“Hold up Nance,” I said over the radio. “I think these stinkers are serving a higher purpose.”
She double clicked an affirmation, but I knew those two like the back of my hand. They were chomping at the bit to mow them all down and loot the few rickety buildings around the marina.
From one of the shacks emerged a man I pegged to be somewhere in his late sixties, maybe early seventies. He wore work boots, grease stained mechanics overalls and a ball cap that said USS Ronald Reagan on it. He was slightly stooped, with a pronounced limp in his gait. A long shock of gray hair tied back in a loose ponytail jutted out from under the hat. He carried a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun in his gnarled hands, an antique, judging from the twin hammers that he pulled back when he pointed the scattergun in my direction. Antique maybe, but still lethal. I shut off the engine and raised my hands from the steering wheel to show I meant no harm. The shotgun was no threat to the armored Jeep, but I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot. I needed to get across the river as soon as possible and he was my only shot. Besides, I knew Pancho had him covered with the belt fed.
“State your business.” He yelled in my direction.
“My name is Rye and I need to cross the river. Cobb said you were the man to see.” I yelled back.
He eased the hammers down on the double barrel and lowered the shotgun. “So, you’re the damned fool causing all the ruckus on the radio. Get out then and let’s talk business. I don’t have all day to stand around jawing with idiots.”
I exited the Jeep and walked toward him until he raised the shotgun again. I stopped, hands still raised, doing my best to appear nonthreatening. Unlike the Armadillo I wasn’t heavily armored, and the shotgun would cut me in half from the spitting distance that separated us.
“If Cobb sent you, where the hells my smokes and liquor?” He asked.
“In the ambulance,” I replied. I really wished he’d point that thing somewhere else. The barrels looked like they were as big as dinner plates from my perspective. I noticed he had a slight tremor in his hands, barely perceptible to a less observant person. The early onset of something neurological, not fear, judging from the hard set of his eyes. There was nothing but cool detachment in them. This man had seen some shit in his time and not all of it pleasant.
“Well don’t stand there looking like a fool, can’t you recognize a thirsty man when you see him?” He swung the gun away from me and cocked the hammers on the shotgun again when the doors to the ambulance opened. “Careful now, don’t want to go getting my trigger finger all itchy.”
Pancho emerged from the back of the ambulance carrying the crate of Wild Turkey. Nancy had a couple of cartons of the unfiltered Camel cigarettes in an old plastic grocery sack. She tossed them towards him. He let them hit the dirt at his feet, not falling for the distraction. Crafty old buzzard, he kept his eyes on us and didn’t let the shotgun waver.
“Nice try missy.” He growled, not fooled by her attempt. “You plan on crossing too?”
“Nope, old timer, just making sure my pal got here in one piece.” She said.
He grunted something unintelligible and swung the shotgun to cover Pancho, who’d managed to get within a few feet of him. “That’s close enough compadre, set it down there and move your ass over there with the lady.”
Pancho set the whiskey on the ground and backed over towards Nancy, never taking his eyes from the shotgun. I knew he was calculating how to get the drop on the old man. His brown eyes roamed the windows of the buildings and the rooftops, looking for signs of hidden shooters, a rifle barrel poking through a windowsill, the ruffle of a curtain.
The old man swung the shotgun back towards me, I was the closest to him and the first to get a belly full of buck shot if he decided to start shooting. The situation was a little too tense for my liking. I was just here for a boat ride, not a standoff. I sighed, nothing in my life is ever easy.
The zombies were also riled up from our proximity. They gurgled around their gags, strained at the dog collars buckled around their necks. Whatever sense they used to determine prey was in overdrive. They leaned towards us at the limits of their tethers, eager to get to the buffet of uninfected flesh just out of their reach. The whole time this was going on, Crash and Conor had their cameras out and were steadily filming, getting dangerously close to the chained zombies, which wasn’t helping the situation any. The creatures were agitated, anxious to attack. I watched the old man’s shaky hands, there was just a little too much pressure on the twin triggers of the shotgun that was currently pointed at my belly for me to be comfortable with. I hoped nobody did anything stupid.
“I reckon if you two ain’t crossing, then you ain’t got no more business here. Get off my property and take those two idiots with the cameras with you.” He gestured with the shotgun at Crash and Conor before pointing it back at Nancy and Pancho.
He was starting to ruffle Nancy’s feathers. She didn’t like people telling her what to do, especially when she was at the wrong end of a gun. I could see the cold glint in her eyes in my peripheral vision. “It’s fine Nancy. We’re all friends here, he’s just being cautious.”
I hoped that was true, Cobb did warn me that the old man wasn’t wound real tight. I really didn’t need the shitshow that was sure to ensue when he made the mistake of pushing her too far. Goes to show you just how quickly a situation can deteriorate whenever it’s up to me to be the voice of reason.
“You sure, Rye? I bet I can run that old tub as well as he can.” She pointed towards the ferry. She was getting twitchy, wasn’t intimidated by the old man one little bit. I’m sure in her devious mind, she already had him bound to a chair, juiced up with one of her cocktails while she alternated between pilfering through his valuables and smacking some manners into him. Nancy didn’t suffer fools. I’d been on the receiving end of her calloused hands a few times myself and didn’t have any desire to repeat the experience.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said. “I’ll see you when I get back. Thanks, guys, I owe you one.”
She snorted and laughed. “One? One doesn’t even come close to how many you owe me.”
She tilted her hat at the old man before she and Pancho made for the ambulance.
“I’ve got some trash to pick up off the side of the road anyway, but I’ll be seeing ya, pal.” She mimed a pistol with her thumb and index finger and mouthed the word POW at the old vet.
“Hey, Rye! Where did that guy in the armored truck say he was headed?” Crash yelled. The old man flinched and swung the shotgun towards the brothers.
“Somewhere outside St. Louis, if you leave now, right now, you can still catch up to him.” I needed them gone before someone ended up shot, probably me. The brothers took the hint and got back in the car. Nancy was still shooting daggers with her eyes at the old man from the ambulance. I flicked my raised hand at her. GO!
He finally lowered the shotgun when the Chevelle, followed by the ambulance roared away. He tore into the carton of smokes and lit one up, inhaling the nicotine with obvious joy.
“Names Peebles,” he said. “But you can call me Chief, or you can keep the snap on your cock holster fastened, don’t matter none to me. Don’t just stand there gawking, pop a seal and let’s have a drink.” He was abrasive, a grade A asshole, but I needed his services. I moved towards the liquor crate to accommodate him, relieved to have the scattergun not pointed at me anymore.
I broke the seal on a bottle of Wild Turkey while he lit his next cigarette off the butt of the first one. He took a long pull from the bottle and offered it to me, the fact that he’d had a shotgun pointed way too close to Little Catcher a moment ago, seemingly forgotten. What the hell, after the past few days I could use a drink or four. I accepted the bottle and took a swig.
He looked over his shoulder at the building that was once the marina office. “Bait, get your ass out here! We’ve got a fare!”
A boy, maybe thirteen years old at the most joined us in the lot. He was skinny as a tooth
pick with long hair so blonde it was almost white. He was barefoot and had on a tattered Spiderman t-shirt a couple of sizes too big and a pair of military fatigues hacked off crudely at the knees. “You the one they been talking about on the radio?”
“Don’t believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see, especially when it comes to Bastille.” I shook his hand, my hand swallowing his. “Catcher Rye, CEO of World’s End Acquisitions, at your service.”
“Trey Hargis, assistant ferry operator and purveyor of every shit job around here. Chief just calls me Bait, though. Good enough name as any I suppose.” He said with a waifish grin.
“Don’t stand there flapping your gums boy, get that whiskey inside and get ready to go to work.” Chief swore under his breath and turned towards me. “You too jackass, you want a ride across, you better get loaded. Already told you, I don’t have all damned day.”
I fired up the Jeep and eased her past the gagged, gurgling zombies. I was close enough to read the badge stenciled on the barge, USS Catfish. It was about forty-foot-long, half again as wide. The old Navy man guided me up the ramps onto the barge and held up a closed fist when I had the weight settled where he wanted it. He yelled at the boy standing on the shore. “Cut ‘em loose, Bait.”
Bait released the brake handle on the wooden gears and started taunting the undead, staying just out of their reach. The boy spewed a litany of swear phrases at them that I’m pretty sure I didn’t know at his age. I was impressed and I vowed to remember some of the more colorful ones. Apparently, the old military man had taught him more than just how to operate the barge. The undead staggered towards Bait as he taunted them, always a step ahead, fearless in the way only kids and crazy people are. The gears started moving cable through the pulleys affixed to the barge as the undead lurched after the boy. The barge began to slowly move out into the current.
“Pretty slick setup,” I remarked, impressed by his ingenuity. Every time I thought I had been everywhere and seen everything, someone managed to surprise me with their adaptations to this world.
“Sons of bitches want to hang around here, by God, I’m gonna get some use out of them.” He flicked a butt into the water and lit another. “Now shut up and let me enjoy my smokes.”
I walked to the bow and looked across the river. The water was high, swift and muddy, most likely as a result of the dams failing upstream. As far as I knew, all the bridges for hundreds of miles were blown in a last-ditch effort to contain the millions of undead that inhabited the eastern portion of the country. I felt a cold shudder run down my spine at the thought of all those hungry zombies waiting on me to arrive. My Grangran used to say that shudder was a rabbit running across your grave. I hoped this time she was wrong. She was a superstitious woman, full of folklore and stories about ghosts and woods spirits that terrified me as a boy. She practiced the old ways, homebrewed remedies and natural medicines from the plants and herbs in her garden. Some accused her of being a witch, but that didn’t stop them from seeking her out when they had an ailment, especially the kind they didn’t want a spouse to find out about. She bragged she’d never been to a doctor in her life and died in her sleep at the ripe old age of one hundred and three.
I don’t know what I was expecting to see. Maybe an endless wave of the undead waiting on the far shore. In reality, there wasn’t much, just an old fire tower, ivy and kudzu climbing its supports, a couple of deer grazing the blackberries that grew wild along the wood line, an aluminum johnboat tangled in the cattails, but nothing threatening. There probably weren’t more than a handful of rangers and a few campers in this area on a busy day before the outbreak during the hottest parts of the year. It would have been blistering here in September, high temperatures and high humidity, not like Montana where we’d been experiencing fall weather.
The other side of the river was part of the Chickasaw National Wildlife Refuge, twenty-five thousand acres of forest and waterways, interspersed with narrow dirt roads. It looked peaceful, deserted, but I knew that was an illusion. There could be a million undead milling about aimlessly in those woods just waiting for a juicy morsel such as myself to come bumbling along.
“Gonna take a while to get across, them deaders ain’t fast as they used to be.” He rummaged around in a cooler and brought out a tin foil bundle. He peeled it open and bit off a piece of the fish wrapped inside.
“Smoked catfish?” He offered me the tin foil. I shook my head no. Catfish were scavengers, bottom feeders. They were the equivalent of aquatic buzzards and would eat near about anything that held still long enough for them to get their big mouths around. Other fish, dead animals, garbage, it didn’t matter, they weren’t picky eaters. I knew they fed on the living corpses that wandered into the river and I had no desire to eat anything that fed on the undead.
“Your loss.” He washed down a mouthful of fish with the Wild Turkey.
I pulled a sack from the Jeep and settled into a ratty old lawn chair as we made our way lazily across the river. Caitlin had packed me some sandwiches and a slab of the pecan pie. I offered to share one of the sandwiches with Peebles, no way was he getting my pie. He just waved me off, content to chain smoke and guzzle whiskey with his meal of smoked fish. I thought about Caitlin, no doubt she’d been glued to the radio and was worried sick. There was no telling what kind of spin Bastille put on events in his broadcast, but I knew that Nancy and Pancho would get word to her that I’d made it across the river and protect her as best they could. I still had plenty of danger left to face, many dangerous miles to travel, but at least I’d done the only thing I could to protect her. If I died, Nancy and Pancho would stage her death, change her appearance and name and get her resettled somewhere else. She wouldn’t be happy about leaving her business and Lakota, but at least she would be alive. That was enough for me.
I was exhausted, and the combination of a full belly and the warm sunshine lulled me into a fitful sleep. Bex was waiting for me in my dreams, decayed and hungry. Her eyes soulless and black. The stench of her rotted body caused me to recoil in disgust. She cursed me with a voice that sounded like she was gargling broken glass. She screamed at me for abandoning her. She wasn’t beautiful anymore, no trace remained of the vibrant woman I’d wanted to marry, just a wretched imitation, ripped and mangled from attacks by scavenger animals and exposure to the elements. It was all my fault, she wailed. I turned and ran from her, I was afraid of her, afraid of her words and afraid of what she would do to me with her bloodied fingernails and rotted broken teeth. No matter how fast I ran, I could never put any distance between us, she was always one step behind me, spewing hateful words that cut me to my soul. You could have saved me, at the least you could have ended me, but you ran like the coward you really are, she moaned in her horrible voice as she gnashed her teeth and slashed at me with her jagged broken nails. You promised to grow old with me, take care of me, not let me turn into a flesh hungry monster, she seethed. I knew it wasn’t real, her words weren’t true. I’d tried to save her, but I was too late. She screamed that now I would get what I deserved. In my dream I stopped running, wrapped my arms around her. I cried and begged her to forgive me while she tore chunks of flesh from my neck and chest. Forever together, she growled through a mouthful of my flesh while I held her cold corpse close.
The thump of the barge bumping against the far shore jolted me awake. Chief Peebles was already winching down the ramps welded to the front of the barge.
I pushed the dream out of my mind, I didn’t have time to deal with her ghost. I gave the old man a handful of gold jewelry when he finished with the ramps. He hefted its weight in his hand, shrugged and deposited it into one of the many pockets of his stained overalls.
“There’s probably gonna be someone dogging my back trail in the next day or so.” I said.
“Not my problem.” He muttered. “I don’t ask a man’s business, I just haul them across.”
I pulled my loot bag back out of my pocket. It was my emergency reserve, and I was down to
the last of it. The good news was this side of the river was ripe for the picking. I’d help myself to a jewelry store or pawn shop somewhere along the way.
He grinned as I shook out the remaining rings and necklaces from the Crown Royal sack into his gnarled hands. “Course, tomorrow is supply run day, so the ferry won’t be running tomorrow.”
Greedy bastard, I couldn’t help but appreciate his undisguised manipulation of me. “That’s all I’ve got on me, but I’ll be willing to double it on the return trip if you are agreeable to taking a couple of days off to spend in the settlements.”
He guffawed, “Boy, you ain’t coming back, no one has yet. Now, you have about thirty seconds to get the hell of my barge before I toss your ass over the side.”
He picked up his walkie talkie. “Bait, full reverse, bring me home.”
I climbed in the Armadillo and drove down the ramps onto the sandy shore. Welcome to Tennessee. The old prick wasted no time cranking up the ramps as the barge started its slow trip back across the river. I was betting, he’d be passed out drunk within the hour at the rate he was guzzling the booze. That suited my purposes fine if he was too sloshed to make another crossing. I hope the old curmudgeon woke up with the mother of all hangovers.
Passed out drunk wasn’t the worst idea, I thought. No time for that though. It was time to go to work.
I took a right at the first dirt trail I came across. I figured at some point I would run across some ivy covered signs that would get me on US 51 headed east. Based on the limited intel I had, my lead on the competition was solid and I was over the river. Once I figured out exactly where I was, I’d crash for a few hours of much needed sleep. I took a deep breath and ran through the next steps in my mind. Running a harrowing gauntlet of bloodthirsty bandits and ravenous zombies was the easy part.
Road to Riches: Deadline: Book 1 (Zombie Road) Page 13
