by Dixon, Chuck
There were no gomers in view at the second set of glass doors. Smash and Jim Kim covered the panes with paint. The interior of the store was dimmer now. The only source of light came from the skylights. That was partly obscured by the rows of towering shelves creating deep shadows.
“It’s hot in here,” Jim Kim said, running with sweat under the Tyvek jumpsuit.
“We’ll do something about that when we get a couple of generators running,” Smash said and popped the top of an energy drink he’d taken from a warm cooler by a register.
“There’s a lot more work before we can do that.” Caz walked from one of the dark canyons, his rifle over his shoulder.
While the paint dried, they moved and stacked cinder blocks at the entrance and exit doors. When Caz had guesstimated that they had enough block in each stack, they broke for lunch.
“Wendy needs protein. She can’t live on SlimJims and rats the rest of her life,” Caz said. They ate in the break room. A feast of pre-packaged food products was piled on the largest table. The dog lay at Caz’s feet, gnawing on a strip of turkey jerky. A camp light on the table made blue shadows on the wall.
“None of this stuff is good for any of us, long term,” Smash said, washing cheese puffs down with Gatorade.
“Listen to you. You live on this kind of crap,” Jim Kim said.
“I can’t do that anymore, can I? There’s no doctor to go to. And who forgot to pack laxatives?” Smash said with a spray of orange dust.
“We get this place locked down tight. Make it less of a draw for gomers. Then we can grow some vegetables. Maybe get two crops in before it gets cold,” Caz said.
“There’s canning stuff here. We can preserve what we grow,” Jim Kim said.
“What about your dog?” Smash said.
“I’ve seen deer in the woods behind this place. One of them will do her for a month,” Caz said.
“There’s gomers in the woods, too,” Jim Kim said.
“Can’t hunt deer until it’s colder. Worms. By then, the gomers will have wandered off or rotted away to bones,” Caz said.
“I’ve been thinking about that. We’re safe in here. There’s no way in for the gomers. Maybe we shouldn’t be chasing them off. Maybe having a mob of them around us is like protection from the curious,” Smash said.
“For now,” Caz said. “But whoever’s still out there on the road this winter will be stronger, more organized. And more desperate. They’ll be looking for holdouts. Looking to take what we have. Surest sign there’s someone living somewhere is a shitload of gomers in concentration.”
“I can see that. Were you an officer in the Marines, Caz?” Smash said.
“Just a private. A jarhead. What I’m saying is common sense, not military sense.”
“Okay. We’re thinking long-term now. That’s good.”
“We need to think past the gomers to what comes next,” Caz said.
“So, why’s your dog named Wendy when he’s a boy dog?” Jim Kim said.
Caz’s face darkened. He rose from the table and walked from the break room. Wendy followed.
“What was that?” Smash said.
“I thought we were talking.” Jim Kim shrugged, ripping open a packet of pork rinds with his teeth.
30
Caz rejoined them at the front of the store. He pushed a trolley. It was loaded with rolls of fiberglass insulation on top of drums of roofing tar. Wendy loped ahead, happy to be man’s best friend to Smash and Jim Kim, too.
“This is better than paint. A thick coat of tar on the glass with the insulation stuck to it. Cuts out light and dampens noise.”
They smeared the goop onto the glass with brushes while Caz cut lengths of fiberglass batting. The Kraft paper backing stuck fast to the tacky surface of fresh tar.
“This’ll cover our smell, too,” Smash said. His nose wrinkled at the heavy creosote odor.
The boys moved down to the exit doors. When those were covered in tar and insulation, they went back to the entrance door to find Caz mixing mortar in a big plastic tub. He showed them the recipe of cement, sand, and water, and put them to work making more. They spent the rest of the day erecting cinder block walls inside the doors. Caz laid the courses of block while Jim Kim and Smash took turns making mortar and bringing him fresh blocks.
After the sunlight through the roof died away, they worked by the glare of a bank of flashlights. When they were done, both sets of doors at the front of the store were fortified.
Caz and Smash made a trip to the roof while Jim Kim showered off. The mob of gomers along the front of the building had mostly lost interest. A mess of broken bodies was left before the entranceway, where they’d been crushed by the massed weight of over a hundred gomers. A few were broken but ambulatory and crawled away, leaving snail trails of slime and tissue behind them. Now the gomers milled aimlessly around the lot before the store but were not wandering away.
A female gomer was handcuffed to a shopping cart that she dragged behind her. The remains of a toddler were strapped into the child’s seat of the cart. There was a story there that Smash did not want to know.
In the far distance, they could hear the tinny cadence of a public address speaker. The National Guard convoy was working its way west of them.
“I wonder what it’s like in those camps,” Smash said.
“I don’t. I’ve seen camps like it. They’re all the same,” Caz said.
After showers and a meal of snack food, they all fell into a deep sleep following a day of hard labor.
Wendy wandered the dark aisles on her own, ears raised for the sound of rats in the shadows.
Over the next three days, they worked to fortify the doors to the garden center attached to the side of the building. Smash and Jim Kim mixed mortar and hauled block. Caz constructed double-thick walls of block, each with a heavy steel door mounted in the center.
After that, they constructed a curtain wall of two-by-fours and plywood within the steel fence around the garden center. This would keep them hidden from the hungry eyes of the growing gomer army outside. The dead souls crowded the fence line while they worked, hands thrust between the bars in an impotent effort to reach the tempting sight of three living souls working inside. Those in front were mashed against the bars. Some were extruded between the uprights like toothpaste from a tube.
With the doors obscured and strengthened and a freshly built wall enclosing their outdoor space, they were now out of sight from outside. They could move about freely without feeling like ravening eyes were on them. If Caz’s theory was right, they’d soon be out of mind when the gomers were distracted by other stimuli. The gomers would eventually meander away.
Using Tool Time’s vast library of how-to books for instruction, they set about building raised beds in which they planted rows of edibles. Caz had been raised on a farm and had some practical experience. Rows of potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, squash, and cucumbers were planted and labeled in the beds they built from landscape blocks.
They hooked up a gas-powered generator and used it to power the outlets in the break room. There was a fifty-inch flat screen mounted to the wall that became the center of their media room. Jim Kim hooked up the Xbox and a DVR loaded with entire seasons of his favorite shows. They ran the generator at night, but only after Caz was satisfied that the sound of it running wasn’t creating a new draw for the gomers.
Caz’s most recent census counted over two hundred gomers within sight from the roof. The bulk of them were in the front lot. They were no longer congregated near the entrances of Tool Town. Instead, they either wandered in a general circular pattern or stood unmoving except for a flick of the eyes or head at the passage of a bird or change in the wind. He saw a general trend in the pack to wander away from Tool Town. And, while they showed some interest in the motor noise of the generator running, they did not seem drawn toward the sound in significant numbers.
He noted that a single gomer breaking from the others would be followed by oth
ers. It was all random and fractal. Like watching starlings on the wing—only moving at a glacial pace.
The woman still limped along, dragging the cart with the corpse of the desiccated child flopping in the child seat.
Mother of the Year.
With Jim Kim’s help, Caz mounted solar panels on the roof and wired some of the ceiling lights to them. This gave them enough light at night so that they no longer needed flashlights to guide their way.
It was still unbearably hot inside the store. They were able to hook up fans. They set up an above ground pool in the garden center and filled it from the rain reservoir. When it was topped off to a depth of four feet, Jim Kim and Smash peeled down to their undies and plunged in.
“Looking buff there, Jimmy,” Smash said.
“I guess.” Jim Kim smirked.
“Better than a gym membership.”
“Like you ever belonged to a gym.”
It was true. With the intense labor of the past weeks, Smash had lost the tire around his middle. Jim Kim, already rail-thin, had added some bulk to his chest and arms from hauling block and bags of topsoil.
“Too bad there’s no honeys around to admire you, boys,” Caz said.
Caz joined them, stripping buck-naked. He took off more than his clothes before entering the water. The boys learned more about their brand new friend at that moment than they’d wished to know.
Caz’s left leg ended mid-calf. There was a stump at the end, covered in a hatching of white scar tissue. His leg above the amputation was a patchwork of skin grafts and raised lacerations that continued over his hip and along the entire left side of his torso. When he turned, they saw a tattoo inked across his shoulders. It read U.S.M.C in block letters three inches high. Beneath that, in smaller letters, was: Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children. Below that was a Marine globe, eagle, and anchor with a scroll imposed on it reading simply: Helmand.
If he caught them staring, he didn’t let on. The boys were grateful when Wendy leapt the wall of the pool, landing with an epic splash between them and changing the focus of attention. The big dog splashed around, a dopey dog grin on his face. Jim Kim glanced over the side of the pool. A prosthetic of shiny steel rods lay atop Caz’s pile of clothes. His work boot was still laced up on the faux foot.
Caz broke the silence. “You know, we’re going to have to think about how to stay warm come winter.”
“I’m all for turning on the air conditioning, too,” Smash said. The interior of the big store was becoming sweltering as summer dragged on. It wasn’t smelling so good either. There was no ventilation. No air exchange existed with the outside. And the air was becoming thicker every day, a muggy fog of toxic outgassing. The sun coming down through the skylights raised it all to oven heat.
“There’s no way we could power the central air with the generators. We’d run through our gasoline supply in a matter of weeks,” Caz said.
“Then I’m for never getting out of the pool,” Smash said, his head back on a tube float.
“I might have a better idea,” Caz offered.
31
Doe chose the pickup. A ten-year-old F-150. He pulled it out of the shed and up to where the dirt bikes stood in a row on their kickstands. He cut the engines of each. With Mercy’s help, he lifted two of them into the bed of the truck.
Mercy looked to the lightening sky in the east. “I’m tired,” she said.
“Me too, girl. But we’re not staying here,” Doe said.
Mercy nodded.
There were already three ragged figures shambling up the long drive toward the farm. Too far to see much in the pre-dawn gloom, but the halting gait was the giveaway. Stinkers drawn by the sounds and lights.
“Those fuckers have radar,” Doe said.
“I don’t think so. I think they just hear or see something and change direction. Keep on till something else draws them another way,” Mercy said.
“Maybe.” He shrugged before getting behind the wheel.
The kid lay in the grass in their headlights. His chest rose and fell with rapid and shallow breaths.
Mercy set the shotgun on the bench seat and climbed in beside her cousin.
Doe was navigating around the leg-shot kid when they heard a call. The woman was trotting down from the house, followed by the older of the two girls. The woman carried a box in her arms. The girl ran with plastic shopping bags swinging from her hands.
“Some food and water. We have enough stored,” the woman said, breathless. She placed a box in the bed of the Ford. The girl handed the plastic bags in through the open window to Mercy. The girl offered a fragile smile, eyes wet and rimmed red.
“We appreciate it,” Doe said.
“I wish we could do more,” the woman said, swallowing hard.
“Real sorry about your horses,” Mercy said. She worked a smile onto her face.
The woman waved once before she and the girl returned to the house.
Mercy shared the contents of the bags the girl gave her. They split a jug of apple cider between them. There was a jar of peanut butter, and they took turns dipping their fingers in it. They were that hungry.
“Damn,” Doe said, the steering wheel sticky with Jif.
Mercy lay back on the bench giggling until her face flushed. They were tired and punchy and in the emotional freefall that follows an adrenaline rush.
When she recovered, she took the silver crucifix from her jacket pocket. She leaned forward to loop the chain over the rear mirror post. Doe glanced at the little Jesus swinging there, his mouth a tight line.
They didn’t talk much after that. Their thoughts were to themselves. But each knew the other was thinking the same thing. About those crows at the farm. About that girl on her knees calling for her mama. They thought about Mom and Raquel. And knowing that these thoughts were on both their minds made them clamp down hard on the silence they shared.
It was full light when they reached Lyle. A town much like Harrow. A main street of faded brick storefronts and a gas station and a Dunkin’ Donuts sharing a lot.
The “army” the kid had promised had been here. The signs were everywhere. Broken windows. A car still burning. Oily smoke filling the main street with a dense fog. An ice cream truck lay on its side in the middle of an intersection.
The body of a man, wrists tied behind his back, swung from a lamp post outside a CVS. The body was fresh. Some stinkers stood beneath it, looking up, hands reaching for the prize just out of reach. The hanging man’s face was black from strangling. No way to tell if he was white or colored.
The passage of the motorized army had drawn out the dead. The town was infested with stumbling wrecks that were wandering the streets and sidewalks in random patterns. They shuffled along in their creepy mindless parade. A pantomime of a lunchtime crowd out window shopping. The only sound was the scrape of their feet on the asphalt and pavements.
The town was otherwise quiet. No motor sounds or gunfire. The riders had moved on, only staying long enough to break some windows and lynch some poor bastard unlucky enough to be alive when they found him.
The blue dot on the smartphone’s screen was superimposed over the interstate well to the north. Mercy touched the screen and moved her fingers apart to widen the map area. The next big city lay a half day’s ride ahead. The blue dot looked stationary but would blip ahead a bit as the signal refreshed. The RV was moving slow but still hours ahead of them.
“I can’t drive anymore,” Doe said.
“I’ll take over,” Mercy said.
“Bullshit. You’re as beat as I am. We need a couple hours of sleep.”
“But they’re getting farther away!”
“We won’t catch up before they reach the city. Better chance we’d pile up cause one of us falls asleep at the wheel.”
Mercy punched the dash.
“Look, Mercy girl. They can run, but they can’t hide. We’ll catch up tonight,” Doe said.
He turned the truck off on a side street and cruised until he
found a house with an open and empty garage. He pulled inside and got out to drag the door closed. Staying together, they cleared the house top to bottom. A humble split level that smelled of dust but nothing else. There were signs of a hasty evacuation months before, but the beds were still made. The doors were secure. The windows were covered with drapes drawn closed.
They looked at one another, and without discussion, returned to the garage, where they locked themselves in the pickup. Doe slept in the reclined driver’s seat with the Browning in his lap. Mercy stretched out in the rear seat of the crew cab, the shotgun on the floor beside her.
Both were asleep in seconds, exhaustion overcoming stress and allowing their minds to shut down to sweet oblivion.
32
They called it Gomer Manor.
Well, Smash called it that. Jim Kim just shrugged at the name. Caz didn’t say anything.
Using house plans they found in an architectural magazine, they built a six hundred square foot bungalow on a section of floor they cleared in the appliance department at the back of the store. Using a forklift, they stacked the washing machines, dryers, and refrigerators against the back wall. The house had a wood frame with bare plywood walls inside and out. There were casement windows to provide sightlines all around and two steel-clad doors front and back. They insulated it, including under the flat plywood roof.
A ladder led to a hatch in the roof in case they needed to reach high ground in a hurry. Caz was the foreman for the project. Smash and Jim Kim hadn’t built anything in their lives that didn’t come from a Lego box.
When the structure was completed, they installed a wall mount air conditioner. They ran it only at night, so they could sleep soundly in the summer heat. The interior was divided into cubicles. Each of them now had their own space. They ran wiring into the little house and set up the largest room as a shared media room. Furniture from the patio department made it comfortable. Smash invited Caz to their first movie night in their new home.