The Buzzard Zone

by Kelly, Ronald

  When they pulled away, reluctantly, he studied her face. Melissa’s face positively glowed, but still couldn’t outshine her smile. “Well, I guess that answered my question.”

  Jem couldn’t help but smile himself. “Yeah, I reckon so.”

  Following supper, Enolia stood on the rear veranda that adjoined the mansion’s main entrance hall. She breathed in the crisp November air and ran her hands over her belly. She waited and smiled when the baby kicked.

  The woman closed her eyes. Her smile broadened. “Even with all that training, you can’t sneak up on me, Billy Tauchee.”

  She felt her husband’s arms encircle her and a low chuckle as he kissed her on the back of the neck. “If I’d had to reckon with you on all those missions, I would’ve never made it home.”

  Enolia’s good humor faded. “Please don’t joke about a thing like that.”

  “Sorry.” He laid his head on her shoulder and caressed the swell of her abdomen. “He’s going to be a big atsutsa.”

  “If he ever comes. It seems like I’ve been pregnant forever.”

  “He will come soon. Your grandmother said early December, did she not?”

  Sadness weighed heavily upon her heart. “Yes… and she was always right about such things.”

  They stood there for a while, enjoying each other without the presence of the others.

  “We should go over it again,” he whispered.

  “Billy,” she sighed, “there’s no need. I know it by heart. So does Jessie. The names, the addresses, the map coordinates, the code words. God forbid something should happen to you… but if it does, we will know what to do.”

  “Even so,” he insisted, “let’s do it one more time.”

  You said that the last time, she thought to herself, but didn’t say so.

  “Please…from the beginning of the list.”

  She nodded. “Kuruk Shanta, Mescalero Apache. Desert Route 12, Ruidoso, New Mexico. 33 degrees 19’54.2964” North… 105 degrees 40’22.9512” West. Code name: Stalking Bear.”

  “Next,” he urged softly.

  “Janice Biauswah, Chippewa. East Cedar Parkway, Red Lake, Minnesota…”

  Tension hung heavily in the darkness of their bedroom.

  Levi reached out for Nell’s shoulder. She shuddered beneath his touch.

  “What’s wrong, hon?” he asked softly.

  It took her a moment to reply. When she did, his stomach sank.

  “The dread is upon me, Levi.”

  He knew what that meant. It was something they had shared for a long time, since even before they were married. Nell’s intuitions, if the term could be put that lightly, were a part of her as much as flesh or blood or bone. When the moods hit her, they were one of two kinds. Joy or dread. When the joy was upon her it meant babies born and lovers wed, a financial wellspring or a good report from the doctor. But dread… dread carried a dark and cumbersome weight. Sickness, cancer, stillbirth, mountain wakes, and the planting of loved ones, six feet under.

  Levi recalled the last few episodes she had suffered. Nervously preparing for departure before the zombie attack on Hobbs Ridge, seeing Frank Gentry for the dangerous and unstable man that he was, as well as other instances.

  He lay behind her and held her tight. The trembling continued, unable to subside. “Why would you feel that way?” he asked. “We’re in a good place with good folks. We’ve got a dry roof over our heads, plenty to eat, and we haven’t seen a Biter in the two weeks we’ve been here. Seems like there would be a joy to such blessings.”

  Nell stiffened in his embrace. “You know I can’t control this. Can’t turn it on and off like water from a spigot.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said and felt her relax again.

  Silence filled the room for a while, then she spoke when she was ready. “Something’s gonna happen, Levi. I don’t know what or to whom, but it will. I want you and the boys to be extra careful when you’re out timbering or hunting for game.”

  “We always are. More so now than before the world went to hell.”

  She turned and nestled in his arms. He felt her head nod against his chest. “I know that, but things happen. A tree could fall upon you or you could cut yourself with a saw. You could get sick staying out in the cold all day. Get pneumonia or some such ailment. Even if there are no Biters within shouting distance, other dangers can befall a man. Things that can’t be predicted.”

  “Nell.” He held her tighter, attempting to quell her fears. “Sweetheart, you can’t be thinking of such. It’ll gnaw you down to the raw nerve with worry.”

  “It can’t be helped,” she said in resignation. “The dread will have its way.”

  “I promise we’ll be careful,” he whispered in her ear. “We’re safe here. The Lord led us here for a reason, now didn’t He?”

  Nell laughed. It was a flat, humorless, contemptuous sound. “The Lord is full of surprises these days. His way was once straight and narrow… undeniable. But now… now there’s no certain way about it. His punishments seem to outweigh His blessings tenfold.”

  Again, Levi felt hurt by her flagging faith. He had thought she had made amends with the Almighty after her time at the church in Woodrow, but now he wasn’t so sure. “You mustn’t think that way, Nell. Please… for the children. For me.”

  The woman shuddered again, as if deathly cold.

  “The dread will have its way,” was all she would say and said nothing more the remainder of that night.

  Chapter 27

  “The last rose of the year.”

  The words held a finality in her ears that disturbed her. She had seen too much finality in the world since the height of summer. Now that fall was in full swing and winter approached, death—both natural and unnatural—manifested itself daily. She supposed it was wearing her down spiritually, seeing mortality revealed and realized so plentifully.

  Nell knelt in the vast rose garden in front of the conservatory, clippers in hand. She gripped the stem and snipped it cleanly, eighteen inches from the bloom. She had always loved flowers, particularly fresh-cut ones. She had enjoyed displaying them… in a vase on the kitchen table, on the pillows of her husband and children, on the graves of those she had cherished and loved.

  It was a sobering thought, that these would be the last blooms of the season. She placed the hybrid rose, peach-colored with hints of pink along the rims of the petals, into a basket with the other surviving beauties. Nell looked around her. Some greenery remained, but there was mostly the shriveled brown of death, as well as the stark gray and muted red brick of the walls and arbors that surrounded it. She hoped that the following spring would bring renewal, an abundance of color as rampant and vibrant as the photos she had seen magazines and on television. But she could only hope. Things of years and decades past were no longer etched in stone as they once had been. If the destructive black bugs could inhabit human beings and animals, what was there to say that they wouldn’t conquer nature next? The trees, the grass, even the flowers that she loved so much… all could lose their beauty and luster as the parasites infested their leaves, stems, and pedals, turning them into dark things of contempt and avoidance.

  The sound of hammering echoed from the direction of the main house. Levi had chosen to do repairs around the place that morning, instead of venturing into the woods to cut timber or hunt. She supposed that he had done so to appease her fears. It did, knowing that they were near, within sight and earshot.

  Nell felt ashamed of the way she had acted the night before. She knew it had upset her husband, carrying on that way. In broad daylight, in the garden, she felt foolish. The sun was out, burning away the chill of dawn and she experienced none of the awful dread that had gripped her hours before. Working with the flowers, harvesting their beauty, always lifted her spirits.

  She closed her eyes and raised her face toward the sun. She felt its warmth upon her cheeks and its brightness bathed her eyelids. “Lord, I do trust in you,” she whispered. “I weary of cursing
you, so I’ll praise you and your blessings instead.” She stood up and retrieved her basket, brimming with the last remaining roses of the past summer. “Just find a little patience and grace for a sinner like ol’ Nell.”

  She was turning back toward the main house, when she heard a shuffling sound behind her. Nell glanced over her shoulder. She was startled to see a Biter—a shaggy teenaged boy wearing a black Anthrax t-shirt and plaid pajama pants—stumbling along the walkway in front of the conservatory. He must have wandered through one of the arched doorways in the western garden wall.

  The dread threatened to overcome her again, but she managed to stifle it. You’re faster than he is. Just head up to the house and have Levi and the boys come back down here to take care of the poor thing, bless his heart.

  She quickened her pace and headed toward an archway at the northern wall. Beyond, she could see the cobbled pathway that lead past a columned palisade and curved up the hillside to the manor house. As she reached the doorway, she looked back toward the conservatory. The boy had spotted her. He limped in her direction, dragging his useless right foot behind him. His hands stretched outward, showing ragged tissue and partially denuded bone. His face was black with activity. Parasites swarmed from every orifice in his head—mouth, nostrils, the channels of his ears.

  The dread was upon her full-force now. Leave me alone, she thought. I can see the thing. She reached inside the pocket of her denim jacket and drew the Colt Python. Stepping backward through the entranceway, she lifted the revolver and cocked the hammer. She centered the sights just above the bridge of the Biter’s nose.

  And was totally unaware of the two that were on either side of her.

  Nell gasped as teeth bit into the back of her neck. They sank deep, tearing away a mouthful of flesh and grating against the bone of the vertebrae underneath as they pulled away. She screamed shrilly as she dropped to her knees. Blood jetted hotly down her back, soaking her jacket and the flannel shirt underneath.

  “Oh God!” she groaned as the second Biter attacked, grabbing her left arm and tearing away most of her tricep muscle… clothing, meat, and all. “Have mercy, Lord!”

  She attempted to regain her feet to flee, but the two refused to let go. With all her strength, she turned back toward the rose garden. Nell moaned in despair as the teenager finally reached her. His weight, along with that of the others, bore her to the ground. The boy in the heavy-metal shirt burrowed into her chest like a bore hog rooting in mud. The material of her shirt and bra gave away. His teeth latched onto her left breast. With a triumphant lunge backward, he tore the sack from its moorings. For a moment, the appendage stared back at her like some pale, blood-streaked eye. Then it was devoured before her eyes.

  She screamed again, but this time her lungs couldn’t seem to muster the wind to accomplish much. A low, rasping wail lifted into the autumn air, brimming with frustration and defeat. Her thoughts flashed to more pleasant things—Levi, her children, the safety of the big house a hundred yards away. She thought of the notion of working the garden that morning and how it had been a good thing… and not the nightmare that it had ended up to be.

  Nell looked down at her right hand and realized that she still held the .357 in her grasp. She lifted it and pulled the trigger. The hollow-point slug punched through the teenager’s upper forehead. A dark explosion of blood, brains, and bugs fanned against the North Carolina sky, then settled on the walkway behind him. The Biter dropped the mammary in his hands and folded into a motionless heap on the flagstones.

  The biggest Biter of the bunch—a good six-foot-two and nearly three hundred pounds in weight—took her extended arm as an invitation. He bit down on her lean wrist, shattering the fragile bones beneath the skin. Her hand dangled by a ligament for a moment, then tore away and landed on the pathway beneath her. The tendons jerked spasmodically, firing the Magnum a couple of times before growing still.

  Abruptly, motion erupted around her. She turned her head stiffly and saw Avery loping down the hillside, screaming wildly. He swung a broad axe at the overweight zombie. The edge cleaved cleanly through his fat neck, sending his bald head spinning away. It struck the garden wall and bounced off the mortared stones with a sickening crunch.

  “Mind your temper,” she muttered and fell to her back. Her thoughts seemed fuzzy and disjointed.

  Levi followed directly behind his son. With a yell that was both primal and grievous, he gripped a hammer in both hands and brought it down upon the crown of the last zombie’s head. The decay-weakened state of the Biter’s skull caused the clawed head to sink in deeply. Levi let go as a gorge of gore and insects surged up the hardwood handle. He stepped back and Michelle stepped in. She jacked the pump of her ten-gauge in rapid succession, firing blast after blast of double-aught buckshot at the zombie, driving it backward. The momentum of the shotgun blasts plastered what was left of the thing against the garden wall. It clung there for a long moment and then slid, piece by piece, to a jumbled heap in the grass.

  As they tossed their weapons aside and approached her, Nell lifted her only good hand and spoke in the loudest voice she could muster. “Don’t you dare come near me!” she croaked. “I’m full of that nasty vermin! Stay away from me!”

  “She’s right,” Avery declared. Tears streamed down the young man’s face. “They’re all over her!”

  Levi looked around and spotted a garden shed. “Avery, check and see if there’s a tarp in there. If there is, fetch it.”

  As the boy headed for the outbuilding, Kate and Jim arrived. Kate carried a large tackle box, a makeshift medical case that she and Glenda Newman had put together before they had left Henderson. “Oh, God!” Kate moaned. “She’s… she’s…”

  “Don’t carry on so, Katydid,” Nell told her, calling her by a name she hadn’t used since the girl was three years old. “I’m just dying, is all.”

  “No, you ain’t!” Levi said loudly. He took a deep breath and knelt next to his wife. “You just hush up, old woman, and relax. Kate’ll fix you up.” He looked up at his daughter. “Won’t you?”

  Kate could do nothing but shake her head. “I… I can’t, Papa. They did too much damage. She’s…”

  “All in pieces.” Blood teeming with parasites spurted from her nose and mouth as she giggled. “You can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again when she falls off the garden wall, you know.”

  “She’s delirious!” Avery sobbed, dragging a large black tarpaulin behind him.

  “I’m as sound of mind as you, Avery Hobbs!” his mother reprimanded. “And stop that sniveling! All of you! Do you think I want to go to my reward with your squalling faces the last thing I see?”

  As Levi and Avery started toward her with the tarp, she shook her head. “I told you not to come near me.”

  “Ma, we’ve got to do this to get you up to the house,” Avery told her.

  “I ain’t going in the house.”

  “Of all the stubborn…!” Levi muttered beneath his breath. “And why not?”

  “Cause all I’ll do is bleed all over the floor,” she explained, as if to a small child. “It’ll soak into those fine Persian carpets, seep into the cracks between the floorboards, and a generous helping of those bugs will go with it. The entire ground floor will be contaminated and, as those things breed and multiply, the whole house will follow.”

  Kate looked at her father. “She’s right, Papa. We can’t take her inside.”

  Frustration blazed in Levi’s eyes. “Where then?”

  “Beneath that big ol’ spreading chestnut tree down behind the house,” Nell told him.

  “How come?”

  “Because that’s where I want to be buried.”

  A sad silence engulfed the group. Any hope of saving her, of setting things right, was settled now. “We’ve still got to wrap you to take you down there,” Jem told her.

  Nell considered it for a moment and nodded. Levi and his sons moved in carefully and went to work. They positioned the tarp over her bod
y and began to gently roll her in the weatherproof canvas, careful not to get any parasite-infested blood on their skin or clothes. Soon she was wrapped up, as if in a cocoon.

  Silently, Levi and the boys lifted her and began to carry her back up the walkway toward the veranda outside the mansion’s south wing. There they would be able to take concrete stairs to the expanse of the back lawn.

  “Hold up for a second,” Nell told them. Her face was as pale as baking flour and her eyes were slightly glazed, as if having difficulty focusing. “Michelle?”

  The girl stepped up to her. She wanted to reach out and touch the woman, offer her comfort, but knew that was impossible. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I want to ask a favor of you. Something I think you can do for me, being that you’re not kin and all.” She looked up dully at her family. “Something that would be too hard for them.”

  “Anything, Mrs. Hobbs. Just ask.”

  “My right hand is lying over yonder on the path. Could you fetch my wedding band and bring it to Levi when you’re done? I’ve never had it off my finger once in the thirty-five years we were married, so it’s liable to hang on tight.”

  Michelle glanced over and saw the woman’s hand, pale and motionless, still holding the Python Magnum. She felt bile rise into her throat, but choked it back down just as quickly. “Yes, ma’am, I will.” She looked over at Avery, half expecting to see a snickering grin on his face. Instead, he looked horrified.

  “We better hurry, Papa,” Kate said grimly. Her eyes were red from crying and her freckles stood out starkly against her pale skin. “There’s not much time.”

  Michelle watched as they carried the tarp-wrapped body of Nell up the hillside. Before they reached the top, Avery looked back at her and mouthed Thank you!

  You betcha, she thought. Most of the time, the boy from Tennessee was as irritating as turpentine on a bare-assed cat, but at the moment her heart ached for him.

  She walked over and eyed the severed hand for a long moment. Her stomach rolled. The things you get yourself into, Chelle. Kneeling, she careful pried the revolver from the hand’s stiffening fingers. As she stuck the gun in her coat pocket, the hand flexed and jerked, causing her to cry out. Did you just squeal like a sissy-ass little girl? She was thankful that Avery hadn’t been there to witness it.