by Joe McKinney
Seated in a lawn chair out in front of the vehicles was a fat woman of about sixty. She wore a peach-colored dress and brown cowboy boots. Her hair had mostly gone to gray and she’d cut it short and parted it to one side, like a man’s. She was sunburnt and irritable looking, the way some heavy people can be in the hot sun, but she watched the approaching group with interest.
Casey, the leader, got down from his horse and gave the woman a kiss on her cheek.
Glancing back toward the line of vehicles Jacob saw one of the bigger RVs had “Mother Jane” written across the side. Wasn’t hard to figure out who this was.
She studied the Arbella survivors and didn’t look pleased.
“Our scouts said there were eleven of them.”
“There were. They put up a fight.” He held up Sheriff Taylor’s rifle. “Found this on one of them.”
“Which one.”
“He ain’t one of these. Wesley had to shoot him.”
Mother Jane grunted. “Well, them two young ones’ll make good tracts.” She pointed at Barry. “That one with the messed up face, though, you might as well shoot him now.”
“No!” Bree said.
“Just putting him out of his misery, sweetie.”
“But I told you, I can help him. I just need my kit.”
For the first time, Mother Jane seemed interested. “What kind of kit?” She turned to Casey. “What’s she talking about? What kind of kit?”
Casey was about to answer when Bree spoke up. “My medic bag. Your dragoons took it from me. They won’t give it back.”
“ ‘Dragoons’?” Mother Jane said. “Seriously? You ain’t from around here, are you, sweetie?”
Bree held her tongue.
“You some kind of doctor?” Mother Jane asked.
“She said she was a ‘physician’s assistant,’ ” Casey said.
“What’s that mean?” Mother Jane asked.
“It means I can help him.”
“No, no. What’s that mean, physician’s assistant? I remember those back before everything went to shit.” She gave Casey a gentle slap on the hip with the back of her hand. “You remember that Indian doctor I used to take you to? What was his name, Vanketswar or some such crap a soul couldn’t never wrap a tongue around. I kept wanting to call him doctor, and every time he’d correct me and say he was a physician’s assistant. Said he’d gone through med school, but hadn’t done a residency. That sound about like you, sweetie?”
“Something like that,” Bree said.
“You mind telling me how that is? I’ve taken this caravan all over this country, and I ain’t seen a med school nowhere. Unless you’re one of them airship people, and you don’t look like them.”
Bree said nothing, but she did glance back at Jacob.
Mother Jane caught the glance, and stood up. The ravens that had clustered around her took to the air with a furious beating of wings. She moved with a ponderous waddle as she approached Jacob. She looked him over, checking out the jeans without holes or frays at the pant legs, his sturdy boots, even lifting one of his hands to examine his fingernails.
“Where you people from?”
No one answered.
“You ain’t road people. Where you from?”
Jacob didn’t answer.
“You folks ain’t eating until I get an answer. Where you from?”
“Arbella,” Jacob said.
“Where’s that at? I ain’t never heard of no Arbella.”
“South of here,” Jacob said. He could feel others staring daggers at him, and he only hoped they’d follow along with the lie he was about to tell. “It’s south of Little Rock, down near Texas.”
“Arkansas?” She scoffed at that. “What are you doin’ way up here?”
“We’re explorers,” he said. “We’re looking around to see what’s out here.”
At that she laughed. Everybody did. Even the ravens seemed to shiver with excitement.
“Oh, that’s good,” she said. She patted his cheek, hard, sending a wave of pain through him. “Don’t you worry, young man. I trek this caravan all over this land of ours. We cross her diamond deserts and her wheat fields rolling sometimes three times a year. You want to know what’s out here, you’re gonna find out.”
She returned to her lawn chair and dropped into it with effort.
One of the ravens squawked next to her and she reached over to stroke it.
“Go on,” she said, motioning to Casey. “Get them out of my sight. Oh, and you,” she said, gesturing toward Bree, and then to Barry. “You fix him, I may have a job for you. Physician’s assistant. Shit.”
19
They were taken to the front of the caravan and told to sit. About forty other men, women, and children were already there, all of them with the quiet, fearful look of slaves. A few armed men on horseback rode around the periphery of the gathering, but they didn’t seem especially watchful and, curiously, none of the slaves seemed all that eager to run.
They sat in the grass and one of the riders brought Bree her medical kit. She started working on Barry as Kelly looked on.
Poor thing, Jacob thought, watching her. Whatever there had once been between them was truly ancient history now. He saw the worry, the pain, the frustration, the love in Kelly’s eyes when she looked on her injured husband, and Jacob knew where her heart was. No question about it. He’d been foolish to think otherwise.
Bree turned Barry’s face to one side, exposing the piece of wood that had lanced through his cheek. The whole side of his face was red, and he was sweating badly. His pupils looked dilated and he was drooling blood. Some of it had already caked dry on his throat.
“He’s in shock,” Bree said. “We’re gonna have to get that wood out of there. It looks like the bleeding has pretty much stopped, but I don’t like the way it’s swollen up like that.”
“Do you think it’s infected?” Kelly asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. That redness is a bad sign. I need water to clean this wound. It needs to be as sterile as possible, too, otherwise we’re just making the risk of an infection even worse.”
Jacob looked around. A young girl of about seventeen, dirty and malnourished, was huddled in a fetal ball a few yards away, a hacking cough shaking her whole body. Beyond her was a man in his early twenties, just as dirty as she was but clearly not as starving. He watched the young girl with something close to contempt on his face.
“Hey,” Jacob called to him. “Where can we get some water around here?”
The man glanced at him, but said nothing.
“Hey, come on. A little help here. This guy’s in shock.”
“Everybody needs something, pal,” the man finally said. “And if I had water, you really think I’d give it to you?”
“What the hell?” Eli said, and started to stand.
Jacob put a hand on his arm. “Easy,” he said. “Let it go.”
Eli sat and cussed under his breath. Then he turned on Jacob and said in a forced whisper: “I don’t get it. Look at the guards they got around here. How hard would it be to slip away? We could do it right now if we wanted to.”
“We wouldn’t get far. They’ve got horses, we don’t.”
“Me and Max could steal some. We could meet the rest of you someplace, and then we make a run for it.”
The pain flared up again, and for a moment, Jacob was nearly blind with it. Everything went white. Even the dog bites on his arms, which had gone practically numb compared to his headache, were starting to ache anew. He’d lost a lot of blood, he knew that, and his wounds would almost certainly need stitches.
“Hey, boss, you okay?” Eli asked.
Jacob had to work to catch his breath. The pain gradually faded, and at last he was able to nod. “I’m all right,” he said. “It hurts. I gotta tell you, I’m in no condition to travel. And I know Barry isn’t. We need to get him better before we do anything.”
“Okay then, we wait until Bree fixes him up. Then we get the fuck ou
t of here.”
“Agreed. I don’t want to be around these people any longer than I have to. In the meantime, we need to keep our eyes open. I want to figure out how these people work, what their deal is.”
Kelly turned from Barry and wiped her eyes. They were red and puffy, and she seemed to be holding on to her composure with both hands. “You shouldn’t have told them about Arbella,” she said. “Sheriff Taylor said nobody finds out about our home.”
“What was I gonna do, Kelly? Did you think she was just gonna stop asking?”
“But now they know the name of our home.”
“Which doesn’t appear on any map.”
Nick groaned. “Except the ones in my pack. I’m sure they’re probably searching our stuff right now.”
Jacob put his face in his hands. “Crap,” he said.
“It’s not your fault, Jacob,” Nick said. “Even if we’d lied about the name of our town, they’d have found out the truth from my maps.”
“Well, what happens if they try to attack Arbella?”
Jacob looked around the group. The horror of what might happen should these people attack Arbella was on all their faces. It was true they had probably only two hundred riders, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t do some serious damage. Arbella’s defenses were set up to guard against zombies, not human strategy. There were no hidden shooting positions, no turrets or battlements. Shooters on Arbella’s walls stood in the open, to allow for ease of aiming against targets too stupid to use stealth. Even if Mother Jane’s boys attacked in a straight-up fight against Arbella’s walls, losses on both sides would be huge. And if they decided to sneak in through some of the more sparsely covered sections of the wall, it would be a bloodbath.
“If we see them going towards Arbella, we’ll have to escape and get back home to warn them. We could do as Eli suggested, send him and Max out ahead. Even if Barry and I aren’t ready to travel, the rest of you should go. Maybe you could just do a dead sprint back to Arbella.”
Before anyone could respond, Mother Jane’s ravens descended on the slave area. The giant black birds lit on every available perch.
“What’s this?” Nick asked.
“Do you think there are zombies nearby?” Kelly asked.
Jacob doubted that, but he didn’t say as much. He’d risen to his feet and was looking around the darkened clearing in which they’d been put. Slaves were coming out of the woodwork, many more than there’d been when they first arrived here. There were perhaps two hundred in all, which he didn’t like because that meant he’d probably underestimated the number of riders as well. And there were dogs, too. He could see them watching from the edges of the circle, waiting for something.
Soon about twenty guards descended on the slave quarters. Two of them carried a battered orange canoe full of root vegetables and some half-eaten joints of roasted meat out to the middle of the slave area and dropped it on the ground.
“Is that supposed to be our dinner?” Kelly asked.
“God, I’m hungry,” Nick said. “I wonder where we line up.”
Slaves moved in on the guards carrying the canoe. One of the men dropped his end of the canoe and pulled a black nightstick from his belt. He used it to beat the slaves that got too close.
The other man dropped his half of the canoe and then the two men retreated, leaving the slaves to descend on the meal en masse.
Many fights broke out.
Jacob saw a woman pull a piece of meat from the boat and then get beaten by two other women intent on stealing it.
A boy of about eight was knocked to the ground and kicked repeatedly in his back and ribs as he desperately tried to hold on to something that looked like the blackened remains of a potato.
“Oh, God,” Kelly said.
But that wasn’t the worst part, not to Jacob’s mind anyway. The worst part was the laughing and cheering that went up from the riders and their women, who had gathered around the edges of the clearing and were obviously having a grand old time watching the slaves beat the daylights out of each other.
“These people are animals,” Kelly said. “Is this what happens to us after just thirty years?”
They were all on their feet now, all but Barry, watching the melee, the disgust plain on their faces. None of them noticed the young riders coming up behind them until they were standing next to Kelly and Bree. “Come on,” one of the riders said to Bree.
“Let go of me,” she said, and yanked her arm away.
“Hey!” Jacob said. He moved on the men, but several of them pulled pistols and leveled them at Jacob and the other men.
“You ought to give it a try,” one of the men said. “See how it works out.”
“Let go of me,” Bree said.
“Not likely. I’m gonna give you a roll around the mattress. Try me on some bridemeat.”
“The hell you are!” Bree said. She struggled and kicked with everything she had, but there were three big men holding her.
Jacob saw Casey watching the exchange. He looked powerfully drunk and regarded the events unfolding in front of him with a genuine lack of interest.
“Hey, your name is Casey,” Jacob said.
Casey wasn’t wearing his ball cap, but his hair still had a sweaty curl in it where the edges of the hat had been. He looked back at Jacob with plain contempt on his face, but he said nothing.
“Please,” Jacob said, dropping the tone of his voice, trying to sound respectful of Casey’s authority over this place. “Make them stop. They can’t do this. It’s not right.”
Casey regarded him for a long moment.
“I keep hearing that from you Arbella people, that it ain’t right. I don’t know what kind of lives you folks lead down there in Arkansas, but up here, you don’t go around telling a free man what’s right and what’s not. ’Round here, a man makes his own right.”
Behind him, more riders gathered. Many of them were as drunk or drunker than he was.
All of them were armed.
“Please don’t let them do this,” Jacob said.
“You’re done talking. You fellas just mind your place there. My boys are gonna have a little fun time with the bridemeat there.”
“The hell you will,” Jacob said.
Casey pulled Sheriff Taylor’s rifle from his shoulder and leveled it at Jacob. “I told you you’re done talking. Now if you don’t want to start dying, I suggest the lot of you take a few steps back.”
Before any of them could move, Barry climbed to his feet and charged one of the men holding Kelly’s arms behind her back. “Get your hands off my wife!” he screamed, and his attack was so sudden the rider couldn’t react. Barry knocked the man to the ground and then started swinging wild punches at the other men.
In a flash, Max joined in, too.
But they didn’t last long. As calmly as a man would watch a sunset, Casey turned the stolen rifle and shot both men in the chest, three times for Max and six for Barry, the gun quiet as a snake in the grass. Barry, delirious as he was with the pain and the spreading infection and his love for his wife, fought even as he fell to his knees.
“No!” Kelly screamed, and broke free from the men holding her and went to her knees beside her dead husband. She put his head in her lap and rocked him back and forth, wailing so loudly the rest of the slaves stopped fighting, and even eating, to turn and watch.
Casey shouldered the weapon. To the men holding Bree he said, “You boys go and have your fun. Make sure and hold her down, though. The way she’s kicking, she’s liable to break something.”
He motioned to one of the men who had been holding Kelly.
“Go and get two ropes. Hurry now.”
The man ran off in a hurry.
Bree fought all the way to the RV, and the men had a tough time getting her through the door. She grabbed hold of the doorframe and wouldn’t let go. They had to pry her fingers loose one at a time to finally get her inside.
A moment later, the young rider returned with the ro
pe.
“Go and fetch some of them slaves over here.”
“What are you doing?” Jacob asked.
Casey ignored him. When the slaves ran up, he motioned for the young rider to hand them the ropes. “Take these two bodies over to the clothesline and tie them up on the posts scarecrow fashion. Best hurry. They’re liable to make the change here pretty soon.”
The slaves dragged the bodies away, even as Kelly tried to hold on to Barry.
“Make her shut up,” Casey said to one of the riders.
The man took out his nightstick and advanced on Kelly, but Jacob got there first. He picked Kelly up and held her in his arms, her face pressed into his chest. She was sobbing and shaking uncontrollably.
“I got her,” Jacob said.
Casey huffed, then turned and walked away.
Jacob called out to him, “How can you do this?”
“String ’em up?” Casey asked.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jacob said.
Casey shrugged. “Mother Jane’s birds gotta eat, too.” He walked away, leaving them standing there in shock.
And then, from the RV, Bree started to scream.
20
It took a long time for the birds to eat enough of Barry and Max for them to stop struggling against the ropes that bound them. They had stripped the zombie carcasses to the bone in less than two minutes back in the town, but now, the ravens seemed to be enjoying the meal, taking their time about it. Jacob and the others couldn’t watch, but they couldn’t escape the sound of it either. Max went on groaning, even after they’d stripped most of his flesh away.
Kelly was inconsolable.
Bree had come back to them with a black eye and a fat lip. Her shins and wrists were bruised, and there was blood dripping from one ear. She wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t let anybody touch her or even get near her. She crawled inside her shell and stayed there.
Jacob blamed himself. From Sheriff Taylor to Barry to Bree over there, it was all his fault. There was the Code, a promise to always have the other fella’s back, and he had failed to live up to that code. Taylor and Barry and the others were dead because he had failed, and Bree was broken for the same reason. And now, Arbella’s very existence was threatened, all because he had failed to live by the Code he’d been raised with.
