by Dixon, Chuck
“Look around. Has to be some CDs or something,” Doe said. Mercy unbuckled and clambered into the rear seat. There were cargo pockets and a center console with storage. She rifled through gum wrappers, a dog-eared Harry Potter paperback, bottles of nail polish, and a flashlight until she came up with a zippered case of compact discs. She settled back to read off titles.
“One Direction. Justin Timberlake. Demi Lovato,” she said, holding up each disc.
Doe snatched each one from her fingers and winged them out the window.
“No country? They had a farm and never listened to any Miranda or Dwight?”
“The Yeah Yeah Yeahs?” she said, holding up a disc, leaning back against her door to keep it out of his reach.
“What the hell is that?” Doe said, clawing for the disc, the truck wobbling over the single lane.
She smacked his hand away and slid the disc into the mouth of the player.
The rising squeal of electric guitars filled the cab and fell into the rhythmic dirge of Buried Alive masking the sounds of road noise.
“Yeah. Leave this on,” Doe said.
He floored the pedal to scatter a gaggle of turkey buzzards gathered on the raised span of concrete ahead. Through the frantic spread of fleeing wings, Doe could see something on the road. A shifting dark mass stretched across the corridor rammed through the wrecks. Fifty yards down the road stinkers clogged the single lane.
Doe brought the truck to a juddering stop. Mercy came out of her half-doze with a jerk. The mass of dead did not turn to them. The mob, moving beneath a fog of flying insects, was walking north away from them. None turned at the banging, squealing stop of the pickup. They continued away, impossible to number, toward an unseen destination to the north. This was the tail end of a procession of the damned. There was no end in sight.
“Where are they going?” Mercy said.
“No idea, girl. Something more attractive than us,” Doe said.
“What do we do?”
“Last exit is four miles back. Next one is eight miles ahead. We could creep along behind them.”
“Can’t say I care for that option, cousin,” she said and wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah. They take the prize for stench. Being behind them is almost as bad as being in front.” Doe shrugged.
“Like following a truck hauling pigs,” she said, rolling her window up.
He opened his door and stepped out on the road surface, hands on the small of his back as he arched his spine. The kink came out with a satisfying pop. Mercy did the same and stood, bending her knees like a drum majorette before bending to touch her toes.
“Want some water?” he said.
“Doe,” she said in a way that made him look up and follow her gaze down the highway.
A white pall of dust or smoke rose high above the cluster of forms limping away from them. A black shape loomed into view over the heads of the departing stinkers. A long blare of noise exploded from the shape racing toward them. An air horn. A big one.
“Shit the bed,” Doe said and leapt behind the wheel. Mercy threw herself in the cab. He put the truck in reverse and punched the accelerator. Her door slammed closed as the truck leapt backward, tires spinning for traction.
“Turn around!” she shrieked at him.
“No room!” he shouted back, standing on the pedal. He was twisted in his seat to see through the rear window. One fist clutching the steering wheel made adjustments to keep them in the middle of the slot.
Mercy stared transfixed through the windshield as a massive truck came into view. White smoke streamed back from tall stacks either side of the cab. Mounted before the truck was an enormous scooped plow blade. It came to a point inches off the road surface with curving wings rising high to either side. The blade of the plow swiped through the packed stinkers like a scythe, chopping them off at the ankles. The impact sent them in whole and in parts spinning high in the air.
She touched her fingers to the crucifix swinging from the post of the rearview mirror. Her fingers locked on the silver feet of the tiny Jesus.
Plowing through the last of the stinkers, the edges of the blade struck sparks from the banks of wrecks on either side of the lane. The edge of the plow rammed up under the protruding corner of a van, turning it over, hurling wheels, bits of steel shell, and lengths of trim into the sky. What remained of the van spun away, end over end, over the tops of the wrecks mashed against the guard wall.
The truck’s powerful horn blasted again, close enough now to jiggle the glass in the pickup’s cab. More than a sound, the horn created a palpable force that vibrated through Mercy like a liquid malevolence clutching at her heart. She braced herself against the dash and screamed her fear and fury back at the oncoming wall of gore-crusted steel growing larger and larger. The bank of lights atop the cab of the plow glowed and died in three slow and deliberate blinks. The driver, invisible behind the ten-foot blade, was letting them know he’d seen them.
And there would be no mercy.
36
Doe cut the wheel hard to the left and stood on the brakes. He reached a hand out to press Mercy back in her seat. The front wheels locked up. The rear slewed, tires shuddering. The pickup angled backward into a narrow gap in the wall of wrecks to their left.
It came to a violent halt with the front end tilted out into the roadway. Doe pulled Mercy to him and squashed them both against the driver's side door.
The edge of the plow blade struck the pickup’s exposed quarter. The truck was lifted and dropped in a ferocious impact that threw Doe and Mercy to strike the roof of the cab. A shriek of tortured steel. A wheel soared into the air. The windshield collapsed inward as the crumpled hood was driven against the glass. The plow roared past, taking the cab door with it.
The truck came to rest in the middle of the lane. Frame bent and with a river of multi-colored fluids spilling from the front end. The plow moved southward, leaving a haze of white exhaust lit from within by showers of sparks.
Mercy was dazed but conscious. She clambered across the seat out of Doe’s embrace, brushing beads of safety glass from her.
“Doe? You alive, Doe?” She could smell gas vapors rising from the floor.
“I was wishing I wasn’t. Head hurts like a bitch,” he croaked.
“We need to get out of here,” she said and tugged on his hand.
They were out of the truck, standing well clear and looking at the ribbon of road stretching in either direction. The plow was out of sight over the horizon. Buzzards were dropping back down onto the roadway to the north of them. Feasting on the goulash of rotting tissue left by the plow’s passage.
“That bastard damn sure cleared the way of stinkers,” Doe said.
“Do we go forward or back?” Mercy said.
“Back. That plow’s making way for something. I don’t want to run into whatever that might be.”
“We walk, then?”
“Fuck that.” Doe trotted back to the truck to climb the back bumper into the bed. He freed one of the dirt bikes from the tangled mess. Mercy gave him a hand getting both bikes down. The front wheel of one was bent from the crash. The remaining bike started with a low bark and a high whine. They put whatever they decided was most necessary into the saddlebags or their pockets. Mercy slung the shotgun across her back and climbed on board behind Doe.
Doe turned them south, back the way they’d come, toward the last exit.
37
The nights were getting cooler as summer ended. But the day watch in the OP atop Tool Town was still hours spent in a hot box. They hooked up some fans using long extension cords to reach outlets powered by the generator. The generator was now indoors in a soundproofed utility room with an exhaust pipe to the roof.
The fans did little more than stir the hot air. Jim Kim was on morning watch. Stripped down to his boxers and still swimming in sweat, he leaned on the lip of the north-facing view slit.
The view all around was like looking at a still picture. Not a cloud in
the yellow sky. The only movement was a funnel of buzzards circling something beyond where the interstate curved toward the horizon. The only sound was from infrequent gusts of wind making the leaves of the dogwoods whisper.
A metallic squeaking sound from the parking lot. That woman cuffed to the shopping cart. She’d shuffle a step, arm stretched back, then pull her arm to bring the car closer with a squeak...squeak...squeak.
Jim Kim picked up the binoculars to watch the woman. Sad as this little drama was, it was the only thing going on within his view. The woman wore jeans and a hoodie over a t-shirt with some kind of glitter design on the chest. Her sandals had long since broken and come off her feet. Her skin was burned black by months of scuffling around the open lot in the summer sun. Clumps of dirty blonde hair still remained on her rotting scalp.
White shopping mama.
What was left of her child, if it was her child, was only a ragged onesie stained dark with blood. The little head had dropped from the neck sometime since she’d last been around this way. It lay, gleaming white, in the basket like an obscene play ball. Jim Kim focused the binoculars on the child. Hello Kitty smiled back from all over the cotton onesie.
A little girl. Once.
As he watched, the shopping mama shuffled and dragged between two parking lanes. A front wheel caught on a concrete wheel stop. The gomer stopped when the chain of the cuffs stretched taut. She pulled, but the cart would not move. She pulled again and again in a futile attempt to free the cart.
After three hours on watch, this was the most interesting thing that had happened all morning. Jim Kim watched through the lenses, absorbed in wondering what might come next. The gomer mama pulled over and over again. Never turning its head to see what was impeding its progress. Never increasing the speed or urgency of its pull. Never seeming to feel the urgency to either free itself or the resolution to quit.
Thirty minutes or more of the one-sided tug of war, and it was beginning to lose its appeal as entertainment. Still, Jim Kim was transfixed. He went into a state of aggravating tedium. The Zen mind frame he adopted when he was repeating the same level of a game over and over in an attempt to get to the next level. Would shopping mama still be yanking on the handcuff a week from now? A month? For all eternity?
And what was keeping these gomers ambulatory?
Jim Kim regretted once again his choice of business administration as a major. Perhaps if he’d listened to his grandmother in Suwon, he would have been pre-med. He might have been able to ponder these imponderables with at least two and a half semesters of medical knowledge.
Standing watches from the OP gave them all a day-after-day view of the gomer population in the parking lot. The same faces passed by below in a halting clockwise parade. Smash was bored enough to clock them on a long day watch by picking out a gomer and timing him. His choice, a dude in a red-checked flannel hunting jacket worn over pajamas, made the circuit in just over five hours. That meant that the average gomer was circumnavigating the one-hundred-acre lot all the way around four to five times a twenty-four-hour day. An endless hike in search of living meat, a hunt that was now four or five months in progress.
How could they sustain that? Jim Kim took a census over a few watches. The number of gomers on the treadmill remained roughly constant at two hundred and ninety-six. They might lose a few participants only to have them show up again a few days later. What kept them going without sustenance was a mystery.
The sun baked them. The rain soaked them. Their clothes were fading and rotting off them. Most sloughed dead flesh from their limbs, exposing muscle, sinew, and bone beneath. More than a few dragged ropes of innards in their wake, the tissue bloated with the egg sacks of flies and God alone knew what.
By any understanding of human physiognomy, the gomers should have stopped moving long ago. Whatever imperative that drove them long gone. The sheer chemical combination needed to remain mobile exhausted. The raw physical toll taken on their structures crippling them to immobility.
They should all be dead by now. Dead dead.
Without a scientific explanation to make sense of it, the boys agreed that the whole undead Shit Happened phenomena was supernatural in origin. Real monster movie stuff. Caz stayed out of these discussions; opting out with a dismissal outlook worded as “it is what it is.”
While the idea of an apocalypse straight out of Revelation shook Jim Kim’s religious convictions right where he lived, Smash looked on it as every horror movie he’d ever seen could be viewed as a cautionary documentary.
“If shit like this could happen, then why not vampires or werewolves or any of that kind of shit?” He would posit the question more like a kid around a fire at summer camp than the presentation of a scenario in which their worst nightmares were possible.
A metallic clink down in the parking lot brought Jim Kim out of his thoughts. He put the scopes to his eyes and glassed the lot in search of the sound.
Shopping mama was free and moving at her customary ass-dragging pace away toward Toys ‘R’ Us. But the cart remained where it was, stuck fast against the wheel stop. Jim Kim twiddled the lenses into sharp focus. The handcuffs dangled from where they hung in the grate of the shopping cart, the female gomer’s hand was still secured in the hasp where it had been pulled free by the incessant tugs of its owner.
38
The Amtrak line ran nearly parallel to the interstate. The grading by the tracks allowed an uninterrupted pathway though the terrain was often rough riding. They sighted few of the dead. Most of those they saw from the vantage of rail overpasses were clumps and loners stumbling down surface roads. The stinkers looked up in mute interest at the whirring motor passing swiftly over their heads.
It was evening when they reached a rail yard south of the main station in the city.
“My ass is numb,” Mercy said, standing with shaky legs on a gravel siding.
“At least you have an ass. My bony rear is feeling every bump from the last twenty miles,” Doe said, leaning his hands against a post to stretch his legs.
“We’re close,” she said. The smartphone glowed in her hands.
“How close?”
“The signal’s within a mile west of us.”
Doe looked west to where a broad field of smoke was smeared over the sky, tinged red by the setting sun. They’d seen the smoke column through most of the afternoon, off on the horizon above the rooftops and trees. The column grew wider as they approached, losing definition at the edges. Finally, it was just a haze filling half the sky like an approaching thunderhead. A big fire burned somewhere in the city, or the remnants of one still smoldered. Even miles away, the sulfurous fug of it reached them.
“We can’t take the bike. Too noisy,” Doe said. Across the broad yard, he could see a few figures moving from out of an open engine barn. Shadows limped toward them in the uncertain light.
“On foot then. Take as much as we can carry,” Mercy said as she shrugged into one of the sweaters she took from the house back in Lyle. She put her jacket on over it and pulled the knit hat over her ears.
Doe took another of the sweaters and put it on. The bite of cold increased as the sun fell. It was coming on winter.
There was a string of commuter rail cars further along the siding. One of them was a baggage car with a litter of luggage spilled over the tracks. Doe emptied a couple of backpacks for them to stow what remained of their goods. Bottled water. A jar of peanut butter. A couple of jars of preserves and another of pickles. Doe saw Mercy place the crucifix and chain in the front pouch of her pack. He hadn’t seen her retrieve it from the truck. She must have pulled it off the rearview mirror before the plow struck them; been holding it when the crash happened. He said nothing.
Stinkers were beginning to converge on them from all across the yard. Ten or so in singles and loose clutches. Nothing they couldn’t weave between. It felt good to move after hours straddling the bike, blood coming back into their legs with a burning tingle. They crossed the yard at a trot
and followed the line of a cyclone fence until they came to a gate and then out onto a surface road that led through scrubby woods of sumac and elder to a residential street.
The streets were lined with small single homes, closely placed on cramped lots. They kept to the middle of the street, maintaining a distance between them and cars parked at the curbs. The tree branches were bare of leaves, casting shadows that seemed alive in the cold light of the rising moon.
Mercy turned at a rhythmic tapping from one of the houses. A woman in a sundress that was probably once colorful but now hung loose to reveal shriveled breasts was pressed against a picture window. Her hands made squeaking noises on the glass as she reached for them in a futile gesture. A charm bracelet tapped the glass with each movement. Her face was mashed to the glass, a purple tongue in a lipless mouth slid over the pane, leaving a slimy trail behind.
“Don’t look,” Doe said low.
“Have to look. Have to keep our eyes open,” Mercy said, walking swiftly to keep up with his longer stride.
They attracted the attention of stinkers that came off the lawns or out of garages to follow them. At each corner, Mercy and Doe would turn either left or right. This took them from the sight of their slow-moving pursuers and, apparently, out of mind as well. The dead following them were always those who had only just caught sight of them. There was no prolonged pursuit. Once they were no longer in the line of sight, the marching morons seemed to forget where they were going and why. Like anyone forgetting what it was they went into the kitchen to get. Doe dubbed it deadzhiemers. By keeping to a zig-zagging pattern, they prevented stinkers from building to an unmanageable number that would cut off retreat. They were able to move generally westward toward the last location of Raquel’s cell phone.
The first signs that they were nearing an area still occupied by live humans were an increase in the number of stinker bodies with either crushed heads or no heads at all. They saw more and more desiccated corpses lying on the streets and sidewalks. Some were only heaps of filthy clothing draped over bones. Others were fresher, lying in gag-inducing pools of blood and liquefying flesh.