Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages

by Неизвестный

  He took a deep breath and sliced as cleanly as he knew how, while Jackson howled through the cloth, which thankfully dampened the sound of it, and then fainted. George poured another slug of whiskey onto the wound, then wrapped the hand tightly with scraps from a shirt that had been abandoned by one of the men who had vanished.

  Having just encountered the undead cur, he now was pretty certain where they had gone.

  He’d answer Jackson’s question when he woke, tell him exactly what that was all about. He swore he would. Because though he may have decided he’d just have to get used to being one of the loneliest guys in the world, something which he never thought he’d have to be, there was no way out of this life alone.

  Tonight proved that.

  The men never saw how the movie played out, whether or not the fancy-pants hero managed to save the day against “that vampire guy.” George ended it all when he came running out of the bunkhouse, screaming, his eyes wild. He sprinted up to the boss, shouting hysterically, grabbing his collar, calling out Jackson’s name. They all followed him back inside and found Jackson stretched out there, his hand a ball of bloody cloth.

  George tried to explain what had happened, what he wanted them to think had happened, but couldn’t be heard over the chaotic questions from the men. Dix had to fire a shot into the ceiling to shut them up. With the room silent, George was barely coherent, or at least tried his best to be, and Willie insisted he down some whiskey, which helped in his pretense, especially considering he’d already taken a few shots on his own before sprinting outside.

  He explained how a coyote had attacked them as they’d been talking there quietly in the dark, and how they’d fought it off, but not before Jackson had lost a thumb. One of the men, who’d almost finished high school, and had done some book reading, peeled back the sodden makeshift bandages. George could see that the blood ran red, thank god, and so what he’d done had been worth the funny look the man then gave him. George looked away as the man did his best to sew up Jackson’s hand, though he heard him explain that he wouldn’t be able to return to work for at least weeks. George then saw the guy whispering to Dix, who walked over to him angrily.

  “Are you sure you’re telling us what really happened?” he barked.

  George protested that he had, and Dix seemed to take his word for it. At least at first, for he did glare back at him suspiciously after he returned to stand over Jackson.

  George hoped that once he woke, the man would be able to keep his story straight. George’s life, George’s plan, depended on it.

  George’s life? Hah!

  One way or another, it would have to end.

  George spent the next day toiling in the field while wondering how Jackson was doing, what he was saying, and how everything could have gone so wrong. Nobody was in the mood to talk much, and the men kept their distance from him, so he had plenty of time in which to wonder.

  He’d sworn, though his intentions then were not what they were now, that his aim had been true. He’d pressed the barrel of that gun right where the spine and the skull joined, but he must have closed his eyes, or looked away at the last moment, or done something to stop the shot from firing straight. How else to explain it? It was love that had caused him to do what had to be done, but he guessed that it was also love which had left space for the mistake which had allowed his friend to come back.

  The day passed quickly, because even though he pressed himself to work like a dog, harder than he ever had before, in an attempt to forget, he wasn’t really there, since that attempt was a failure. He was instead off in that clearing in the brush where it had all gone down—Had it truly been only a few weeks before? That seemed impossible—but also lost in the night before, when in the instant Jackson was attacked he had made a decision. So he was in those two places, not out under the hot sun. He had no way to undo either of those events, but he could damn well make sure that there would be no other such events in the future. If only Jackson could remember what George had whispered to him through his delirium.

  By the look Dix gave him when the crew returned at the end of the day, it seemed as if he had. George nodded at his boss, and the man nodded back without judgment. As the rest of the men ran to the dining table, George slipped away to sit himself down next to Jackson’s cot. Jackson, propped up by a pile of sweat-soaked pillows, was clear-eyed, and appeared fully himself again.

  “I’m sorry,” said George, his voice cracking.

  Jackson studied George, taking his measure of him, and then nodded.

  Then George told him everything.

  He told him all about Lenny, big as an ox and just as dumb, and how Aunt Clara had asked him to watch out for the poor bastard, and all the promises he had made, and livin’ off the fat of the land, and what happened to drive him and Lenny out of Weed, and about Curley, and Curley’s wife, and it all tumbled out breathlessly, right up until that horrible night in the clearing near the brush by the river.

  And through it all, Jackson kept nodding, his expression revealing nothing. So the tale he never thought he’d tell anyone kept pouring out of him, those impossible things that came after, how Lenny, and the things he had killed, had started to come back. Back for him.

  Finally, there was nothing more left to tell. Nothing. Except—

  “I need your help,” said George.

  Jackson held up his crippled hand.

  “Help?” he said, snorting. “What can I do? What good would I be?”

  “More good than what all of the others could possibly be put together,” said George. “After what you seen, you’ll believe.”

  Then George told him of his plan.

  “Will you do it?” said George. “As far as I can figure, that’s the only way to make it stop.”

  Jackson whistled.

  “You’re a crazy bastard, you know that?” he said. “Crazy as a wedge.”

  “Maybe. But that don’t mean it won’t work. Will you help me?”

  This time, Jackson didn’t hesitate.

  “From the sound of it, you saved my life,” he said. “Wouldn’t seem right not to.”

  George reached out to shake Jackson’s hand, then frowned, letting his own undamaged hand fall back into his lap.

  By the time George finished laying out what the two of them would do next and got to the dinner table, most all of the food was gone, but it didn’t really bother him. His hunger had been dampened by his plans. He mopped up some gravy with a heel of bread and mulled them over. That would have to be enough for now.

  Once the meal was done, and the men poured outside to unwind with jawing and horseshoes, with one an excuse for the other, and it was never clear which the excuse and which the thing that had brought them there, he snuck back in and made his way to the deserted kitchen. He packed a bindle with half a loaf of bread, a rind of cheese, and a couple of cans of beans. Such a theft had become far too familiar to him, and he hated that, but depending on how things went, one way or another, this would be the last time he did this.

  He returned to his bunk, hid the supplies under his covers, and pretended to sleep. When the snores of the other hands began to echo through the room, he slipped to his feet, tucked his boots under one arm, and made his way over to Jackson. He nudged the man, who snapped awake.

  “It’s time,” he whispered.

  George grabbed Jackson’s things so that he wouldn’t have to use his bum hand to fumble with them, and led him out the door, feeling crazy for doing so as the darkness swallowed them.

  They hadn’t been on the road for more than a couple of hours before they came upon Curley’s wife shambling toward them in the moonlight.

  Seeing her make her way unerringly in his direction through the bramble, each step clumsy yet determined, George realized that if they hadn’t left when they did, this encounter might have occurred at the ranch, and then he would have been responsible for even more wreckage than he’d spread so far. Three men whom he did not know were already dead. He wouldn’t
have been able to bear the burden of more.

  Her right leg was twisted in a way a leg shouldn’t be able to go and still function, while her left shoulder seemed dislocated, the arm that hung straight down from it dangling limply.

  “Damn you,” screamed George. “You done this! If not for you, we still coulda been back there, still hoping, still dreaming, still pulling together our stake. But you had to go and mess things up, didn’t you, you had to—”

  Jackson dropped his good hand on George’s shoulder.

  “She can’t hear you, George,” he said. “There ain’t nothing left inside of her to hear.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” said George. “Considering what we gotta do to that woman, I sure hope so.”

  George pulled out the pistol he had taken, a theft for which he hoped Dix would forgive him, but Jackson tapped his wrist with cold metal of his own and shook his head. George could see that he was grasping his baling hook.

  “Save your bullets,” said Jackson. “From what you been telling me, we’re going to need them.”

  The two men separated, moving in wide circles to take up positions on opposite sides of the woman, their hands filled with curved steel. That she moved toward George without hesitation, whether from conscious thought or just some primal animal instinct that remained, ignoring Jackson as if he was nothing more than part of the landscape, told him, as if he needed any more convincing, that all his running had been pointless. He could never run far enough that she, or something like her, would not have been able to follow him.

  As George looked at her then, her once shining sausage curls now dull as they hung from a grizzled flap of scalp, the splotch of red smeared across her mouth no longer lipstick but rather fresh blood, the hatred he’d been carrying around for her suddenly vanished. Whether that was going to make what was about to occur easier or more difficult he could not reckon.

  He didn’t have much time to figure that out, either, because he could see Jackson coming up behind her, beginning to make his move, and so he dashed in and dropped to his knees, swinging wildly to slash at the tendons in her calves. Unable to die or not, that would at least slow her down. As she bent toward him, he rolled to one side, and as he hacked at her again, Jackson joining him, she toppled like a downed oak.

  With her face in the earth, Jackson leapt upon her, pressing both knees into the small of her back. He plunged his hook into the base of her neck, tearing through the gray flesh. George was right there with him, alternating his blows so that they only slashed her, and not each other, their hooks occasionally getting stuck in her skull and needing to be pulled free. The ichor flew like ribbons in the wind each time they raised their fists to the sky, and they did not halt their attack until what had once been Curley’s wife stopped wriggling beneath them on the ground. Then they fell back, gasping for breath, dropping their weapons into the dry earth.

  George poked at her with the toe of his boot. He felt the bile rise in his throat, felt as if he was about to retch, but he somehow managed to hold himself back.

  He’d only known the woman for a little while, and still it had been difficult. But Lenny . . . Lenny was like a brother. He couldn’t imagine how much more painful that would be.

  He looked across her broken body at Jackson.

  “The next one won’t be so easy,” said George.

  Jackson looked at the blood seeping through his bandages, and nodded. He glanced down at Curley’s wife, and suddenly grew solemn.

  “She deserves a decent burial after all she’s been through, don’t you think,” he said.

  “She’s already had one,” said George. “And one is more than most of us ever get. Besides, we just don’t have the time.”

  So they piled stones on her until she could no longer be seen, though George doubted that any animal would be drawn in by what was left of her and be tempted to feast. He said a short prayer to keep Jackson happy, even though he believed in God less now than ever.

  They stood silently for a moment, until George could bear no more, and then they continued on.

  As George led Jackson back, back to where this final chapter had begun, the journey made him feel as if they were traveling not just in space but in time. If only that were possible, if only he could have undone it all with different choices, instead of what was coming. But that was wishful thinking, and he had no more wishes left.

  He did not follow a path which would lead them there directly, because he did not want them to meet head on the one who followed, but rather force this to be ended where it seemed right that it should be ended. So they circled back around the far side of the valley, made their way as far up the foothills of the Gabilan mountains as they had the energy to spare.

  George wanted no possibility they would meet at some random midpoint. Rather, he wanted to draw his friend back, back to that place in the brush by the sandy banks of the Salinas River.

  Lenny would remember that place, even with all that had occurred, even with what he had become. George had made sure to drum that hiding place into his feeble brain until it stuck like tar. If all else was burned away, that would remain. George was sure of that.

  It took them several days to reach the spot, and several further encounters with pets which Lenny, when living, had not been able to help but kill, and by the time they arrived, night had already fallen. George could barely see the outlines of the place, but in his bones, he knew. This was where his friend had been reborn.

  “What do we do now?” asked Jackson.

  “We wait,” said George. “It shouldn’t be long now until he returns, until it’s over.”

  He knelt, ran his fingers through the soil on the patch of ground where his friend had fallen.

  “I don’t know that I’ll be able to sleep,” he continued. “But I have to at least try. Why don’t you take the first watch?”

  George threw himself down under a sycamore tree, and closed his eyes, but even though he was exhausted, his eyelids atwitch with fatigue, sleep would not come. Somehow beyond conscious thought he must have sensed that he should be aware of that stretch of final moments before he did what he had to do, and not pass through them unconscious. He looked at the branches above him, and then closed his eyes to think about his next step, and when he opened them, he found that he must have fallen asleep anyway, for Lenny was there, crouched beside him.

  George quickly glanced over to where Jackson was supposed to be keeping watch. The fool was slumped over, having fallen asleep, instead of preparing to do to Lenny what they had done to Curley’s wife. He cursed, not at Jackson, but at himself. It was too much to have asked of him, after he’d already undergone so much.

  George looked back at Lenny, who sat there as if frozen. He could have been a statue in the moonlight, rather than a man, a dead man, but still a man. George could make out a wound at the base of his throat, the bullet hole not where he would have imagined it to be. He hadn’t been able to look before, but now he knew for certain he must have pointed the gun down at the last instant, missing the brain completely. It had been enough to kill him. It just wasn’t enough to keep him killed.

  They sat there, unmoving, and in George’s mind it was almost like the old days, a night like any other in a long string of nights, and he was being asked to tell him like he done before, asked this time not with words, but with silence. And he knew that he would answer that request, as he always had.

  “Guys like us are the loneliest guys in the world,” said George in a whisper, not because that’s what he intended, but because that’s all that would come out at first. “They got no family, nothing to look ahead to. But not us. No, not us. Because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you!”

  George looked over at Jackson, his sleep unbroken by the bizarre conversation occurring so close beside him. George raised his voice, hoping to rouse the man.

  “We’re gonna get the jack together and get a little place,” he continued. “We’re gonna live off the fat of the land.�
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  That’s when Lenny would normally have punctuated the speech by clapping his hands together. George hesitated, leaving a space for the old familiar answer. He waited, looked for any movement, however imperceptible, from his old friend, but none came.

  “We’ll have chickens, and a vegetable patch—and rabbits. Rabbits, Lenny. Rabbits!”

  George was shouting now, but no matter how loud the words came, Jackson would not move. He could see then in the moonlight that the man wasn’t sleeping after all.

  Arrayed around him were dozens of undead mice in various stages of decomposition, and all the other animals Lenny had in his clumsiness put down. Every watchful eye was aglow. The puppy they’d encountered earlier sat curled in Jackson’s lap, its intestines draped over the man’s legs like ribbons.

  His neck was bent and broken, and what George had earlier taken to be a shadow from the brim of the hat pulled low over his eyes had actually once been a waterfall of blood, a waterfall now stilled. George looked back at Lenny to see a matching patch of color smeared across his face.

  George stood slowly.

  “I guess I’m not going to get to tell you about the rabbits no more, am I?” he said.

  Lenny answered by also getting to his feet, and once he started rising, he kept on rising. George tilted his head back to look him in the face, the way he’d had to for years. He was surprised that even though it hadn’t been that long, he’d already forgotten how amazingly tall Lenny had been. His friend stepped closer, but George did not retreat. There would have been no point.

  And besides, all was as it should be.

  He’d made a promise to Lenny’s Aunt Clara, a promise to watch over him, to make sure no harm came to her addled nephew.

  He’d failed. Failed them all.

  Failed Lenny, and Clara, and Candy, and Crooks. And now Jackson.

  And himself. Most of all, himself.

  He’d made endless promises, and he failed to deliver on any of them, and whatever happened next in the remaining moments of his short, hardscrabble life, he deserved it.

  Everybody in the whole damn world was scared of each other.