BRING ON THE DEAD
ROBERT HARTERMAN
Copyright 2012 by Robert Harterman
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce any portions thereof.
This is a work of fiction. The places and characters it depicts are the product of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or places, dead or alive, is purely coincidental.
This e-book is licensed for your entertainment only. It may not be re-sold, in part or in whole.
Prologue
It wasn’t the tits, buoyant and unrestrained, enthusiastically given him their best rolling cabbage imitation under that shirt.
Not specifically.
But all the blood and gore, of seven generations of fighting back, of humanity’s place in the wet gray muck of it all—well, it comes down to that shirt… Sometimes. The stretched, thinning fabric. Old Navy versus the molten bowling balls. He watched them as cold winds pelted the torches behind him, casting the tavern in strangle angles of light. And while the cold air splashed up he back, Chase Gunderson turned from them long enough to see a pair of battered hunters leaving, limping, holding each other up. The first brawl of the night was over. For now. Some nonsense about money. But more on that in a moment…
Chase’s father sent him to a neighboring compound about the rye prices—his father didn’t mention the nudity. He never mentioned things like the nudity. He’d just ask how things went, then he’d start laughing like some kind of thunder god when he’d tell him. It was a thing of theirs. If Chase wasn’t about to get him killed, they’d laugh about this bastard in front of him; they’d talk about how this enormous, bare gut right in front of his face was as present and mysterious as a nearby moon. He would say that it being tattooed was almost irrelevant. In the open robe across the table, that sum’bitch just loomed. But, dying, the old boy is not going to have the time to hear about it. Which is all just another way of saying—Chase Gunderson had not anticipated the nudity.
The fat merchant settled in. Supposedly he had something people call a sideways wit, which his father had coming out of his ass; you didn’t what was going to fly out of his mouth. But the huge fellow in front of him didn’t say anything, witty or sideways.
“Hello there, sir. Pet Allison, I take it?”
The enormous merchant yawned, sending a ridiculous outburst of orange eyebrow arching high onto his forehead. After a moment, plenty of time for the big fellow to smile, extend a hand, or at least nod, he instead grunted ominously and began pulling the small oaken table closer to himself.
Chase harrumphed thoughtfully. Maybe this wasn’t a good morning. Hell, it was entirely possible that this was not Pet Allison. He could be sitting in front of the wrong fat naked bastard—which would be about right.
He leaned over, pulling his chair to rejoin the table. But the big guy halted him with a flourish from his great paw.
Now what the hell is this about?
Across Red Horn Pub, a curious hush spread. Farmers and cutthroats alike began to turn. Bent and frozen, Chase turned his head to the deepening quiet. The silence splashed, almost viscerally, stretching to the lightless corners where it enveloped a small army of barmaids. They rose like deer from tall grass, emerging from laps and under tables to scuttle toward the kitchen. Everyone, including the retreating barmaids, was staring. Some of the saltier scrappers had a predator’s glint. Sizing him up for something. But Chase was a veteran man at arms, a hunter of both zombies and assholes alike, what the local boys called a zombie commando; he wasn’t worried about drunken pissants. Anyway, he could smell the animal-blood scent of a fight long before it erupted. There was something else going on in here. And there was something on going on in them, in their heads. Curiosity, perhaps.
He swallowed his own curiosity a moment, and sat. In the prickly silence, he regarded the pub itself. It was oddly damn dank, he noted. Even for a Sheepworks pub. Soggy timbers supported the walls, which appeared to be carved from the hillside. The ridiculously low ceiling meant it was likely a converted slaughterhouse tunnel, once used for the sheep that had given the enormous compound its name.
Probably a slaughterhouse turned slaughterhouse.
After what could have been a minute, or thirty, the maids returned. Four of them. They came with armfuls, stacking the table with oddest assortment of breakfast Chase had ever beheld. Before them was heaped large piles of fish and ham. Then came eggs. There were links of sausage and dozens of toasted bread slices. The fourth plunked down an array of fried creatures, varying in size from rodents to something that resembled a seagull. When they were done, there was a feast large enough to feed the entire pub, plus half the inn upstairs and the street-toughs who stared through the window.
Chase harrumphed again. He rapped his fingernails on the wood rhythmically, then ventured a glance at the big man.
“Well,” he said. “Where’s the damn butter?”
The silence reverberated, thickening into a stillness that sent cold gloves sliding down Chase’s back. Someone sniffed. Then he heard an unlikely pair of noises: a group of farmboys chuckling under their breath, then a woman snickering as Pet’s glossy eyes went alight.
Then the hall exploded in wild hoots.
Chase shrugged off the hoots as Pet clapped for some butter. A moment later, it arrived alongside a plastic bucket, scored with plain lettering, PET’S BROWN SOUR.
Pet made a soft, happy noise. He drew a large breath, closing his eyes as he wrapped his massive hands around the cold white plastic.
Then he glugged.
For a full minute.
Chase was dumbstruck, studying the dark rivulets streaming down the ripe cheeks. He watched the gullet as it engorged and bobbed, ballooning like the belly of a winded frog. When the big man clunked bucket down, it sounded half-empty or so. He wiped his mouth. Then he nodded to it.
“Drink, boy.”
Chase finally allowed himself a grin. He was no lad. Not by thirty odd years. But he was thirsty, and life had brought him to admire a certain amount of sloth, gluttony, and decadence. Precisely this amount.
“We’ll need another!” he barked.
Now the cutthroats roared.
Chase put on a serious face and peered over the top of the bucket to see that he was wrong—there was more than half left. He shook his head and drew the bucket to his lips. He breathed, then started drinking, immediately feeling the weight shifting down through his core. Across the table, Pet Alderwrack suddenly wore a serious face as well, visibly impressed by the long bloop bloops of the swiftly-depleting contents. When the bucket dropped with a hollow thud, he winked in admiration.
As Chase belched, the big man across the table scooted his chair forward with a great splintering noise. Then he pulled a dangling wing from the fried bird and offered the rest of the carcass to Chase.
Chase belched again, nodding. He dislodged the remaining wing and raised it like a mug of beer. When Pet did likewise, Chase turned to everyone and quoted Mad Hamm, a local glutton of historical note.
“Peace, you roughneck scumbags. Peace and bacon be with us.”
Then it began. They shared pounds of roasted flesh and a near-instant fondness. There was also a growing, mutual awe—though he was nothing approaching fat, Chase’s belly was thick, and beyond that it had a Bumblebee’s Logic, a near supernatural ability to do what seemed impossible. As for Pet, Chase had not ever seen such glorious gluttony. Not from anyone. Not even his own sprawling dad, Alfurd, who was widely regarded as one of merriest old fat asses in the watershed. An hour passed. Then half of another. By the time afternoon began to redden the bar’s dirty windows, the small crowd that had gathered around them had doubled three times over.
Fin
ally, Pet brushed the yellow egg crumbs from his chest.
“I… yield,” he grunted.
“Hoo, blessed balls! Thank God.”
Now Pet grinned. As the remaining crowd dispersed, the big man rolled his neck, producing a series of pops that resembled clacking riverstones. He grunted and leaned across the table, kissing Chase’s forehead.
“That bitch mother of yours,” he said. “Her birthday feast is tomorrow?”
“Earlier, if she has any say.”
Pet nodded politely, as if the information were not obvious.
“Then they’d better get to terms.”
“Very good.”
“Tell Old Alfie we’ll keep last year’s prices.”
Chase looked up, stunned.
“Less fifty, for his silence on that ruined rye last year. God-sakes, boy, I tell you something. Life can get as slick as snake’s dick: Two days frost. Two days! And half of Gintypool gets fucking bark-at-your-mother crazy.”
Chase nodded, recalling the bizarre weekend, wherein everyone, including himself, had tripped balls for two solid days. Snapping himself out the bizarre memory, he tsked, and that was it—the negotiations brought to an abrupt, satisfying end, he nodded again, slowly. He kissed Pet’s hand and stood, revealing to all who were morbidly curious enough that under his bloated middle, Pet did at least were a thin cotton sarong.
With a slap on the big fellow’s back, Chase proclaimed Pet to be a living shrine to Mad Hamm.
A roar of approval went up.
“By God, sir, you could sell your toenails for relics.”
Big Pet winked and squeezed his shoulder. In thanks, Chase sensed. For all the merriment the day brought, perhaps, and certainly for the honest fraternity between them. Chase bowed to him, solidifying his own gratitude in the matter before they kissed foreheads again, this time good bye and good day. He turned from the merchant, grinning: He knew no one had ever seen Big Pet rivaled so well. And he knew Big Papa Alfurd was going to be thrilled beyond words.
As he made for the door, he felt the warmth of the day stretching through the windows. He felt the odd relaxation that comes from standing after sitting too long, and he looked forward to the remnants of sunlight on his trek home.
Outside, however, a lifelong suspicion was confirmed: the world had sensed his fun.
“There’s always a counterweight,” he muttered.
He took some deep breaths. The air was muggier than he had expected, thick with smoke from the butchers across the alley. He leaned for a moment with his back to the door. The joyous din behind him, he discovered great cat-like noises issuing from under the belted camo. He was starting to sweat. And as he began to shoulder through the crowds, he felt agonies coming, big, burgeoning bellyaches, and they were the sort of rolling quivers that were going to grow in his gut for hours.
Deeper in the congested alleyways, he felt weak. Cheap hops and truffles be damned, he was miserable. The crowds pounded him. He wore a walking cudgel at his belt, for gentlemanly defense, or when a 12 gauge or a samurai sword might prove to be a bit… overkillish, but now he unsheathed it and used the old walking stick for its intended purpose, leaning heavily on it as he strode. Every step through the narrow, near-vertical streets of Sheepworks felt like a tug of war with a carthorse. He stopped often, wiped his brow, and moaned. He feared he may have damaged something.
When he finally escaped to the fringe-roads, his knees were jelly. And there was a full night’s walk ahead of him.
Chase unpacked a small silver and jade pipe from deep within his trousers. He uncapped it, finding it already stuffed with a pinch of marijuana, the only indulgence he had planned for himself before the impromptu feast. He struck a small, flint-tipped matchstick and lit it, drawing deeply.
Then he turned to the setting sun.
Yep, Old Alfurd was going to be pleased as puppy with two peters. If he rushed, that is—not making it home in time with the bitch’s birthday present would be roughly equivalent to not protecting his big flabby flanks in zombie combat.
CHAPTER 1
Deep in the gloom of the forest path home, Chase paused, looking down a winding, crumbling snake of a way that some ballsy builder had declared to be a road. It didn’t take long, he mused, for things to turn to shit anymore. But it was probably always like that, he figured, musing on the stories he’d been told as a child…
“School closings,” the oldest survivors say. “They got no more warning than a fucking bunch of school closings… due to illness.”
After that, they say, it turned to shit in a hurry. And we’re not even talking about the heps, the zombies that sprung up after what became known as Hepatitis Z. We’re talking the world itself. After the fields were left to themselves, a change began to be visible the first year. It became green everywhere—a concept that sounds great when you’re in a carpeted office or a concrete jungle. Not so great for the rising wheat, which had mere days before the outbreak, and would receive any further care. Most arable fields had not been sown at all, like the corn and bean fields, and where the last stubble had been ploughed up, it was soon the overrun with crab-grass. Where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. There was absolutely nothing aside from the concrete that was not greener; the footpaths were the greenest of all, it being the nature of grass where it has once been trodden on to come back stronger than ever. As the summer came on, even the gravel roads were thinly covered with the grass that had spread out from the margin.
In the autumn, the meadows and fields were not bush-hogged, of course, and the grass withered as it stood, falling this way and that, just as the wind had blown it. The wheat that remained standing was eaten by clouds of starling and sparrows, or mowed down by vast carpets of field mice and grasshoppers, both of which flocked to it undisturbed, feasting at their pleasure.
As the winter came on, the crops were beaten down by the storms, soaked with rain, and flattened by herds of deer and loose cows. The first cracks and holes in the paved roads started to appear. The same happened to the thinner glass windows of homes and smaller strip malls.
Next summer, the prostrate wheat didn’t stand a chance. It could scarcely push its way up through the long grasses and weeds, but thistles, maple saplings, and wild onions found no such difficulty. Footpaths were completely gone, and even though the gravel roads could be traced, they were as green as the fields.
Year by year, the fields themselves grew smaller. The brambles, which grew faster than a wild hog with an itchy ass, had sent their prickly runners farther and farther from the hedges until they had now little to contend with but the briars, which had followed right after them Starting from all sides at once, the brambles and briars in the course of about twenty years met in the center of even Tennessee’s largest fields. Hawthorn bushes sprang up among them, and, protected by the briars and thorns from grazing animals, the water maples, weeds of the tree kingdom, flourished. Sapling ashes, oaks, sycamores, chestnuts, the suckers from birches lifted higher and higher from the bushes. The cattle would have eaten off the seed leaves with the grass as soon as they were out of the ground, but the cows, slow as a barefoot fat man on grave, were the first to fall to the survivors, their jerky now the most coveted currency. By this time, no fields remained but the former roads, and the brambles and briars had choked up and blocked them to a point where, at places, even the old paved roads were as impassable as the fields.
In the end, as Tennessee transformed into an immense forest, the drains become choked with maple and willow roots. Only the hills and the forest that already existed offered any break where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path. The ditches had long since become full of leaves and dead branches. And the water that should have run off, stagnated instead, spreading out into the hollow places of what had once been fields. It formed marshes where cattails and swarms of mosquitos hid the water. Everywhere the lower lands adjacent to the streams had become marshes, some of them ext
ending for miles in a winding line and occasionally spreading out to a mile in breadth. This was particularly the case along the rivers, which were also blocked and obstructed as they brought down trees, branches, and islands of corpses. Sometimes, after great rains, these macabre piles swept away, weakened with rot and driven by the irresistible power of the water. The ensuing floods, though, only added fuel to the growing, greening land.
To what degree other states had succumbed to all this, who the hell knows—but as for Tennessee, they say it had all gone to shit in a hurry.
Just like the road before him…
As Chase stared into the darkness, he shuddered. He wished this sudden, creepy feeling down his back this was just simple fear, forest road fidgets, they call it. But he and his father had ended hundreds of zombie. They had wrecked heps and torn apart the savage crawlers in a manner befitting their own. He could dull fear into the true mathematics of a situation, by damn — something was following him.
Ahead and behind him was just the dip and lee of the path. The stillness of the giant timbers. But there was also the sensation. There was a presence nearby; it could be a wolf, he mused, or just a damned chickadee. Something …
Chase grunted, shaking his head. In wet boots and a pensive humor, he forced himself back down along the forest road.
Nearing midnight, he halted once more at the ruins of an old gas station. The trail had narrowed to little more than a thin ridge. He stepped through the crumbling brickwork and steel, the hillside plunging to either side of his steaming feet. He peered down to his right, into the noiseless black.
Nothing. Just two dewy spots that seemed to stare back up at him.
Then suddenly a sticky, aching sort of sobriety washed over him like a suit of wet grass. He could feel something staring, behind him. He gripped the samurai sword. He counted his breaths in the quiet, trying to keep his head from swiveling around to look up at whatever was looking at him.
Bring On The Dead Page 1