“I recognize a few of them. That woman,” Cardo said. “That’s Marietta Stolf.”
“What do you mean,” Misty asked, trying to squeeze between Reggie and Cardo. Crate growled something incoherent and pulled her away.
“They’re from town.”
Reggie pulled his finger from between the blinds and turned around, looked at Cardo.
“You did this,” the old man said, glowering, and for a second Reggie wasn’t sure who he was talking to. Crate leveled a curled finger at Reggie’s chest. “You did this.”
“What?” Reggie asked, though he knew exactly what the old man was talking about. “How could I—”
“You led them right to us, you black son of a bitch.”
That answered that. And suddenly, Reggie was staring down the barrel of the old man’s rifle. Not missing a beat, Cardo raised his gun. It wavered before the old man’s face.
Reggie pressed the barrels of his shotgun to the old man’s chest.
“We don’t need to be doing this,” Reggie said, cocking both barrels.
“Stupid son of a bitch,” the old man said, spittle bursting from his mouth and clinging in shiny beads to his beard.
“Goddammit, Crate,” Misty said, placing a hand on Crate’s shoulder. He shrugged her off, jabbed the business end of his rifle to Reggie’s throat.
“He’s right,” Cardo said, leaning forward. His hand was steady now, the barrel of his gun less than an inch from Crate’s nose. “We really shouldn’t be doing this. Got to stick together if we’re going to make it out of this.”
“Stop this,” Stacy whispered. “And be quiet, all of you.”
“They don’t know we’re in here,” Cardo said, glancing at Reggie. “I’ve watched them, remember. I know how they work. Crate?”
The old man would not take his eyes from Reggie’s face, and as he stared into their frightened depths, Reggie was certain that Cardo was wrong. Somewhere not far beneath the surface, the old man was exactly like that.
“Crate?”
“What?” he whisper-screamed, his eyes darting toward Cardo and back to Reggie—back and forth, back and forth. The barrel of Crate’s gun pressed harder into Reggie’s throat.
“I’m sorry,” Cardo said. “We didn’t know they were going to follow us here, okay? How could we?”
After several seconds of loaded silence, Cardo repeated his question: “How the hell could we?”
“Okay,” Crate said, lowering his rifle, de-cocking it. Reggie and Cardo followed suit. “Now what the hell are we going to do?”
Reggie stared at the old man, running scenarios through his head. He could get to his truck, no problem. He could get to his truck, and he could be gone, fuck these hillbilly assholes. Cardo could even come along—they could be out the door and inside the truck before the dead fucks outside even knew what was happening, and that would be it. To hell with the old folks and the hippie chick…
Only thing, he felt a little bad—a little, not a lot—for leading the dead folks to the store, and he thought maybe there was some hope for the space-case. God help him, he kind of wanted to keep her around. She was dumb, but she didn’t deserve to be abandoned here, left to die.
“Listen,” he said, adopting the voice of authority, a shut-up-and-listen-to-me tone he’d used more than once when things in Vietnam had gone to shit and everyone around him was turning into Jello. “We can survive this. I’ve survived worse. Those dead motherfuckers out there don’t have guns and hand-grenades.”
He looked outside. From where he stood, he could see more than twenty walking corpses. The dead didn’t like the fire—that much was obvious. They kept their distance, and as such hadn’t come near the porch. Most of them wandered in the middle of the road. They’d worked over Bilbo’s carcass, but had since abandoned it. The dog now stood on all fours, head low, glistening legs quivering like those of a newborn calf, tattered innards hanging from the ruin of its stomach.
“About twenty,” Reggie said, looking back at the others.
“Bullshit,” Crate said. “After I shot the first two, I walked to the edge of the parking lot. I looked down the road. There were a hell of a lot more than twenty coming. It’s why I shot my damned dog. He just would have kept on barking, the dumb bastard.” The old man shrugged. He looked defeated. “Would have led them right to us.”
He stepped away from them, toward the tables, where he sat down and fished a lighter and the twisted remnant of a joint from his breast pocket. After a few sparking flicks of the lighter, the joint flared up. Smoke plumed around the old man’s head, churned in the dim glow of the coolers, and he looked to Reggie like some prophet who’d been to the mountain one time too many. He raised his eyebrows, stared Reggie into the ground.
“Well?” He said.
“They can’t all have followed us,” Reggie said, looking to Cardo for conformation.
“He’s right,” Cardo said, looking at Crate. “How many did you see down the road?”
“Hard to tell,” the old man said, drawing deep on his crooked joint. The tip flared. Crate held his breath and closed his eyes, opened them a few seconds later. “A lot.”
“There weren’t more than five hundred in the streets when we left town,” Cardo said. “They’re not smart. I doubt even half of them followed us.”
“And I’m sure some of them went south when they reached the intersection.”
“How many bullets you have?”
“For this,” Crate said, lifting his rifle. “A few hundred.”
“A few hundred,” Reggie said, the tone of his voice suggesting that he really didn’t need to say any more. “Not counting our guns.”
“Yeah,” Crate said.
“Then here’s what we’re doing…”
Thirty-Two
The wound in his left arm was infected. It throbbed in time with his racing heartbeat. The flesh around the holes was livid and swollen. He’d need antibiotics before long, but at this rate he’d die of starvation first.
Richard’s legs quivered. He was beginning to wonder if he could eat handfuls of grass, or maybe from one of the many clusters of waxy mushrooms he’d encountered. He dropped to his knees and clawed through a layer of decomposing leaves and pine needles, revealed the dark and rich soil beneath, released an aroma that called to mind his uncle’s compost heap, down in Texas, back when he was a boy who’d eaten dirt once or twice, for no other reason than to see what it tasted like.
His fingers slipped into the soil. He pawed and scooped like a dog in search of a long-hidden bone, and eventually he found what he was looking for. Dirt-speckled, the earthworm slid like wriggling sandpaper down his throat. He found another, its accordion-ringed length bulging and fat. It got stuck and split in half as he tugged it from the earth, and the other half flapped back and forth. He pinched it between his fingers and tossed it into his mouth, swallowing it whole.
He took a break, and when he was certain that his stomach would not betray him, he dug and he dug, plucked a thick grub from the dirt and quickly swallowed it. Chew your food, his mom always told him, but he couldn’t—not now. Not yet.
His knees were still weak, but his stomach felt better. Time oozed by. He walked and he walked, stopping once more to fish the meager protein of a handful of worms from the earth. When he pissed, he did so with regret, watching the stream leave his body and patter onto the ground, where it was quickly absorbed. Rainfall had been steady but light, barely a drizzle most of the time, and he could only stand around for so long barely feeling droplets spatter his tongue. He wasn’t taking in as much as he was letting out, and if the sky didn’t open up real good real soon, he was in trouble.
A few minutes before he saw the shed, he knew he’d gotten himself turned around. It was the tree, the fallen one with the branch that looked like a dick. Silly, totally juvenile, the kind of puerile stuff Kimberly gave him a hard time him for, but he’d seen it on the way out of hell, and even though he was in the roughest shape he ever had b
een, those words—looks like a dick—had nonetheless shot through his head as he stumbled past it.
There it was again, and there was the shed, goddammit all to hell.
The gun seemed promising for a second—it would not take much. He need only bring it to his head and pop, it was all over—he could die twitching on the ground with raindrops on his face and a bellyful of earthworms. But that wasn’t his thing. He messed up, same as anyone, but quitting, giving up, it just wasn’t an option. Kimberly playfully mocked this attitude, called it macho nonsense, but it was probably the one thing they’d actually had in common, aside from a love of each other’s bodies: Kim hadn’t believed in giving up, and though she may have dressed up this determination in a slightly more righteous and noble garment, at the end of the day it was the same damned thing.
He’d save his remaining bullets for the bastards who’d done this to them, if he had the chance. And if he ran out before they were all dead? Fine.
He reached the clearing at the top of the hill, the three buildings. The place where the attack had come. The winding road leading down to the highway.
He stood in the clearing, looking around, brazen. He tried the door leading into one of the apartments, found it unlocked. Stepping in, he turned on the light and shut the door, locked it. The air was stale and meaty.
There were two rooms—a bedroom with a tiny kitchenette and a small bathroom. The bedroom looked like a hundred dorm rooms he’d partied in during his five ill-spent years at college. A bed with rumpled sheets spilling onto the floor. A scattering of beer cans, an uneven stack of skin magazines. He found a .38 Special in one of the bureau drawers, the kind of weapon a woman would keep in her purse. It was fully loaded—five bullets—and it slid neatly into his pocket.
He opened the small fridge, which contained only five cans of beer and a pack of sliced ham. The ham was slimy and smelled bad. He checked the torn label and was not surprised to see that the ham had come from Misty’s.
There was a can of beans in the cabinet, a can-opener on the counter. There was a fork lying in the sink, crusted with the remains of some other meal. He rinsed it off and shoveled beans into his mouth, downing the contents of the can within minutes. He drank water directly from the tap, and when he got tired of that he looked around until he found a plastic cup on the floor next to the bedside table.
The walk downhill was, in its own way, as difficult as had been their initial uphill trek. He was weak and tired, and he resisted the urge to give up and simply tumble downhill. Gravity tugged him along, too hard sometimes, and eventually he reached the truck he and Guy and Daniel had been thrown into, and not far from it, Daniel’s corpse, still bound to the tree.
He looked around. There was no sign of Guy.
Daniel’s corpse lifted it head, stared with lidless eyes at Richard.
“Gah,” it said.
He considered his remaining bullets, but not for long. The highway was within reach, and he was not willing to risk drawing attention to himself.
“Not now,” he said, and left.
Soon after, he reached the ranch-style house, stopping long enough to stare for a few seconds at the van, parked just where they’d left it, and he simply kept going, the gun at his side.
The ground leveled out, the sun sank into the west, and when he reached the highway, he turned left, south, toward town.
Thirty-Three
They helped Sally out of bed, out of her clothes and onto the floor, where she got down onto a padded vinyl mat and lay on her side. When the time came, she’d get on her hands and knees. She refused drugs, though Mathilda offered, and when Colleen asked about her position, Sally informed her between contractions that she’d delivered her first two children that way, and that she’d do the same now.
Mathilda launched into a spiel about natural childbirth and the disadvantages of lying on one’s back, never mind the fact that the position was the preferred choice of most doctors. She spoke with the surety of someone who knew exactly what she was talking about and wanted to make sure you knew it, and Colleen could not help but think of Kimberly. She sounded like that when she went from simply talking to educating, to opening your eyes, if she could, to the truth.
Feeling useless, Colleen stood looking down at the two women, Sally on her side, wearing only a bra, her massive stomach smooth and somehow beautiful, her back arched and her ass pointing at Mathilda, who knelt behind her, hands resting upon her thighs.
“Hey,” Sally said, looking up at Colleen and smiling. She nodded toward the floor. “Come on.”
Colleen sat beside the pregnant woman, tried to smile, could barely hold the woman’s gaze.
“We’re going to make it,” Sally said, and Colleen could only stare at her. She reached out and took Sally’s right hand.
“Does it hurt?” It was a stupid question, but Sally did not seem to care.
“Yeah,” she said. “But it’s the good kind.”
“Oh.”
Behind Sally, Mathilda said something about dilation. The child was not crowning yet, but would be soon. The window between contractions was drawing shut. In the living room, one of the children wept.
“Dammit,” Mathilda said. “Poor kids.”
“What should we do?” Colleen asked.”
“Can’t do anything,” Mathilda said. “They have to wait.”
“To hell with that,” Sally said then grunted, teeth clenched. “Get out of here. See to them.”
“I may need her here,” Mathilda said.
“Bullshit,” Sally snapped. “Need her for what? Go.”
Colleen looked up at Mathilda, eyebrows raised. Mathilda shrugged.
“Go on.”
“I’ll be back,” Colleen said, bending over and kissing Sally on the cheek. “I’m going to calm them down and—”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
She did.
The unnamed child was asleep where they’d left him, on the floor, lying on his back and supported on either side by pillows taken from one of the beds. Little Huff sat at the base of the bookcase, an oversized book containing photographs of Northern California opened before him. He’d torn out several pages.
The twin leaned against the door leading into the nursery, wailing. Above his head, the doorknob rattled. Thankfully, the deadbolt was well out of his reach.
“Hey,” she said, sliding down the wall and sitting beside him.
“I want Jack,” he said, answering the question on Colleen’s lips.
“I know, Davy,” she said, unsure if that was one of his nicknames. She patted her thigh. “Come here. I want to hold you.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s sick, baby.”
“Is he gonna be okay?”
“I think maybe he just needs his rest, kiddo.”
“He needs a nap?” The kid asked. His face was still red, his eyes wide and watery. His bottom lip quivered, and he threw himself into her arms, unleashed another round of tears.
“Aw,” she said, rocking him, her own lip quivering, her own tears flowing. She held back a scream, as much for her own sake as that of the child clinging to her chest. To their right, the doorknob turned and turned. “Come on, honey.”
She took him back to the couch, sat him down. He looked up at her, and she wondered if maybe he was cried out for now. In the bedroom, Sally gasped and growled and cursed, and Colleen stood looking down at David.
“I have a job for you, okay?”
“Okay,” he said, sounding confused.
“You want to be a big boy, right?”
“Yeah,” David said, smiling. He lifted his right arm and curled his small fist toward his shoulder. “I got muscles.”
“Yes, you do,” she said, realizing with horror that the boy would bounce back a lot quicker than any of them. He was too young to have any expectations of the world. He’d never known normal, not as she and her friends had defined it, and he never would. “Strong muscles.”
“Yeah!” He fl
exed both arms now. She raised a finger.
“Now listen.”
“Okay.” He lowered his arms, folded his hands on his lap.
“I need to do something,” she said, and David watched her, eyes wide. His face was no longer red. His pale eyebrows no longer stood out. “I need you to watch the babies, and stay right here, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Don’t follow me.”
“Kay.”
“Okay,” she said, bending over and kissing him on the cheek.
In the hall, she slid back the deadbolt on the nursery door, watched the knob as it rattled and turned. She wondered how long Lissa’s corpse would stand there on the other side of the door, going through the same motions, trying and trying and trying to turn the knob, trying to get out.
Colleen seized the knob and, turning it, pushed into the nursery. The dead girl tumbled backward, tripped over the other dead child, which had yet to get to its feet, and landed butt-first on the floor.
“Urk,” it said, looked up at Colleen, heavy-lidded and slack-jawed, its legs across the dead twin’s back. Colleen closed the door behind her, moving quickly. Stepping around Lissa’s corpse, getting behind it, she slid a hand beneath the dead girl’s armpits, picked it up, and quickly moved to one of the cribs, where she sat it down facing the wall.
The dead twin had managed to crawl less than a foot since last she saw it. Its little bloody hands tugged at the carpet. It tried and failed to lift its head. Though its fat arms were an unhealthy shade of light gray, its tight blond curls still looked the picture of health. They bounced as the dead child’s head rose and fell, rose and fell, quivering.
It peeled away from the bloody carpet with a wet thwack. She lay it in the crib beside the dead girl, careful to not look at its face. Lissa was bad enough—the sight of the boy’s face might provide that final bit of pressure: the twig would snap, and she’d be done.
At the diaper-changing table, she scrubbed her hands with wet wipes, dropping them to the floor when she was done with them. She hadn’t gotten much blood on her fingers, but she wiped and she wiped as if her hands had been doused, stopping at last once she’d gone through nearly half the box of wipes.
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