Search and Destroy

by Jay Bonansinga

  “I know it ain’t much,” Norma Sutters is saying in a hoarse, exhausted voice, her portly body awkwardly wedged in the V-shaped crotch between two trunks. The racket from below nearly drowns her voice. Her sweater reeks of walker bile and spoor, her duct-tape-wrapped ankles and Reebok tennis shoes dangling over the edge of the concavity, swinging like the legs of a small child. “Got some red licorice I managed to hold on to. Anybody wants some, you’re welcome to it.”

  Nobody says anything. Jinx sits nearby on the horizontal elbow of the trunk, silently chewing a leathery hank of beef jerky, morosely gazing through squinted eyes at the length and breadth of the horde. The loss of the horses has hit Jinx Tyrell hard. She has that look now that Lilly has seen from time to time on the faces of survivors—a raw, glassy, dazed stare—which usually precedes acts of intense violence. Next to her, Miles Littleton balances on a limb, struggling to open a can of Spam with his pocketknife, saying nothing, his expression pained and surly as he breathes through his mouth. Tommy Dupree is the only one standing. He holds a dangling spiral of vines as though gripping a hand-strap on a train at rush hour, waiting to be conveyed home. He glances at Lilly. He waits for her to say something.

  Lilly takes a sip of water from her army canteen, wipes her mouth, and says, “From now on, we gotta conserve everything … water, food, bullets, first aid, everything … we can get outta this mess, I believe we can, but we have to pace ourselves. Horses are gone, that’s a bad hit, but it’s a given now, and we can overcome it.”

  She feels her heart beating too hard. It gets like this sometimes, like a broken bearing in an engine, misfiring, pinging. Up until now, she has controlled the panic reflex by thinking about the children, about getting them back through any means necessary. But she’s losing her focus now. She remembers being seasick once on a ferry that she took with her father across the Tennessee River outside Chattanooga. She remembers her father, Everett, admonishing her to keep her eyes on the horizon. Always on the horizon. At the moment, unfortunately, the horizon has vanished behind the dark silhouettes of tree limbs and the tendrils of Spanish moss swaying like curtains in the night breeze.

  Lilly fixes her gaze on the makeshift structure that has practically fused to the tree fifty feet away from them, its ancient planking faded and silvered by hard weather and rot. The old tree house looks to have once provided children with a secret fortress out here in the sticks, a place in which to escape the yoke of school and parents, a hideout where cigarettes could be smoked, beers could be chugged, and girlie magazines could be perused. The twenty-foot-wide shack lashed to the spreading trunk system sits out in the shadows, a cruel joke on the loss of innocence, the fragility of life, and the vagaries of the apocalypse. Some of the unevenly spaced windows have been boarded up, now looking like tiny burlesques of grown-up desolation. The sight of the thing makes Lilly’s heart heavy. She had a tree house in her backyard for most of her childhood—it was the place she learned about boys, smoked her first joint, and regularly tippled stolen bottles of crème de menthe. Now this abomination silhouetted against the shadows twenty yards away makes her gut clench with anguish.

  “You ask me,” Norma Sutters grumbles almost under her breath, looking down but clearly directing her words at Lilly, “I don’t know how we’re gonna overcome a damn thing on foot, traipsing through this damn herd.”

  “Would you give it a fucking rest!” Jinx raises her voice at the older woman, the volume of it making everyone jerk. “You just have to keep on ragging!”

  Tommy closes his eyes. “Not this again, please, please, please—”

  “Hey!” Lilly raises a hand, scolding them in a loud stage whisper. “Keep it down!” She can feel the reanimated army beneath them shifting at the sounds of their voices like fish in an aquarium sensing food being dropped on the surface of the water. “Jinx, it’s okay. She’s just venting. I don’t blame her.”

  “I ain’t raggin’ on nobody!” Norma counters in a wounded bark.

  Jinx burns her gaze into the portly woman. “I got a news flash for ya! Lilly just saved your fucking ass, so show a little gratitude!”

  “STOP IT!” Tommy Dupree twitches on his perch as though electrocuted by the argument. He nearly falls off the tree as he covers his ears. “STOP IT!—STOP IT!—STOP IT!—STOP IT!!”

  “Okay, that’s enough, everybody, cool down,” Lilly says softly as she pushes her way across the gap and puts her arm around Tommy. She holds him tightly in her arms, cradling his damp, feverish head and whispering, “We’re gonna get outta here, I promise you, we’re going to be okay. We’re gonna find your brother and sister.”

  For a single, surreal instant, there’s a pause as though the very air around them has inhaled a giant breath, and Lilly hears the noise first. She looks up. “Hold it!” she whispers. “Wait a second. Hold on. Listen … listen.” The breeze clatters through the branches around them. Lilly wonders if the stress is making her hear things. Maybe she imagined it. She could have sworn she just heard a creak—an unnatural noise—coming from somewhere on a parallel plane with them, from somewhere in the shadows of the tree. It could have been a branch swaying in the wind but to Lilly’s ears it sounded too sharp and abrupt for that kind of phenomenon.

  “What is it?” Jinx wants to know, nervously looking down and scanning the restless horde. Thank God walkers don’t climb trees.

  Lilly shrugs. “I don’t know, I thought I heard something coming from the—”

  The noise reaches her ears again, louder this time, a sudden creaking followed by a thud—the sound so abrupt it makes Lilly bite her tongue—and she looks up. Her hand naturally goes to the holster on her hip. Her fingers grasp the Ruger’s grip. But she stops herself. Her gaze locks onto something in the shadows of the tree. The others frantically look down below for the answer. Lilly can’t breathe.

  She stares at the tree house. She tries to form words but can only manage an anguished, terrified sigh as the creaking noises give way to the snap of wood. Mesmerized, paralyzed, thunderstruck, she watches the boarded door of the tree house burst open.

  The others look up then, eyes going wide and bright with fear.

  What emerges from that broken-down little fort defies logic, description, or categorization.

  NINE

  On a strictly forensic level, one would have to call the creatures that burst from the doorway of that forlorn little tree house deceased children. But in the murk of impending night, behind the drifting motes of cottonwood and fireflies, the figures that pour out of that derelict fort appear to have originated in a nightmare. No bigger than chimpanzees, their flesh the color and consistency of black mold, they share the fixed grins of the decomposed as they scuttle, some of them on emaciated hands and knees, down the main forking trunk. Some are still clad in desecrated OshKosk overalls or filthy baseball caps fused to their oozing scalps. Each rictus of green, rotten teeth appears too large for its tiny cranium, each eye socket too deep and iridescent for the width of its skull. Each dead child moves with the rusty, stubborn jerking motions of a broken puppet.

  At the same time, every living human on that tree other than Miles Littleton rises, begins to back away, awkwardly inching down the length of that main horizontal trunk. Everyone but Miles instinctively reaches for a weapon, and everybody—except for Miles—seems to instantly grasp the enormity of the situation. They have so little ammunition, it would be useless to fire. At a glance, there seem to be at least a dozen of these cadaver kids now trundling like rabid tree monkeys toward them, jaws working, their husky snarling noises raised an octave as though coming from pull-string dolls.

  Over the space of that single, protracted, excruciating instant, Lilly speculates that these are the lost children orphaned by the plague, the castaways who returned to the one place that gave them comfort in their latchkey existences, the place in which they were willing to not only starve to death but turn as a ragtag family. But at precisely the same time that Lilly imagines these things, she also sees t
hat Miles Littleton is about to employ his own force of will to bring about the end of a different kind of predicament.

  “MILES! FOR FUCK’S SAKE!—WHAT ARE YOU—MILES!! MILES, NO!!”

  The pitch and tenor and volume of Lilly’s voice not only paralyzes the others but also draws even more of the horde. Down at ground level, each and every walker within a hundred yards of the massive mother oak now languidly shifts direction and starts to swarm and press in and crowd the area, looking for the source of the human voices. Lilly ignores the hellish chorus of growls and indescribable odors wafting up to her. She sees that she has one chance to stop the young car thief from whatever heroic plan he has banging around right now in his traumatized mind.

  She turns and shuffles back down the thick span of trunk when all at once she trips on a cavity, falls, and lands on her shoulder. Her balance goes haywire. She hugs the trunk, nearly slipping off, hanging there, digging in her fingernails. The impact has knocked the breath out of her. She looks up, her vision blurring, dizziness threatening to send her plummeting. She manages to see through watery eyes a dreamlike scenario unfolding before her.

  Miles Littleton has stepped into the path of the tiny monsters as they approach, and he starts waving his hands as though guiding a plane in for a landing. He calls out, “Come and get me, you little motherfuckers! That’s right. COME AND GET ME!”

  Lilly fumbles for her Ruger, thinking she’ll get one last shot off and perhaps stop this madness, but it’s already too late.

  The first dead child reaches the young car thief just as he glances over his shoulder and makes eye contact one last time with Lilly.

  * * *

  It’s all there on Miles Littleton’s face—a broken home, life on the street, a decade of drug addiction, his pride in his skills as a thief, his struggle to overcome his fate, his unshakable belief in God, and maybe even his secret longing for a mother, a family, a noble cause. Crouched only inches away from him, close enough to smell the acrid stench of the dead children swarming him, Lilly Caul realizes right then that she had never really studied the young man’s face for more than a fleeting instant … until now. Now, she gets one last close-up glimpse of those long-lashed eyes, that vaguely feminine mouth, the straggly goatee, high cheekbones, and street wisdom flashing at her as the monsters pile up on him. One of them bites into his leg, another rooting into his kidney, another going for his neck. Miles has the strangest smile on his face now as he gives Lilly one last look. An almost beatific expression passes over his face that contradicts the terrible sounds coming from all around him, not the least of which is Norma Sutters’s shriek. The portly woman is trying to intercede, trying to save her surrogate son, but Jinx—of all people—is holding her back. Miles grins and blood oozes from the corners of his mouth as baby piranha teeth pierce his abdomen and internal organs. Lilly screams as Miles finally twists around and then vaults into the air as though performing an awkward stage dive into oblivion.

  Lilly reaches out for the young man as though it’s within her power to stop the event from unfolding, pull him back, travel back in time, yank the episode to a stop, rewind it and prevent the young thief from performing this ridiculous act. But now, at least half a dozen dead kids cling to Miles as he plunges toward a weak point in the trunk system—a long, overhanging bough. He lands on the end of the limb and instantly breaks through—the rest of the small cadavers going with him as he plunges to his death—making the entire skeletal system of the tree vibrate and shudder.

  Lilly watches on her hands and knees, still clinging to that center trunk, unaware that she has started to cry. The tears streak down her face in scalding, salty tracks. Her vision glazes over as she tries to focus on the gauzy outlines of the shadows below. The sound of Miles landing on the swarm at ground level is strangely muted, dampened by the cushion of countless dead. Norma’s shriek goes on unabated, a terrible counterpoint to the rising choir of growls and wet snarling vocalizations reverberating up from below. Lilly wipes her eyes and fights the urge to vomit and sees the horde shifting down there in the darkness yet again, another countercurrent of shambling shadows pushing in toward the unexpected introduction of warm-blooded human meat to their ranks. Lilly tries to move, tries to react, tries to call out, scream, do something … but for a moment, all she can do is remain glued to that trunk and gape.

  Then, a fraction of a second later, she realizes what’s happening down below.

  * * *

  Jinx climbs down the massive central trunk first, followed by Norma, then Tommy, and finally Lilly. They each know all too well that the window of opportunity will only be open for precious seconds—the herd currently preoccupied with devouring Miles Littleton. The survivors descend, one by one, as quickly as humanly possible, skinning their knees, banging over cankers and cavities, and silently hyperventilating as they drop themselves into the clearing around the base of the mother oak.

  For the moment—mercifully, miraculously—a single acre of bare ground as hard and smooth as a dance floor stretches before them, devoid of any biters, enrobed in the chill mists of night.

  Now, keeping their heads down, moving single file through the shadows, they scurry across that hard-packed earth, setting their sites on the adjacent woods about a hundred yards away. If they can make it to the tree line before the rest of the horde catches wind of their hasty exit, they might just be able to escape. Lilly can sense the outer edges of the herd in her peripheral vision, between fifty and a hundred yards on either flank, a haphazard wave of walking dead suddenly noticing more humans in their midst, locking their metallic gazes on Lilly and her crew, which makes Lilly’s pulse pound even harder as she hastens along, urging the others with hand signals to hurry the fuck up.

  Not a single one of them dares to look back at the grisly feeding frenzy transpiring on the other side of the mother oak. By this point, Miles Littleton has been drawn and quartered by the gnashing wood chipper of countless rotting teeth. The ground is sodden with his blood. The odors and noises rise up into the night sky and dissipate in the wind.

  Lilly feels the weight of her sorrow tugging on her as she closes in on the palisades of white pines less than fifty yards away now. The tears sting her eyes, astringent and raw in the wind. The landscape blurs. Her vision tunnels as she approaches the deeper shadows of the woods. Almost there. Forty yards now. Thirty.

  She runs so hard, her tears so profuse now, she doesn’t see the men on motorcycles waiting patiently on the gravel road a quarter mile to the west, their assault rifles propped on their hips like those of cavalrymen. Nor does she see the military vehicles on the opposite side of the meadow, idling in the darkness, lights off, the silhouettes of roughnecks inside the cabs smoking cigarettes, watching, waiting. It’s too dark to see the ambush until the first flash.

  On the back of one of the Humvees, an RPG suddenly spits fire, a strobe light flickering silver in the darkness above the treetops.

  Lilly sees the rocket-propelled grenade strike a deadfall log fifty feet dead ahead of her, glimpsing this in her watery vision a split second before she hears the thunderous boom of the launcher. Wood pulp and shards of leaves and dirt erupt in all directions. Lilly goes sprawling to the ground. Ears ringing once again, breath knocked from her lungs, blood boiling with adrenaline, she tries to rise back up, go for her gun, get her bearings. Her body responds slowly, the sharp pain in her side weighing her down.

  She sees huge halogen lamps snapping on with the loud pop of arc welders at key junctures up on the ridge and along the gravel access road to the east. Shafts of harsh silver light sweep across the dark meadow, penetrating the haze of dust and particulate. The walkers are still busy with Miles, the peripheral ranks still slowly approaching. Lilly glances over her shoulder and sees her people crouching down, looking for cover, Jinx going for a weapon.

  An amplified voice makes Lilly jump, the source and direction from which it’s coming undetermined at this point. “Folks, I’m going to have to ask you to keep your hand
s where we can see them, and please refrain from drawing any weapons or we’re going to be forced to go ahead and take you out, and nobody wants that.”

  Lilly goes stone-still. Her heart thuds in her chest. Crouched there, blinded by the glare of the searchlights, she squints into the supernova closest to the sound of the bullhorn. The wind stirs the leaves and the treetops, the stench of the dead wafting, making Lilly’s stomach clench. She can sense Jinx, Tommy, and Norma behind her, each of them paralyzed, the wheels of their brains frantically turning, grasping for a response, a way out of this mess. But Lilly has other ideas. She has latched onto the sound of this disturbingly casual, officious voice as a panther might latch onto the bleat of a lamb.

  “What we need y’all to do now, if you don’t mind, is we’d like you to go ahead and throw any weapon you might have on your person to the ground. And if possible, it would be really, really great if you could do this slowly. With no sudden moves, as they say.”

  Lilly rises to her feet and carefully pulls her Ruger from its holster.

  “What the fuck are we doing?!” Jinx demands to know, her voice coming in a low, tense whisper from the beams of light behind Lilly.

  “Just do what he says.” Lilly throws her pistol on the ground. “This is the only way we’re gonna find the kids.”

  “Fuck!”

  Squinting into the brilliant white beams of spotlights, Lilly can see the others slowly rising to their feet, pulling weapons, tossing them. Norma’s Bulldog lands with a hollow thud; Jinx’s knives thump on the ground, one by one, as she clears her belt of its steel. The leading edge of the herd has closed the distance on either flank to about fifty yards. Some of the corpses are getting so close now that Lilly can see what they were in their former lives—mail carriers, farmers, laborers, farmers’ wives, white-collar drones—most of them weathered to a mildew-gray color. Only their eyes and mouths glisten with discharge, bile, and drool.