He pulled away from the glass. Proust regarded him with mistrust.
“Okay?” Cardo asked, not bothering to raise his voice.
Proust looked back at his son, who stepped away and vanished from sight.
“You leave your gun outside.”
“No, I don’t,” Cardo said.
Proust glowered at him.
“Open it.”
“Okay,” Proust said, jabbing a finger at the crowd. “Make them get back.”
Cardo told everyone to step back and quiet down for a second, and they listened, though there were many taunts, and more than a few of the people in the crowd cried bullshit.
“I’m going in,” Cardo yelled, palms held before him. “Just, please, everyone calm down—he’s opening the doors soon, okay? We’re going to figure this out. I can’t stop all of you from smashing these doors, but I’m asking you not to. Proust and his sons are looking for a reason to start shooting their guns. Don’t give them one, okay?”
Cardo turned away from the crowd and stared at Proust through the glass, raised his eyebrows. Proust unlocked the door and Cardo slipped into the store without incident.
“Jesus,” he said, leaning across the counter and looking Eddie Proust in the eye. “This is a bad idea, man. You’re messing up big time.”
“This is America is what it is,” Proust said, sliding his holstered gun onto his belt. “A lot might be changing out there, but that hasn’t.”
“Damn,” Cardo said, putting the customer service desk between himself and the entrance. Proust’s boys carried shotguns in plain sight of the people pressed against the glass storefront. They’d paraded them around for the last five minutes, after Proust let them know the doors were opening in ten. He’d given the crowd time to spread the word.
“Open up,” Proust said a few minutes later, and his son did. They filed in, giving the shotgun a wide berth, looking around, eyes wide. There was a Proust family member stationed the head of every aisle, each carrying a gun.
“Hey, Troy,” Eddie Proust said as Troy Matthews walked by and picked up a can of kerosene. Proust smiled as if it were any old day. Matthews looked dazed. There was a spot of blood on his cheek.
Bodies pressed in, and Cardo backed away. Tasgal and Clark were outside. He saw flashes of them between jostled throng pouring into the store. They wouldn’t be able to do a damned thing. Cardo looked behind him, down the empty aisle and toward the back of the store. Wouldn’t be long now before someone noticed the prices.
“Oh, come on, Eddie,” a short man with close-cropped red hair and a nose that seemed too small for his face yelled, indignant. “This is ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry, Keith, it’s just business,” Proust said, speaking to the short man in the same tough-luck tone he probably used on folks who tried to get a refund on an open box of detergent. “You know as well as I do that the trucks aren’t coming anytime soon. This is—”
Everyone yelled at once, and then the little red-head lifted his arm. There was a muffled pop, and the back of Eddie Proust’s head flapped open as if on a spring-loaded hinge. The crowd surged. By the time the air filled with the thundering chorus of gunfire, Cardo was halfway to the back of the store.
He pushed through the swinging doors and into the back hallway, his gun out and ready. He put his back to the wall and looked left, right—there was no one around. At the end of the hall, a door led to the alley behind the store. It was chained and padlocked shut. He could shoot the lock, but that might draw unwanted attention.
The door to his left was labeled WOMEN. He wasn’t sure where MEN was, but considered lying low in the ladies room but then decided that he needed to be higher. There was a two way mirror located at the center of the store, between the meat display and the bank of coolers containing milk and juice.
A door at the end of the hall led right. He pushed it open, revealed a staircase—eight steps leading up, a right turn, eight more steps.
He opened the door at the top of the stairs, and one of Proust’s meathead grandsons turned and lifted the large gun in his small hands. Cardo looked right town the barrel. It bobbed and weaved. There was a puff of smoke, and in the close quarters the sound was like cannon fire. The bullet thrummed past Cardo’s right ear and slammed into the wall behind him. His hands took over, squeezed three rounds into the kid’s surprised face, pummeling it into some kind of spurting cubist mess. The kid’s body hit the ground, the misshapen sack that had been his head flopping forward onto his chest.
“Gah,” Cardo said, backing out of the small office and sliding down the wall, watching a sticky wad of what must have been brain matter roll slowly down the fabric of the boy’s Superman t-shirt. The dead boy’s hands twitched in his lap, and he pissed his pants.
Cardo leaned sideways and vomited onto the top step, and continued to stare into the ruin of the kid’s head until the sight of it ceased to make sense.
“Stupid bastard,” Cardo screamed, looking at the gun in his hand and throwing it onto the floor as if it were something hot. He wasn’t sure he was cursing—Proust, Proust’s dumb grandson, or himself.
Downstairs, there were more gunshots. Someone screamed in pain, and the place sounded as if it were being ransacked. It quieted down eventually. He waited for the sound of people—alive or dead—finding their way into the hall and onto the stairs, but it never came.
Cardo stood up, took off his uniform shirt, stepped into the small office, and used the shirt to cover the dead boy’s obliterated head. He picked up his gun, holstered it. The massive gun that Proust had left in the care of his twelve-year-old grandson lay on the floor between the boy’s splayed legs. Crouching, Cardo lifted it, wiped a spot of blood from the barrel onto his pants, and set the gun atop the desk placed before the window that looked down upon the interior of the store.
He dragged the kid’s remains into the hall, careful to not upset the placement of the shirt that concealed the damage that he’d done. He stepped into the small office; shut and locked the door.
For two hours, he watched as a steady stream of Beistle residents filed into Proust’s Supermarket and picked the shelves clean. There were dead bodies everywhere, and not the walking kind. As far as he could tell, all of them were in about the same shape as the kid out on the landing.
He reached for his radio and found that he had lost it somewhere along the way. He picked up the phone to confirm it was dead, and it was. There was a small television on the floor beneath the desk. He picked it up, set it atop the blotter, and plugged it in. The picture was a fuzzy mess, and no amount adjusting the antenna made a difference, so he turned it off and sat staring into the store.
By the third hour, the place was empty. A dead body wandered in, seemed to take the place in, and then backed out and dragged itself someplace else.
There were bullets for Proust’s gun in one of the desk drawers. He stood up, replaced the bullet the kid had fired, pocketed the others. Sliding his new gun into his belt, Cardo opened the door and left.
Downstairs, a dead man stood before the bathroom door, tugging at the knob. A large piece of broken glass jutted from its throat. Smaller shards glistened like jewels across its forehead. Its cheeks hung in tatters, revealing the musculature of its jaw. Cardo was past the dead thing before it realized he was even there.
His shoes crunched across broken glass. The acrid reek of blood and pine oil and bleach hung in the air. He nearly slipped on blood. It pooled on the tile, mingled with soft drinks and beer. Behind him, someone gasped—a raspy exhalation that could have come from either the living or the dead. Unseen feet shuffled across something that crinkled and crunched, and Cardo was certain-absolutely certain—that it was a bag of Lays potato chips.
There was life in the parking lot, actual living life. People rummaged through the products strewn across the ground. They stopped what they were doing long enough to give him a once over and promptly got back to their work.
Not far from his cruiser, a dead woman
lay near an overturned shopping cart. The cart, no doubt once brimming with looted goods, was empty. A plastic gallon jug lay empty in a puddle of milk mixed with the blood surrounding the woman’s diminished head.
“You okay, Cardo?”
“Not really,” Cardo said, looking back at the person addressing him. Jerry Smith, a long-haired stone-freak who’d never gotten the news that the Summer of Love had actually ended. They’d shared a few grades in high school, but nothing more. Sometimes it seems like no one in Beistle was going anywhere. If this were so, then Jerry Smith was getting there a little faster than the rest of them. “You?”
“Not really, man.” Smith had a case of beer under each arm. “I’m sorry about this,” he said, indicating the beer.
“It’s no big deal,” Cardo said, walking over to his cruiser and cursing. The front left of the car was crumpled in. The headlight was smashed and half of the grille lay on the ground. The front wheel was both flat and twisted in such a way that told him the axle was screwed.
Good thing home was a ten minute walk.
“I saw that happen,” Smith said. He sounded proud, eager to talk.
“Yeah?”
“You wanna know who did it?”
“Not really,” Cardo said, shrugging.
“It was Carl Perkins, from over in Harlow?”
“This is a damn mess. Could still use the radio.”
“He got bit,” Smith said. “He was in bad shape.”
“You see any more pork around?”
“Pork?” Smith asked, and the confusion in his eyes cleared. He laughed, obviously surprised to hear Cardo using a word typically reserved for folks who didn’t like the police. He shook his head. “No. Oh, yeah, wait. Tasgal. He got into his car. I was still in there, but I saw him through the window. I think Clark was with him. Clark got shot.”
“Oh,” Cardo said. “Damn it. Where did they go?”
“Away,” Smith said.
“Okay. How’s your mom?”
“She died yesterday.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Cardo said, sliding behind the wheel of his cruiser and checking the closed band radio. Dead air, distant voices muttering, and no more.
“I got no place to go, really.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Smith opened his mouth to say something, but Cardo silenced him with an upheld hand.
“Go home and drink your beer, Jerry,” he said, walking past the man and toward Main Street. “Try not to get eaten.”
Cardo walked toward his house. Before he got there, he’d have to pass through the heart of town. From the looks of it, that’s where all of the action was.
He walked, and in his mind he saw the kid’s head open up and deflate. Eyes open or closed, it didn’t matter: the kid was right there.
What else was he supposed to have done? Well, he didn’t want to think too hard on that. He could have kicked the gun out of the kid’s hand. He was close enough to do that. Kick the gun or kick the kid in the chest. Step to the side and just pluck the gun out of his little hands.
The way the kid’s arms had quivered, it was obvious that he was having a hard time holding up the hand cannon. Did he really think the kid had been strong enough to cock the gun once more before Cardo could take two steps and close the distance between them?
After firing, did the kid even have a decent grip on the thing? Had the gun already left his small hands before Cardo opened fire?
Three shots?
“God,” he said.
There was a large crowd gathered before the fire station. He walked through them, head low, making eye contact sparingly. Bodies parted around him like the Red Sea around the Israelites. Familiar faces turned to watch him pass, eyes wide and eyes weary. And guns, lots of guns. Rifles and shotguns; pistols hanging from hips like it was Dodge City. The folks who didn’t have guns had baseball bats and pitchforks.
“Hey, Cardo,” someone said, and he just walked. It sounded like Mike Hanson, and this was good. He liked Mike, and was happy to know that Mike was alive, but that’s where it ended. He had no desire to hang around and swap war stories and speculate about what tomorrow would bring. He needed to be home and drunk and in his chair, and he needed the Proust kid out of his head.
They didn’t really need him around anyway. If he stopped walking and joined this band of survivors, it would be as one of them, not as the law. They were the law now. Out there, he’d just be another gun, and they had more than enough of those.
Across the street, bodies were lined up three rows deep in the BEISTLE BAKE parking lot. Their faces were covered in sheets or blankets or shirts. Sheets of paper and cardboard bearing hand-written names were pinned or taped to their chests, identifying the corpses for any relatives who wished to claim them. People sat weeping beside a few of them. A woman knelt, the rag-doll body of a toddler across her lap. The baby moved, but its movements were all wrong. A man knelt behind the woman, his face pressed into her shoulder.
Further down, a tangled and charred heap of limbs and torsos smoldered in the evening light. Not everyone had friends or family. He wondered if anyone would find the Proust kid, and what his name had been, anyway.
It wasn’t until he got past the throng that he realized what was wrong—he hadn’t seen any soldiers. The National Guard had pulled out.
Cardo lived in a two room hovel at the end of Main Street. Despite its size, the place was not an embarrassment. It was relatively new, and in very nice shape. Cardo kept it nice and neat, inside and out, and he was happy to bring women here on the rare Saturday night that found him knocking back beers at the Redwood Tavern and looking for a little love. Better than all of that, it was paid for.
The dead body standing in Cardo’s yard looked as if it had been dragged through fire and broken glass. The parts of its body that were not charred were stripped to the muscle. The corpse had a hard time walking, and he wondered who it was and where it had come from. So much was missing that he could not tell if he were looking at the remains of a man or a woman.
He stepped into his yard and looked around, pulling his gun and leveling it at the side of the thing’s head. Like the corpse trying to get into the bathroom at Proust’s, this one had not yet noticed him. It tried to turn in place and stumbled on its own twisted ankles, collapsing to the ground and lying facedown upon the grass. A belch rattled through the dead thing’s throat, and Cardo felt his stomach tighten.
He shot the thing through the back of the head. This close, he noticed an ornate jade earring nearly lost in the blackened remains of the thing’s left ear.
“Oh.” It was Kora Wareheim. She lived three blocks down the road, worked at the bowling alley on weekdays, told fortunes on the weekend, and was the single mother of two small girls.
He went inside and looked around for a sheet of paper. Not finding one, he ripped the front from a Raisin Bran box and, using a black marker that he found in a cluttered drawer to the right of the kitchen sink, scrawled her name upon it.
Outside, he placed it upon the dead woman’s back. He looked around, frowned at the stone frog that sat in the flower-free flowerbed to the right of the front door. It had belonged to the previous owner, and he’d seen no reason to get rid of it. He placed it atop the placard on the dead woman’s back and went inside, locking the door.
Five minutes later, Cardo sat in his recliner, two guns resting on the tray next to his chair and a fifth of good whisky tipped bottoms up. For some reason, the local CBS affiliate was playing an episode of The Honeymooners. He didn’t bother changing the channel. There was news on the other channels, but the news made him remember the sight of the stupid, scared Proust kid’s face turning inside out. Ralph and Ed Norton and the whisky burning its way down his throat helped him to forget.
The events of the last two days caught up to him. He closed his eyes and slept for nearly eight hours. The news was on when he opened his eyes, and he’d spilled half of the whisky between his legs. The sun was down
. It was nearly nine.
He got up and went to the bathroom, returned to the living room and ate stale Rice Krispies dry from the box. On the television, an obviously tired and annoyed doctor was explaining that life had simply been redefined, that these things could not be considered dead because dead bodies could not possibly walk or see or do any of the things that these creatures were doing.
Cardo nodded off again, opened his eyes four hours later to the whupping sound of a helicopter. He stood up, legs tingly and stiff, and stumbled toward the door, opened it. Kora’s body made him jump. He’d forgotten about it. He’d forgotten his guns, too, but that was okay—aside from Kora, there were no dead bodies within sight, walking or otherwise.
A large low-flying helicopter circled the town. It was military, he knew that much. Beyond that, he had no idea what he was looking at. It had two rotors, and it looked a lot like the choppers he’d seen in news footage from ‘Nam, dropping down from the sky and extracting injured soldiers, dumping off fresh ones.
He watched, expected the chopper to set down across town, on the Beistle High football field, or to maybe fill the night sky with parachutes. Neither happened. Instead, the chopper looped around, away from where he stood, toward the highway. It spun around once more and headed back toward Beistle. At first he thought something was wrong, that the helicopter had caught fire: a white plume trailed from the underbelly of the helicopter, billowing out and descending upon the town.
“Oh, God,” he said. He ran into his house, grabbed his guns, and was out the door. He didn’t bother closing it behind him.
Fifteen
The bridges were not a problem. On the first one there was a burning car. A black thing stumbled in the middle of the road, clutching at the air with hands that had no fingers. Reggie ran it down, wincing at the sound it made coming apart beneath his truck, but that was it. No Army blockade, no blown out bridge, no road choked bumper to bumper with abandoned vehicles.
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