by John Russo
“Yeah,” Bruce agreed with a sigh. “I’m pretty sure Linda is sexually active. I tried talking with her about love and commitment, but she called me a dinosaur and laughed in my face.”
“Well, maybe she’ll turn out okay somehow,” the sheriff ventured.
But Bruce went on worrying. “I know she’s tried marijuana. I just hope to God she’s not into anything worse.”
“You can’t watch over her all the time, Bruce. You’re just gonna have to let her make some mistakes and hope they ain’t the really bad kind. This is harder for us cops than for most parents ’cause we have a tendency to sorta be control freaks. We wanna save people from themselves and keep ’em in line.”
“I shouldn’t be crying on your shoulder,” said Bruce, “when we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
The sheriff nodded in agreement and said, “Right now we’ve got us a situation we not only can’t control, we don’t even know what to do next—unless we get some kind of lead.”
“Do you think a general epidemic is gonna break out?” Bruce asked.
“Probably not,” Harkness said, dolefully mulling it over. “We don’t know where Melrose’s daughters may be headed, but we know it’s to a secret lab someplace. As long as their cargo doesn’t get loose, I don’t think we’re lookin’ at the same kind of thing we had sixteen years ago. But I’d like to put an end to whatever they might be up to before we all go to hell in a handbasket.”
CHAPTER 31
In the murky candlelight of the Hideaway, Bearcat and Slam sat at a round oaken table guzzling vodka straight from the bottle and wolfing down burgers and fries. Henry stood behind the bar where he could keep a close eye on his daughter through the serving window. She was still in the kitchen cooking up more food, and Honeybear was in there with her.
Bearcat suddenly barked, “Hey, Henry, you got a basement in this joint?”
“No, it’s built on a slab.”
“Where the hell do you store stuff?” Slam demanded.
“In my shed out back,” Henry said. “I have a generator in there, if we could get to it.” He wouldn’t mind having some light in his place, if for no other reason than it would make it easier for him to monitor the hoods’ movements. And it would give them fewer dark, shadowy places from which to lurk and then pounce on his daughter.
“Hmmm . . . what else you got in that shed?” Bearcat mused.
“Like what?” Henry asked him.
“Like copper cable. Or better yet, fencing wire or barbed wire.”
“What for?”
“For me to know and you to find out.”
“There is some copper cable,” Henry admitted, trying not to lose his temper, for fear it would give Bearcat and Slam all the provocation they would need to start beating on him or raping Sally. “I guess about a hundred feet of it, for when I use the Weedwacker. None of the other kind of wire though. I never had any use for it.”
Slam said, “Why don’t you have a cell phone or at least a portable radio?”
“I do have a cell phone,” said Henry, “but it’s not getting a signal. I imagine a tower is down. I thought about having a radio in here, but my customers never want to hear anything but the jukebox or the TV.”
“Well, what good is the generator to us right now?” Slam asked gruffly. “It ain’t gonna help us pull in any stations if the cable is out.”
“It’d give us power for the refrigerator and the electric lights,” said Henry.
“Fuck that!” Bearcat barked. “I got my own ideas what I wanna use the generator for!”
“There’s a radio in my pickup,” Henry said. “If you want to risk going out there to listen to it.”
Bearcat said, “What we need is a shortwave radio so’s we can listen to the police bands.”
Henry shook his head despairingly. “Power’s out. Phones are out. I wish we had some kind of communication with the outside world.”
“Why?” Bearcat said sneeringly.
“So we’d know exactly what’s happening,” said Henry. “How widespread is this thing? What are the authorities doing about it? And what do they advise us to do?”
Slam and Bearcat both snickered. Then Slam said, “Piss on the authorities! Me and Bearcat has permanently run afoul of ’em as the sayin’ goes. Like I tol’ ya, they find us here, we’re as good as zombie meat.”
“If they find us,” Bearcat said. “Which they might not do right away, if all the communications is down.”
“They might think we’uns is poor innocent lambs!” Slam blurted drunkenly, and it sent him and Bearcat into paroxysms of laughter.
Finally Bearcat said soberly to everyone within hearing distance, “Don’t believe it if anyone tells you we’re hard men. We’re just misunderstood. We try to do good, but no good deed goes unpunished. Right, Slam?”
“Right on, Bearcat,” Slam said, continuing the charade.
For the past week they had been trying to distance themselves from a horrendous crime they had committed in a suburb of Pittsburgh. It was a home invasion gone bad, but in their own minds they were not to blame—it was the fault of the victims. If the man of the house, Jonas Silverberg, hadn’t tried to be brave and snotty, he’d still be alive to talk about it, and so would his wife and his two sons who had to die because of his own foolishness. Honeybear had met the Silverbergs in her square previous life as a nine-to-five receptionist for an insurance agent. She had filled out some of the computerized forms pertaining to their homeowners’ policy, which revealed that they were temporarily keeping cash and jewelry at their house that was worth an estimated twenty-five thousand dollars. The fact that they happened to be Jewish made them perfect targets for her new skinhead buddies, and she figured she’d really get in good with them by handing them the Silverbergs on a silver platter. In fact she put it that way—“the Silverbergs on a silver platter”—when she told Slam and Bearcat all that she knew about them, including their home address, their work schedules, and their days off. The two skinheads chortled when she made an even bigger joke out of it, saying, “From now on we’ll call them the Platterbergs.”
“You gotta get us in there,” Slam said. “They ain’t gonna open the door to us. We look too fuckin’ suspicious.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Bearcat countered. “They know who Honeybear is. Cops’ll track us all down through her. We gotta go in with masks on.”
“That means a nighttime job,” said Slam. “We bust our way in, and they won’t know what hit ’em. Honeybear can stay in the car, and be our lookout and getaway driver.”
They pulled off the home invasion on a Tuesday, a couple hours after midnight, because Bearcat said it was best to rob people in the wee hours when they were all in bed, so nobody comes home and surprises you. Honeybear stayed outside in the car, ready to gas it and take off. Wearing red bandanas for masks, Slam and Bearcat kicked the Silverbergs’ back door in, charged upstairs into the master bedroom, got the parents under control at gunpoint, and then rounded up the two kids. They tied and gagged the whole family except for the mother because they wanted her to lead them to the cash and jewelry, which Honeybear had told them was in a safe, and they wanted Mrs. Silverberg’s hands to be free to work the combination. But she wouldn’t talk, and she wouldn’t budge. All she did was cry. So they took Jonas Silverberg’s gag off and told him he better do what he was told or they would rape and kill his wife. That’s when he called them “despicable assholes” and Slam pistol-whipped him, and Mrs. Silverberg jumped into the tussle, and in the flurry Slam’s mask came off—so Slam shot her. Now the whole family had to be killed because they could describe Slam, and if the cops got Slam, they would immediately figure out that his accomplices were probably Bearcat and Honeybear. The two skinheads didn’t want to keep on shooting people, for fear that the noise would attract attention, so they got knives from the kitchen, herded Mr. Silverberg and his kids down into the family room, and slit their throats. The bodies weren’t discovered for two days, but the license plate number and the ma
ke of Honeybear’s car were memorized by a woman walking her dog in the quiet of the night, and the three renegades had to go on the lam. They ditched and torched the car, but that didn’t do much to take the heat off them.
Highly pissed because they hadn’t glommed onto any of the cash and jewelry, Bearcat gave Honeybear a good beating as soon as they got themselves holed up in a fleabag motel. He felt that everything that went wrong was either the Silverbergs’ fault or else Honeybear’s fault for setting up such a bum job.
When Bearcat took a desperate chance on getting in touch with Drake and Bones, and Drake bragged about the big rig they were going to hijack, full of equipment from an outfit called M-R Electronics, it seemed like salvation—a chance to come up smelling like a rose, just like the rose in the emblem on the truck. But once again Bearcat had gotten drunk on the smell of somebody else’s cork. The big rig and its promise of electronic gear was nothing but fool’s gold. He had hoped that the cargo could be fenced for a ton of cash. But whoever heard of fencing a truckload of zombies?
CHAPTER 32
Flipping a greasy burger on the grill, Sally said, “What did those two guys mean when they talked about you? You didn’t willingly join up with them?”
“Hell, no, not at first,” Honeybear said. “I was Little Miss Goody Two-shoes, with a prim little job at an insurance agency—till Bearcat and Slam bopped in and robbed the joint with two other guys named Drake and Bones. They gagged me and tied my wrists and dragged me with them in the back of a van while they held up a couple more places! I was scared out of my wits. I wanted to make them like me so they wouldn’t kill me, and I figured if I gave myself to them it wouldn’t be as bad as being raped. Thinking about it like that, I got turned on in a weird way. There was a side of me that liked the things they did. They didn’t take any crap from anybody, they weren’t part of the rat race that I had always despised, and they showered me with the money and stuff that they stole.”
Sally was subtly trying to engage Honeybear in meaningful conversation, in hopes that she might make a connection with her and maybe turn her into at least a partial ally. In an attempt to draw the girl out, Sally said, “They say that even bad guys have their good side. Do you think that’s true of Slam and Bearcat?”
“Well, to them I’m their ideal blond, blue-eyed Aryan woman. No man that I ever went to bed with in my old life had me up on that kind of pedestal. Or any other kind of pedestal whatsoever.”
“You’re flattered by that?”
“I am, in a way. I admit it.”
Sally blinked and raised her eyebrows, then went back to pressing the sizzling burger patties with her spatula. Through the serving window, which provided her with a view out to the bar, she saw Slam gleefully pushing buttons on the dead, unlit jukebox, pretending to be selecting music. As if he were the record he had just played, he started singing a rock song badly off-key and dancing drunkenly by himself, hugging a bottle of vodka. Then Sally’s father went by, eyeing Slam warily and carrying a little cardboard box over to the table where Bearcat was still sitting.
“You find the stuff?” Bearcat demanded.
Henry said, “Lead balls, black powder, and extra flints.”
“How about wadding?”
“It’s in the box with the other stuff.”
“Bring me the weapon,” Bearcat ordered.
Still dancing and stumbling around hugging the vodka bottle, Slam called out, “Why you wanna piss around with it, Bearcat? It holds only one shot at a time, and what if it blows up in your face?”
Henry fetched the black-powder musket and handed it to Bearcat, who hefted it fondly. “I know what I’m doin’,” he said confidently. “My grandpap had one of these. I just wanna see what it’ll look like to blow them zombies’ faces off with a big fat lead ball.”
With a loud clatter, he spilled the contents of the cardboard box out onto the tabletop.
CHAPTER 33
Victoria looked beautiful, Tiffany thought, as they sped along a country road in their father’s vintage Pontiac, a black 1967 Grand Prix. She was proud of her fifteen-year-old sister, who had the stunningly voluptuous good looks of someone three or four years older. She could definitely be an outstanding seductress. She should have no trouble taking blood from any man or woman she chose. By working together, Tiffany thought, she and her sister could seed the world with subservient creatures under their own control, or with vastly superior ones who might share their own attributes.
Now that Victoria had fully recovered from porphyria, she was angelically gorgeous. All of her oozing purple blisters had disappeared, much as a pimply teenager magically outgrows the embarrassing acne that overrides her natural beauty and emerges in the full blossom of her sexuality and her femininity.
“I’m hungry,” Victoria said, not at all whiningly, but as a straight-forward statement of fact.
“I understand, dear,” Tiffany responded warmly. “We’ll have to get you fed. It’s a vital priority.”
The fact of the matter was that once a pubescent female recovered fully from that ugly disease, she would always become ravenously hungry, and this inordinate hunger would last ten days or more. It demanded to be fed. And its need was not ordinary food, but human blood.
That’s why the two sisters were driving on a country road instead of an interstate. They were looking for an isolated victim. Someone they could feed off and then kill.
Someone whose body might not be found for a long time after they were gone. Someone whose body might not ever be found if they could take the time to hide it or dispose of it well.
CHAPTER 34
With the power out to the roadhouse’s neon sign and interior lights, it would have been pitch-black were it not for the full moon in the night sky. Zombies milled about in the parking lot, breathing huskily and hungrily.
Some of them hovered in the shadows, back by the Dumpster or among the trees, making munching or bone-cracking sounds. They were consuming parts of the old man, Smokey, who had been killed by them in the early part of the day.
They looked up from their feasting when they heard heavy footsteps on gravel, as if they were afraid of a superior force that might come to steal their meal from them.
They started and cowered when they saw the huge zombie named Barney coming slowly, ploddingly toward them from someplace beyond the shed.
Other zombies followed behind Barney as if somehow he had become their leader. The pack of followers included the zombified serial killer, Chub Harris, who looked the worse for wear now that he had been undead for about twenty-four hours. His eyes were yellowish and his skin was a putrid gray. The quoits in his earlobes had been ripped out, and the loose flaps of ear skin hung down like ropy strings of dead flesh.
Chub and his companions had found their way here from the Brinkmans’ farm, and now they were in search of another food supply.
The one called Barney, perhaps because of exploratory treatments he had received while under the care of Dr. Melrose, seemed to possess a bit more of a functioning brain than did some of his followers. He was also better fortified, thanks to the regular “meals” he had consumed over the years while he was in the doc’s care.
He stopped and stared at the roadhouse, the shed, and the Dumpster, moving his big head slowly and stiffly, taking it all in. Then he picked up one of the whitewashed stones that bordered the gravel parking lot.
CHAPTER 35
“Hey, you wenches gonna bring us more burgers or not?” Bearcat demanded from out in the bar area.
“Yeah!” Slam shouted. “We want ’em today, not next week!”
“Hold your pants on!” Honeybear yelled from the kitchen, where she and Sally were cooking more food for the rapacious skinheads.
“I’ll beat the pants off you if you get smart with me!” Bearcat roared back at her.
Sally said to Honeybear, “Well, I guess these ones are brown enough. Here, bring the platter over. I don’t want those two beasts to start pounding on you.”
Sally worked a well-done patty onto the spatula, and Honeybear reached toward it with the platter.
A loud crash of glass shattering.
Sally and Honeybear both gasped and jumped back, and Honeybear dropped the glass platter, which broke into sharp shards when it hit the floor.
More shattering glass.
The whitewashed stone picked up by Barney was doing the smashing and shattering, wielded in his big, partially decayed hands. He succeeded in smashing a hole through one of the boarded-up kitchen windows, then pounded what was left of it to bits. Then his zombie hands poked through.
Another crash!
Bloody, greenish hands started poking through the other window, clawing and grasping, not caring if any of the dead skin was torn or gashed.
Then a heavy thud against the door! And more thuds!
The zombies were clubbing and pounding at the front and back doors!
“Omigod!” Honeybear cried. “They smell the food cooking!”
Sally contradicted her. “No, they smell us!”
Henry, who was closest to the kitchen, came running in, followed by Bearcat and Slam. Slam had his pistol drawn.
Bearcat’s pistol was still in his belt. He was carrying the black-powder musket, and even as he ran into the kitchen he was using the ramrod to jam home a lead ball and wadding.
The two skinheads each manned a window. They grabbed kitchen knives and whacked at the hands poking through till the zombies backed off. Then Slam poked the barrel of his pistol through and fired.
“Shit! Missed her!” he said. “I’m too goddamn drunk! Got her in the chest though!”
The zombie he had shot, a gray-haired old woman, had a gaping hole in her chest, and she was staggering from the impact, but it hadn’t felled her.
Slam fired again, hitting her between the eyes, and her dead breath whooshed out of her and she went down.
Bearcat took careful aim with his old-fashioned musket, squeezed the trigger, and blew a male zombie’s head off.