The wild man was warming more to the topic.
“Course, well, prison’s empty now. When all this plague shit hit six months ago, they opened the doors and most of those motherfuckers got ate, or became stinkers, then dead stinkers, within a couple of days. Whacked a few of them myself, right here in my woods. So who’s to say some folks didn’t pick the empty prison to work on their research.”
“Uhhh …” Tim began.
“Fuck, I’ll take you there and we’ll see. If there’s a chance of getting any of this crazy shit turned back to normal, I’m all over it. So get up, Mr. Talking Stinker, and walk ahead of me on that path. Don’t do nothin’ funny or your brains will become part of the scenery.”
They walked for five minutes in silence until the man said, rather suddenly: “Name’s Stacey. Like the girl. Laugh an’ I’ll shoot your dick off. What’s your’n?”
Tim had to think about that for a moment, but he came up with it. It’d been some time since he’d said his own name, and the single syllable sounded odd coming out of his mouth. Like a badge of humanity, the simply introduction hurtled him a few evolutionary steps beyond the nameless Zee he was not too long ago.
“Tim, eh? That’s a pretty funny fucking name for a zombie,” Stacey said. Then he let ring peals of laughter that reverberated through the early morning woods like cannon fire. “Hey hoo! Tim the fucking zombie! Watch out! He’ll eat yer fuckin’ balls off, he gets mad enough! An lookee: He’s hungry, that Tim the zombie!”
Tim said nothing, walking in silence until they came to a place where Stacey had his ‘70s vintage F-150 hidden under a pile of branches. Still laughing, he gestured for Tim to hop up into the bed, and they were off down a dirt road that eventually bumped them out onto a highway.
Peering up over the side, Tim watched the ruined world with a growing sense of doom. What if he could get cured and it could spread to the others still alive (or alive-ish)? Was it even worth it anymore? He could see the city in the distance where they’d spent the night in the furniture store, plumes of smoke still rising in many different parts of it. Out here, there were fields punctuated by various large buildings. More prisons?
The sliding window on the door came open and Stacey yelled at him.
“Get yer fucking head down ya dumb shit! There’s a put-down squad headin’ this way! Pull some-a that shit back there over you.”
He was right. What Tim called a squealer squad — a mean-looking pickup truck full of heavily armed assholes — was fast approaching. He dropped to the floor of the pickup bed and pulled a broken piece of drywall over his head and chest. But the put-down squad didn’t stop; they just raced past, and Stacey continued on his way, driving slowly south on the wreckage-strewn highway for another hour or so with no further comments directed through the slider. Tim stayed where he was, feeling the truck maneuver slowly around the road’s obstacles as Tim himself grew faint from pain and, now, hunger. Lying still made his wounds throb incessantly, and he felt himself losing consciousness even as more details of his human life drifted in and out of his mind. He could hang onto nothing; the memories were strands passing over him like clouds — taking recognizable shapes, then morphing into abstract blobs, meaningless packets. Finally the only image on the screen was a dark shade being drawn down over him, which he recognized as death, long delayed, coming to visit him with a decided finality. He rose to it, longed to embrace it and felt it start to wrap around his being like a warm, wet sweater.
The wet was real, at least: His descent into that dark tunnel was interrupted by a great mass of water being poured on him by Stacey. He saw his furry face looming above him.
“Wake up! Don’t fuckin’ die on me yet, you stupid motherfucker. Come on now! Open yer eyes!”
Water had gone up Tim’s nose and into his mouth, and he sat up spluttering, gasping for air — to Stacey’s great mirth.
“Ha! That worked like a fucking charm!”
Behind Stacey came the unmistakable sound of a zombie screech.
“Oh shit. Damn, that didn’t take long.”
Tim let his head fall back to the bed of the pickup as he heard Stacey dispatch what sounded like at least a dozen Zees. In between shotgun blasts and the report of the 9mm, Tim heard Stacey’s running commentary addressed to the Zees approaching him.
“OK motherfucker, here you go! (Blam!) You want summa this? (Blam) Ouch, that’s gotta hurt, getting’ the top of your head blowed off like that. Ha! (Blam!) Oh, sorry dear, did that hurt, the slug in your forehead? Looks like I got you right ‘tween the eyes. Nice shootin’, Stacey. Whoa, Hey Timmy, this guy here’s nekkid, an’ looks like he got his dick chewed off. Ow, buddy. Let me put you outta yer misery …”
After what seemed like a very long time to Tim, Stacey reached over and poked him with the barrel of the shotgun.
“Hey Stinky, wake up! This is gettin’ bad out here. We got stinkers comin’ from the east over there, and to the south there’s a whole herd of ‘em cloggin’ up the road. I’d need a fuckin’ mini gun to get through ‘em all, so we’re gonna have to hole up somewheres. Goddamn zombie convention goin’ on out here, I tell you what. So stay put, don’t die. I’m-a look for a house or some shit.”
Tim blacked out again as the truck began moving. When he came to, he was looking at a set of stairs receding behind him. He was being carried by Stacey, who’d flung him over his shoulder and brought him into what looked like some kind of office building. At the top of the stairs, Stacey gently set him down against a desk and sat down heavily beside him.
“Fuck,” was all he said. After a few moments, Stacey got up and moved to the other side of the room.
“No offense, boy, but … damn!”
“I know,” mumbled Tim. “I stink.”
“You stink …” here, Stacey paused for a moment to think of some more good stuff … “like a friggin’ garbage truck that’s loaded with vulture vomit and’s been sittin’ inside a locked warehouse on a hot day.”
“Thanks … for bringing me up here. Not sure why.”
“Why is cuz for whatever stupid fuckin’ reason I believe your bullshit story about a cure, an’ I got nothin’ better to do, ‘cept whack stinkers. We gotta hole up here til dawn when the stinkers start to settle down, then we’ll head back toward Caswell. Although damn if I’m not breakin’ my promise to never set eyes on that fucking place ever again.”
“Well,” said Tim, now whispering, “It’s probably much nicer if you’re just visiting.”
Stacey laughed. “Yeah, right. A real nice place. How you feelin’?”
“Close to death,” Tim said. “Really.”
“Don’t close your eyes. I guess we gotta keep you up all night. Just as well: I don’t want to fall asleep in here with all that stinker activity goin’ on out there tonight. Something’s got ‘em stirred up. Full moon — who the fuck knows. So we got like 10 hours or so before daylight, so you gotta listen to me ramble on about all kinds of shit until then, OK?”
“OK.”
He started at the beginning, his earliest memories. It was nothing unusual: running around some Texas suburb with other kids, recollections of dogs, siblings, bullies and teachers. He spoke in a quiet voice, and his edge and choice of words softened — except for when he saw Tim nodding off.
“Wake the fuck up! Open yer goddamned eyes, motherfucker!”
And then he’d resume the soft voice, telling about his third-grade teacher, or a baby bird he’d found that had fallen out of the nest.
Occasionally, Tim would manage a question. When it seemed like Stacey was going to gloss over the reason he’d spent so much time in Caswell, he croaked, then spoke.
“How’d you end up in prison?”
Stacey let the question hang in the air for half a minute before he spoke.
“There are only three reasons a man winds up in the pen, and I know from being in there a long time that this is true. And those reasons are alcohol, money or pussy — or some mix of the three. Violence, that’s just a sym
ptom. It’s those other three that cause everything.”
Another pause.
“For me, I guess it was all three, but mostly it was the last one. June, that was my wife (the fuckin’ bitch), we were getting’ divorced and we had a kid, Peter was his name.”
Here, Stacey stopped and didn’t speak again for a minute or two. Tim didn’t say anything, struggling to stay awake while remarking to himself, over and over again, how much pain he was in, and how it was so far beyond endurable as to defy credibility. How could a person be alive and be in so much pain at the same time? But listening to Stacey helped, if ever so slightly, take his mind off it. So he tried a prompt.
“Peter, your son?”
Stacey had gotten up and crossed to a window. He held up a hand to Tim.
“Hold on a sec. Somethin’s goin’ on down there. Looks like stinkers found themselves some dinner. What were those stupid fucks doing out there? Looks like three of ‘em, and a dozen stinkers. Shit, they ain’t even got any guns!”
Stacey decided to skip the story of his troubled marriage to offer Tim a blow-by-blow account of the Zee feeding unfolding in the street.
“OK, here goes the first one down. Woman in a dress. Dress is off like a prom dress — heh-heh — pretty nice titties, she’s got three stinkers on her and there’s the first neck bite. He’s got a gusher, holdin’ on good while the others are chewin’ on her tits an’ arms an’ her gut. And there’s the intestines already! You know it’s over when your guts are on the ground. Blech. I’ll never get used to that. There’s a reason people got skin all over ‘em.
“OK, they got the other guy. All’s I can see is his legs, which are twitchin’ all over the place and … OK, now they’re still. He’s zombie food. Third one is a young gal, trying to climb over a fence. She might actually make it. You go, girl! Uh-oh. Nope, one of ‘em’s got her leg and here comes two more, pullin’ her down. Oh, she’s got a scream. You hear that, Timmy? Breaks your fuckin’ heart.”
He turned away from the window and put the palms of his hands on a desk, standing there with his head down as if he’d just walked up a steep flight of stairs.
“I jump in a lot, Timmy. Savin’ people an’ shit. But I can’t get to ‘em all.”
He turned his watery blue eyes toward Tim.
“I’m no hero. Not by a long shot. I only wade in when it’s safe — when I know I can get in and get out without getting my own ass in a wringer. Sometimes I feel like a pussy, like now, watchin’ people die. But I figure I wouldn’t be much good to anyone dead, or as a fucking zombie. So I help who I can, and the rest, well … that’s just the way of the world these days, ain’t it? The way of the fuckin’ world.”
Now, Stacey sat in a chair and talked directly at Tim, like a doctor addressing a patient.
“And maybe that’s the way it’s always been, hey? Just some different players right now. Hell, a year ago we were all worried about, whatever, Goldman Sachs comin’ in an’ taking all our shit, rippin’ out our financial guts. Once it was the fucking Nazis, or the Soviets or the goddamn al Qaeda Taliban motherfucker terrorist assholes. Zombies, well, they’ve just traded all those bad guys for their action, an’ it makes those Nazis in a way not seem so bad, right?”
“It’s different,” Tim managed to croak. “Zees don’t know what they’re doing.”
Stacey gave him a penetrating look.
“Well, maybe. But the upshot’s the same: regular folks get fucked.”
Tim couldn’t argue with that, but he wasn’t going to be able to contribute any more to the conversation. His throat felt like it was closing up, and his breath was coming in tighter and tighter gasps. It didn’t seem like he’d be able to make it another five minutes, much less the rest of the night.
But make it he did. Stacey, after he ran out of autobiographical information, poked around the office and found some reports and other business documents to read from.
“This one here’s something about marketing for some new shit, looks like software. Called ‘Ellipsis one-point-oh.’ Supposed to solve all your accounts receivables problems.”
He read some of the executive summary and then tossed the binder aside.
“Ain’t nobody going to be needin’ that shit anymore, hey?”
He rummaged in another desk.
“What do we have here? Pair of runnin’ shoes, some panty hose an’ a box-a tampons. Wonder where this gal is now? Alive somewheres, livin’ in a basement or a cave eatin’ rats for dinner. Or is she dead, chewed up an’ shit out by some stupid fucking zombie?”
He looked over at Tim.
“No offense.”
“None taken,” he managed to gasp.
If he could have, Tim would have said he wasn’t going to be a Zee for much longer anyway. He’d either be all the way dead or cured, somehow. At the moment, the former seemed the most likely, but in the back of his mind lurked the suspicion there was more in store for him. How could he have made it this far only to die in some anonymous office park? Why would he have met Stacey — a man who should’ve shot him on sight but, rather, took him under his wing and was trying to help him? The hand of fate was intervening here, for whatever reason.
If he could only just keep breathing a little while longer.
Chapter 17. Meridian
As soon as the sun poked up, Stacey had Tim over his shoulder again and down into the truck bed, where he covered him over with the piece of drywall and told him to keep his eyes open.
“We’re close. Don’t die.”
Tim gave him a feeble thumbs-up and focused all his attention on staying alive, breathing … being. The truck started moving, with Stacey calling out the sights through the slider. Tim was touched by his attempts to keep him awake and alive, despite the content of the running dialog.
“Looks like it was a busy night all over. Blood slicks everywhere, here’s a put-down squad that got put down itself, stupid fuckers. Tell you one thing, half the time those guys are so drunk they shoot themselves. Or they get sloppy. I stay as far away from them as possible. Shit, they’re almost as bad as the fucking stinkers, terms-a how dangerous they are.”
Despite Stacey’s best efforts, Tim fell into a shallow, troubled sleep. Bits of life from his past, present and possibly future — it was hard to tell — flew in and out of his mind like broken pieces of glass. There was no more leisurely exploration of old memories; the bouncing of the truck mirrored the scattered detritus of his soul welling up once again as he approached death. Again, he was ready to welcome it, at the same time a small portion of him clung to the notion that, if Stacey could get him there pretty soon, maybe he’d hang on.
And Stacey delivered, the truck rolling to a stop, doors slamming, tailgate being dropped with a noisy bang.
“Well, this is it, stinky. Caswell State Penitentiary. Home-a Meridian an’ the miracle zombie cure! Ha ha ha!”
Tim felt hands grasp his ankles and drag him forward a few inches.
“You still alive, boy?”
For an answer, Tim managed to push the drywall off his face and offer a wan smile.
“There you go! You’re a fuckin’ trooper, is what. I don’t know how you’re still breathin’ with all that lead in you. But I always knowed the fuckin’ zombies are tough. Tough an’ weak at the same time. Hard to kill, that’s for sure. But listen up: There’s no gate open, an’ the one place with a guard greeted me with a slug through my windshield. So we’re going to have take a more direct approach. So hold onto your zombie nuts, we’re goin’ through. An’ just hope these assholes are in here with some kinda doctor, cuz you ain’t long for this world.”
Stacey slammed the tailgate shut again and got behind the wheel. Tim shut his eyes in preparation for the jolt ahead and promptly blacked out again.
He didn’t come to until Stacey, blasting through a weak spot he identified in the fence, spun sideways and came to a halt. Tim flew out the back of the pickup and landed in a heap on the asphalt of a basketball court. And then
Stacey was standing over him, grinning.
“Don’t worry, you can’t be much worse! Ha ha ha! Look: There’s some cars over there, so I’m thinking this is our best bet. Now we just need to figger out how to get inside …”
But by this time, some doors had burst open and several heavily armed men were approaching. Stacey dropped his shotgun in the face of the overwhelming firepower and put his hands behind his head.
“Uh, look, this stinker here talks, name’s Tim, an’ he told me he needed to get here. He thinks it’s some place called Meridian, with some folks working on a cure. Y’all want him? He’s in pretty rough shape.”
Other than to train their weapons on Stacey, they ignored him. One of them got on a walkie-talkie.
“Mark, this is Craig, over.”
The radio crackled. “Go ahead Craig.”
“Believe it or not, looks like someone delivered the package you’ve been looking for. He’s … he’s a mess. Needs Linda, like now.”
Within a few minutes, the doors opened again and some others in haz-mat suits emerged.
They were pushing a gurney, and they scooped Tim up and disappeared inside, followed by the guards. One of them paused long enough to look at Stacey and say: “Thanks for fucking up our fence, asshole.”
“Don’t thank ol’ Stacey or anything, you fuckers! I just saved humanity an’ all, that’s all. Shit.”
Stacey climbed back into his truck, drove slowly through the hole he’d just made in the fence and went back to his woods. If Tim was right about a cure, he hoped he’d hear about it some day so he could stop whacking zombies and go back to … whatever.
When Tim awoke next, he appeared to be in a hospital room. His arms were restrained, he had tubes in his mouth and up his nose and lines coming out of his chest and arms. He heard the sounds — the beeps, the chuffing of some oxygen machine — but outside, none of the hustle of a hospital. There was no TV in the room, no window, no drapes. The walls were painted concrete, and there was nobody around.
Zombie Road Trip Page 10
