Colette, I’m sorry, he thought helplessly.
“There it goes!” cried one of the men in the front. Xan peeked through the panel. Guards were hustling by, all of them with guns over their shoulders, and a metal grating came from the bridge. It trembled and started to lower.
“Viet-nom-nom-nom. Here we go to Viet-nom-nom-nom.”
“Goddamn, that one is a fucking crazy apple,” Buddy muttered.
“Craziest apple we’ve had in months,” Zeke agreed.
“A nurse told me they weren’t going to be sorry to see the backside of him. He had a stroke or something. No, that was someone else. This one has been causing trouble for ages, whatever he’s got wrong.”
The sky was turning gray, and the stars had winked out of sight. More of the grayness became visible as the bridge came down. Little could be seen on the far side of the moat: the other half of the lowering bridge blocked Xan’s view. He didn’t know the name of the city out there where they were going to be dumped. It couldn’t be seen from Newgreen when he had worked up here in the building of the moat. In his split second breaks, his skin burning from the sun and his body aching from moving thousands of shovelfuls of dirt, he’d seen only fields and pastures. A few buildings had been visible at the top of the hill far away. The rest of the city was on the other side.
The bridge sank down. He could see the water, darkly rippling under the lights. Guards climbed onto the wall, guns pointed out to hell, and a few were riding the bridge. They clung like monkeys to the metal railings, shouting, “Clear?” “All clear!” “Clear?” “Shoot! Shoot!” A gun fired.
“Always one,” Buddy said. “That’s got to be the one that Captain Taylor was talking about yesterday.”
“Didn’t hear about that,” Zeke said. “Why didn’t I hear about that?”
“You were in the shitter. That zombie’s been walking around the north side for two days straight without hitting a single land mine. Too stupid to know what the X’s mean but lucky as hell! Misses those X’s by inches.”
“Zombies know where the meat is,” Zeke said. “Just can’t get to it.”
“We’ll have to scoot-and-skedaddle. The sound of the blast will draw them out of the hills real quick, and the blood.”
“Why do you always got to tell me my job? I know what they do. They’ll come sniffing around and walk away ’cause his blood is all dirty from those bugs. I can get us to Gellen in ten minutes flat. Maybe less. I’ll shove out four or five corpses and you give them a hack. Nice clean blood will make them happy campers.”
“I’ll shove them out. You hack them. I did it last time.”
If they were busy doing that, distracted from the living occupants in the back of the truck, Xan might have a chance. He’d ditch these two out there and haul ass back to Newgreen. Get inside the moat and go home.
The halves of the bridge connected in the middle with a sharp metal chunk. The cross-arm went up. A guard waved to Zeke, who returned it and turned the key in the ignition. Then he flipped off the music and Buddy didn’t argue. He only gripped his gun and fell silent, his eyes watchful on the land beyond the bridge.
Zeke pressed on the gas. The truck lurched forward.
Chapter Four
In seconds, the bridge was behind them. Xan looked around hell wildly, but he had a poor view through the broken panel. The road cut through scraggly grass. There was no one and nothing out there to see, so he turned to consider his fellow captives. Zeke and Buddy were well outnumbered, but they had guns. The crazy man, the sleeping woman, and the dying girl didn’t much count in Xan’s favor, and the murderers were shackled together, as well as the thief to himself.
The truck jounced in a pothole, Buddy yelling to Zeke to watch it or they were going to pop a tire. The girl slumped over onto her side with a moan. Xan went over and propped her back up in the corner. The jouncing happened again and Xan caught her just before she hit the floor.
She was awake now, fully awake, but she didn’t have much control of her body. Her eyes were wide with fright and her mouth worked dryly. Xan was frightening her. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m . . .” His name wasn’t Santa Claus, Mom or Dad or anything inherently trustworthy to her. “I’m a junior high school English teacher. Mr. Spencer. I got knocked on the head. That’s why I’m bleeding. What’s your name?”
Her voice was very little. “Selena. Where . . .” Her eyes skimmed around the truck, and then her fear quadrupled. “I wasn’t . . . she said I wouldn’t wake up. She said I wouldn’t wake up!”
“Who said?”
“The nurse!” She wrenched her body back and forth, trying to get the sheet off her chest. Xan pulled it down to her lap, where her hands flopped like beached fish to pat it in place. All she had on was a thin hospital gown. The ties at the front were undone, exposing her, and she tried to do them up. “I . . . I can’t . . .”
“Do you want me to tie them?”
“Yes. Yes, please. I can’t get hold of them.”
He’d expected some teen girl attitude, wariness or a testy question if he was a pervert, but she was only polite and desperate. He tied the laces and she touched them clumsily with her bony fingers to make sure they were well secured. The cancer was making a feast of her flesh. She didn’t look like she weighed any more than Katie had at age eight. The other woman was still sleeping deeply on the floor. She was on the heavy side, and the hospital had apparently done a better job in estimating how much it would take to keep her out. Not so much with this scrap of a girl.
The truck bounced and swerved. “Goddammit, Zeke, you drive like a crazy person!”
“Shut up and keep watch.”
“I wasn’t supposed to wake up,” Selena whispered, a sheen of tears in her eyes. “Oh God . . . are we . . . out there?”
“Yes,” Xan said as the truck lurched and tossed her. He sat down at her side to pin her into the corner. Tears slipped down her cheeks.
There wasn’t time to make friends here and set up a plan. He’d jump out as the guys pulled out the bodies, grab a gun from one of them, shoot them and race for the cab. Until then, all he could do was wait. There wasn’t anything to arm himself with in here, unless he could fashion something in just a few minutes out of plastic sheets and the belts hanging off the walls. He couldn’t reach the metal grate along the ceiling, which was far too large to use for a weapon anyway.
“I can’t run,” Selena whispered in terror. “I’m slow even when I walk. They’re just going to . . . they’re just going to fall on me.” She rubbed at a bloody spot on her arm where an IV had recently been.
Prickle.
Xan swallowed hard on an excess of saliva. This wasn’t his world any longer. That was Newgreen, and he was getting farther and farther away from it every second. Again he canvassed the back for weaponry. Then it occurred to him that if he pretended to help with moving a body down, one of the big ones, he could distract them for a moment. They couldn’t hold onto their guns when they were wrestling with the body of a grown man. That would be Xan’s chance.
Wiping awkwardly at her face, Selena said, “She said . . . it wasn’t going to hurt. I wasn’t going to know what was going on. I’d be in a coma or dead by the time . . . it happened. I’d just fall asleep in the hospital and wake up in heaven. She said that I would get enough . . . to make me sleep. Why did she say that if it wasn’t true?”
“I don’t know,” Xan said as Buddy banged on something and shouted that he had one coming up at three o’clock. A window rolled down and Zeke yelled at him to roll it up since he could drive past the zombie. An argument ensued, Zeke threatening a child lock and Buddy exploding in curses. Selena cast the panel a look of terror.
“Like a rollie-coaster,” the old man announced. “We’re on a rollie-coaster. You like rollie-coasters? Hands and feet in at all times! Hands and feet in at all times!”
“I was saving that jewelry for the Night Ladies to drive through,” said a shackled murderer to his companion as the old man shoute
d. “Now I’ll never get to spend it ’cause you got us so drunk.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t make me feel bad about you and your whores!” exclaimed the other one.
“What school did you go to?” Xan asked to drown them out.
Selena didn’t answer. Then her fingers twitched and she said, “Before? Miller Intermediate. But I only went there for a little while. I got sick and did homebound after that. I missed going to school. I thought I’d be going back, but then . . .” Then Olyvyr Gravine. A thin tear slipped down her cheek as the truck picked up speed. “I want my mom.”
It was quiet, the truck moving beneath them. The old man had spaced out and the murderers were glaring vituperatively but quietly at each other.
“Oh, shit! Skip Gellen, you see them all up there?” Buddy hollered. “Take a right, take a right!” The truck slowed, swerved, and sped up. The walls in the back shuddered. Everyone flew up and down, the truck having gone over a fallen tree or a body. From Buddy’s cheer, Xan guessed it was a body. The corpses in the back were sliding all around, the plastic crinkling and rustling.
“They’ll eat us up,” Selena said in horror, and that memory of his jerking neck, the meat tearing free, came to Xan’s mind and squatted there. Please, man, please . . .
He and Colette had gotten to the elementary school to find it in pandemonium. Kids from kindergarten to sixth grade were running everywhere, screaming their heads off, teachers were shouting and trying to corral them and there were those people in the mix. Grabbing kids, biting them, dropping them, grabbing more . . . and those screaming, bitten kids stopped screaming and began to do the same . . .
Xan’s last memories were of running into the bedlam, searching for his daughter as Colette screamed, “She went to school in her red sweater, Xan! And she had me put her hair up in pigtails!” His eyes fastened to every spot of red, every flying pigtail in the crowds, and God almighty, he saw her. She was running around the music building with a group of children from her grade, her mouth open in a scream. One of them was chasing after the group, his hand sweeping out and jerking away the boy at Katie’s side.
“Katie!” Xan shouted, bolting for her as the boy thrashed and shrieked in the man’s arms. “Katie, Katie, Katie!”
His voice boomed through the mess, through every shriek and scream and cry, and Katie’s head turned. Her eyes widened, because when Daddy was there everything was okay in her world, and everything was not okay at the moment but Daddy was going to make it okay like always . . . She leaped off the sidewalk and charged through the grass, wailing, “Daddy! Daddy, help!”
He would catch her up into his arms. He would spin around and race back to Colette. Then they would quit the school.
Jump in the car.
Lock the doors.
Hit the gas.
Drive the fuck away!
A teacher staggered into him, a sobbing child in her arms. Xan stumbled but pressed on. “KATIE!” She wasn’t the fastest runner, but adrenaline had changed her into a gazelle. Her legs were eating up the grass as he flashed over the white hopscotch and foursquare grids painted on the cement. His baby, his baby, his baby . . .
Thirty feet.
Twenty feet.
A girl sprawled, pulling down two boys with her and all of them in front of Xan, and he stopped short to not trip over them. Then someone grabbed him.
DADDY!
Gone.
He had changed but come back to himself. She had changed forever. The truck bounced and shuddered and shifted beneath him as he wondered where she had gone from the elementary school. He had wept every time a load of survivors was brought in during those early days and she wasn’t among the children. He had wept every time a new list of survivors came from the settlements and her name didn’t appear on it. It killed him to think that she was cold at night, even though so many of her brain connections had been severed that she wouldn’t feel it if she was.
“Wanna get it on?” The murderer who hadn’t gotten a prostitute was facing the nurse. “Last time to ride the pole.”
“Shut up and die,” the nurse said wearily.
The man turned to Selena. “You? No one wants to die a virgin.”
“Don’t be sick,” Xan snapped as the girl shrank into the corner. The man just laughed.
“Please talk to me,” Selena whispered. “So they don’t.”
The old man came back to himself. “Viet-NOM-NOM-NOM!”
“Shut the fuck up!” the young man screamed at him.
Talk. Xan struggled for something to talk about. “Favorite subject?”
“I . . . I liked Latin,” Selena said.
That surprised him. Holding them steady as the truck bounced, he said, “Your school taught Latin? Most don’t.”
“They only taught one year. You could take it as an elective. It . . . it was interesting. Because everything we read . . . it was written by someone long dead, and in dead words that no one can . . . understand anymore.” Talking made her out of breath. “Languages die just like people. And . . . my teacher was good. She’d take an English word at the start of each class . . . break it down to show us . . . how a part of it came from Latin. So Latin died . . . but it kind of has this second life in English.”
Like zombies, Xan thought.
“So I liked that. And I liked history.” Her eyes slid to the murderer nervously. His hand was at the crotch of his pants. The guy intended to masturbate in front of everybody. But then he raised his hand, a silver foil piece falling away, and pushed a stick of gum into his mouth.
“It’ll give me good breath,” he said lewdly to the nurse. “What’s your name?” She didn’t even look at him, let alone answer.
“Tell me about history,” Xan encouraged the girl. “Who was your teacher?”
“Mr. Patel.”
“Did you like him?”
Her eyes slid from the murderer to Xan. “Yeah. He didn’t just talk on . . . and on about what adults were doing way back when.”
“What did he talk about instead?”
“He’d give lectures about what it was like . . . to be a kid in those times. How boys and girls did such different things, how rich kids did such totally different things . . . from poor kids. You could be four years old and going to work all day long in a factory. He had us write down a regular day in our lives . . . and then he’d hand out a regular day in their lives. They were nothing alike. I remember his class . . . really well.”
“Worst subject?”
A ghost of a smile settled over her skull-like features. “P.E.”
“Don’t tell my girlfriend. That’s what she taught.”
“I was always the slowest at everything . . . me and my friend Astor. And I didn’t like English so much.” She remembered what he taught. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. Nobody likes every subject. Why didn’t you like it?”
“A rollie-coaster through Viet-nom,” the old man said as the truck turned. “Keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times.”
“Mrs. Velcher was really boring,” Selena said. “We called her Mrs. Belcher behind her back. We’d just read story after story in the textbook . . . she’d ask if there were any questions . . . and then she’d give out dittoes with essay questions to fill out. She didn’t even read our essays, and I had proof of that.”
The gum-chewing murderer glanced at Selena again. Xan gave him a ferocious glare, the glare he had once given a weird guy at a carnival who had been staring with too much interest at five-year-old Katie. Back off. The carnival guy had stammered something about being an artist and Katie just being so very beautiful; the murderer scoffed, mumbled that he wasn’t serious, and found something else to look at.
“Tell me the proof,” Xan said to Selena, who relaxed minutely when the man stopped looking at her.
“I put down the right answers and Astor didn’t. Those were the classes we had together, P.E. and English. Once she wrote down the entire plot of an alien movie in response . .
. to the questions and we got the same grade, one hundred percent. She told me to stop . . . trying so hard. We’d both get an A in the end. That was . . .” She dragged in a deep breath. “That was funny.”
“You know what my favorite subject was in junior high?”
“What was it?”
“Lunch.”
She processed his answer and smiled wanly. “Yeah, I liked lunch, too. I had fourth period right by the cafeteria, so I’d be first or second in line.”
“That was lucky.”
“Astor would give me her money before first and I’d buy us two orders of nachos. She had fourth period . . . all the way over in Building H, her photography elective. That’s like practically a block away from the cafeteria. So I’d just pick it up for her and wait on the bleachers . . . by the volleyball net. Or else she would have been in line for the rest of the lunch period and they ran out of nachos fast.”
“I only had the nachos once at the school where I taught. Stale chips, hard beans, oily cheese. No thanks.”
“Ours were . . . good. And you got a ton of them for a buck-fifty.” She looked up at him in fear as the truck slowed.
Zeke and Buddy were chatting tensely. “Any back there following us?” “No. Look around that way.” “We’re clear. Let’s go.” “No, let’s check the maps first. I need to know how to get over to Sandalwood. We always miss it the first time-” “But-” Paper rustled. “Keep watch!”
“Mr. Spencer? Are you scared?” Selena asked.
He wanted to lie and tell her it was going to be fine. The deep grooves around her eyes stopped him. She was too old for platitudes, too sick for them. Her life hadn’t been fine in a long time. “Yes, I’m scared. I want to go home.”
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 28