Bring On The Dead

by Robert Harterman

  Chase pulled the lad close, but they walked past yet more bodies like the first. He counted eight within a stone’s throw, and there were twice as many heps here and there as they continued to walk, so many that it soon became obvious that the commandos had not killed them all.

  Had it been the work of the barmaids before they met up?

  Chase hoped so, and his hope was so great that Chase did not even care to go have a look and find out if their wounds were by axe, arrow, or claw. Where they lay, Chase could tell only that they were dead; carrion wheeled with wicked cries overhead and there was a vague movement of wolfish shapes along the ground.

  What possessed him to get back to the creek bed, Chase cannot imagine, unless the fear of those creatures returning. But he carried a thing or two to end them easily enough. At any rate, Cullie and Chase scampered back, and it was in seeking that hidden little way that Chase thought he distinguished the faintest motion of one the zombie’s figures. It was clothed like a man, though, and lying apart from the others.

  Then it moved.

  The sight riveted him to the spot.

  Surely it was a mistake! The form could not have moved. It must have been some error of vision, or trick of the shadowy starlight. But Chase could not take his eyes from the prostrate form. Again the body moved—distinctly moved—beyond possibility of a trick of the eye, the chest heaving up and sinking like a man struggling but unable to rise. With the ghastly dead, and the ravening wolves all about, the movement of that wounded man was strangely terrifying. And though he dared not show it, his heart thudded with fear as he ran to the man’s aid.

  The form was Dale. One hand staunched a wound in his head and the other gripped a knife, with which he had been defending himself.

  Chase stooped to examine him.

  At first, he was unconscious of his presence. Gently, Chase tried to remove the left hand from his forehead, but at the touch, out struck the right hand in vicious thrusts of the hunting-knife, one blind cut barely missing his arm.

  “Hold on, bud!” Chase cried, “I’m no foe!” and he caught the right arm tightly.

  At the sound of his voice, the left hand swung out, revealing a frightful gash. The next thing Chase knew, his left arm had encircled his neck like the coil of a strangler, five fingers were digging into the flesh of his throat and Dale was making frantic efforts to free his right hand and plunge that dagger into him. The shock of the discovery threw him off guard, and for a moment there was a struggle, but only for a moment. Then the wounded man fell back, writhing in pain, his face contorted with agony and hate. Chase did not think he could see him. He must have been blind from that wound. Chase stood back, but his knife still cut the air.

  “Dale!” Chase said.

  The right arm fell limp and still.

  “Chase?..”

  The thin lips moved again. He was saying, or trying to say, something.

  “Speak louder!”

  The lips were still moving, but Chase could not hear a sound.

  “Speak louder!” Chase shouted.

  Chase put his ear to his lips, fearful that life might slip away before he could hear.

  There was a snarl through the glistening set teeth. The prostrate body gave an upward lurch. With one swift, treacherous thrust, he grabbed Chase’s arm.

  “I’ve cleared you a path, Chase. Get the kid to the Naked Ones. Show him to that big Mexican you shared the night with… They’ll get you two home.”

  Chapter 39

  Chase supposed there were times in the life of every man, even the strongest—and Chase would never call himself that—when a feather’s weight added to a burden can snap their endurance. Chase had reached that stage before encountering Dale. With the events of the quest west, and the long, hard trek eastward still weighing on his head, the past months had been altogether too hard-packed for his wellbeing.

  The madness of the Merry Commandos no longer amazed him.

  And the lad and Chase wept in each other’s arms.

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  An old wetnurse of his young days, whom Chase remembered chiefly by her bulbous ass and wickedly large tits, used to say, “Balls! Balls! To get through life, one needs nothing but balls!”

  Chase had his doubts. It was daylight of their third day out. Chase was no weak-kneed coward, but he physically shook every time he thought about what the child had been through.

  There was a daze to his eyes, which the overly weary know too well, and in the child’s brain he knew there was a whirling exhaustion that would only let him distinguish two thoughts: whether he was okay or not okay.

  For now, he was okay.

  Chase faked a smiled, shaking his head. He was aware, as he dragged Cullie and himself out of the ruins of Nashville onto greener pastureland, that the there was a courage in the little guy that was hard to imagine.

  He had caught the packhorse again, and after a dozen false plunges at the stirrup, he gave up the attempt, let Cullie ride, and footed it. With the beast at the end of a trailing bridle rein, he saw Cullfor smiling, just riding along.

  Chase got a sudden feeling, like a breeze of a thought, that life was going to get back in tune.

  One day.

  There was no one around, and there was hardly a sound in the still air. The storm in his mind had driven all concerns away. Chase did not encounter a soul. In a stupefied way, he was aware that zombies were still around, but not any of the people, but it was merely a flash of distant lightening in his head. As the Mexican’s dogs came barking, scrambling at them, growling from the compound, he knew he should have stopped and asked for help. Chase merely walked by them, half-laughing as the dogs began to fight among themselves. There was something almost evil in his laugh, Chase knew. Perhaps he had broken though the point where the brain counts things either good or evil, which may be that the reason good quests fail so often where evil ventures succeed. That’s thing about life, he mused: the good man blunders forward tirelessly, trusting to the merits of his cause. The evil manipulator proceeds warily as a cat over broken glass.

  And so, altogether apart from these random thoughts, another arrived. Chase understood then that they had to kill a deer or a pig, have them a good meal. And just rest for a week or so.

  And so they did.

  A wind rustled through the foliage as they banked that night, and when Chase came back to their little camp with a deer already skinned, he saw Cullie laugh as though Chase had brought him a basket of toys.

  And he knew, or felt, rather, that he had made the right decision.

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  For almost two weeks, they stayed there. Did they encounter zombies? Yes. Longmongers? Yes. It was a small place, tucked away were brushwood gave place to a forest of ferns, which concealed them in their deep foliage. The camp was not a hundred feet away from the river, though you’d never see it from the bank. Chase had only stumbled upon it by accident during his hunt. Chase put up a lashing of fern leaves. He and Cullie lay in lazy attitudes about the fire. They ate three meals a day out of that deer for two solid weeks. They told stories. They laughed. They never talked about his father or his mother.

  “Follow me, little dude,” Chase commanded one day.

  And they left out for Beergarden, and Chase tried to think of what he’d say to Dahl. Which was a useless distraction.

  A longmonger very nearly plucked out his eyes before Chase slashed him in the face. The man fell back, roaring like a wound pig as another longmonger, insanely, approached from behind him, right in full view. Chase leapt as high the man’s head and landed atop him, sliding down him until he could bite out his throat. The man was dragging himself away along a pool of blood as the other zombies rushed in. They fell on him like sharks in the black mud of the riverbank. Everything blurred. Chaos exploded. Arms, fists, and steel were whirling in every direction. Swords and arrows flashed in impossible sweeps; it was impossible to distinguish the bite of one from the stin
g of another. Chase bore his teeth, knocking as many down as he felled with the sword. The fearsome thwacks and pings were chorusing death-grunts now. Animalistic wailing rose. Chase was tearing his way through the tumult, chopping heps in half, his samurai swinging like it was alive, popping any skull too close. Then he fell back. He could only vaguely sense the surreal gravity as he grabbed his bow. He could not hear a thing over their growling as one fell with an arrow in its face. Chase’s eyes narrowed. He watched another fall, then another, wrenching at the arrow in its chest as it rose again. As his fourth or fifth arrow flashed through the nightmare on the riverbank, a thwack resounded and red mist popped from the skull of a zombie, which reared and rolled backward, galloping ten feet with that terrible stick in its brain. More arrows dropped more zombies, and he had perforated the edge of the black madness, burning with the perverse high of it, when he noticed Cullfor.

  Chase turned to him, laughing now, baring the red teeth.

  Lunging back away from the fury and bedlam, Cullfor giggled.

  Then, for just a moment, there was stillness. The only noise was his raspy breath.

  There was just them. Alone. Dead zombies. Two dead longmongers. Why two, he’d never know. Nor would he pursue the rest of them.

  Out in the gray, on the water, there was another longmonger.

  Chase motioned with his head for him to go away. Then man’s eyes rolled.

  The longmonger shook his head, and he went away.

  “Let’s go, little man,” he said, and took Cullfor’s little hand. “Let’s go home.”

  Chapter 40

  As night fully muted Dhal’s figure beside him, Chase felt half-conscious. It was a strange feeling, almost as if some part of his chest had slipped into the ground.

  He was aware of her doting about him and could still feel her attention as she bent and gathered their son Cullfor into her arms. He lit an age-old Marlboro. He pulled a little sip from a plastic cup of whiskey.

  For another moment, she and the child ran together, until the darkness surrounded them.

  He had started a small fire, and in time they all sat before it.

  He looked down at the child. His head was in his mother’s lap, and his eyes were closed. His chest was rising and falling softly. He had thought this would not be possible, and he had not planned for it.

  And yet here he was.

  “Okay, handsome?” she asked.

  Chase nodded.

  He was okay.

  ______________ END _____________