As coolly as I can, I turn back to face her. I see she has a can of Coke in hand.
Sweet relief.
“Here you go, honey,” she says.
I’m obviously older than this woman. She’s probably in her late twenties so I have her by over a decade, I’m guessing. It’s weird that she calls me honey. Always thought that was something reserved for couples and grandmas.
She pops the tab on the can. It makes a weak fizzle that both breaks my heart and brings back my hope in humanity. It’s been so long since I’ve tasted Coca-Cola.
“Do you have a cup and some ice?” I ask. I know I’m really pushing it here. Ice? That’s practically unheard of. Sure, they have a refrigerator, but why waste the electricity on freezing stuff, right?
“Sure, hon,” she answers.
She gets a glass and scoops a few small cubes out of a bucket in an old sink. Health codes be damned. I don’t care. This is great.
Then she’s pouring the Coke into the glass and there’s hardly any bubbles at all.
“It’s cold already,” she says.
“No, I’ll wait until the ice does its job.”
She smirks. She can see how hard that is for me. Waiting. I’m practically drooling. “All right,” she says, “if there’s anything else I can get you, just let me know.”
“Will do,” I say.
But the bartender doesn’t go away. She hovers, like she’s waiting for something. It takes me a moment to realize what that something is.
“Right,” I say, never taking my eyes off of the glass. The man three stools down chuckles. “What’s the damage?” It’s a tough question. There’s no such thing as paper money anymore. That stuff isn’t worth anything. I knew a guy in Haven who once lived in a trailer park converted to a zombie defense outpost. He said him and his squadron ran out of toilet paper. The nearest store was cleaned out. But there was a bank. These guys broke into a vault and took cases of twenties, fifties, and hundreds back to their camp just so they wouldn’t have to wipe their asses on old leaves. Imagine that. People literally wiping their asses with Ben Franklin’s face.
The bartender is almost surely going to answer my question with—
“Well, what do you have? And you better not say nothing. There’s hell to pay for people that steal drinks,” she says. She speaks with a bit of good humor in her voice, but her eyes tell me she’s not kidding.
I put my hands up defensively. “No worries,” I say. I dig into my pocket again and pull out a small bottle of Excedrin. It’s green and the label is a bit faded. The expiration date has long since passed. Doesn’t matter much. They’re not making it anymore. This stuff is vintage, and it still works. “Good for pain and aches, especially those of the head,” I say. “Chew ‘em for faster relief.”
She picks it up and holds it to the light, then she shakes it. The pills rattle and cause a few curious heads to turn in our direction. “Still works?” she asks.
I nod. “Still works. Like a charm, I might add.”
“Something like this is good for more than a Coke.”
“I’ll see how I’m feeling after this. Been a long time since I’ve enjoyed one of these. The sugar might not sit well with me,” I say.
She laughs like I’m the funniest guy in the world, then she turns around, slipping the pill bottle into her front jeans pocket. She busies herself with cleaning, but this place needs more than a wipe down by a graying rag.
I sit on the stool and stare at my drink, thinking of my dead wife and son, thinking of Norm and Abby. That’s what you do in a bar, right? You drown your sorrows, even if it’s with Coca-Cola.
The day gets brighter and the few drunk guys inside leave.
“Excuse me, miss,” I say.
She turns around, smiling. “Want a refill, sugar?” That last word just sounds wrong coming out of her mouth.
“No, thanks. I was just wondering where I could get some sleep.”
“Travelers’ Bay right on down the road.” She points to the wall on my left as if she can see through it, no doubt talking about the place I saw those men stumbling to earlier.
“How much for a room?”
She seems to contemplate this for a long moment, tonguing the inside of her cheek. She answers with what I think is her real voice, the one she uses when she’s not trying to butter people up or get them drunk enough to let their most prized possessions slip into that front jeans pocket.
“For you,” she says, “I can get you two nights free of charge.” She pats the pill-shape in her pocket.
I nod. The Excedrin isn’t a dud like the batteries I gave the guard, but it’s not like old headache medicine is that hard to come by. Surely this woman knows this. Even if she’s a little annoying, her deep blue eyes scream intelligence. So, instead, I take it that she likes me.
“Thank you,” I say.
“No problem. Just go on in and tell the fellow there that Lilly says you’re paid for.” She sticks out her hand. I shake it.
“Jack,” I say, “Jack Jupiter.”
“Nice to meet you, Jack. I’m Lilliana, but you can call me Lilly like everyone else in Freeland does.”
I smile. This one doesn’t feel as bad or awkward.
I get up. The fat guy to my right is still nursing his beer, but his eyes are closed to slits. Judging by his slow, heavy breathing, he might be sleeping.
“I’ll see you around,” I say.
“You better.”
I turn and head out the batwing doors, down the ramp, and back to the road. The town inside the walls is waking up. People walk along the street, most of them workers. Older men and women with harsh faces and worn clothes about them, some parents and their offspring—or most likely their adopted offspring. Nobody drives a car. The place isn’t big enough for that, and I doubt they even have a working engine here or a means to get gas.
A couple people smile and nod at me, tipping their invisible hats. I have since lowered the hood of my cloak. I take it seeing an unfamiliar face, one as shanty as mine, with a hood on would not bode well with the locals. Might draw too much unwanted attention.
I get to the Travelers’ Bay not too long after I pass a young lady clutching books to her side. Going to school, I think, and that’s good. At least this place is trying to do some good.
Even if it doesn’t matter much in the long run. We all die in the end. We all get our throats slit and our heads shot.
Inside the motel or hotel or whatever it is, a cloud of smoke rushes out to meet me as I open the door. More smoke than The Jet had. I cough a couple times and wait for it to stop stinging my eyes before I go to the front desk. Behind it, sits an older man with a beard much grayer than mine. He is the cause of all this smoke. He has three cigarettes in his mouth. They look homemade, crooked, fat with tobacco in some places, skinny in other places.
“What can I do you for?” he asks, barely understandable with the cigarettes in his mouth.
“I need a room.”
“That’ll be eighteen shidings,” he says, holding out his hand.
Shidings? I think to myself. That’s a new one.
“Lilly down at The Jet says I’m paid up.”
The old man squints at me, takes his feet off of the front counter. His boots hit the tiled floor heavily. Now he’s leaning forward, squinting so hard he reminds me of the fat guy in the bar. “Paid up? Who does Lilly think she is? Paid up!” He barks laughter, which quickly morphs into a hacking fit of coughing. One of the cigarettes falls from his mouth, careens onto the floor, lost to my eyes behind the counter.
“Yeah,” I say. “Lilly says I’m paid up. She says you can take it up with her if you don’t believe me.”
Squinting again. He doesn’t care that he’s lost a cigarette, there’s two more still smoldering in each corner of his mouth. He waves a hand now, fanning away a fresh screen of smoke. “No, no, young man, I believe ya. Lilly wouldn’t be dumb enough to lie to me, and neither would an outworlder like yourself.” He grins, s
howing black and yellow teeth.
Outworlder. Another term I’ve heard before to describe me. I’m a vagrant, a drifter, the type of guy who bounces from place to place seemingly without a destination. That’s okay. Let them think that. Let them all think that. But I do have a destination.
Revenge. Vengeance.
The man opens a drawer. It squeaks terribly, making me want to shove my fingers into my ears. Keys jingle as he pulls out a small ring. Attached to it is an orange tag that reads 213 and a long, black skeleton key.
“Here ya go, son,” he says, handing it to me.
I take it, my mind already lost in the thoughts of a mattress, a pillow, and a blanket. A roof over my head. The only thing better than this would be the one-eyed man’s head on a stake.
“If there’s any trouble, if you or Lilly is lying, then expect me to send Calvin up to your room.” He snickers, like he’s in on some great joke. “Lock your door if you want, that big buffoon will knock it off its hinges as easily as if it was made outta newspaper.”
“Thanks,” I say, picturing a guy big enough to knock a door clean off its hinges. The image that comes to mind is of the big fellow who was sitting three stools down from me in the bar. Something about him just oozes henchman.
I go up the steps. They creak beneath my feet and a fresh smell of dust and wood rushes up to meet me. It’s a good smell, one that I’ve missed. It beats the outdoors and the lingering odors of zombie guts and sickness so prominent in the wilderness. On the second floor landing, I turn right and read the numbers. Someone screams in 209. The floor groans in 211. 212 is silent and so is 213. The key goes in the lock, the door opens.
The room is nothing to write home about—a single window, a single bed, and a nightstand with a Bible on top of it—but it looks like heaven to me. There’s a toilet and a small shower with a pre-filled bucket hanging from the ceiling. I close the door and lock it. I take a shower. The water is lukewarm at best, but it does well to take the dirt away from my skin, the oil from my hair.
I draw the curtains to block out the sunlight. Strip off my towel and lie naked on the bed. Then I lay my pistol next to the pillow—another lesson I’ve learned traversing the wasteland. Never sleep without your weapon nearby. That’s just how the world is now.
Five
I awake to the sound of clamoring outside of my second story window.
There is a chill in the air, but my body is slick with sweat and the old sheets—that have probably never been washed in their existence—stick to my skin. The sun has gone down. The sky is dark, but the streets are not. Torches light them. Some of them are lit with fire while others are lit by electricity. It is a godsend to see electricity again.
It takes me a moment to gather my thoughts. The noises outside don’t help. There are screams and shouts. I can’t tell if they are out of pain or joy. My guess is the former, but I’ve been wrong before and am hopefully wrong right now. Still, I grip my pistol with a sweaty hand because I’ve learned it’s better to be safe than sorry.
I sit up now and yawn, thinking back to my dreams. They aren’t significant enough for me to remember, but I’m guessing they were nightmares. Almost always are.
Outside, someone is saying, “Make way! Make way!”
Speaking of nightmares, before Darlene and Junior were murdered, I suffered from the most horrible dreams imaginable, the type of nightmares one could never forget—believe me, I’ve tried very hard. All consisted of death. Once I dreamed about waking up next to Darlene. The sheets were soaked with warm liquid, but I’d never felt colder in my entire life. I patted the mattress, moved the covers, found Darlene. I remember in the dream, I shook her and said her name. She didn’t answer. I was just about to turn on the light when I heard a tapping on our bedroom window. We didn’t bother to put curtains up because we were on the second level. Because of this I saw the monster outside of the glass as plain as day. It was as if a spotlight had been shining on it’s face. I can’t say for sure, it might be the fact that many things have happened to me since those dreams, but I still think to this day that the one-eyed man had found a way to inhabit my subconscious mind. He held a bloody knife in one hand and Darlene’s head in the other. She stared out at me with lifeless eyes. He tapped the knife’s blade against the glass and said, Jaaaaackkk, Jaaaacccck…JACK! And the lights flipped on and I saw Darlene’s headless body next to me. I saw that the warm liquid soaking through the sheets and my clothes was blood. Her blood.
I woke up screaming. Darlene was right next to me, unharmed. I don’t know how many more nights we would’ve had together before the unspeakable happened to her and Junior and Haven, but it wasn’t many.
Then something crazy did happen. At one of our council meetings Carmen, Darlene’s sister, brought up the nightmares she’d been having. They had all dealt with death. Then Abby spoke up and Darlene did, too. Norm wouldn’t admit to having the same nightmares as us, but his husband Tim did. Not only did they deal with death, but they had something else in common, too. There was a man in all of them. This man was older, his face was wrinkled and worn like he’d seen more bloodshed than all of us combined. In my dreams, he was missing his eye; in Darlene’s he was missing a nose; in Abby’s a hand like her; in Norm’s he was whole (we knew this to be an obvious lie). And so on and so on. Norm still wasn’t convinced of our shared dreams, he had said it was some fantastical bullshit and I would’ve been inclined to agree with him had zombies not infested our world. If that was possible, anything is.
Then, not too long after Haven had fallen, and I’d seen that face from my dreams brought to reality. The one-eyed man, the leader of the radical group calling themselves the District, the one who took my family from me.
He had help. I’ve found some of those bastards.
Like I’ve said before, I have not let any of them live.
I’m up now, getting my pants back on, my shirt, my cloak. The rambling outside has picked up, but I’m not quick to check it out. Frankly, I don’t care much. In my experience any noise after sundown is never a good thing.
It can’t be a flood of zombies from a breach in the gates, either. If it was, there’d be a lot more screaming.
Once I’m dressed, I go downstairs, taking the creaky steps one at a time. There’s a clamor coming from the first level of the motel, men and women talking in hushed tones. It’s dark down here, too. Shadows dance across the floor from a single candlelight burning at the front desk. The old man still sits behind it, but his feet aren’t up. He doesn’t look the least bit relaxed, though he’s still smoking. Just one cigarette tonight.
I see the windows are shuttered and the door is barred closed.
“Might as well go back up to your room, sir, and get some shut-eye,” the old man says to me.
“What’s going on?” I ask. My fingers tingle as my post-apocalyptic senses tell me I should fill my hand with a weapon.
“Don’t want to know, outlander,” the old man says.
“I do. That’s why I asked.”
Someone in the lobby area chuckles. “He got you there, Franky.”
“Aw, stuff it, Rich, or I’ll kick you out and make you see them District boys face to face,” the old man says.
My heart shudders to a stop. I arch an eyebrow, trying not to let the surprise show on my face. So I ask as nonchalantly as possible, “District?”
“What are you, a dummy?” Franky asks, looking at me cross-eyed.
“Be nice,” a woman says to the left of the bottom of the stairs. I look over, thinking it might be the bartender Lilliana. It’s not. It’s a woman in her fifties or sixties with silver hair. Her skin is porcelain smooth, no lines or wrinkles whatsoever. I’m reminded of Eve, Darlene’s mother, who was the leader of Haven and the founder of the council we were on before she died of what the compound’s doctors diagnosed as cancer. It was a nasty affair. Without proper treatment, Eve withered away to basically nothing. It had hurt Darlene and her sister Carmen very badly. Hell, it hurt e
very last one of Haven’s citizens.
“Don’t tell me what to do, woman!” Frank yells.
“Quiet!” Rich hisses.
There’s a handful of others in the room, but they look too scared to speak. Their faces are pale, their heads are stooped.
“I’m going to get a drink,” I say, and walk through the lobby.
Rich steps in front of me. He’s a man about my age, somewhere in his forties. He’s burly, clean-shaven, short-cropped hair covered by a Sherlock Holmes hat. There’s nothing about him that’s intimidating, I think, until I look into his eyes. There is a primal fear in those eyes, and the reason he’s so frightened, the reason the door is barred and the shades are drawn, is because he, along with everyone else in this lobby, is afraid of the District.
I don’t blame them.
But I’m not scared. Not many things scare me anymore. Before I lost Darlene and Junior, the only thing that did scare me was losing my family. Now I’m a man with nothing left to lose.
“Please, sir, don’t go out there. For all our sakes,” Rich says.
“If he wants to be a dumbass, let him be a dumbass,” Frank says. I do my best to ignore it. No need to pick a fight with a crotchety old man. “If you think about it, he’ll be a distraction. Them District boys will set their sights on him and forget about us.” He closes his eyes then mumbles something that reminds me of a silent prayer. This is all but confirmed when he does the sign of the cross right in front of me.
“Please,” Rich says again, ignoring Franky. “Please, sir, I don’t know you, but I know there’s not a lot of us left. No reason to get yourself killed.”
“You see his sword, Rich?” the woman asks. “He isn’t going to die. Not Conan the Barbarian here.” She chuckles and a score of the other formerly silent people echo her laughter.
I’m not amused. Not many things amuse me these days.
“I appreciate the concern,” I say to Rich, “but I’m parched. I could really use a drink.”
The Dead Collection Box Set #2: Jack Zombie Books 5-8 Page 23