can be expected.”

  Dax frowned at the radio. “Calcutta George in Kansas? What the hell?”

  “Her sources always have weird callsigns,” Tony said. “I think they just do it to fuck with us.”

  “I also heard from Cherished Fire, and she says motorcycle brigands have expanded their reach throughout the edge of Elderwood and into much of Muldoon.” All of our sniggering stopped when she got to that information, and Dax turned the radio up higher. “There’s several groups, and some of them are vicious as all hell, so you might want to steer clear of them.”

  “Now she tells us,” I muttered.

  Tony stifled a yawn. “What kind of a biker name is Root Canal, anyway? Not exactly awe-inspiring.”

  I had to agree with him there. If I ever started a biker gang, I’d change my name from Vibeke to something more a
ppropriate, like Throat-Slitter or Wildebeest or Bone Crusher.

  Gloria went on, although she didn’t have much more to offer. “I’m sorry I don’t have better news for everyone, but it’s been a slow few days…”

  She issued this apology just about every other day. I half-expected her to start apologizing for other things, too. I’m sorry the world ended—I miss eating real food, too. I’m sorry the dead got up and walked, it’s a terrible inconvenience. I’m sorry the electricity isn’t working; my iPod won’t recharge, either. I’m really sorry about all of it.

  I guess this is how the world winds down. We cling to what we can, listen to our favorite fluff reporter-turned-newshound, and wonder what’s going to go wrong next.

  The radio faded into dead air, and the sudden silence unnerved me. “You guys should start calling me Bone Crusher,” I announced. “You know, to inspire fear in our enemies.”

  “And non sequitur of the night goes to Vibeke, better known as Bone Crusher.” Tony twisted onto his side to look at me. “Can I call you Boney for short?”

  I stuck my nose in the air. “It is unwise to mock the Bone Crusher, for obvious reasons.”

  “So is it like a bone crusher, or do you crush boners, or what?”

  I deepened my voice as much as I could. “Come over here and let’s find out.”

  Dax snickered, turning off the radio. “How’s that supposed to work? ‘We don’t want to fight you—here, deal with Bone Crusher?’ And then we just sort of let you…what? Interview them to death?”

  “Hey, I ask the tough questions.”

  Evie snored. I’d considered her small, as far as golden retrievers went, but she had a real motor in there.

  Tony switched on his flashlight. When I looked over, I saw he was hanging onto Dead Mennonite Walking, which he flipped open to the first page. “Who wants to hear about Ezekiel versus the zombies?”

  “Veto,” Dax said. “I don’t want to hear about zombies when there’s real-life zombies hanging around outside.”

  Tony turned the page, pointedly ignoring him. “Once upon a time during a zombie apocalypse…”

  SEVEN

  The next day, we came to the remains of a 24-hour pharmacy. Abandoned cars littered the lot, and Tony crouched down to inspect some tire tracks, though whether he could actually identify them remained up in the air. “These are pretty fresh,” he announced. “Keep your heads up.”