by Chuck Wendig
“Oh, shit!” he said, laughing so hard he coughed. “We got guests?”
Loco hurried over and held up his M-16, then knelt by Thuglow like a knight offering his sword. Thuglow didn’t even seem to see him and kept walking.
They all stood around, not sure what to do.
Thuglow sauntered up, threw his arms wide and embraced as many of them as he could. Kayla noted that his hair reeked of skunky smoke.
“Pinball,” he said, shaking his head. “What a fucked-up game. Am I right? No matter how long you play, man, result is always the same. You lose. This isn’t Pac-Man or Asteroids. You never win that shit. Maybe you play for ten minutes. Maybe you play for ten hours. But you never win.” He headed over to a card table, reached down beneath it and pulled out a purple glass bong. With a lighter he sparked the flame, took a gurgling hit, exhaled a dragon’s plume of smoke—one jet from each nostril. When next he spoke, his words were more growly, and he coughed a little. “It’s like life, I guess. Nobody gets off this carousel alive.”
Gil stepped forward. “Listen, uhh, Thuglow—”
“King Thuglow,” Loco corrected, raising his gun but not pointing it (yet).
“King Thuglow,” Gil continued, “we’re just—”
“You cannibals?” Thuglow asked.
They all looked at one another. “No.”
“You got any diseases that you know about? AIDS? Gonorrhea? Sexual shit? Some kind of, I dunno, space flu?”
More shared looks—this time, even more confused and concerned. They all shook their heads.
“And nobody here is a boogieman.”
He was seriously asking if any of them were zombies.
“No,” Gil said. “None of us are boogiemen.” He pointed then to Leelee. “In fact, one of us has some medical training and would probably know if we were boogiemen or had some kind of disease.”
“Sweet!” Thuglow said, again laughing so hard he hacked. The lanky stoner wiped tears from his eyes, and Kayla was having a hard time believing he was king of anything but his own deluded imagination. “Hey, man, you guys want a bong hit? Or I can fix you a cocktail or something.”
Gil answered for the group. “No. Listen, King—”
“Cool. Here, check this shit out.” Thuglow went over to the wall, and pulled down a bundle of wrapped cloth from a metal shelf. He unswaddled it and revealed a cheap, flea-market katana. He started doing action movie poses with the Samurai blade. “I’m like the king of ninjas over here.”
“Listen,” Gil said firmly—he’d clearly had enough. The politeness in his voice had gone ragged. “This is all well and good but we’re just passing through, heading on out to the West Coast. Los Angeles. If we could just get a place to stay for the night, maybe we could discuss or negotiate transportation or food…”
“The West Coast?” Thuglow asked. “Pshh. Why? We got everything you could ever want here in the 66 States, man.”
“That’s for us to know.”
“Let me guess. You heard the CDC has some lab set up out there. Military dudes and scientists and shit. Trying to cure this thing. I heard that, too. Way I figure it, it’s total bullshit.”
He sliced the katana through the air at some invisible enemies. Imaginary boogiemen, Kayla wagered. “Same way those jizz-bags to the north are full of shit, too. Sons of Man utopia. Whatever. They got everything they need, why do they keep sending guys down here try to negotiate with us? Trying to buy up our jet fuel supplies? Trying to convince us to cede territory? Buncha richy-rich red-in-the-necks. They come at us, we’ll run at them with the hatchet, bro.” He cut a hard arc downward—the blade’s tip hit the floor of the hangar and snapped off, clanging off to the side. It woke the two naked girls in the bed. They looked around, but closed their eyes and went back to sleep. “Shit! Shit. Aw, man. Anyway. My bet is that out West? You ain’t gonna find nothing but a limp dick.”
“No, not the CDC. And we’d like to find out for ourselves.”
Thuglow came back with just the katana handle and part of the still-attached shattered blade in hand. “Nn-nn. Uh-uh. Nope. Sorry, old timer. But the 66 States isn’t inclined to let such healthy folks go. It’s like that old poster with Uncle Sam pointing all up in your grill and shit, and he’s all like, I Want You For The US Army? This is that. I want you for the Kingdom of the 66 States.”
“Excuse me?”
Thuglow seemed to be thinking. He began pointing to them one by one, down the line.
To Gil: “You look smart. You can rock the motor pool.”
To Leelee: “You got medical training. So you can do doctor shit.”
To Ebbie: “Man, you are a big dude. We got a gladiator circuit round here, figure I’ll send your meaty ass down to Abilene to fight in the arena.”
And finally, to Cecelia and Kayla: “And you two will make good whores.”
Uh-oh.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Mojo Rising
Kayla sat on the bed, trembling. Morning light, bright and white, came in through the blinds of the motel room, hurting her eyes.
As they said in the military, things had gone AWOL. SNAFU. FUBAR. The idiot ‘King’ of the 66 States sentenced them all to roles—and soon as he told Kayla and Cecelia what they were going to be doing, Gil moved faster than an old man should. He snatched up the glass bong and cracked it over Thuglow’s head—he screamed, backpedaling with shards of glass stuck in his head, the air filled with the sudden skunky stink of the spilled water. Loco, Dope Fiend and Jester were suddenly knocking Gil to the ground, kicking him and pistoning their rifle butts into his curled-up body.
Chaos reigned. Kayla and Cecelia attacked back, both singling out the muscle-head, Dope Fiend. Loco raised his rifle but found himself hoisted off the ground by a charging Ebbie. The wiry Jester started to get into the fight, but Danny stepped in his way, fists balled up. They had no chance, of course—Ebbie wasn’t anything close to a gladiator, and with Kayla’s cancer in play she and Cecelia had the combined upper body strength of a wilted daisy. Danny put up the best fight of the bunch and turned out to be quite the scrapper, but even still, he got dropped, his lip split and bleeding, a gun thrust up against his throat.
Didn’t matter anyway—eventually the hangar filled with the chatter of machine-gun fire. Ears ringing, Kayla rolled over and saw that King Thuglow stood there, a small submachine gun in his grip, gunsmoke climbing up out of the barrel like a pair of snakes wrestling.
Thuglow looked like he was crying. Like he just didn’t get it.
“You don’t appreciate me, man,” he said, blowing a snot bubble and wiping tears away with the back of his scrawny arm. “I thought I was doing you cats a favor, but this is how you repay me? My hair stinks! I got glass in my head!”
Then he swept his arm—“Take ’em away, Loco”—and turned to pout.
And now, here they were. In a place called the Friendship Motor Lodge. The sign out front made up in the motif of a giant teepee, for some reason. It was draped with tinsel and toilet paper. The power lines around it were hung with bloody sneakers, baby dolls hung together with makeshift nooses, and other morbid accoutrements.
They’d been separated. Ebbie, Gil and Leelee were off somewhere. Kayla and Cecelia were here in a room done up in a mid-century-modern meets the desert look. Thuglow had decided to take the dog, Creampuff. And Coburn…
…well, he was gone.
“I hope Gil’s all right,” Cecelia said. The face she wore was either sincere in its worry or a very convincing mask. Not that Kayla was in a real good position to know. “Those motherfuckers.”
“Daddy’s tough. He got beat up pretty good but…” She couldn’t finish it. He did get beat up pretty good. His face looked like a horror show, bruised and bloody and one eye already swelling shut.
“It wouldn’t be so bad, you know.”
“What wouldn’t be so bad?”
“Being… you know. Whores.”
“Ew. Cecelia. Ew.”
Cecelia knel
t down in front of her. Desperate for something, all of a sudden.
“The word whore, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. Way back when, the Romans or Greeks or whoever, they didn’t mean that word in a bad way like we do now. It meant something different. Whore meant to desire, or be desired. There’s nothing wrong with that. Is there?”
Kayla paled. “You used to be a damn hooker, didn’t you?”
“What?” Cecelia said, suddenly incredulous. But she couldn’t keep it up. “We preferred to be called escorts.”
“Oh, god, Cecelia!” Kayla said, suddenly grossed-out. She stood up from the bed and started pacing by the window, squinting in the bright daylight. “That is nasty. And you and my Dad? That’s gross. Was he paying you? Is that how you saw this whole thing? As a business transaction? Just… ew.”
“It’s not gross,” Cecelia said. “It’s the way men and women are. Men do nice things for women so they can sleep with them. It’s just biology. Being an escort just cuts out the middle-man. A guy doesn’t need to buy me drinks or a meal. He just… has to buy me.”
“That is cynical as… well, that’s cynical as hell, Cecelia.” Kayla wasn’t used to using curse words like that, but it felt right.
“That’s why Danny is being nice to you.”
Kayla’s jaw dropped. What was worse was that Cecelia wasn’t saying it out of malice—when she was being mean, her face twisted up like a fox who just caught a whiff of some possum shit or something. This wasn’t malice. She was being sincere.
“You shut up about Danny,” Kayla said. “Danny’s just a nice boy, is all. He doesn’t have that kind of poison in his head. We haven’t even kissed yet! And I don’t know if we’re gonna. I don’t know if it’s like that. He probably doesn’t even feel that way. I don’t know if I feel that way. I just know…” Her words drifted off. “I just know that I hope he’s okay.”
“I hope Gil’s okay.”
Kayla plopped back down on the bed. “I’m tired. I need a cigarette.”
“Me too.”
Locusts sang.
Somewhere above, two crows circled, complaining to one another.
A rattler crawled across the hot broken macadam, accompanied by serpents made of dust, creeping along as the wind blew.
And then, the locusts quieted. The crows shut up and took wing away. The rattler hurried off, found somewhere else to be.
Loco had left the I-40 gate last night in the Humvee, taking Dope Fiend and Jester with him. That left Big Money Jigalo—AKA Pete Sorvin—as the one guard at this gate, which wasn’t that big of a deal. They didn’t see humans all that often, and mostly the zombies stayed away because there wasn’t much out here for them. Thuglow’s crew had cleared out Erick and all the surrounding towns.
Still. Pete—er, ‘Big Money’—liked having his rifle handy. A Ruger Mini-14 with a long-looking Leupold scope on it and chambered for .223 Remington. Any zombies thought of hiking it up the highway, they’d find their skulls evacuated by a bumblebee made of hot lead.
Killing zombies was one of the only things that gave Pete much happiness anymore. Everything else was gone. His wife. His boy. Swept away by the zombie horde. Turned into… well, God didn’t even know. Only the Devil had a clue.
Pete didn’t much like the other survivors here. Bunch of lunatics, they were. Taking their dopey names. Dressing like clowns and like the jokers in a deck of cards. All because of, what? Some white rap group the King liked? They gave everybody dumb names—‘Skull Hustla.’ ‘Pimp Killa Z.’ And him, ‘Big Money Jigalo.’ He didn’t have any money. He damn sure wasn’t a jigalo. The name didn’t make any sense. It was like they picked it out of a hat.
In this way, the apocalypse was a lot crazier than Pete imagined it would be.
But that was okay. He had his rifle.
He leaned up against the top of the fence, laying atop an old beater Oldsmobile, and pressed his eye against the scope.
Heat vapors rose up off the highway like the sizzle off a hot pan. Way those vapors worked was, they distorted things a good bit, and sometimes in there you’d think you saw a zombie when really it wasn’t anything at all.
So when he saw the four dark shapes come up at the horizon’s edge, heading down the highway, at first he thought, this can’t be real. They didn’t look right. Taller than they should’ve been, maybe. Longer arms, too. And necks he could see. He caught a flash of pink fabric.
But they kept coming. They weren’t a mirage.
And behind them, Hell’s own army followed.
They rose up from the horizon’s edge like the first dark wave of a coming tide, a black tide, a dead tide—zombies. And not just a handful of them, either, but dozens. Maybe hundreds. They just kept coming, following behind the four like an ineluctable force. Pete felt his hands shaking. Remembered seeing his Mary—with their son Owen in her arms—swept beneath a crowd of zombies a fraction of this size. He lined up a shot. Cranked the magnification.
The four in the front weren’t like the others at all.
Their mouths, bigger. Filled with tiny teeth. Hands curled with claws. He let one of their wretched faces fill the scope.
Thumbed off the safety.
Took a deep breath.
Steady.
Just before he pulled the trigger, he was sure the thing looked right at him. The monster hit the ground just in time for the bullet to sail over its head, clipping one of the zombies in the back in the neck. A jet of black blood arced up and that zombie dropped.
“Shit!” he said, moving the rifle to rediscover his target in the scope. The monster was nowhere to be found. Neither were the other three.
He pulled his gaze away from the rifle, and with his bare gaze he could see them: they were loping like animals, like wolves launched straight out of Satan’s womb, and they were headed toward the fence.
It all happened so fast.
The one draped in scraps of pink launched herself up over the fence like it wasn’t but a knee-high hurdle. Pete stood, staggered backward, tried to get off a shot—but this wasn’t a shotgun and that wasn’t a clay pigeon.
She struck him in the chest. It felt like he was hit by a bull. Launched him off the Oldsmobile and down to the ground, to the dust.
He tried to get his rifle between them, either to shoot her or to shoot himself, but she tossed it away. Then she buried her face in the crook of his neck and began to chew. Everything felt wet, hot, cold, electric.
The other three hit the gate like sharks headbutting a diver cage.
As Pete’s life drained away, he saw the front fence denting, bowing, crashing inwards. The cars behind it jumped the tracks as the hunters struck them again and again, pushing them back with the groan of metal.
The way was open.
Hell’s army was here. The 66 States were breached.
Pete saw blood in darkness.
Gil stood in the motel room bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror. He looked about as good as a shovel full of road-kill. His left eye was shut behind two swollen lumps competing for attention. Half his face looked like a roadmap of broken capillaries. In his palm he held two bloody teeth.
He upended them into the sink with a clatter.
He hadn’t felt more alive in a long time.
Seemed strange, really. Even he couldn’t quite justify it. All things considered, they were pretty well screwed. Held captive by a kingdom full of mad-men in greasepaint. His daughter on the path to prostitution. His other friends—they were that, he reminded himself—held against the wall for their own strange fates. He had been resigned to the motor pool, which sounded fairly benign, but apparently attacking that dope-smoking dickweed who called himself ‘King’ was frowned upon, and about an hour ago they’d come in to tell him that his sentence was set: they’d drag him out into the firing range, stick a grenade in his mouth, and a bunch of stoned clown-faced fuck-wits would take shots at him until one of them managed to blow him to pieces like a scarecrow with dynamite up its ass.
>
So, no, things weren’t looking so hot.
And yet: he felt good.
Maybe it was the beating. Pain had a way of clarifying things. Probably a brain-thing. Adrenalin. Dopamine. Endorphins. Something. He’d been in a fight before. Hell, he’d been in dozens of fights. As a younger man—and, frankly, sometimes as an older one—he had quite a temper. Anybody said something to him he didn’t like, he’d make sure to give them a good whipping. Sometimes he took the whipping instead, but way he figured it, he’d won more than he lost.
Really, though, it came back to something Leelee said to him. As they were being dragged into the Friendship Motel, as Kayla and Cecelia were thrown into their room and Leelee was being moved into hers, she bent over and said something to him, something that stuck with him.
“Your daughter is special,” she said. “She is protected. Fight for her and she will be free.”
Fight for her and she will be free.
“Okay,” Gil said now, to his busted jack-o-lantern face in the mirror.
He knew he couldn’t go out the window: they’d been smart enough to bolt wrought iron bars (really, old garden gates) against the frames.
They weren’t that smart, though. They’d left the trappings of the motel in place. Like, say, the bedside lamp. It didn’t work—the motel didn’t have power, not like Thuglow’s hangar did. But the lamp didn’t need to work.
He grabbed it. Pulled the cord taut.
He cleared his throat, sauntered over to the motel room door, then pounded on it and yelled out in his best tortured voice:
“Oh shit. Oh shit. I think something’s broken inside me! I’m hemorrhaging. Help! Help.”
He stood to the side of the door. Out there, he knew, stood two guards: his favorite buddies, Dope Fiend and Jester.
The older fellow, Jester, was first through the door. He caught the lamp right under his chin and he went down like a stack of teacups. Dope Fiend—the human wall—was close behind but slow to react. Probably, Gil figured, because he was dumb as a wrench.