Norm smiles, looking cocky. That’s the look I missed. Welcome back, Norm.
“Each day our numbers get smaller.” He pauses and sticks his hand out to me. “Name’s Grady by the way.” I take it. He moves on to the rest of the group, nodding and smiling.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Darlene says.
Grady shakes his head. “It’s not as bad anymore. You get used to this kind of thing, but you never get over it, you know?”
Darlene nods.
“Is the doc in?” Grady asks.
“In the back, working on a girl,” Brittney says from the front desk.
“Okay, we’re gonna need some medical attention. Steve got grazed by a bullet and Emma took a nasty spill, messed her leg all up. They’re on their way.”
“I can look at them until Phyllis is done,” Brittney says. “Bring them around back.”
She gets up to leave and Grady does the same. Before he goes, he turns to me and says, “It was great to meet you guys. I hope your girl pulls through. Phyllis is a firecracker, but she knows what she’s doing. Saved me from a gunshot wound couple months back.” He pulls down his collar and shows us a puckered scar right below his collar bone. “‘Course I had luck on my side. A couple inches lower and my heart explodes. Sometimes, you need luck.”
We shake hands again and he’s gone.
I find the nearest chair. My legs are wobbly. Darlene sits next to me on my right, grabs my hand and squeezes. I feel a migraine coming on. Norm takes the chair to my left and Jacob and Herb next to him.
“Jack, I don’t want to get your hopes up. Phyllis might be good, but zombie bites…” Norm says.
“I know,” I say.
Darlene is crying silently. She puts her head on my shoulder.
“I had a daughter. She was a little younger than your Abby, but she…she was bitten, too. On the leg. We had to amputate,” Jacob says. He leans forward and puts his head in both hands.
Sad, I think. Everyone’s got a sad story and everyday we add to the list of sad things weighing on our minds. It never ends.
“Our Abby is tough as nails,” Norm says.
“I hope so,” Jacob says. “My own girl…well, the infection got to her. I wasn’t quick enough.”
I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“It’s not your fault. It was mine. I should’ve never let her go out there with me. But ever since she was a kid, she wanted to be just like her daddy. Fishing, hunting, hauling garbage six days a week. She was too smart for that, of course. Had a scholarship to Vanderbilt. Then the Lord swept the rug out beneath our feet,” he clears his throat, trying to mask the sadness in his voice, “and well, here we are.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Herb says.
“Oh, thank you,” Jacob says.
The door to the patient care opens. I hear the hum of machinery, the beep of a slow heartbeat. Thank God. Thank you, God. Phyllis steps out and closes the door. I stand up, and everyone follows with me. Jacob takes off his hat.
Phyllis is covered in blood. She pulls her glasses off her face and hooks them around the collar of her dress. “She is okay for now,” Phyllis says. “I cauterized the wound, disinfected it, and dressed it. But she lost a lot of blood. We’ll be able to give her a transfusion, but — ”
Herb springs across the room, a goofy smile on his face, and wraps Phyllis up in a big bearhug, lifting her off the floor and spinning her twice around the room.
“Easy, big fella,” Norm says. “We need her alive.”
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” Herb says, then puts her down. She is smiling, her hair sticking up out of her tight ponytail in little coils.
“You’re welcome. I did all I could for her, for now. As for the…virus, I’m not a hundred percent sure. Vital signs are stable and she hasn’t turned yet. Time will tell. We’ll have to keep her here for a few days, maybe more, until she is okay,” Phyllis says.
“Anything,” I say. I resist the urge to start biting my nails, for my restless legs to start pacing me around the waiting room. “Just make her better.”
“Please,” Darlene adds. “She’s my best friend.”
“She’s family,” Norm says.
“Family,” Herb echoes.
Phyllis smiles. “I would let her rest for now. You can visit her in a couple of hours.” She looks at Jacob, a frown pulling the corners of her mouth down. “If there was ever a time for a run, it would be now,” she says. “Talk to Mother for me, Jake. Tell her we’re getting desperate.”
“I will,” Jacob says.
Then Phyllis looks back at us, smiling. “If you’ll excuse me, I believe I have more people to attend to.” She walks to the door Brittney disappeared to, removing her bloody rubber gloves and depositing them in a biohazard bin. Then, under her breath, she says, “Fucking zombies.”
I snort with laughter when I really shouldn’t. Who would’ve guessed a practicing physician would talk like that? But hey, I guess in the zombie apocalypse anything is possible.
We are gathered in a tight circle, the four of us, Jacob on the outside. Darlene wraps her arms around me.
“Group hug,” Herb says, and joins Darlene and I. Norm is reluctant, but once Herb gets a hand on him, he realizes he’s going nowhere and we share a group hug for the second time today. Except this one is without Abby and I think we all can feel her absence.
As we part, I turn to Jacob and stick my hand out to him. “Thank you again,” I say. “None of us would’ve been able to do what you did today.”
He smiles. “I wish I could say it was nothing, but you know, amputation and all.”
I chuckle. “Yeah.”
“Well, I better get back to my wife. She’s going to be wondering what happened and she’ll be glad to know it’s looking up for you guys. When we lost our little girl she didn’t talk for weeks. There ain’t enough joy in this world now. We gotta spread it while we can.”
I nod. “I agree. One-hundred percent.”
He turns to the door, but stops as a bell outside chimes. I am reminded of churches. “Hm,” he says, “guess that trip home will have to wait.”
“What is it?” Norm asks, then quietly, “Dumb to be making noise that loud with the zombies this close.” He’s right. It’s not super loud, but it’s loud enough. And hearing these bells actually angers me a bit, especially after what just went down outside of the fences.
“It’s very rare,” Jacob says. “Town meeting.” He shakes his head. “It only happens after…well, tragedies. Guess I’ll be having that conversation with Mother sooner rather than later.”
The way he says it is not pleasant. He almost sounds scared.
19
There are not many people walking through the streets. Again, we follow Jacob’s lead. His wife has joined us. She was glad to hear about Abby, but sad to hear about the men and women lost at the top of the hill. Jacob grabbed her around the shoulders and pulled her close.
Now, we file to the meeting place with the rest of the people. These are mostly families. Some of them have newborns, and I think to myself what a fucked-up world we’re living in when a newborn has to grow up learning Zombie Defense 101 before they learn their ABCs.
The town is made up of buildings and shacks. They are well-made and even cozy. The setup is not well-made, however. The buildings have been put up without pattern. They have risen as randomly as wild trees. The roads are not paved in all parts. Mostly it’s pact down dirt and rocks. There are torch lights on the side of the paths. Not all of them are lit. It may not be society — not the society we are used to — but it beats the hell out of empty neighborhoods full of rotting corpses, both alive and dead. And it certainly beats Eden.
Darlene is not like the rest of the people walking. She isn’t staring straight ahead, looking at nothing besides the road ahead of her. She’s looking around, taking it all in. It reminds me of the way I used to be whenever I visited a bookstore, before I got my first publishing deal. Back then, I would
wander in a place like Borders or Books-A-Million the same way I’d wander into the library as a kid, or even the toy store, all wide-eyed, completely baffled by the sights and colors and the endless possibilities. So I don’t say anything to Darlene. I let her drink it all up. Six months on the road can make you forget the beauty of just settling down, of making friends and memories, and living your life. Plus, it helps put Abby to the back of her mind, though she is not in the back of my mind at all. Neither is Doc Klein, where he is, what he is doing, what was wrong with him when he passed through this little village. I intend to find out all of that.
“Oh, it’s nice, Jack,” Darlene says.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s very nice.”
“It’s a community. Nothing like Chicago. It kind of reminds me…reminds me of home.”
I smile at her and keep walking, knowing what she means. Our voices aren’t particularly loud, but no one else is talking.
She looks at me again, her eyes big and shining, and says, “When Abby is better, Jack, we should stay. There’s walls and people and houses. They even have electricity — at least in the med center. Jack? What do you think?”
I think about lying to her, but I’ve never been good at that. So I speak true. “I think that this place isn’t any safer than the car we left on the bridge. I think that before long this place will be overrun because places are always overrun. I think — ”
No, I can’t say it, especially after our little conflict earlier today. I know she wants to settle down, but can one really settle down the way the world is now? I don’t think so. With the ever-present threat of the zombies, one’s never safe. The only certain way to settle down is to get rid of them all. Doc Klein might not be our answer, but catching up to him would be going in the right direction. Not settling down. Not folding and giving up.
“What, Jack? What?” Her voice is lower now, but it’s still sharp.
So I say what’s on my mind. I have to. “I think if we stay here, we’ll end up dying…or worse, we’ll hurt the people that live here. You saw what happened in the forest. If we would’ve just left it alone, none of that — ”
She grabs my hand, her eyes dropping but her her mouth trying to smile. “Quiet, Jack,” she says. “It’s okay. Abby is going to be okay. Everyone here is going to be okay.”
We walk on.
The meeting place is a bandstand in the heart of the village. There are about a hundred chairs set up around the stage, but the town only fills half of them. Jacob leads us down an aisle. He tips his hat to a young family. They nod back. Nobody is smiling. There are plenty of tissues and handkerchiefs in hand. The village has electricity running through the various buildings, but here at the bandstand the only light comes from low-burning torches. The flames dance in the black eyes of the crowd.
The man named Grady we met back at the med center takes the stage. He is not smiling, either. “As many of you have heard, we lost some of our own tonight. The threat has been neutralized. There is nothing to worry about, but I would like to take a moment of silence to commemorate the ones we lost. William Croghan, Walter Caspri, George Jones, Stephanie Newt, Harold Strom.”
We all bow our heads. I hear faint sniffling from the row to my right.
“All right,” Grady says. “Thank you. I do have two pieces of good news to share. There were survivors. Steve was shot, but just a flesh wound. He’s back at the med center with Brittany and Phyl. Brittney stitched him up — God forbid!” This brings a chuckle from the crowd. “Emma broke her foot, but nothing serious. She won’t need surgery, but she’ll be on crutches for the next few weeks. So if you see her hobbling around, open the door for her, if it do ya.” He grins. “She’ll appreciate that. I’m all right, too, in case you were wondering — you’re probably not. Bobby was a little displeased to see me after the incident since I took away his Gameboy and all. Little brat.” He sighs, “But what kid doesn’t hate his stepdad, right?”
Another laugh from the crowd. I look around and see the balled-up tissues in hand now instead of pressed under eyes or under noses. People are smiling, looking at this man dressed in a ratty flannel shirt and mud-caked hunting boots.
“The second piece of good news is we have celebrities in our midst. And it’s not too often we have celebrities in our little village,” Grady says. He starts clapping. “C’mon, give a hand to Jack Jupiter and his gang.” Nobody claps at first, then Grady says, “They took down Eden! They killed Spike!”
Here we go again, I think.
“No way,” a voice says from the left of the crowd. Jacob pats me on the back. I feel my throat starting to seize up, my hands getting sweaty. Darlene is the first to stand. She climbs over me and makes her way into the center aisle. Then Norm, but he stops to let me out.
“C’mon, little bro, it’s your time to shine,” he says.
No, it’s not, I want to say. I didn’t do anything to be proud of. I saved my family and my own ass. Nothing more.
Herb trails behind him, his head pointed down but his eyes darting all around the crowd who has turned their heads to us. As I walk through the center aisle, I feel the falsity of these cheers closing in around me, choking me, making it hard to think.
We climb up the bandstand. Grady is there to shake all of our hands, then he says, “Tell us about yourselves. Don’t be shy.”
The group’s eyes go to me first and I stammer. “Well, I-I’m Jack.” I point to the rest of the group and say their names. “There’s one more of us, a girl as tough as nails. She was bitten, had to lose her hand, but we think she’s going to pull through.”
The crowd collectively takes their eyes someplace else. A man in a straw hat says he’s sorry. I thank him.
Grady starts speaking again. “I’m sure everyone would love to hear how you took down Eden and that bastard Spike, but I think we’ll save that story for another time. We’ve heard enough of violence tonight.”
The crowd nods. An older woman says, “Amen.”
“Besides, we have more good news,” Grady continues.
The crowd begins to rise out of their seats, smiles on their faces, eyes glancing to the nearest building adjacent to the bandstand. Their applause is thunderous, louder than the ringing of the bell.
“That’s right,” Grady says. I see the tears in his eyes. Norm and Herb are looking down the bandstand at the building. Darlene and I exchange glances. I shrug and she smiles. I feel myself smiling, too. The atmosphere is infectious. It feels good to be smiling, to be safe. Maybe Darlene is onto something. Then I think of Abby and the way the blood spurted out of her arm when Jacob performed his homemade amputation and the way her skin was pasty and sweaty. That good feeling goes away.
The door of the building opens, candlelight drifting out and casting an orange sliver onto the grass.
Now, I’m feeling a sick sense of anticipation and excitement. The crowd quiets, feeling the same thing as I am.
There is creaking, the sounds of old metal whining and rubber digging into the earth. Mother is an ancient woman. She is black, but her skin is so old and weathered, it has a dusty quality to it. Her hair is full, frazzled. I am reminded of the Bride of Frankenstein. Her arms are thick with ropy muscle, an odd sight on such an old body. She smiles, teeth too perfect to be real.
The applause sounds again, and I find myself clapping my own hands together and beaming. This woman…there’s something about this woman. A long time ago, I had read book on ESP and psychic touch. One of the topics discussed were people’s auras and for much of my sophomore year of high school I thought I could see faint, glowing outlines around everyone. The teachers I loved — the English teachers who let us read modern authors instead of the classics had beautiful, radiant outlines, like they had so much goodness it was spilling from their bodies. And the people I didn’t like, people like Freddy Huber and his gang of friends who made gym class and lunch and study hall a nightmare for me had outlines the color of rotting, cancerous organs. It was the next year I realized this w
as all my wild imagination.
But this woman, her outline glows like diamonds in the sun. This is not my imagination. Each and everyone of these people see it. It’s undeniable.
We watch her as she slowly wheels her way up to the bandstand. I’m taken by her spell. This is the aura of a queen, of a person of great knowledge, one of the world’s last living treasures. I get on one knee and bow my head. Darlene and the rest of the group follow me.
“Rise,” the woman says. Her voice is not the voice of someone elderly. No. It is strong, full of life, carrying on the wind.
I rise, and so does Norm and Herb and Darlene.
“I’m — ” I start to say, taking the old woman’s cracked hands in my own. “I’m — ” But I can’t speak, I can’t say my own name. I know whatever I say will pale in comparison to what this woman says. She squeezes my hand back and smiles.
“I know who you are, sugar,” she says. “I’m mighty glad to meet you.”
“Me, too,” I say, smiling back. I never thought I’d see such a shining beacon of hope in such a dark land.
“And you and you and you,” she says to the rest of the group, nodding to each one.
The lady waves at the crowd. I didn’t notice until now, but the applause still goes on. With the tiny gesture, the crowd quiets and watches her with glistening eyes.
“We’ve suffered a great loss today,” the woman known as Mother says, “But we suffer losses everyday.”
People nod. I find myself nodding, too. I can’t help it.
“We suffer the loss of time and youth and wisdom, and though our lives may one day end, our journey is not done. We keep going because we have to, just as we keep going in life. We have to.”
I’m smiling wider now. I’ve said the same thing before, more or less, or I’ve at least thought it. Darlene takes my hand and sidles up closer to me.
“I can’t bring our friends back from the dead anymore than I can stop the rotten ones from terrorizing us. But I can offer you the same words of wisdom my own daddy offered me when I was a little gal with a dead dog at her feet. My daddy, he said, ‘Be strong, baby,’ and by golly there ain’t never been truer words in the English language except maybe ‘I love you,’ and ‘I’m sorry,’ but only those if you mean them.” Mother brings both hands to her mouth, kisses deeply then blows them to the crowd. “So I leave you,” she says, “and you might be feeling broken and sad and dejected and scared, and if you are then remember: I love you, I’m sorry, and be strong, baby!”
Jack Zombie (Book 3): Dead Nation Page 7
