by Tim Curran
Carl jumped up, sighting as he did so. He fired, ejected a shell, and repeated the process twice in quick succession. I couldn’t have done it in a matter of seconds like that and even if I did, I wouldn’t have had any accuracy. But Carl did. His first two rounds punched into the face of the building mere feet from the window and the third went right through it.
And then a figure-a woman, I thought-leaped in front of the window and fired twice, the slugs hitting the street in front of the car. She kept trying to fire, but she was out of rounds and that was obvious by the temper tantrum she threw at that moment before crying out and jumping away from the window.
Carl handed the. 30.06 back to me and took up his AK. “I’m going to get the bitch.”
“Leave it,” I told him.
“Leave it? Full moon’s not far off, man. We need something before then if you know what I mean.”
I just nodded and Carl raced off. I felt the guilt cut into me as it always did and I could feel Janie next to me, disapproving. She just didn’t get it.
Texas Slim said, “Well, I’d better go accompany him. Boys do get into trouble when unsupervised.”
I sighed and leaned up against the car. Sometimes I felt like I was leading and sometimes I knew I was being led. Janie was looking at me. Her face was unreadable.
“If nothing else, they get her she might know where a car is.”
“Oh, is that what you want her for?”
I lit a cigarette to keep my nerves in check and probably so I didn’t slap her right across the face. “Listen to me, Janie. Do me a favor and pack away your fucking morals and ethics, okay? In case you haven’t noticed we’re at war here. We’re fighting for our lives. Do you think I care about some crazy bitch who’s trying to kill us? Well, I don’t. I care about Texas and Carl. You, me. Gremlin. If she dies so that we live, fuck it. That’s how it has to be. You think she cares about us?”
Janie was ready to answer that, of course, but in the building across the way there was the distinctive staccato of Carl’s AK-47 doing some talking over there. He wasn’t cowboying it…just two rapid three-shot bursts and that was it.
“Well, he either got her or she got him,” Gremlin said.
Then we waited. The silence was heavy, almost crushing as we watched the building, listened to the wind make things creak and groan in the deserted street. Dust devils whipped around. Birds cawed in the sky.
I crushed my butt. “Hell are they?”
And then they appeared, pushing a woman before them. Carl shoved her out the doorway and Texas took her by the arm and guided her down the stairs and out into the street. I figured she was probably in her twenties, tall and long-limbed, very attractive. She was tanned and fit, swearing and bitching and fighting the whole way. Texas Slim and Carl, being quite resourceful, had torn up some bedsheets and tied her arms behind her back.
And she didn’t care for it much.
They brought her over and Carl shoved her to the ground. She twisted and squirmed, struggling up to her knees. “You fucking asshole! I said I’d go with you! Quit fucking pushing me, you prick!”
“Quite a mouth on her,” Texas Slim said.
“We caught her in the corridor. She was making a run for it. I convinced her otherwise.”
She was wearing a pair of cut-off jeans and a yellow shirt with a picture of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster on it extending his middle finger. EAT SHIT, was printed above this. And that pretty much summed up her feelings concerning her captors.
Carl put a hand on her shoulder and she jerked away and spit on him. He laughed.
“Settle down,” I told her. “We’re not fucking crazies. We’re not going to hurt you.”
“Oh no, I can see that.”
“You shot at us first, honey. Not the other way around,” Texas reminded her.
She sat there looking at us with big dark eyes, lips pulled away from white teeth that wanted to snarl. Slowly, by degrees, she mellowed. She was still breathing hard, but she wasn’t as predatory.
Her T-shirt was ripped and I could see a fine expanse of flat belly and a pierced navel. I cleared my throat, dug a water bottle from my pack and gave her a drink. “They didn’t…ah…hurt you, did they?”
She shook her head.
“I’m Nash,” I said and made a quick round of introductions.
She licked her lips, still looking ready to claw out eyeballs. “Mickey. Mickey Cox.”
Texas Slim giggled. “Cox, did you say? I like women named Cox.”
Carl started laughing.
Gremlin was just staring, his mouth hanging open. He wasn’t drooling at our captive, but he wasn’t too far from it.
Janie went to her, pulled a jackknife from her pocket and cut the knotted sheets from her wrists. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
Janie smiled at her and Mickey relaxed almost instantly. No one could refuse Janie’s eyes, I knew, when she put them on you. There was such honesty and sincerity in them she could have melted a rock. “Are you sure these idiots didn’t hurt you?”
“They were rough. But I’ve been handled rougher.”
“I’m certain you have, child,” Texas said. “And often.”
I thumped him on the arm to shut him up.
Janie looked her up and down. “You sure they didn’t…touch you or anything?”
Mickey shook her head. “They’re still walking aren’t they?”
“C’mon,” Carl said. “Nash, you know I wouldn’t do something like that. I might kill her ass, but I wouldn’t fuck it.”
“True, very true, that’s our Carl,” Texas Slim said. “He’s a noble sort. And you all know I wouldn’t hear of such a thing. I would never assail a woman’s virtue unless she asked me to.”
“Comedians,” I said by way of explanation.
Mickey drank her water, kept an eye on us. Particularly me. The others she didn’t much care about, but she kept her eyes on me. I was very aware of it, but pretended I didn’t notice. She was eye candy. Or maybe, and more bluntly, hand candy. Unlike Janie who was petite and fair and porcelain doll-pretty, Mickey was tall and dark and long-limbed. She was pretty, too, but in a blatantly sexual sort of way. She had the curves and the legs, the high tits, the big dark eyes and full lips. The sort of girl who could talk about eating a salad and make it sound positively sensuous and carnal, make you want to dash out and fuck your hand. Here was a girl who’d gotten along on her looks her whole life. She knew what men liked and she knew she had it, knew how to use it.
I figured she might be trouble if she started trying to manipulate my people.
I told her what we were doing and how we needed some wheels.
“Where you going?” she asked.
“West. Just west. Out beyond the Mississippi, I think.”
“That’s kind of funny,” she said. “You see…I was moving west, too. I was in Philadelphia when New York was hit. Everything went to shit there.” She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “A bunch of us got out, started heading west. I’m the only one left now. You know how it goes. There were six of us. Rats. Hatchet Clans. Fallout. My boyfriend…Mike…we lost him in Canton one night. Something attacked our car. They yanked him and another guy out, left us for some reason.”
“Something?” I said.
“Yeah…it was dark I couldn’t see. But they had claws. Big claws. Smelled like piss…like rotten meat.”
“Trogs,” I said.
“Were you with those people…back there?” Janie asked her.
Mickey nodded. “Yeah. For the last two or three weeks. They were nice, you know? Real nice. Real normal. They had a little community set up. All of it was run by a guy named Fisher. He’d been some kind of minister once. He was cool. They had some doctors and nurses, carpenters, teachers, all kinds of things. They were all working together. Lots of families were living with him. A few kids even, ones that hadn’t changed over yet…you know how that is.”
She told us Fisher was planning on
getting out of the city. He had a bunch of buses stashed away on the south side over in Hammond. Trailers of supplies, military surplus, medical, everything. He had his sights on a fortified monastery down in Hebron County. They could have lived there in safety.
“What happened?” Carl asked her.
“Clans came, man. They must have been watching us awhile because they just came out of nowhere…we never had a chance.” But that was something she didn’t want to talk about and everyone saw it in her eyes. “So you guys are going west? Yeah…I can’t explain it, but ever since this started I’ve had the strongest urge to go west, too. Funny, huh?”
“It’s a funny world, dear,” Texas said.
I thought of my dream of The Medusa exterminating the human race city by city. Moving westward. I wondered if maybe Mickey was just one of many that would be trying to escape west, part of some exodus.
“Can I come?” she asked. “Can I come with you?”
“Sure.”
Carl was looking at me and I could feel those eyes. More so, I knew what he was thinking which was very much along the lines of, course you can come, sweet thing. Wouldn’t be a party without you. Next night of the full moon, we gonna get down, we gonna bust a move you’ll never forget. I guess I was thinking it, too, more or less. But maybe not as bluntly as Carl.
Mickey kept watching me. “I know where there’s a nice Jeep Cherokee just north of here across the river. It’s in a garage. Fisher had vehicles stashed everywhere. It might work out.”
I smiled. “Welcome aboard,” I said.
And then there were six.
At least until the full moon began to rise.
17
I decided Mickey was going to come in handy because she was a resourceful girl. I just had the feeling that she was going to work out. We stood around talking more for a bit, ducking into a building nearby for a bite of MREs-freeze-dried spaghetti and meatballs, yum-and started swapping war stories while Gremlin drooled over Mickey and Texas Slim watched Gremlin and Carl watched everyone and Janie…Janie just kept her eye on the new girl.
There was something between them that was unspoken. At least on Janie’s side of things. What had been sympathy and understanding was blossoming into something along the lines of jealousy and you could plainly see it in her eyes. Women sometimes got territorial, I knew, without meaning to. And I was sensing that in Janie.
She had competition now. And she didn’t look like she cared for the idea.
Mickey was an interesting girl. There was no doubt about that. Not just easy on the eyes, but smart. Maybe she’d never be invited into Mensa or win the Nobel Prize for physics, but what she lacked in book smarts she more than made up for in practical schooling. And intuition. She had an almost sixth sense where danger was concerned. Something we all soon learned about.
After our impromptu luncheon, it was out into the streets again. It would be dark in a few hours and I wanted the Jeep before that happened. Mickey led the way, knowing exactly where we had to go. She barely made it to the end of the block before she stopped dead and started shaking her head back and forth.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“I don’t know…something’s wrong. I can feel it,” she said. “Something’s wrong.”
Texas Slim and Carl just looked at each other.
“She’s giving me the willies,” Carl said.
“That ain’t what she gives me,” Gremlin said.
Mickey shrugged. “Sometimes…sometimes I just sense things before they happen.”
Texas laughed nervously. “Had a grandmother on my mother’s side, a Taney from Terrabonne County. Swamp country. She had the gift, too. Oh…she was old, old, old, was old Mother Taney. Had but two or three working teeth and a narrow face, big old nose looked like a coat hook. One eye was bad…lost it when she was a child in an unpleasant spearfishing accident…but the other was just big and round, kind of yellow and staring. Made her look like that witch in the old comic book…you know the one I mean? Gave me the creepy-crawlies, it did, that staring yellow eye. One day she says, Whet yee looking fowa, booy? Cause that’s how she talked. I says, I lost my socks, Mother Tee…that’s what I called her. Mother Tee. She says, Thems socks bee out yondah the sweetgoom, hear? And they was. Right where I left them by the sweetgum. Couple weevils made a home in them, but that was all. She had the sight and she could find anything, anytime-”
“Quiet,” I told him. I knew Texas was just nervous and whenever he was nervous he started telling wild tales, but now was not the time. “What is it, Mickey?”
Everyone was waiting and Janie was getting perturbed, liking the new girl a little bit less all the time. The poison between them was thickening away on the back burner.
Mickey turned and looked at me. She was pale beneath her tan, her eyes huge and wet. “Clans. The Clans are coming.”
To which Carl immediately disagreed…but then he heard it. We all heard it.
Heard them coming.
Six or seven rose up from behind the hulks of smashed vehicles, screeching and wailing. It was an ambush. I was certain of that. A carefully staged ambush of the sort that the Clans were so very good at. But for some reason…they just couldn’t wait. Maybe it was that Mickey had somehow sensed them out there and stopped everyone in the street. Maybe they’d known the gig was up.
But now they were waiting no more. They charged from their hides, screaming and hissing. They ran in zig-zagging patterns through the street, just insane and bloodthirsty.
“Son…of…a…bitch,” Carl said.
I brought my Savage up and dropped two of them. When a third got in range, Carl opened up with his AK and stitched him…or her…or it, crotch to throat. They were merciless, these things. Remorseless, relentless. For even when they squirmed dying in the streets, riddled with bullets, they still fought and shrieked. Only a couple of them carried crude weapons…clubs and spears. Carl and I dropped all but two, but it wasn’t going to be enough. For these few had only been the spearhead. The others were coming now.
A beat-up pick-up truck came rambling down the street, glancing off dead vehicles and bouncing over drifts of sand. There were two Clansmen in the cab and a dozen more in the back. I saw them, swallowed, figured I knew what the Romans must have felt like when the Picts came at them.
Berserkers.
That’s what they were. Every one of them just psychotic and vicious.
They hopped from the truck while it was still moving and fanned out into the street. They looked much like the dead one we had found. They were all bald with warrior scalplocks, distorted faces hidden behind gas masks. They wore flapping overcoats and leather trenchcoats, jackets that were stitched patchworks of other coats, even what looked like ponchos made from tarps. They swarmed forward, brandishing homemade spears, spiked clubs, axes and pikes and, yes, hatchets.
We laid down a volley of fire and then got the hell out.
We ran for our dear lives like spooked rabbits. It was all confusing and there was no cohesion whatsoever. Should we make our stand in a building? On a rooftop? Behind a wrecked car? In the end we found ourselves back in the vicinity of Fisher’s little commune, which was now a commune of corpses. We spread out, armed, and got ready.
The truck came storming forward and I sighted on it, put a couple rounds right through the windshield. It blew into the cab in a spiderwebbed mass of candy glass. The passenger slumped over and the driver jammed on the gas.
I sighted again. I knew the only weapon that would work from this range was my. 30.06. This was my baby. Maybe I could have passed the rifle to Carl but Carl was behind a station wagon on the other side of the street. There just wasn’t the time.
“Nash,” somebody said.
I breathed in and out. Sighted. Squeezed the trigger with a half-assed prayer brushing past my lips. I caught the driver in the throat, I thought. He snapped back in his seat, hands flying from the wheel trying to stem the flow of blood from his neck. The truck went out of control,
bouncing off a minivan, and spinning up onto the sidewalk and ramming the remains of a police patrol car. And there she died.
The driver struggled out and Texas ran up on him and blew him away with the. 50 cal Desert Eagle. But the others were coming.
As they got in closer, I saw it was true what they said about these animals. They did wear the scalps of their victims. They wore them in scarves and belts. And not just those things, but necklaces of blackened ears and teeth strung on wires, a wide and gruesome collection of mummified body parts.
Carl dropped two with his AK and it was just sheer pandemonium as we all cried out, firing, pouring everything we had at our attackers whose numbers were swelling as more of them came running down the street. Already, eight or ten of them were down and writhing and they’d been replaced by twice that many. Even Janie was shooting with the Browning. 45. Mickey had Carl’s. 22 Airweight.
One of them got with twenty feet of our position by crawling underneath some cars and I popped him right in the face. The slug went right in through one of the plexiglass eye ports and the Clansman was thrown up against a truck. But he did not go down. He took three or four shambling, zombie-like steps forward, bright red blood spouting from the entry wound and then went down, face-first.
Others closed in.
One jumped on top of a truck and threw his spear. It barely missed Janie. Carl blew him away. I ran out of rounds and had to switch to my Beretta 9mm. I shot one and then another and then something clubbed me in the back and I went down. I hit the ground and twisted away just as an axe bit into the pavement where I’d been. I jumped up and emptied the Beretta into my attacker and then another jumped me, tossed me against the car. He lashed out with a knife and I just avoided it, kicking him in the belly and hammering his scabby bald head with the butt of the Beretta until something gave in there with a wet snapping.
Carl emptied his AK and starting blasting away with his Mossberg. Texas Slim was hit with a spear in the side and went down. Gremlin was beaten down with a club. Mickey fired her Airweight, jumping around with great athletic grace and popping them one after the other and then she was out of ammo and two of them grabbed her. She fought and kicked and they slammed her face-down on the hood of a car. They were going to rape her then and there because that’s how the Clans operated…not with military precision or organization, but with sheer mania.
