by Dixon, Chuck
Two guys not much older than her reached the landing between the two doors. Wisps of beards. One wore a strip of black cloth as a headband. The other tied his sign around the sleeve of his leather jacket. The taller of the two had tattoos on his exposed arms. They looked like prison tats she’d seen. His greasy white t-shirt had the crow and skull emblem printed on it in red.
The doorknob waggled. Pressure was applied. The deadbolt held. She glanced back at Doe, who mouthed at her to get out of his line of fire, a fierce rage twisting his face.
Through the peephole, she watched the one who was trying the door turn to his buddy. The other guy, the one with prison ink, was kicking at the bottom panel of the door to the opposite apartment. The panel gave under his booted foot and he fell to the floor, his leg inside the door. He was laughing. His buddy doubled over himself.
The drunken hilarity turned to screams. The guy on the floor was fighting to free his leg. Something within the apartment had him and was pulling him hard against the door.
Mercy stood on tiptoes to adjust her view through the fisheye lens of the peephole. The fallen guy was screaming for his buddy. John. Or Sean. Someone, or several someones, were yanking hard. The fallen guy’s head struck the door panels. He splayed hands on the doorframe to keep from being pulled further. The other guy opened fire on the apartment door with a handgun. Mercy leapt back from the door.
Doe’s hand gripped her shoulder and yanked her back behind the sofa with him. They knelt and listened. Gunfire and shouts followed by the sound of splintering wood and something heavy tumbling down the stairs. They could feel the impact through the floor.
There were calls of “Shit!” and “Damn!” followed by a barrage of gunfire from below. The voice of an older male was speaking. It was hard to make out the words. He sounded pissed off.
Then silence.
“They won’t be back,” Doe said.
“I guess not,” Mercy said.
Still, they fell asleep there, kneeling on the back of the sofa, dozing after hours of keeping vigil and wondering about what had played out on the other side of that door.
23
They woke, stiff and headachy, to silence from outside.
Doe checked the windows in front and Mercy the bathroom window in back. There was no movement on the street other than some trash blowing around. There was new debris on the street where things had been pulled from stores. Broken glass glittered in the morning sun. The smell of smoke was still strong. Streams of white blew along the street.
“Let’s give it a few hours. Just to be on the safe side,” Doe said. Mercy nodded, eager to stay well on the safe side.
They split a king-sized Kit-Kat and the last swigs of Fiji. Too much sugar and not enough water was making Mercy’s head pound. She put her head down on a sofa cushion and was back to sleep in seconds.
Their shadows were long on the floor when she woke up. Late afternoon. She rose to see Doe standing in the open door of the apartment, looking down the stairs. A cigarette, his first since the day before, dangled in the corner of his mouth.
“Bring along the shotgun,” he said and started down.
The landing was covered in a black pool of gelling blood. Flies buzzed over it in lazy circles. A bare leg, torn off from the knee, lay in the mess. There were tattoos on it; twisted thorn branches, each thorn dripping a single crimson drop. The door had come apart in the frame under a weight from behind. The ruins of it lay on the landing and stairs. Mercy could see past Doe to the source of that destructive weight lying at the foot of the stairwell.
A grossly obese man filled the bottom of the stairs from wall to wall. He was completely naked and had to weigh in well over five hundred pounds. Pinned beneath him was the headless, and one-legged corpse of the guy with the prison ink. The naked fat man still had some of his head attached. The rest was spread up the wall of the stairwell in a chunky spatter.
“Nothing to it but to do it,” Doe said and stepped atop the quivering white mass of the bovine-like corpse. He offered a hand back to Mercy. She took it and closed her eyes while Doe pulled her up and over. Their combined weight brought pressure on something deep within the fat man’s guts. A stream of foul stench hissed from some orifice, either natural or manmade. The huge body was holed through in places from the gunfire they’d heard the night before.
“Damn, that’s one fat-ass stinker,” Doe sniggered through a hand cupped over his mouth.
Out in the fresh air, Mercy dropped to her knees and puked up Kit-Kat and Fiji. Doe helped her to her feet and guided her along the back wall of the stores.
“Where we going?” she said, spitting bile.
“To get what we came for,” he said.
The Walgreens was in worse shape than when they’d left it. The rows of shelves were collapsed in places. The remaining items were dashed to the floor and trampled on. The sharp scent of medicinal alcohol brought on a new bout of retching for Mercy. Doe told her to wait outside and keep watch.
He came out the back within ten minutes. He’d found most of the stuff they’d gathered scattered on the floor. He brought along some children’s backpacks, Spider-man and Dora the Explorer, and a box of heavy-duty plastic trash bags. They stuffed the feminine napkins, medicines, and the rest into the backpacks. Whatever was left over, they triple-bagged into trash bags.
Mercy stopped by the shot-up minivan and crouched to run fingers over the grass in the strip of lawn at the curb. She came up with the crucifix, the chain catching the sunlight where it swung.
“That important to you?” Doe said.
“Means something to my mom,” Mercy said.
Doe shrugged.
Before setting out, they tried the cell phone one more time. A recording told them that the voicemail for this account had not been initiated.
“They should have answered. They’d be waiting on us,” Mercy said.
“Could be Raquel run down the battery playing games. Could be they’re staying quiet. Playing it safe,” Doe said.
“Think they heard the crew going through?”
“Don’t see how they couldn’t less than two miles away.”
They each took a backpack, Doe insisting on the Dora one just to get a short-lived smile from his cousin. Doe slung the trash bag over his shoulder and, after a moment’s reckoning for any suspicious sounds, they stepped from the cover of the store.
“Wish we had that Garmin still,” Doe said, eyes shifting left and right.
“Do you?” Mercy said and produced her smartphone from the pocket of her jacket.
“That’s my girl,” Doe said.
She activated the pad and pressed the Go Home option. They entered the mouth of a street and walked into the sheltering arbor of the bare tree branches joined above them. It was cold in the shadows with the first hint of winter chill in the air.
They were a half-mile along down a street named for President Harding when the smell of new smoke reached them, a thick, oily odor drifting down through the trees.
At an elementary school lot, they came out of the trees into a grassy clearing that led to a softball field and playground. The open sky was marred by a thick coil of black smoke rising over the trees ahead. It reached high over them, where the wind whipped it into bands of blue-gray streams. The base of the black column was somewhere ahead beyond the woods around the water treatment plant.
Sleepy Hollow.
24
Caz told his story.
“Wendy and me were in the Marines. EOD. That’s bomb disposal. We’ve been together since Afghanistan. Came back and took some emergency tech courses. Somebody’s got to do it and I’m used to the chaos, so…
“When the shit jumped off, I was working calls with my partner. Ran across some gomers before it all went public. My partner ran off after our first contact. I worked the unit a few nights on my own until some serious shit happened in the ER. I could see we were all past the high-water mark and sinking. The whole system falling down as I watched.
>
“I went back to the apartment and got Wendy. I don’t have any family this far north. Packed up all the kibble and canned tuna I could get my hands on, and we took off. That’s my station wagon out front. Still has some of my goods in it. We lived on the streets, moving around until it was obvious things weren’t going back to the way they were. Ever.
“There’s worse shit out there than the gomers. No rule of law anymore. Not out in the suburbs. I saw some gangs roaming. They up-armored trucks, and they roll on whatever they want and take everything. There’s no strategy to it that I can see. No place for me and Wendy out there. I reached this place and saw it was mostly un-fucked with. Found a way in through the back of the garden center and locked it down as best I could.
“We were living quiet until you two came down through the roof. There’s just the two of you, right?”
“Yeah. We were students at the university. I used to work here at Tool Town,” Smash said.
“Roommates?” Caz said.
Smash nodded. Jim Kim got the inference. “Just roommates. Nothing more!” he insisted.
“Not any of my business. Don’t give a shit either way. There’s no rules these days. That shit’s over for now.” Caz shrugged.
“We’re not gay. Clear?” Smash said after catching on.
“You know what is my business?” Caz said, waving a hand before his face. “You two need to shower off and change clothes. You both stink. Until then you sleep outside my house.”
They climbed the ladder and slept on an empty plywood shelf ten feet above the floor. Both Smash and Jim Kim fell into a deep sleep after the events of their first day of free-ranging in Gomerland.
The next morning, Caz led them out to the garden center. He left them alone to strip down and shower off under a sprinkler strung up from the water collection reservoir. They tossed their filthy clothes aside and scrubbed themselves clean under the cool spray. They rubbed themselves dry using rolls of paper towels Caz left for them.
“The dog,” Jim Kim said.
“Yeah. He’s got a dog,” Smash said. “He calls it Wendy.”
“So what? He calls it Wendy.”
“It has a pair of balls. You see that? It’s a boy dog,” Jim Kim said.
25
The Coachman was gone.
Doe’s pickup sat in a lake of burning oil.
Mercy and Doe were gasping and choking. They were winded by the run through the smoke-shrouded woods. Doe hacked and spit, hands on knees. Mercy trotted around the fire, holding a hand clapped to her ribs. The run had created a stitch that knifed into her side.
“Where are they?” she called between spasms of coughs.
“Gone,” Doe managed after a bit. Through the haze of roiling smoke, he could see a blackened skeleton near the scorched remains of his truck. He said nothing to Mercy.
She ran around the park, calling their names. “Mom! Raquel!”
Doe ran out after her and pulled her away.
“Whoever did this ain’t long gone,” he said, arms about her, hand held gently over her mouth.
She broke from his grip.
“We go after them, right?” she said. It wasn’t a question. More of a challenge.
“You know we will. Only we don’t know where they took them.”
“We know where the RV is,” she said. She fished in her jacket pocket for her phone.
“Is that gonna work?”
“It will as long as the battery lasts on their end,” Mercy said, tapping the screen.
“You mean as long as the system stays up.” He shrugged.
“You don’t know much about this stuff.”
“I admit I do not, girl.”
“There. The locator app is working. Even if their battery goes dead, we’ll have a record of their last location,” she said and held up the phone in a shaking hand for him to see a tiny blue dot moving along a road map.
“They’re on the county road heading north. A few hours’ lead on us. This here happened early this morning,” Doe said.
“We need a car,” Mercy said and hared off into the remaining trailers.
Most of the cars left behind had fresh bullet holes. On a pad in the back corner of the park, they found a Chevy Impala. A ’79 that someone had plans for. It was primer-coated. The hood was removed and leaning against a camp trailer parked nearby. There were toolboxes on the grass in the shade of the trailer.
“Will it do?” Mercy asked.
“It will get us to something better if I can start it,” Doe said.
Doe hot-wired the Impala, but the wires were cold. No spark. The battery was dead. They pulled a working one from one of the shot-up cars. Doe worked the battery loose from under the hood of a Bronco. Mercy kept watch with the shotgun in her fists.
She was holding back shakes. It was either fear, exhaustion, anger, or all three and found its way out through nervous energy. She couldn’t stop stamping her feet.
“I can handle this, Mercy girl. Find us some food and water,” Doe said, lugging the Die Hard back toward the Impala.
There were candy bars, cookies, and bottled water in the loot they took from the Walgreens in Harrow. Only they’d left that stuff behind when they saw the smoke column. And there was no way she was going back for it. Mercy ran from trailer to trailer, doing a quick and messy search through cabinets and totes they’d already been through a dozen times. All she could scrounge was a can of Spaghetti-Os and a wax carton of Goldfish crackers. There was no water, but she found a six-pack of Diet Sprite at the bottom of a cooler.
She loaded her finds into the cooler and stepped from the trailer. A clinking sound. Through the drifting smoke, she could see a shape moving along the fence line.
One of the dead was on the other side of the fence, brushing fingers over the steel mesh, marching at a halting pace for the gate, which lay open.
“Doe!”
Doe raised his head from under the Impala’s hood to see Mercy running, shotgun up, for the fence. He pulled the Browning from his waistband and raced for her. He reached her as she was fighting to pull the gate closed. A man was moving along the fence toward the opening, eyes locked on his prize. The guy was a big one in gym shorts and a polo shirt and what was left of the gym muscle he’d put on when he was alive.
Three paces away, the dead guy reached for Mercy with splayed fingers at the end of an arm notched with ugly bite marks. White bone and yellow teeth showed through where the flesh of his chin had been chewed off.
Mercy was yanking on the gate to close it, too intent on what she was doing to see the guy closing on her.
Doe fired through the chain links, taking the guy in the neck and shoulder with two shots. Through and through shots took fist-sized chunks off the guy without slowing him down. Doe rushed up and stuck the barrel of the Browning through the fence and put one through the guy’s eye from inches away. The guy dropped like a sack of wet mush to the grass. Doe looked past him to see other figures moving at the same peculiar gait out of the woods toward the fence.
He pulled the gate closed and undid the padlock and wrapped the chain around the center posts to secure it tight. The other dead, five in all, stalked toward the fence. There were a wife and two elementary-age kids. They looked like a polo shirt’s family. The little girl wore a communion dress. She reached for them with fingerless hands.
“The smoke, or the noise, is drawing them,” Doe said.
“They took their time getting here,” Mercy said.
“But they got here in the end. Remember that. Wherever we go, they’ll be there eventually,” he said and led her back to the Impala.
It started on the second try after he primed the carburetor with a splash of gas. The tank was half full. It would have to do.
They were lifting the hood to set it in place when Doe saw movement at the front of the trailer park. He shushed Mercy and took a peek around the corner of the camp trailer. Three people were stumbling toward them between the trailers. Heads bobbing and turning, loo
king to feed.
“This place is a goddamn salt-lick for these stinkers,” Doe said. He shoved the hood away from the front of the car.
“Don’t we need that?” Mercy said.
“Ain’t like the cops are gonna pull us over. Get in, girl,” he said and slid behind the wheel. He tossed the Browning atop the dash.
“Shotgun,” Mercy said out of habit, settling in the passenger bucket with the Ithaca held in her fists.
“Funny,” Doe said and peeled out. Neither of them smiled.
26
They looked down from the roof to see that the bagboy was still lingering around the Sorento. He’d been joined overnight by a handful of others milling around. The messy heap of luggage and boxes was undisturbed on the loading dock.
“You guys pack like girlfriends I’ve had,” Caz said, a foot up on the ledge. His voice aroused the bag boy who raised his head and arched his back to fix on the three figures silhouetted by the late morning sun.
Smash and Jim Kim were dressed in crisp new coveralls from the Dickies aisle. They had new orange Wolverines on their feet and clean socks. They were both commando since their changes of underwear were down in the luggage on the dock.
“How would you pack for Armageddon?” Smash said.
“Long as I have this, I figure the rest takes care of itself.” Caz shrugged and patted the rifle hanging from the sling on his chest. They climbed back down the ladder to the utility room where Wendy stood watching for their return, wagging his tail. They moved to the rear door, the same one Smash had unlocked the night before. The bolts at the top and bottom were secured tight.
“Stay, Wendy,” Caz said. The dog remained by him, tail going. “She don’t listen like she used to. Jimmy, will you hold her collar? She’ll take off on me if she smells a gomer. Hates ’em.”