by Thomas Head
It made Doc think. Here in the hilly, relatively safe part of the state where they lived, zombies had taken to living in caves and keeping mostly to nests that were deep in the woods and marshes, but away from the base’s heart, the world was overrun still by the steady stream of Shado, still filled with the beasts in some places—and it occurred to Doc that while he had brought every manner of thing to trade with the hillbillies, they didn’t have enough people to take on a full onslaught from a large pack of Shado.
“We need a seventh member,” Doc said to no uncle in particular.
The old man knew at once knew what Doc was hinting at. He looked up at Dale. He had seen the new guy beat two commandos to an inch of their lives. He was hovering over a hole in the ground now, like a polar bear hunting seals, waiting for the zombies within to emerge. He was wearing some sort of coyote skin hat. Or it might have been a dog.
Jickie “puhed” loudly.
“Puh? Puh doesn’t feed the hound, Mister Jick. Someone has to man the river pole. That leaves us five guns. And we need someone who’s been south.”
“I said call me uncle.”
“He’s from Nashville,” Gig agreed behind him. “Came on this very river. Seems he’d make a damn fine guide if you ask me. Knows how to keep that mouth shut too!”
At that, Big Kenzo grunted, followed by several others, though it was hard for Doc to tell if they agreed or not.
Suddenly, just ahead, Dale filled the air with the thunder of his guns. Sparrows, just out of their winter sleep, swooped across his large frame. When the echoes settled, he turned away from the smoking nest, approached the bank, then stepped beneath the naked branches of a brake of willows. and yelled, “Fine vessel, boys! I hear that that motherfucker could float on a puddle!”
Then he came wading out to greet them, crunching through the thinner ice until he waist deep in the frigid water.
“Now what the fuck’s all this!” Uncle Jickie said.
“I’ll tell you boys what all this is. This is a deathtrap. Going to Nashville in this, you better be right with God. Sometimes you’ll pass a riverside settlement of barbwire and timber, and you’ll think it’s a trading post. But the folks inside… I tell you, a lot of them, they’ve become like them. Hungry for flesh of any kind. Some are more like wolves than men at all.”
“Says the man in the wolfskin hat!” thundered Jickie.
Doc suddenly had the feeling he’d been very foolish, or else very wise, wanting to talk to this guy.
“Trust me on at least this much, Mister Jickie. I know them like… well, as good as any man does. If you won’t make me rich as your guide, then make me satisfied knowing you will not travel by day. Hide the boat, boys. Hide it by day and glide it by night.”
“Shit, son. We are commandos!”
“They have commandos, too,” Doc said.
Big Kenzo laughed. “I think only one man in three is a real commando, and sometimes not even that many, but in our company, young Mister Dale, every man is a commando.”
“Well, maybe. You know, they say that in the first years, if you didn’t want to kill, you stayed home. You tilled the soil, cooked burgers, drove the tow motor, but you did not take to unfamiliar land and become a commando. But now, boys? Come on. I shouldn’t even have to say, every man is forced to the fight.”
“Hell yeah!” Kenzo growled. “But what you have to realize it is that one in three or maybe only one in four has the belly for it. The rest are farmers or fry cooks at heart. They just run when they see a Shado. We’ll be like rabid hounds.”
One or two of the oars dipped and the Feisty-Uncle glided backwards.
“Yep, hounds. Growling and yelping, fighting bears.”
The vessel slowed.
“I saw zombies try to take a band of longmongers down.”
For once, Doc’s kinsman fell silent.
“These were smart beasts too, boys. Two bands of them had joined.”
“What!”
“Oh. Yeah, boys. That’s not all. They had blocked the river with felled trees. There were about a hundred of the fuckers. And the longmongers just had about a dozen riflemen, and some jackass with a sword. But then I see a pair of spear-throwers. Sons of bitches trotted right up on the blockage, skewering them.”
“Oh Come on. Fucking lies.”
“Believe me or don’t. But that was something else I learned about the blackwaters. First of all they call them longmongers in Tennessee. A man’d like to think it’s all about money. But they’re Shado cutters too.”
“Nope.”
“Yep. For some it’s just the joy. I’ve seen go out after the undead. And I’ve seen the utter geniuses they are at it. I saw men whooping with joy, I mean real fucking joy, as they leaned down to stab the beasts, only to have Shado teeth rip off their faces while the others laughed. Laughed…. And some, I shit you not, they’re like fucking ninjas. I’ve seen them disappear with people they kidnap without so much as—”
Doc watched in amazement as Tyler hefted Dale over the Feisty-Uncle’s prow.
“If you fight half as well as you talk shit…” he offered, at which the others had a much-needed laugh.
They had their seventh member.
Chapter 30
As they were embarking, young men with wild hair and hungry faces scampered along the wall or ran to the banks, watching them as they began to paddle downriver. The boys of these wilds embraced adventure like a wrestling partner. If they could not find trouble, they made it themselves. Most had nothing but monstrous pride, battle scars, and well-sharpened wooden weapons, and with those things they would make whatever trouble they wanted.
They very nearly had to pull ashore and chase them off at one point, as they threatened to sink them for not taking them along.
Beyond that first obstacle came another.
His “uncle”.
Jick.
Almost immediately after he started calling him nephew instead of Doc, he launched into advice, lest they encounter Shado. Doc supposed he was a surrogate for the silent, brooding Tyler, whom even old Jick didn’t dare disturb too much. Whatever the reason, the advice was incessant: “I know you’ve fought alone, nephew, or alongside your father a long time ago. But fighting as a group is another matter. Don’t hesitate because of us. You see a zombie, skin him, Doc, take that sum’bitch out, skin him! Let him play the skinned monkey. Kay? Don’t assume it’s in someone else’s line of fire. Put him in your line of fire. Then fucking blast him.”
And so Jickie continued to warn him all the way from Goback to Bastard Hill downstream, mixing his metaphors the way dogs and coyotes like to mix their blood. Of course Doc had long since learned not to complain against these outbursts of explosive eloquence—lest all the canons of McCarthy heritage be outraged. Growing up with a merry but equally boisterous father, Doc had long since known what an outrage it is to try to teach an elder man.
“What’s that, boy!” his father had roared out when Doc had audaciously ventured to pull him up once, telling him he was pronouncing “salmon” wrong. It was the first time his father ever called him boy, and at first, he thought the old man was proud of him. “What, boy! Don’t talk to me like that! Is words for the use of the man, or is mankind for the use of fucking words?” and he looked at him in a way that set him packing.
But when Doc told his mother, she laughed. In fact the the normally reserved English expatriate laughed with a jolliness Doc had ever heard from her, roaring, struggling for breath as she stroked his head.
“He’s pronouncing the ‘L’ is he?”
“I think he added an extra one.”
“Oh, shit! But—well then… Oh, boy, it’s something else you called him on it. Something else!
The walls of Bastard Hill’s riverside citadel, one of the few stone structures around was all that saved his ears from more lessons. There is something about solid and intact stone that quiets a human soul, and sometimes it even quiets a man’s mouth.
There were
ships like the Feisty-Uncle clustered together on the riverbank, and even though it was the full light of day, fires were lit ashore. Men were posted as sentries, and every warrior kept his weapons beside him atop the thick stone walls and high palisades, a line heavy with samurai swords, shotguns, and compound bows.
They were saluting them with fists over their right eye.
This, Doc presumed, was normal. But his uncle whispered that this was Old Addly’s way of wishing them well.
* * *
Apart from the peppery discourses of Tyler’s uncle, little happened on their first day of travel. It was a much more somber affair than Doc had supposed, as he had hopped getting out on the river might enliven Tyler, but he was still sitting dazed and silent opposite him. His uncle was quite the opposite, unfortunately. He held with just enough bluster to make him wonder if he weren’t working to conceal his nervousness for the road ahead, endlessly going on about “skinning the Shado monkey before he eats your balls” and “knocking the head off anything that stood in his way”.
Doc would admit, it was starting to make his head hurt. He wanted to paraphrase him to show him how ridiculously patronizing he was being and tell him, “Uncle, that’s the tenth time you’ve said that. The tenth damn time, and you’ve imparted no more information than the first!”
But Doc recalled trying to teach him how to say “salmon”, and held his tongue.
Barely.
Besides, his head did not hurt not half so bad as his arms. His right shoulder was already burning as the sun started dropping, though they had paddled fewer than twenty miles. Some miles downriver from that, perhaps four more miles, the sun began to redden. They traveled now between shores that showed less and less ice and snow, and they glimpsed the first, sheerest hint of green.
It was somehow refreshing, that hint of life. It even hushed his uncle. But as they drew near a deep rift of cliffs, frosty air blew through the dank ravines, where snow patches yet lay in the shadow. And he would start up again. His words were proving as endless as a woman’s.
And there was nothing lying around to stuff in his ears.
Here and there throughout the rocks would be the fresh, spring odor of dampness, with a vague suggestion of violets, mayflowers and ferns, ready to burst through the black clods. But sadly, it did not have the same quieting effect on Jickie. So Doc distracted himself with the scenery. The purple folds of the hills, with their wavy outlines fading in the haze of distance, lay behind them, but everywhere were endless hills. On a few of these rested the brown shades of human compounds with chapel spires and citadels pointing above tree-tops.
At the end of the day, when their boat sheered once again against a bluff of cliffs, came the dull, heavy roar of riverside village. Above the walls of rock rose great, billowy clouds of woodsmoke. With a sweep of their paddles, they were opposite a cleft in the vertical rock and saw the stout walls of a wooden fortification, leaning high over the dizzying precipice. The walls continued down a riverside hill, until they were at a level with the lapping water.
They ended the first day of their voyage here.
* * *
The town was called Beergarden, Tennessee, which was not the merry place it sounded. It was a much larger village than any of the little compounds that surrounded For Campbell, but as they neared the banks, they saw that the roar of this place was only rapids in the water. The town itself was a darker, quieter place than their little burg
Some ships’ crews nodded to them silently, waving to the sentries atop their fortification, which wrapped the town itself.
This was their signal that they could go in, if they like.
“I’m hungry,” Rocco said.
“I’m thirsty,” Gig said.
“Now what? Nonsense!” Uncle Jickie lashed out. “I told you two—leave your hunger—leave your thirst back in Goback Pub!”
“Ah, Jick, let them be,” Tyler said. “Let those who can, go eat, and let those who are able, have a little fun.”
“Here! Here!” Dale agreed.
“I could use a woman or two,” Kenzo said.
“Oh, Kenny Boy,” Jickie whispered, palming his forehead. “You too, sir?”
At which, Doc thought he saw Tyler smile.
Chapter 31
They flung a silver dollar to the fine man who had motioned up to the guards. He tied their prow to the cluster of sluggish vessels in a muddy part of the riverside, adding to a mass lapping hulls. Spotlights, made from relfcloting and intensifying firelight with mirrors, ensured that no undead lurked in the dancing shadows.
Gig, Jickie, Rocco, Kenzo, Tyler, Dale, and Doc stepped ashore with empty plastic mugs and legs like spaghetti. From the sight of them, one might expect that they had been at sea for a month. And the village of Beergarden was no place for a man with watery legs. The bold heights of a fort they called, rather uncreatively, Point Look-See loomed up to the right; and they had a time clambering up the rude wooden way to get to the plank roads, which wound in every direction, even up and down, through the hillside city.
They stood there for a moment at its edges, soaking it in, trying to orient ourselves in the moonlight that streamed through the towering pines and maple trees that surrounded them. It added a strange, moving glow to the dull, gray wood of cathedrals, pubs, brothels, gunsmiths, woodwrights, boatwrights and homes, turning every window on the west to dull smudges of frost and transforming the whole town in a confusion of deep shadows and crazy angles. It was no wonder, indeed, that all their rough warparty stopped mid-road to set their eyes on the largest stone thing in the place, a statue of stately woman with exaggerated breasts.
For some reason or other, Doc found his own hat off. So was Jickie’s, and so was Tyler’s. Then Kenzo spat, and they stepped once more through the strange shadows of the place in search of a pub.
It was after midnight when they found one. Nilbi’s Nest seemed like a comfortable-enough place, and they were still a fair number of horses tied to its hitching post. Winding from among the wooden roads, they entered the torch-lit foreroom and sat themselves near a welcoming fire. Their shadows had hardly stretched to the dining hall before they were invited further in by the barman, who called out, “Beef, lamb or pork, boys?”
“Oh hell, some pork!’ Kenzo demanded. “Pulled from the shoulder and smoked in apples and hickory to an inch of its life!”
As the pub hushed, and every eye turned to them, a chubby woman in purple and silver earrings pointed to some seat and filled their plastic flagons.
“Here here!” Gig said to her, then turned and said the same to all who looked at them.
A few plastic mugs were raised, but not one soul returned his greeting. This place was a wonder, Doc thought, the shelves piled high with cheeses, smoked fish, newly baked bread, salted pork, and a barrels and barrels of beer, all of which was served by some of the prettiest blonde barmaids Doc had ever seen. And yet there were no chuckles, no fights. As they turned back to their conversations, Doc reached for a small loaf and had his hand slapped away by the woman who said the cakes were for Martin Luther King Day.
“Who?”
The woman shook her head.
In Fort Campbell, they had a celebration coming too. Mayday. In fact it was one of the biggest celebrations of the year. A whole week of food and beer and fights and laughter and drunken men, treated like kings, vomiting in the new grass. There would horse races, wrestling matches, competitions in throwing spears, hatchets, and rocks, and, his favorite, the drunken women, so helplessly shnokered so that their legs would not work but to wrap around him as they go moaning and thudding like spring rabbits. But Doc doubted these fellows would be doing any of that. There was an undercurrent of sadness to this place, and he could feel as sure he could have felt a cold stream.
He saw Jickie watching the folks too, wrestling with the same thought: Had folk here fallen prey to the blackwaters as well?
Fewer fires were lit than Goback, Doc noticed. Men were talking low.
&nb
sp; In time, with a second round of beers poured, pork served and eaten with the determined reserve of a warparty on a mission, they settled in and got comfortable. Almost sleepy. And after a few more long moments of quiet drinking, someone whispered something behind them.
“What?”
“Harvest time,” someone said in disgust.
Doc turned.
“What?”
It was the woman. “They call this the harvest time of the longmongers,” she explained. “Just before the greening of the land.”
Doc cocked an eye, seeing that she wore a nametag, the universal badge of prostitution. He patted his knee, inviting her to sit in his lap.
She shrugged, hiked her dress a bit, and obliged. Doc could pay little attention to the ripened, soft buttocks as they sat on his knees. He watched an old woman, instead, who was no doubt her mother, eyeing him. But the woman in his lap did not notice, or else care. She braced herself with an arm around his neck, her left breast almost removing his memory of the cold facts of his life of late.
He did, however, realize that her nametag said Dolly.
“Oh?” was all he could manage.
“We’re a town with few problems. So few that all we do is talk about our problems, if you catch me,” she said, “and we intend to stay that way by not incurring the blackwaters’ wrath.”
Doc, confused, simply waited for Uncle Jickie’s thunderous response, but none was given.
He asked, “And to keep them away, every able man is supposed to be unnerved and moody.”
“Come,” she said. “Walk with me won’t you?”
“Hell yes I’ll walk with you.”
The woman watching them laughed.
* * *
From the pub he heard the old woman calling. “Ye fool boy! She’s a hungry wolf-bitch!”