by Brian Keene
"I love you Jason."
Jason pulled the gun away and leaned forward, kissing the indentation the barrel had made.
"I love you too, Pop."
He put the shotgun back in place and wrapped his finger around the trigger. His tears were gone now.
Delmas closed his eyes.
The roar of the gunshot ripped through the house, silencing the songs of the whippoorwill and the crickets. Martin jumped, then continued to pray, more fervently now. Jim stopped pacing and walked toward the door.
"No," Martin stopped him. "Let's give him a moment."
Jim nodded and then a second blast tore through the night.
They ran for the room and Jim knew what they would find before the door was even opened.
Martin gasped. "Oh my Lord! Jim, don't go in there!"
The room stank of cordite and wisps of smoke still floated in the air.
Delmas' body lay slumped in the bed, the top of his head running down the wallpaper behind him. Jason was sprawled on the floor, fingers still clutching the shotgun tightly. A pool of blood spread out behind him.
Jim crossed the room and knelt by the body, removing the weapon from Jason's lifeless grasp.
"No nono no no!" He repeated the word over and over, like a mantra.
Then he turned it into one long and mournful wail. Martin was reminded of fiction, when writers expressed that sound with Noooooooooooo. He'd never heard a human utter it before now.
"Jim, maybe we should-"
Jim turned his face to the ceiling and screamed.
"Dannyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!"
Outside, the whippoorwill began to sing again.
"Slow down!" Frankie shouted. Her arm dangled out the car window. "You wrap us around the guardrail and we're going to have a hard time finding an ambulance!"
"If this were Texas," Eddie drawled, "we'd have wide open spaces to drive through." He revved the car and the speedometer crept past ninety as he snaked around the twisted wrecks littering the highway,
"If this were Texas," Frankie replied, "then I'd already be in hell."
"You don't like Texas?"
"Never been there and I don't plan to go now. Isn't it all cowboys and cattle?"
"Awww, shit no, honey. We've got cities that'd make Baltimore seem tiny by comparison. We've got nightlife like you wouldn't believe! Best country music outside of Nashville. Well, at least before all this."
"Country music? Gag."
"What's wrong with country music?"
"It's nothing but redneck noise." She turned back to the road and shouted "Watch out!"
A tanker truck lay on its side in the middle of the highway, blocking all three lanes. Cursing, Eddie swerved into the breakdown lane and the Nissan bumped and lurched over the grass-covered embankment. The wheels spun, threatening to drop them down into a culvert. Then they found traction and Eddie struggled to weave around the truck and back onto the highway.
"That was close," he muttered. He tipped his cowboy hat backward, wiping his brow with a meaty palm. "Sorry about that."
"That's alright," Frankie said sweetly. "NOW SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!"
"Punch buggy red!" John of Many Colors shouted from the backseat as they passed a wrecked Volkswagen. He playfully tagged Frankie's shoulder.
"I don't know why we had to bring that fuckstick along," Eddie sulked.
"Anybody with a lick of sense can tell he ain't right in the head."
"We brought him along because he's alive," Frankie explained again, her patience with the burly Texan wearing thin. "And if he's alive, he deserves a chance to stay that way. The only way we're going to make it is if we start banding together."
"Well, just don't you go forgetting your promise," Eddie warned her. "I help the two of you get out of the city, and I get to sleep with you tonight."
"A promise is a promise." She turned away.
His sweaty hand left the steering wheel and began to paw at her breast.
Frankie's nipple stiffened; not in arousal, but in revulsion.
Professional detachment took over. Here was skill; the one thing she was good at. While Eddie grinned, mistakenly believing she was turned on by his crude attentions, Frankie was working. She did what she'd always done with her Johns; left her body and let her mind go someplace else.
Before the rising started, that place had been a daydream of the oblivion that her next fix would bring.
Now, she thought about her baby.
What kind of mother would she have been, she wondered, had she never gotten hooked on junk and finished college and ended up married? Would she have been a good one?
She liked to think so.
"Lookie there," Eddie pointed through the windshield. "Possum burger."
A fat possum, its hind end crushed by a previous vehicle, crawled with excruciating slowness across the highway. Frankie idly wondered if it had died before it had been run over or after it had been run over.
Eddie headed directly for it, and there was a sickening thump as the tires passed over its front half. The car bumped and then continued on.
"Ten points!" Eddie yelled happily, and went back to roughly kneading her thigh.
"Gray," John of Many Colors played along. "That possum was gray!"
Eddie laughed. "It's red now!"
John of Many Colors whipped around in his seat, staring out the back window to confirm Eddie's declaration.
"Gray and black."
Frankie closed her eyes. A headache was forming in her temples and the air inside the car, even with the windows down, was hot and oppressively humid. John of Many Colors stank of feet and unwashed armpits, and Eddie reeked of cheap after-shave (he'd pulled a bottle from the glove compartment and splashed it on immediately after picking them up).
She wondered if despair and futility had a smell, and if so, did the car reek of those as well?
After Troll's sacrifice and her escape from the sewers, the first living human Frankie encountered was James. In his previous life, he'd been a photographer for the Baltimore Sun, and he still carried his camera slung around his neck.
Frankie had found herself pursued by several zombies, and it had been James who gunned them down, picking them off one by one from the rooftop of a crumbling tenement building.
She expected him to want sex as payment for saving her life, and was pleasantly surprised when he made no overtures in that direction. Instead, he proposed that they escape the city together, since there was safety in numbers. She'd readily agreed and they skirted their way around the harbor.
Arriving at the National Aquarium, they encountered John of Many Colors, and Frankie had been overjoyed. The homeless man was somebody she recognized from before the dead started rising. He'd long been a source of hilarity among all of Baltimore's street people. Think your life couldn't get any worse, sucking ten dicks a night for enough money to score, only to sleep in an abandoned warehouse and do it all over again the next day? It could be worse. You could be John of Many Colors.
Rumor had it that once upon a time, he'd been an actor; summer stock mostly, and had enjoyed more than his fair share of cocaine. When the addiction delivered its inevitable blizzard, he had been starring in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He ended up on the street; broke, snowblind, and with only the coat as the last remaining vestige of his previous life.
John of Many Colors spent his days panhandling for money in front of Baltimore's WorldTradeCenter, and shouting out to passersby what seemed to be the complete inventory of every color Crayola included in their crayon box.
Finding him alive, a recognizable link to the old world, filled Frankie with hope.
Frankie and James made an effort to convince him to come with them, but if the unstable vagrant understood, he gave no indication. Still, when they finally began walking away, he'd trotted after them like a faithful pet dog.
They came across a pawnshop that had somehow miraculously avoided being looted, and spent an hour arming the
mselves. Several blocks later, they came across a grocery store and completed outfitting themselves. The produce, meat, dairy and frozen goods aisles reeked of rot and putrefaction, but the canned and dry goods were still safe. They loaded up their backpacks, avoiding any cans without a label or dented or rusty.
Then, they slowly made their way out of the city, cautiously ducking and running across the industrial outskirts, until they'd reached Interstate 83.
That was where they'd lost James.
Insisting on finding them a car, he convinced Frankie that they should search a nearby parking garage. They'd entered the dark, six-story building, and a zombie hiding behind a pylon on Level Two attacked him with an axe and tore his still beating heart from his chest before he'd even managed to switch the safety off his pistol.
Frankie shot the zombie, and after closing James' eyes with her fingertips, put a bullet in his head as well. She added his weapons to her own, and transferred as much of his share of the food as she could carry to her backpack. Then she'd spent ten minutes tracking down John of Many Colors, finally finding him cowering in the back of a dark blue pickup truck ("Blue," he'd kept repeating. "This truck is blue.") before continuing on.
The zombie in the parking garage had apparently had friends. Attracted by the shots, hordes of undead humans, dogs, rats and others spilled from the surrounding factories and abandoned lots. More rushed out from the strip of trees beneath the overpass. Frankie shot as many as she could, and John of Many Colors contented himself to screaming out the various colors of their rotting garments as they fell around them, when a black Nissan sports car screeched up beside them.
"Ya'll need a lift?" a man called from the partially open window.
Frankie squeezed off another shot, dropping an elderly zombie whose false teeth looked garish and sinister in her twisted mouth, then gave the car a backward glance.
The driver was a big man: thick chested, heavily muscled arms with a tattoo on his left bicep that said Feo Amante. He wore a black cowboy hat and mirrored sunglasses, below which a thick mustache drooped like a hairy caterpillar.
"Yeah, we could use some help," she'd calmly replied, and took aim at another creature.
"Cost you a blow job now," the driver casually informed her, "and you've got to let me fuck you later on." He was a southerner by the sound of his accent.
"No deal," she bartered, and emptied her clip at a row of advancing zombies. John of Many Colors was clawing at the Nissan's back door, whimpering with fright.
"Suit yourself, brown sugar." The cowboy rolled up the window, and the car began to slowly pull away.
"Wait!" Frankie shouted, hating herself for it.
The car stopped and the window came back down.
"Yes?"
"How about a blow job and that's it?"
"No deal."
Frankie's clip was empty and the zombies were forming a semi-circle.
"Alright, I'll fuck you later." She started towards the car.
"Promise?" he asked.
She yanked the door handle but it was locked.
"Yes!" she hollered in frustration. She could smell them behind her now, hear their rasping curses and profane assurances of what they would to do to her. "I promise! Now open the fucking door!"
There was the telltale snick of the locks disengaging and then she and John of Many Colors jumped inside the car. Frankie slammed the door shut, locking it.
The cowboy floored it and the car squealed away just as the zombies began to pound on her window.
And that was how they'd met Eddie. As they drew farther away from the city and into the Maryland suburbs, the number of wrecked vehicles decreased. Eddie contented himself by driving with one hand on the wheel and shooting out the window at the occasional zombie with the other.
They passed by a strip mall, and a deceased biker on a massive touring bike roared up the entrance ramp after them. Eddie let it pull alongside and then swerved into the lane. There was a horrible screech of metal as the car lurched sideways. Then both the zombie and the bike lay scattered across the lanes.
Eddie's laughter grated on her nerves.
"Asshole," Frankie muttered beneath her breath.
"What's that, bitch?" He gave her nipple a hard pinch and Frankie dug her ragged nails into her side to keep from giving him the satisfaction of hearing her scream.
"You shouldn't be doing shit like that," she told him. "We could have wrecked."
"You're getting awfully mouthy, brown sugar. I'm starting to think you're mighty ungrateful."
Frankie backpedaled quickly. The last thing she needed was for the Texan to put them out along the side of the road with so many of the undead lurking about.
"I'm sorry," she said sweetly and massaged the crotch of his dirty jeans. She fingered the growing bulge playfully, then licked her index finger and traced the tattoo on his arm.
"What's that mean-'Feo Amante'?"
"It means 'ugly lover'. My ex-wife gave me that nickname."
Frankie felt the laughter bubbling over but it was too late to stop it.
She leaned back in her seat, giggling uncontrollably and holding her stomach.
Eddie's face grew red, then scarlet, and then purple as thunderclouds of anger flashed in his eyes. He slammed the brakes hard and the car slid to a screeching halt. Frankie flung out a hand to keep from hitting the dashboard and John of Many Colors collided with the back of Eddie's seat.
With a sudden movement, Eddie grabbed her by the throat and shoved the pistol under her nose.
"Bitch, I've had enough of your mouth. I'm gonna put it to good use right now. Start sucking."
"Fuck off and die, you needle-dick mother fucker."
Eddie went pale with rage. His mouth became a cruel, thin line.
"What did you say?"
"You heard me, needle-dick. Go fuck a zombie because that's the only way you're gonna get any pussy. You ain't touching me."
"You just signed your death warrant, you cunt!"
In the backseat, John of Many Colors began to whine.
"Red. Too much red in the car. Red."
Eddie pulled the trigger.
"You're empty, asshole," Frankie told him as his eyes grew wide. "I counted your shots."
She brought her hand, the hand clutching the pistol, up from under the seat and blew his brains through the back of his cowboy hat.
John of Many Colors giggled.
"You liked that, huh?"
"Red," he told her. "Red and pink and gray."
"You know, you could have helped me a little more."
She glanced out the windows quickly, making sure there were no zombies in their immediate vicinity. She didn't see any but she knew they'd be coming within minutes. There was no disguising the gunshot. Quickly, she reached around Eddie's still twitching corpse and opened the door.
Grunting, she shoved him out onto the road. Using napkins from the glove compartment, she wiped the blood and skull fragments from the upholstery, and slid behind the wheel. She dropped the car into drive and they sped away, as the first of the undead scavengers loped onto the highway toward them.
She checked the rearview mirror in time to see them swarming around Eddie's remains.
"Too bad he wasn't alive for that, huh John?"
"Too bad," John of Many Colors agreed. Then he pointed excitedly at a green Volkswagen laying on its side and punched her playfully in the shoulder.
"Green punch buggy!"
Frankie laughed, then realized she was shaking.
I just killed a man, she thought. Good. It's a good start.
They flashed by a sign that said PENNSYLVANIA 32 MILES.
"It's a good start," she repeated aloud.
"What a pissant little town," Miccelli grumbled. "Ain't nothing here except that water tower, some houses, and a gas station. And it's all built on a fucking hill!"
"That's why the Colonel wants us to scout it, genius," Kramer sneered.
"Easy to clear, easier to guard
and control. Say hello to your new home."
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," Miller warned them. "Tell Partridge to stop."
Skip radioed the command back to Partridge, who was driving the white cargo van behind them. They slowed to a stop at the top of the hill. The town lay spread out in the valley below them, and Skip noticed that Miccelli was right. If you were driving by on the nearby highway, you'd never even notice the town. There were two roads; the one they were on and another that ran north to south. Both intersected in the town square. There was a small cluster of homes, a gas station and convenience store, a church with a cemetery behind it, and a water tower. The outskirts were mostly cornfields. Far off to the north, beyond the corn, the interstate wound its way through the countryside.