The Afterblight Chronicles: Death Got No Mercy

by Al Ewing

  Once upon a time, these people were probably the scum of some community down south or in a trailer park somewhere even people as damaged as Cade and the Duchess wouldn't end up. A bunch of inbred hicks, a sick town joke. And then the bad times had come and turned the whole damned world into the punch line. And suddenly the hillbilly scum family everybody laughed at turned out to be the last survivors. Any of them who could read or switch on a wireless would put two and two together and the first thing such a clan'd do sure wouldn't be to stop screwing the hell out of each other. Keeping it in the family would go from general policy to an article of faith.

  Keep it in the family and you kept the blood pure.

  The old woman's eyes glittered, hard little stones in the grey flesh of her face. "Who's gonna keep it pure now? Got Maybelle and the baby waitin' back in the woods. Their brothers are dead now - so who's gonna get 'em with child? Who's gonna keep that blood pure? You tell me that!"

  She was crying.

  "We was gonna start again! Gonna - gonna -" She groped for the word, clawing the air with her fingers. "Gonna repop... repopulate the world! You killed the world today, yes you did, killed the whole damn world! Killed the future of the world..." She shook her head. "You best kill me too. You better had - better put me in the dirt right now! Because I'm going to come after you!"

  Cade looked at her. She was thin as a rake - malnourished, probably full of cancer.

  She grinned, and there was one tooth in it. "I'm going to come after you! And I'm gonna kill you and anyone you love like you killed mine, boy -"

  Hell with it, thought Cade.

  He figured you should take your elders at their word.

  He swung his right into her face, the lead weight smashing just above her eyes, crushing the skull inward and turning the frontal lobes to jelly. She tottered back for a step or two, her head dented in like a car bonnet after a death-crash, whatever was in her bladder and bowels hitting the ground with a wet slap, then tumbled over like a rag doll. Twitching on the ground, she looked like nothing quite so much as a puppet with the strings cut.

  Cade figured she was probably just crazy, but there was a chance she had some clout - maybe she could have caused him trouble on the way back. He was better off dealing with her now. Anyone coming across the scene would probably put the picture together, but Cade'd be long gone by then.

  He reached down and gripped the handle of the combat knife, tugging it free of Burn This Flag's skull. Cade wasn't a man who worried himself a great deal, but there was a troubling aspect to the encounter. These were probably the most screwed up people he'd ever encountered outside the confines of his shaving mirror, but they made some sense. Their blood was an antidote to the thing that'd murdered a planet, so inbreeding made sense. Screwing your own family, bearing children by them, that made sense. Pretty good sense, in fact.

  That worried Cade.

  He wondered if there were crazier people waiting for him in Frisco. More dangerous people. And if there were, he wondered if they were going to start making sense to him too.

  When Cade got out of the woods, he put the truck in gear and pointed it south, down Highway 101. Behind him, to the north, was what was left of Sausalito and Marin City. Part of him had been hoping Woody was wrong about that, but one look at the column of smoke still rising up towards the horizon was enough to set him straight. Woody wasn't wrong. Sausalito had most likely been razed to the ground, and the chance he was going to find what he needed there was slim to none.

  San Francisco lay ahead, across the Golden Gate Bridge. Cade gunned the engine, narrowing his eyes.

  There was something strung across the bridge. Something white and flapping, half-burned, stained with blood in places. A banner. Cade strained his eyes, and read:

  HIPPY donT let thE Sun set on yu HERE!!!

  Cade didn't figure that was a good sign.

  Chapter Five

  The Alpha Male

  Cade kept the truck on Highway 101, past the cemetery and along Marina Boulevard. The parks and suburbs around the Presidio looked as gutted as Sausalito had been - wrecked houses, smoking timber where trees and fields had been, dead bodies nobody had bothered to clear up. A lot of them looked dead from the bad times - bled out on the street or on the porches of their houses. Some of the corpses looked like they'd died some other way, though - there was one in particular, a pair of legs dangling by almost-rotted trouser cuffs from a telephone pole, the top half laying propped against a fire hydrant, mostly lost to rats and scavengers.

  Across the street, there was another sign, of sorts. A fat fella - had to weigh a good three hundred pounds, and all of it blubber - was sitting naked on the road ahead, placed so that Cade had to swerve around him. He slowed the truck, taking a good look. The man was naked, and had been posed and propped up with a stick, sharpened and pushed into the meat of his back. His head had been severed, and the neck was ragged, as though it'd been pulled off. What was left of the head was sitting in the man's lap, and flapping out of the open mouth was something Cade thought at first was a thumb, until he got a little closer and saw it had a foreskin on it.

  Carved into the chest were some words. It took Cade a few seconds to read them.

  Helter Skelter.

  Not good at all.

  Something bad had happened out here. Probably the same bad thing that happened to Sausalito, to Marin City. The destruction seemed to get worse as he went further down the boulevard, the last of the suburbs a still-flaming vision of something out of hell - then suddenly he took the truck past the line of Baker Street and he was on the city grid. And things were different.

  He slowed the truck down to a crawl. The streets were empty, and they were mostly clean. There weren't any bodies laying anywhere - he figured they'd been dumped into the Marina, or piled up elsewhere, out of sight. Maybe even buried. He glanced right, down the length of Broderick Street. The same story. Clean, deserted, no dead, no garbage.

  Cade figured he'd just crossed a boundary line. Either whatever had torched the Presidio had been turned back here... or it'd started out here. The hairs on the back of Cade's neck were itching a little, the way they had out in the desert when the officers were talking about their damn-fool strategies. Those hairs on the back of Cade's neck were an antennae, of sorts. They flared up when something got to smelling bad.

  Cade had to admit, this smelled pretty bad.

  He figured he had a couple of options, as things stood. He could find the first pharmacy, load up with as much insulin as he could handle and get the hell out. Thing was, that wasn't much of an option for two reasons.

  One, if he loaded up the truck with one drugstore's worth, he'd buy the Duchess maybe another year at most and then he'd need to do it all again, and he'd be a year older and a year slower and have a year less gas for the truck. And then the year after that - well, it just wasn't sustainable, was Cade's thinking on the matter.

  No, Cade needed to find a big supply of the stuff, which meant he'd probably need to ask some questions, which meant, judging by the state of the Presidio, that he'd need to kill a few people. That was fine by Cade.

  The other reason was a matter of security, and it'd been half in his head since he'd seen Sousalito, and now he'd crossed the bridge, he was sure of it. Muir Beach was a ways away from San Francisco, but if they'd trashed the Presidio and the suburbs, then gone for Sausalito, then Marin, then who knew where else up to the north - well, it was a matter of time before they headed west and got to be a serious problem. Whoever did what he'd seen, there was a hell of a lot of them. Either they were out to the north and he'd need to run them down, or they were here and he'd need to burn them out.

  Either way, he needed to ask some questions. He needed to ask a few just to get the lay of the land, because it was pretty damn clear to Cade that San Francisco was as foreign a country as he'd ever been in and he didn't have a damn clue what the customs were or who the local boss was. All he knew for sure was that there wasn't a single soul on the
streets.

  Not one soul, alive or dead.

  Which was a little weird in itself.

  There's a hell of a lot of weight on a dead body. Woody and Cade had done the best they could with the hundreds of bodies in Muir Beach, although in the event Cade had done most of the actual work, cutting the bodies down and lugging them a piece at a time. Woody wasn't made to haul bodies, though he did as many as he could before he started crying and throwing up, and Cade didn't want to trouble the Duchess with it. Cade didn't exactly care about people, but there were a small number of people he nearly cared about, and he came the nearest with her. He wasn't about to put her through a nightmare he could take on his own self.

  It had taken months to even make a few places in Muir Beach liveable again. That was a small town of a hundred and fifty homes and no cable TV, and they couldn't clear it entirely - had to give about two thirds up for lost.

  San Francisco was a whole damned city. There were more people on five or six blocks than in the whole of Muir Beach. And by the looks of things, it was clean as a hospital wing.

  Frankly, that just wasn't right.

  The air blowing in through the truck window was clean, with no trace of that rot that blew through Muir Beach when the wind went the wrong way. But it still stunk to high heaven for all that. The hairs on the back of Cade's neck were buzzing like death row.

  "Hell with it," he muttered, and jerked the wheel right, turning the truck down Cervantes Boulevard. He wasn't going to be getting anywhere pissing about the edge of town.

  His eyes narrowed as he crawled down the street, checking the buildings one by one. Something about halfway down the Boulevard caught his eye, and it took him about a half second to work out what the hell it was.

  Neon.

  BLARNEY'S, flickering on and off in green with a little shamrock. An irish bar.

  With a neon sign.

  Those neck hairs were dancing tango.

  They had electricity - probably something rigged up in back, a cheap gas-powered generator, maybe, but someone had to rig that up and run it. And nobody was going to the trouble of making a neon sign flicker without a good reason. Neon signs were what Cade would call a hell of a luxury.

  What that was, was a beacon. Maybe an invitation.

  "Hell with it," muttered Cade, and parked the truck.

  As he got out and closed the door - Cade knew better than to slam it - he was listening. There was a sound on the wind - low voices, men's voices, singing softly. Cade stopped for a moment, breathing in the clean air. There was something about that song that halted even him, something that gave him a little pause. Not the soft tone of the melody, or the reverence, but that such a thing should be at all.

  Amazing Grace... how sweet the sound...

  Cade scratched the back of his neck, and his mouth twitched towards a frown for a second. Cade wasn't generally a man who allowed himself to be spooked by much of anything but he had to admit to himself that this was a touch spooky no matter how you cut it.

  Back in the desert, Cade had been in a humvee with a guy named Fuel-Air. That wasn't his name - his name was Billy Dominguez - but the Sergeant figured nicknames were good for morale, so if someone looked like he was bucking for one, Sergeant A made sure it stuck. Fuel-Air got more Ripped Fuel than air, according to Sergeant A, so he ended up on a permanent caffeine and ephedrine rush. That made him a hell of a driver on no sleep, but made him a hell of a talker besides, which wasn't the best company for a man like Cade, who gave the impression in a conversation that he lost a year of life for every word he said.

  Fuel-Air pissed Cade off no end. He never shut up, and he had a way with a phrase, short little explosions of profanity and bitter sarcasm mixed in with all the shitty DVDs he used to rent before he joined up. Fuel-Air Bombs, according to Sergeant A, who was a lot funnier in his head than he was in real life. Still, he cared about his men, and he did his damnedest to keep them alive.

  He wasn't like the Captain in that respect.

  No sense dwelling on that, though.

  Fuel-Air was dead now - dead before the bad times hit, which was probably best. Cade didn't think Fuel-Air could've coped with losing his guts out of his anus. That would've been some five-star fucked-up undignified Stephen King shit as far as Fuel-Air was concerned. He'd have complained about it every damn second he was dying. Probably would've been one of the ones who lasted a week, just so he could discuss it at length.

  Cade blinked and pictured his voice, yelling over the dull engine roar of the humvee droning in the background. Always yelling, always talking.

  "This is some five-star shit, dog, some five-star Silent Hill strange-ass Children Of The Corn shit! They're gonna put fuckin' bees on your head or some shit like that, man, like Nic fuckin' Cage!"

  He was dead before that film came out, though. Cade shook his head. He didn't know what the hell he was thinking about that boy for. He'd hated the little bastard.

  Time to get to work.

  Cade walked to the door of the bar and pushed it open, and the singing stopped.

  The first thing Cade noticed was that all the taps had been torn out of the bar, and instead of booze on the shelf behind, there was bottled water. All kinds of brands, sparkling and still, rows and rows of glass and plastic bottles and not a single drop of anything alcoholic between them.

  Each of the bottles had a cross drawn on it in magic marker.

  That spooky feeling was getting worse.

  Cade didn't like where things seemed to be headed. He counted the men - ten sets of eyes staring in his direction. Ten men, a couple bigger than Cade, and none of them looked like a man who wasn't used to fighting.

  And he'd done interrupted their choir session.

  This would not end well.

  The muscles in Cade's back tensed, but he spoke gently, calmly. Truth to tell, Cade didn't really have another way of speaking but calm, and soft, and low. A lot of folks found that menacing, but Cade just wasn't the shouting kind. He hoped he didn't sound like he was trying to be menacing now. He wanted some information.

  He didn't want to kill anybody.

  If it came to a fight, Cade pretty much only knew one way of fighting, and that was fighting to kill. So if things got a little untoward, there was a good chance none of these people would be left in a position to say a damn word about Sousalito or any other subject you could name. They'd be a little busy being dead. Cade didn't want that. At least not just yet.

  "Sorry to disturb you." he said, as a courtesy. "I've got some questions."

  One of the men was chewing a stick of gum. A blonde guy, maybe six-five, had an alpha-male look about him. He stopped chewing, and his voice was a slow, lazy drawl, heavy with scorn.

  "You a hippie?"

  Cade considered the question. No, he couldn't say he was. He shook his head, keeping his eyes on Alpha Male.

  "You look like a hippie."

  Cade lifted his hand to his face and tried to remember the last time he'd looked at himself in a mirror. Cade pretty much avoided looking at himself in a mirror unless he had to. It wasn't a guilt thing, exactly. Cade wasn't a man who felt guilty as a rule. But it was a pastime he couldn't say he got an awful lot out of.

  His fingers brushed through his beard. It was pretty furry there, all right. A good three months of growth.

  And now he came to think about it, the Duchess had been saying she needed to cut his hair again. It'd been about eight months since she'd done that. She was saying he was getting to looking like a damn mountain man.

  Cade ran his fingers through his hair. It was pretty long at that.

  This was something he should've considered when he saw that sign on the bridge.

  "I said you look like a hippie, boy."

  Alpha Male was pressing his point. Cade was a fair-minded man when he had a mind to be, and he surely had to admit that there was a certain logic to Alpha Male's position. Cade probably did look a bit like a hippie, at least going by his hair, and his beard. Mind y
ou, there was the big splatter of slowly drying blood on the side of his tank-top, and all over his fists and up his arms, but maybe in this light they just looked a little grimy.

  Hell with it.

  "Guess so." Cade nodded. No harm in being agreeable. "All the same, I've got some questions." He paused, looking at the men. The ones with glass bottles were carrying them by the neck now, like clubs. Cade figured he could see where this was headed. "Hoping you could answer them."

  One of the men smashed his bottle against a table, the water splashing onto the ground along with shards of glass, leaving him with a weapon. Cade looked in his direction for a moment.

  "I'd be obliged." said Cade, softly. He figured there wasn't much else apart from that to be said.

  Alpha Male spat.

  "You got a nerve, hippie. You're a long way from the Hashbury now, you know that? Satan doesn't have the power to help you here. This here is God's city." He grinned, and the grin lit up his face. There was malevolence there, but also a kind of fervour, a sort of ecstasy that shone out of those blue eyes.

  It hit Cade, suddenly, that this talk of God and Satan wasn't an excuse.

  Cade had met a lot of folks in the past who used talk of Jesus to excuse themselves when they figured they'd give Woody a punch in the mouth for sleeping with who he did, or take a tyre iron to Lou Greer's caddy because Maisy Greer was white, or tell Frank Bellows' eldest she was Lucifer's own murderous whore because she'd gotten herself pregnant and decided not to keep it. Cade had come across a fair few of those folks, and usually it was people like Frank Bellows - who didn't appreciate some damn fool making his only daughter feel even worse about something that wasn't their damn business to begin with - who'd ask him to make their acquaintance.

  For the most part he'd gently let them understand that Muir Beach wasn't the best town for them to make those excuses in. Generally that didn't take more than a couple of fingers.