Bring On The Dead

by Robert Harterman

  “Five miles,” he said, and Chase knew by the sudden scream and plunge of his horse that spurs were dug into raw sides.

  They turned down that steep, tortuous street leading from Goback to the Valley of the Leaf. The wet thaw of midday had frozen and the road was slippery. They reined their horses in tightly, and by zagging and zigging from side to side, they managed to reach the foot of the hill without a single fall.

  Here, they again gave them the bit, thundering across the bridge without stopping, which brought the keeper out, cursing and yelling for his toll.

  Chase tossed a coin over his shoulder and they galloped up the elm-lined avenue leading to that Robo Forest retreat that Kenzo called home. Turning suddenly to the right, they followed a seldom frequented road, where snow was drifted heavily. Finally, their beasts sinking to their haunches and snorting through the white billows, they had to slacken pace.

  Billy had not spoken a word. Clouds were still massing on the north. Overhead a few stars glittered against the black, but the wind had the most mournful wail Chase had ever heard.

  “Chase—listen! Do you hear anything? Do you hear someone calling for help? Is that a child?”

  “No, Billy. I hear nothing but the wind.”

  But his hesitancy belied the truth. They both heard sounds that could have easily been wailing. It was impossible to discern anything in the gathering storm. And the wind burst over them again, catching his empty denial in a mean sound, like the howling of a woman.

  Then there was a lull, and Chase discerned the noise: It was Billy.

  The stout man by his side, who had held iron grip of himself before other eyes, was now giving in fully to grief.

  Chase looked away. Yet they rounded back for his hall and hallooed for servants.

  When they pushed on, the moon shone for a moment above the ragged edge of a storm cloud, and for a moment all the snow-laden evergreens stood out, spectral and still, like mourners. Snow was beginning to fall in great flakes that obscured the air. At last, a bit of the moonlight gleamed from the river’s water.

  With the lanterns they brought them, they examined every square inch of the smoke-scarred rocks and snowy rubbish heaps. Bits of hide or bone were scattered here and there, along with stones for the fire, and the ends of ropes and tattered rags lay everywhere over the black patch.

  In the end, they found nothing, not one single thing to indicate any trace of the lost woman and child, until Chase caught sight of a tiny, blue string beneath a piece of rusty metal. Kicking it aside, Chase picked it up.

  On the lower end was a child’s shoe.

  Chase would confess it took him a moment to reveal it. He would have rather had felt the point of a dagger, shoved in his ear, than have shown that simple thing to Billy. But Chase did.

  Billy nodded, grimaced maniacally, then just nodded again.

  Then the sky fell out. The snow broke upon them in white billows, blotting out everything. They spread a sheet on the ground to preserve any marks of the little camp, but the drifting wind drove them indoors and they were compelled to cease searching.

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  All night long, Billy and Chase sat before the roaring fire of his hunting room. Both of them were at a loss for what to do. He just leaned forward with his chin in his palms, saying few words. Chase could only offer futile suggestions, uttering mad threats.

  Chapter 8

  They spent a long, melancholy night waiting amid the roaring of the northern gale, driving through any gap it could find in the hall. It seemed as if it would wrench all the eaves from the roof. It shrieked across the garden like malignant spirits. And all the while poor Billy kept rushing into the blinding whirl.

  Outside, though, he could not see twice the length of his own arm, and the servants and Chase begged him to come back.

  As long as the storm raged, he would pace back and forward the full length of the hunting-room until his eye would be caught by some object the boy had played with. He would put this carefully away, as one lays aside the belongings of the dead.

  Then he would set himself down, gazing at the leaping flames of the log fire.

  Chase felt nothing but the agony of their utter helplessness.

  Afterwards, the lanterns that they had placed on the oak center table, began to smoke and give out a pungent, burning smell, and morning revealed an ocean of billowy drifts, crusted over by the frozen sleet. It reflected the white dazzle and burned the eyes shut. Great icicles hung from the naked branches of the sheeted pines, and snow was wreathed among the cedars.

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  After lifting the canvas from the camping ground, they sought in vain for more trace of his boy or wife.

  There was none.

  They dispatched a dozen different search parties that morning, Billy leading those who were to go downriver. Chase took some well-trained rangers upriver. They were picked from the servants, who could track the forest to every Zombie haunt within a week’s march of Goback.

  A few of Addly’s men came. They both knew they showed up more out of curiosity than to help, but they needed help. Chase put them on a boat with a dredge with instructions to report back that night.

  As soon as they left out, Chase hunted up an old Chinese fellow. Batt was a hunting guide Chase used now and again. Grizzled, stunted and chunky, he was not at all the picturesque figure of grace that Chase thought typical of Asians. He wore a stocking cap with earflaps tied under his chin. His long shirt was an ill-fitting garment, and his trousers slouched in ample folds above the beaded skin shoes favored by mountains men four centuries prior. The old fellow was as silent as an animal, and the men hereabouts had nicknamed him The Mute. Or perhaps his name was Mute, and they called him The Bat. Chase can’t recall which. Chase just knew that what he lacked in speech, he made up in an almost animal-like acuteness of the senses. It was commonly believed that Batt possessed some nameless sense that big game possess, by which he and they could actually feel the presence of an enemy or a predator before ordinary folk could.

  For his part, Chase would be willing to pit that “feel” of Batt’s against the nose of any hound dog.

  “Batt, old man. Good to see you,” Chase said. He was puffing one of the old Marlboros to calm his nerves. “I wish I could say I called you it was for one of our hunts.”

  The old man nodded.

  “Listen, let me get right to it. Somebody took Shiri and little Cullfor a day ago. And they did it without so much as a foot print. We need to find them.”

  As Batt digested the information, he began lick the air, as if tasting it for an answer.

  Chase raised his eyes imploringly, hoping he had something.

  Batt just fixed his eyes on an invisible spot in the snow and ruminated even more. In time, he hitched the baggy trousers up, pulled the red scarf that held them to his waist tighter, and, taking his eyes off the snow, looked up for him to go on.

  “Um… well, yes. Let’s see. We think the longmongers took them to the river. We found the boy’s toy by the water—”

  “The boy drop it you think?” Batt asked, speaking for the first time Chase had ever heard.

  “Maybe. That would have been a clever trick for so little a fellow.”

  The Mute’s eyes went back to the snow.

  “Listen, Batt, before we take off after these bastards, we need to make sure they’re not around her. I’ll make you a rich man if you help.”

  Batt’s eyes looked up with the question of how much.

  “Rich,” Chase said.

  No sooner was the word out of his lips than he darted off into the forest like a rabbit.

  “Well, damn it, man.”

  Chase did not follow before he lost sight of him; but he knew his strange, silent ways, and Chase confidently awaited his return.

  How he could get two pair of snow-shoes and two poles inside of five minutes, Chase would not attempt to explain. At any rate, he was back again, equippe
d now for a long hike. He and Chase laced on the racquets, Chase having to watch and imitate him.

  And before long, they were skimming over the drifts like a boat on water.

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  In the maze-like confusion of snow and underbrush, no one but Batt would have found and kept that tangled path. At places, there were great trunks that had fallen across the way, but Batt planted his pole and took the obstacles in a leap. Then he raced on at a gait which was neither a run nor a walk, but an easy trot common to the natives of this wilderness. Chase had been schooled to a swift pace from boyhood, though, and he kept up with him at every step. However, to be honest, they were going so fast Chase lost all track of his bearings. They might have been in some crystal-walled cavern as they pressed over the brushwood, now packed with snow and crusted ice. Snow-crusted branches snapped like glass when they brushed past. Chase tried to discern a trail by the broken thicket on either side, but that was in vain.

  Then Chase noticed that his guide was keeping his course by marks, which were cut into the trees. At one place, they came to a steep, clear slope. The earth had fallen away from the sheer hillside and snow had filled the incline.

  Prodding forward to feel if the snow-bank were solid, Batt promptly sat down on the rear end of his snowshoes slid quick as a hiccup down to the valley.

  Chase came leaping clumsily from point to point with his pole, risking his neck at every bound. Then they coursed along the valley, the Mute’s eyes still on the trees. Once, he stopped to emit a gurgling laugh at a badly hacked trunk, beneath which was a snowed-up sap trough.

  Honestly, though, Chase could not tell what Batt’s mirth was about.

  “Where to, Batt?” Chase asked with a vague suspicion that they were heading for the Zombie nests near Leafy Lore. “To Leafy Lore?”

  Batt agreed with a grunt.

  Then he whisked suddenly around a headland up a narrow gorge, which seemed to lead to the very heart of the mountains and might have sheltered any number of fugitives.

  In the gorge, they stopped to take a light meal of dried herrings and biscuits. By the sun, Chase knew it was long past noon and that they had been traveling northwest. Chase also vaguely guessed that Batt’s object was to intercept the Longmongers, if they had planned to slip away from the Jickie River through the bush, where they could meet eastbound longboats. But not one syllable got spoke on the matter.

  Or any other matter.

  Clambering up the steep, snowy banks of the gorge, they found themselves in the upper reaches of a mountain, where the trees fell away in scraggy clumps and the snow stretched up clear and unbroken to the crest. Batt grunted, licked his pipe-stem significantly and pointed his pole to the hilltop.

  Suddenly, Batt shoved him backward with the end of his pole and a curious expression showed on the dull, pock-pitted face.

  “What?”

  “You right. Zombies no get them. And they no cross to big river.”

  Chase stood on the embankment and peered into the lengthening shadows of the valley.

  “You go, Mister Chase. Go get boat and go downriver. Get them.”

  Chase hurried down the gorge as fast as his snowshoes would carry him. The Mute, wise old bastard, seemed to understand Chase did not want to get them back. He needed to get him back.

  Perhaps this was the truth, or he may have just felt the disturbing tension Chase’s half-wild heartbeats, but whatever the truth, the old man sat back on its haunches , lifted his head, and let out the most miserable howl imaginable.

  “Oh! Goooo! Mister Chase,” the guide said. “Gooo or he die, mister. Oh, he die if you no get him back!

  Chapter 9

  Chase had been relating his experience with the Mute, recounting how even he was certain it was longmongers. But, being highly successful in all his own dealings, Jickie could not tolerate guesswork. And yet two days of vigilant searching had yielded not the slightest inkling of Shiri and the child, and the aggravation of it ignited all fury of his uncle’s fiery temperament.

  “We’ll find who did this. I won’t stop till I’ve chopped his head off and cleaved him in two, nephew!” he continued. “Make it a point to knock the balls off anything that stands in your way—”

  “Dangerous business, dealing with the longmongers. We’ll be venturing as far off as Nashville, right into their neck of the woods.”

  “Danger is my business, Chase! I’m Jickie Fucking Gunderson!”

  “But you don’t suppose …”

  “Suppose!” he roared. “I make it a point never to suppose anything. I act on facts. And the fact is I’m not sitting around here. I’m waiting for more of those bastards to pick us off one by one. What the hell are they doing that for anyhow!”

  “Who knows…”

  “I know you better hack the balls off anything that opposed you.”

  “You’ve said that several times already, Mr. Jickie,” Chase put in, having a touch of his own peppery temper from his mother’s side.

  The uncle looked at the ground, then said with uncharacteristic softness, “Go. Get the boys together.”

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  Meanwhile, Billy rested neither night nor day. In the morning, he would outline the plan for the day with a few hurried words. At night, he rode back to the lodge with eager questions in his eyes, and Chase knew he had nothing better to report to him than he did to him.

  After a silent, meager meal, he would ride through the dark forest on a fresh mount. How he passed those sleepless nights, Chase did not know.

  Chapter 10

  Not even someone who had lived in the Old World, the world of air conditioning and McDonald’s, would have trouble imagining what the eyes around this table had seen. No one who had seen a documentary about chimpanzees would have any difficulty understanding the cost of fighting something that was their equal in strength, but thirty times as aggressive. Certainly no pampered history professor would doubt that medieval lords and earls ever waged more ruthless war on each other than the zombies and commandos during those first fifty years of The Good Fight. The savagery and sorrow seen by the eyes around the table would not be eclipsed for centuries.

  But it did not damage the hearts of these old bucks.

  Uncles Jickie, Robo, Gilli, and Kenzo were the sort of men who were still pulled by the life of the cutter. They still wanted to rise up and salute their destiny with a growl. They were still ravenous for danger and barbarity. They still felt the stirrings of youth, the places where they had faced down and laughed at death, and roared out the inexpressible depths of defeat’s anguish. But since they had taken their seat at a table behind Gilli’s Hall, they sat silently across from Billy and Chase, just looking.

  They were positioned in a mossy and rock-strewn clearing, the long wall of the compound casting them in the moon’s dim shadows. They sat for long minutes, perfectly still, all of them, still just staring in the lone candle before them. Beside it was a mason jar of goat’s blood, to be drunk should any oaths be sworn this night.

  Gilli harrumphed quietly at the head of the table. He cocked an eye at Kenzo, a dour old man whose hair had not yet flecked with the slightest bit of gray. “Well?.... What the fuck are we waiting for?”

  All of them, silent and rapt, turned to Billy. He made a strange wincing expression and seemed to study the ceiling.

  “Boys, I can’t ask this of any of you.”

  “Fuck that! Here, Here!” Uncle Jickie thundered. “Once more, boy! Once more to the filthy joys of war!”

  “Here, here!” they all cried.

  And each of them, in turn, drank from the jar of goat’s blood.

  Chapter 11

  In making his oath, they had decreed Chase their leader, and Chase took up the role with an enthusiasm that prompted more than a few eager nods from their band of adventures. Indeed, a horny young fellow, on his first escape into the night with a young woman, could not have been half as exhilarated as Chase was
to have so venturesome a quest before him. He provisioned them with every worthless trinket and flashy trifle that could tempt the local hillbillies and rednecks into aiding them with supplies or the secrets of the forest. And if these things should fail, Chase added a dozen fine as new hunting knives, which everyone knew could corrupt the soul of even the most hardened backwoods bruiser. Chase also equipped them with a box of wicked-looking swords. He placed these things in square cases that were slow to open, which would surely add to their aweing power.

  As to their needs, Chase secured a twenty-seven foot aluminum longboat with a flat bottom, specially designed for the river. It was lovely thing with a hull about five feet wide, a small 25 horse outboard at the stern, and a triangular wind vane made of bronze, on which a pair of shotguns were painting like a black X beneath a skull. The wind vane was mounted at her masthead, atop what used to be a live-well, though the mast was now lowered and being supported by two metal crutches so that it ran like a rafter down the center of the long ship

  And for all their posturing, preparation, and searching the week prior, it seemed like no time before the at all before the unlucky number of six of them were loading the vessel with every manner of supply: Tents, blankets, bows, arrows, flints, pipes, marijuana, shotgun shells, flour, deer jerky, and

  The Feisty-Uncle was a recreational-turned-military ship, so despite the handsome cost in gold, Chase had to suppose that Addly harbored no grudge against his good friend—for he obviously labored on it with love, and Chase believed that he even reinforced the sides with some metal plating for them right before they bought it. From a distance, the vessel looked lean, and somewhat knifelike, but when you were aboard you could see how the midships flared outward so that she sat on the water like a shallow bowl rather than cut through it like a blade. Even with her belly laden with several stout men, their weapons, shields, food, and supplies, she needed very little depth.