A few dogs ran by, catching the men’s attention. They both stared out of the open front door and saw a couple of cats go darting after them.
“That was weird,” Gunny said. “I thought dogs chased cats, not the other way around.”
As they watched, a few more animals ran down the road, heading for the woods outside of town. Opossums, a few more cats, and a couple of raccoons.
“Something ain’t right,” Griz said and they both stood, setting their cans aside and drawing their pistols.
Before Gunny could answer, Griz threw up his hand in a quiet gesture. They both cocked their heads to listen to the barely heard rustling noises. Silently, they slipped into the living room and peeked past the curtains. If the horde had been running and keening, it would have froze their blood. It was disquieting enough seeing what they were seeing. There were thousands, a massive horde that filled the road and spilled out among the buildings. The mindless, lumbering wrecks bumped into each other, bounced off cars and houses and shambled straight into town, instead of following the curve on the main county road. They were a rough looking crowd, most of them had strips of flesh dangling and were missing chunks of meat, mostly from their legs. They stretched back as far as the eye could see, in an undulating, slow-moving mass of tattered gray. Maybe a hundred thousand, stumbling south out of Memphis. Ashen figures baked by the sun, with bare feet being worn away by the road. At one time, they had probably been chasing something. Maybe days ago, or even weeks. They had lost the urgency, but they were still traveling and would keep going until something else caught their attention.
It was too late to slip out the back door, by the time Griz had heard them, the silent mob was enveloping the town.
“Upstairs,” Gunny whispered and they crouched below the window line so any movement they made wouldn’t be noticed. Too late to close the front door. They might see, or it might squeak. The silence was haunting, only the whispered rasp of skin on pavement, or the muted sounds of bodies bumping into things. No breathing. No talking. Occasionally the sound of a single shoe slapping the ground, or a bone scraping against the asphalt. Most of them were barefoot, their footwear ripped open or loosened during the bloating period of their death, then falling off when the swelling went down. The night birds stopped their song and the insects hunkered down in silence as the unnatural procession passed by.
Gunny and Griz watched for a long time from behind the curtains in the upstairs bedroom. The shuffling horde never looked up, never wandered far off the path, and never stopped moving. Huge flocks of birds were settling into the nearby trees, bedding down for the night. Carrion birds with full bellies which would pick up the trail again tomorrow, swooping in, landing on shoulders or matted hair to peck away at the easy meals. Many in the horde were blind, their eyes the first to be plucked out once the birds learned the walking smorgasbord didn’t fight back, or even try to bat them away. When they made it to the river, they had turned south. Gunny hoped they would get caught up in the boggy mud and get stranded until the next flood came along and either buried them or carried them out into the ocean. The birds would all become fat and lazy. He didn’t know if the crawdads would eat them or not, but if they did, they would have an abundant food source for generations. By midnight, after a solid six hours of the macabre parade, it had thinned enough so there were only crawlers and toddlers. It was sad and pathetic, a little heartbreaking to watch. The moon showed them clawing their way along the trail of refuse left by the rest. Worn out shoes that had finally fallen off, fragments of clothing rotted to shreds, occasional glints of jewelry and the odd body part that had dropped off. Pieces of arms and clumps of hair, for the most part. The babies and the broken wrecks kept following, though. Kept scratching their way south, useless legs trailing behind them and slowly being scraped away to nothing. The toddlers were hard to watch, as they stumbled and fell every few steps. They were a mass of cuts and scrapes, the bones of their knees showing through the torn skin. The babies were even worse. They had been crawling for months on asphalt. Their legs barely worked, the knee joints scraped away to nothing, and fingers had been worn to nubs. Thriving colonies of maggots and beetles infested some of them and coyotes and other carrion animals trailed the horde, following the food source like the Indians followed the great buffalo herds an age ago. They didn’t even dart in for a quick kill and slink away. They didn’t fight over a meal. They walked among them, choosing the flavor they wanted and snapping a bite or two off. Eating their fill in leisure.
“I’ll take first watch,” Gunny said, turning away from the window and a pack of coyotes tearing an unprotesting woman into bite-sized chunks. The danger of them being discovered and swarmed was over. As long as they had enough warning, even if one of the undead did home in on them, there were so few in the immediate area they’d be able to grab the canoe and make a dash for the river, if need be.
When Griz shook him awake in the morning, they grabbed enough canned goods to last them until they made it back to Lakota, then tossed the pack in the canoe with the paddles. They carried it over the levee, set it in the water and climbed in, trying not to get their feet wet. The fresh socks they’d found in the house felt good, they didn’t want them muddy and reeking of river water.
They paddled quickly, making their way through the channel, around the enormous marshy island and back to the main river. They could tell where the horde was by the circling and cawing of the thousands of birds swooping in and out for their morning meal. They were almost back to the destroyed bridge before they spotted signs of civilization and cut back up a bayou. They beached at a grain warehousing facility that could ship by barge, rail, or truck. Plants like these were dotted all over the country, and teamsters had been hauling freight in and out of them since they did it with mules, a hundred years ago. Nondescript places on cheap land, that held thousands of tons of grain and other raw food materials. Most people could be dying of hunger and pass through the shadows of the buildings, never guessing the treasures held inside.
They were on the outskirts of Helena, a dusty little town in Eastern Arkansas that was the boyhood home of Conway Twitty and Robert Junior, the stepson of the King of Delta Blues, Robert Johnson himself.
Neither man concerned himself with tales of bluesmen selling their souls at the crossroads, but watched for movement among the buildings. The town was quiet, the only sound the occasional birdsong. There was a slight breeze coming off the river that ruffled the listless flag, but there was nothing else to be seen or heard.
They crunched across the gravel unloading area, looking for a suitable vehicle to take. They both would prefer an up-armored Humvee, but if wishes were horses…
There were a couple of semis, but neither had a cattle guard up front and both were new Volvos. They couldn’t take the punishment of an older truck if they ran into trouble. They were mostly fiberglass and plastic, with ground effects for better fuel mileage. They’d never hold up if they had to plow through a crowd of the undead. They checked the employee parking lot and hit the jackpot. A newer crew cab Silverado was parked near the entrance, driver door open, keys on the ground near a puddle of old, dried blood. It had oversized tires, a wraparound brush guard, and a big fuel tank. It looked fine, just a dead battery and a wet seat from last night’s rain. Gunny pulled the hood latch and they checked the connections. They were the typical top post style, not the side mount bolts, so one of the batteries out of the semi-truck would work. There was a toolbox in the back seat of the truck so they grabbed some hand tools each and started working. The town was quiet and they were well hidden behind the levee wall, so they split up, Gunny pulling the dead one and Griz popping the side panel on one of the Volvos and grabbing one of its four batteries.
It was nearing noon when they closed the hood and turned on the key, hearing the welcoming sound of chimes and clicks and the hum of a fuel pump.
“Three-quarters of a tank,” Gunny said, watching the needle on the gauge slowly climb.
They
looked around the parking lot. There were plenty of other cars, and it would be easier to add the fuel now. There was enough light, they weren’t in any danger, and it was plentiful. They might really need the extra hundred miles that gas would take them. They were still about four hundred miles from Lakota, they’d have to stop at least once more.
There were a few other pickups in the lot, and even a Jeep, but none of them had spare fuel cans mounted. They eyeballed each other, each thinking the same. They hadn’t started up the Silverado yet, they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. Now the question was, should they risk going out past the levee wall and into the town, or check the buildings, searching for a gas can. Who knew how many of the undead were wandering around out there. Or inside. There were a lot of cars in the lot. They were both bone tired, they’d been running hard and lack of sleep for the past couple of days was catching up on them. Griz had a pronounced limp and favored his left side, where he probably had a few cracked ribs. Gunny’s bullet wound had soaked the bandage once already today, and they were low on ammo. Neither man felt up to a fight. They could search the building, maybe find a funnel and a container they could use to hold the fuel. It would probably be safer. They hadn’t heard any screaming of the undead coming from the buildings, but they’d been pretty quiet during their battery swap. Might be dead inside, might not.
“Let’s just get the hell out of here,” Griz said, pulling out the road atlas he snagged from the Jeep. “I’m tired of fighting. We’ll find an out-of-the-way gas station somewhere.”
“Agreed,” Gunny said.
It fired right up and he took off instantly, not giving any milling hordes time to zero in on them. By the time they were out of town and chasing route 49 west, a few thousand screaming undead were stumbling down the two-lane road after them.
Gunny drove for hours, listening to the only radio station in America, maybe in the free world. Once it got late and Bastille’s Disfigured Road Angel show and Scratch’s god-awful noise show were over, Wire Bender put an iPod on shuffle and the songs became eclectic and random. It would play classical, then country. R&B, then speed metal. When it played the second gangster rap song in a row, both men reached for the dial to turn it off.
“Need me to drive for a while?” Griz asked in the silence, the only sound was the tires singing on the pavement. The only thing to see, the endless black ribbon disappearing in the darkness beyond the headlights.
“I’m good till dawn,” Gunny said. “That’s when I start nodding off. Try to catch some shut-eye, bro.”
Griz settled into the seat a little more comfortably, absentmindedly rubbing his swollen knees.
“You think maybe we had something to do with all this?” he asked. “You think they panicked because we were taking all the big players out one by one, and were afraid they were next?”
Gunny had been thinking the same thing, a small part of him with the same worries as Griz.
“Maybe,” he finally allowed. “But if we did, it just means they were planning it anyway. If they did things the way they had wanted, if we really did force their hand early, I don’t think we’d be fighting to build our country back. I think their original plan would have been better executed, there would be no one left except them in their fortresses with their slaves.”
Griz let that sink in, both of them mulling over what could have been, what should have been. The stretch between Witching Hour and dawn has always been the time for contemplation and dark thoughts. A time to believe in the supernatural or the unbelievable.
Gunny suddenly swerved, dodging past a wide-eyed and blood-soaked thing that lunged for the truck, bringing them both back fully awake. Griz rummaged around and found a Fred Eaglesmith CD in the glovebox and popped it in, turning the volume down low.
He got comfortable again.
“You remember those girls in Tajikistan that helped us when we went in after Abdul Whatshisface?” he asked, closing his eyes and leaning back, thinking of more pleasant things.
“Yeah,” Gunny smiled. “Amina and Urwa. I liked them, they had a lot of spirit.”
“You ever talk to Lacy about her? I was wondering how much I should tell Collins, you know, if things work out.”
“Oh hell, no,” Gunny said and looked over at the big man, who knew so much about life, but so little about women. “Some things are best left unsaid.”
“But you didn’t do anything,” Griz protested. “I was the one wearing out the bedsprings with Amina. The whole time we were there, all you did was drink coffee and help Urwa cook and crap like that. You were a regular little house husband. You even did the dishes.”
“That’s just it,” Gunny explained. “Some girls get madder at you for having a female friend than actually banging some hooker in the pickle park. You’re emotionally involved or some shit like that.”
Griz grunted. “That’s stupid.”
“That’s women,” Gunny said, grinning. “You need to start reading Cosmopolitan or Vogue or something. Maybe start watching chick flicks.”
Griz drowsily shook his head, drifting into sleep. “Didn’t you keep in touch with her after we left? Weren’t you sending her money for a while to help her out? Whatever happened to them?”
It took a while for Gunny to answer, his good mood going dark, and when he did Griz was already snoring softly.
“The Taliban found out they helped us,” he said. “Hasif told me a few years later.”
40
Hasif
Hasif watched the world burn all around him. His city of nearly ten million people had fallen into chaos in a matter of days. The missiles that pounded them had been precisely targeted at the things that made a city function. The power plants, the dams across the Nile, the presidential palaces, the fresh water pumping stations. They were all gone and people were running to and fro, not knowing where to find safety.
He didn’t even feel anger at the destruction. Just a great sadness that things had come to this. He supposed it was inevitable, the world had been on the brink of annihilation for decades. Nations were bristling with enough nuclear weapons to blow the planet to bits, all of them aimed at each other, all of them minutes away from pushing the button. Perhaps it was for the best, he tried to tell himself. Perhaps this was what was meant in the holy book when it said the graves will be laid open. Perhaps it was all in Allah’s great plan to rid the world of its destroyers, with a disease that only affected them. Perhaps the peoples of the world would perish, but the planet itself would live on and reclaim the cities and roads. It would cleanse itself and in a hundred years, most traces of man would be buried under the sands of time once again. Perhaps.
He was high up on the Great Pyramid, dusting off the solar panels and checking their antennas for the Ham radio. He was sitting at the flattened peak, wearing his dusty, pale robes to blend in. He didn’t want to be seen.
The worst was yet to come, the undead hadn’t even reached their borders. Turkey was overrun by the hordes, the walls protecting them nearly obliterated. People fleeing to Israel and their fences and walls were being turned away with automatic weapons. There were reports of gunships sinking any vessels that tried to escape to the oceans. The fear had started when the bombs fell, and had turned to panic when the wall of water came tearing through the city on its way north to the Mediterranean Sea. It became hysterical mobs when the trucks stopped running. When there was no more food to be had, and the people with nothing started taking from the people with something. It had been a week with no running water and no prospects at getting any more. It only rained less than an inch a year in Cairo, and even though it was the winter season, none was expected anytime soon. The Nile was a polluted mess that had raged out of its banks, destroying everything in its unchecked path when the dams had collapsed. It was clogged with rotting bodies, the same as the city streets. There was no one to organize a clean-up. No more government to take control. It was everyone for themselves, and anyone that could, had already abandoned the city for pla
ces they thought were better.
He and Fariq had reinforced the lower entrances to the Pyramid, made it impossible to get in without cutting torches or explosives. They had removed the handrails and the wooden planks that led up the ascending passageway. They had gallons of oil to dump if people did manage to get in, and plenty of ammo to pick them off one by one if they tried to make their way up the narrow chamber. It wasn’t what they wanted, but they didn’t have enough to share with everyone else. If they helped one, he would want more for his family. They would demand more and soon, they would either have to starve with them or cut them off and face the battle that would follow. It was best to stay quiet and hidden. They were safe, the only way up was if someone lowered the rope. They had enough food and water for maybe a year, if they were careful and rationed it.
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