by Brown, TW
Marshawn and Vance both had similar results. Their targets each suffering the same fate.
I turned to the old man. “What do you want for these?” I asked, the awe seeping through my voice despite any attempts not to seem overly anxious to obtain one of these babies.
“The Rag-and-Bone Man needs a favor,” the old man cackled.
“What kind of favor?” Marshawn did not attempt to hide his skepticism.
I knew nothing came free these days, and I would not have a problem paying a fair price for the weapons, but my idea of fair and this crazy old man’s might be at opposite ends of the spectrum.
“Lost my workshop.” Rag-and-Bone Man’s face almost seemed to clear. There was a hint of a regular person for just the briefest of moments before the crazy sparkle returned. “Man in a bus with big guns came through and ran right through my gate. Broke my tools or stole ‘em. Now the Rag-and-Bone Man gots no home. Can’t make no more of his weapons. How can a man feed himself without a job?”
I looked at Marshawn and Vance with a raised eyebrow. I am certain we were all thinking the same thing about who had to be behind the man’s problem. But I had an idea as to where we could relocate the Rag-and-Bone Man. It would mean taking down a suffering and emaciated guard dog and making sure there were no nasty surprises lurking, but it shouldn’t be that hard to pull off.
“If we can get you a new place to stay and make your weapons, we each get one.” I turned to the old man who was peering up at me through his wild, filthy gray hair. His crazy eyes focused on me and he cocked his head to the side.
“Everybody gets his pick,” the man said with a maniacal chuckle. “Two if you like.”
I didn’t see the need for more than one. The weapon I was holding in my hand felt pretty damn sturdy. I had serious doubts that it would break any time soon.
“Maybe we take one extra just in case for a total of four,” Marshawn whispered as the old man scuttled to his cart.
“Solid idea,” I agreed.
“So where are we gonna set this guy up?” Marshawn asked.
“That shop with the dogs.” It seemed like a no-brainer to me.
The only problem we would face would be heading back toward a bunch of the undead. And there was the possibility of having to deal with the child-zombies as well. That was the downside. The upside was that we would get a real, honest-to-goodness field test with these apocalyptic cudgels.
I saw something flash in Marshawn’s eyes, and for a moment, I expected him to reject my idea. After a pause, he nodded. Whatever his misgivings might be, he obviously put them aside.
“You up for this?” I asked Vance who had been silent throughout the encounter.
“Seems like a good deal.” The man shrugged.
“Then let’s get to it.”
I started back up the highway the way we’d come. I wasn’t thrilled about the possibility of dealing with a large number of zombie children, but there was always the chance that they had returned to wherever they were congregating now that we were long gone. Since we didn’t have to actually pass that close to the park where I’d spotted them, I gave us at least some chance that we wouldn’t have to take them on.
I didn’t know what it was about the child versions that had me so creeped out, but I’d surprisingly reached a point where I wasn’t really afraid of regular zombies. I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea or not.
5
No Rest for the Weary
The quiet was what had me the most concerned. Even the Rag-and-Bone Man was not making a peep. In fact, until now, he hadn’t shut up almost since we’d started out for this place.
I stopped at some brush that gave us cover and pushed them apart just enough to get a peek into the fenced lot of the equipment supply place. I didn’t see any sign of the one dog that I knew to still be alive, but I did see chunks of what remained of his former watch dog partner.
A low whistle was all that came from our temporary companion. Vance and Marshawn squatted beside me and studied the open area with critical gazes.
“You think there’s any of them things in there?” Vance finally whispered.
“We were right up at the fence earlier. Those dogs made quite a racket, but nothing came stumbling out,” Marshawn answered.
“Dogs?” Vance gulped.
“Yeah, one of them ate the other.” That was all I really wanted to say about things. As it was, I didn’t like the idea that we were going to have to kill the other one. I didn’t see any other way around it, and in the long run, we were likely showing the thing mercy, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.
“Evan, you come up to the fence and draw Fido’s attention,” Marshawn whispered. “Vance, you and I will slip around to the far side. See that gate over there?” He pointed out a drive-up entrance to the lot and Vance nodded. “You get there and be ready.”
“Ready for what?” Vance was sounding more uncertain about this plan than I felt.
“Whatever happens.” Marshawn shrugged his shoulders as if it was obvious.
Vance glanced over at me like I might have some sort of insight. I repeated Marshawn’s shrug.
That seemed to do it for him, and he dropped his head and walked away, vanishing into the woods. It was only a moment after Marshawn vanished that I realized I had been left with Rag-and-Bone Man.
I turned back to look at the old guy. He was sitting on the ground. He did not seem to notice anything going on around him. He had one of his weapons across his lap, and he appeared intent to fidget with it.
Since I had something that needed doing and he looked fine with the situation, I turned back to the fence. I could see that the dog must’ve been able to smell us. The dog had crawled out from wherever he’d been and was raising his head, giving the air a sniff. I could actually see a large knot where his belly was distended from gorging on the other dog.
As soon as he saw me, he dropped his head and curled back his lip. A low growl came from him as he began to stalk towards me. I’ve been around a lot of dogs. I’ve never seen anything so horrifying. It was looking at me in a way that made my body clench in some of the most unpleasant places. But oddly enough, at the same time, I had the overwhelming need to urinate.
“Hey, boy,” I managed to finally get out. The dog actually stopped. For a brief moment, I thought that maybe he was going to remember that he was domesticated. Perhaps that whole “Man’s Best Friend” thing would kick in.
An instant later he was flashing a mouthful of teeth and the growl was back. His body tensed, and then he sprung at the fence. The metal links bowed, but there was absolutely no way that dog was coming through.
Deep down, I knew that the dog couldn’t get me. But despite that, I jumped back. To add to my momentary embarrassment, I screamed…a bit.
The dog bounced off the fence and landed on its side with a heavy thumping sound. The next sound was so foreign that it took me a moment to recognize it.
I spun around to see Rag-and-Bone Man flat on his back. Laughing. The old bastard was actually laughing. He threw both hands over his mouth, but the puffs of sound were almost more annoying than his open laughter.
“Screw you,” I muttered. I turned back just as the dog struggled to its feet.
Looking past the animal, I could see Marshawn come out of the woods and approach the fence on the far side of the lot and Vance to the left. The old concrete building bordered the right side.
Marshawn climbed the fence; the sound instantly causing the dog to turn and face the new potential threat. When Vance jumped up and started over from his side, the dog turned again. Now it was a matter of which of the men it would choose to lunge for.
It began to creep towards Marshawn for whatever reason passed as logical in its doggie brain. As soon as it was a few yards from me, I returned to the fence and kicked at it, creating a new racket. The dog threw a look over its shoulder, but then returned its focus to Marshawn.
“Must smell the urine and figured you aren’t a problem,” Rag-and-Bo
ne Man stage-whispered.
“You know…” I shot my best withering glare over my shoulder, but the man didn’t seem bothered any more than the dog.
I gave him a dismissive wave and returned my attention to the open lot, the dog, and Marshawn. I started climbing my side as well since it was obviously unconcerned with what I did.
Marshawn threw a leg over the top and gave me a wave, then pointed to Vance. The man had reached the top, but he’d frozen and was looking off past the building. I looked, but from my position, I could only see the lip of the roof. If there was something up there, I wasn’t seeing it.
Marshawn dropped to the ground, a machete in his hand. The dog was slower than it most likely would have been if it was fully healthy and not having just gorged itself on its companion. That made Marshawn’s job almost too easy as he brought the weapon down hard, cleaving off about a third of the dog’s head. It didn’t even get a chance to yelp. For that I was grateful.
I threw myself over and hurried to the door to the concrete building. No surprise, it was locked. I was just starting to wonder what exactly we could do to get inside when Marshawn came up and placed a hand on my shoulder.
I glanced at him to see that he was holding a pretty large prybar. I didn’t know where he’d seen it, and it didn’t really matter. I stepped back and he went to work, wedging it into the frame by where the door latched.
I heard something and turned to see that Vance had dropped to the ground on the other side of the fence. For whatever reason, he wasn’t joining us. Since I wasn’t doing anything much to help Marshawn as he worked on getting the door open, I started over towards Vance who was now looking up his side of the fence almost to where Marshawn had climbed over.
“Hey, man,” I called. “Where are you going?”
He was taking one slow step after another as he walked along his side of the fence until he reached the corner. Instead of turning and heading down along the perpendicular side to his, he kept going straight.
“Vance!” I hissed as the familiar stench of the undead drifted up my nose. Zombies were close. This was no time to go wandering off by one’s self.
The man didn’t seem to notice me. He kept walking away almost as if he were in a trance. I shot a look over at Marshawn who was just getting the door to open.
“Evan!” Marshawn called, and I saw the fingers come through the crack in the door. At least two of the undead were inside.
I hate to admit it, but it wasn’t even a consideration. I bolted back to the door and moved to the side where I could see one face pressed to the widening gap. Marshawn had shoved his foot against the bottom to keep it from flying open.
The face looking at me was so dried out that it reminded me of those shrunken head kits you could get as a child and turn apples into these cheesy looking trinkets. I had my knife in hand and shoved it into the filmed over, tracer-riddled eyeball that was staring unblinkingly at me as its teeth gnashed in anticipation of taking a chunk out of me.
I jerked my blade back and stuck the next one to shove its face into the gap. As the third one came up, I heard Vance hollering something, but I couldn’t make it out over the hissing, teeth snapping, and groaning coming from the slowly opening door.
“Jesus, how many people were in there?” Marshawn said through clenched teeth. The door gave another little surge and I could see two more faces and more shadows flitting by in the gloomy shop office.
I stabbed yet another of the undead. This one sort of slumped forward and was kept in place by the still animated zombies behind it.
“You’re gonna have to step back,” I said as I saw no way to get to the others inside.
“On three,” Marshawn grunted.
He counted down and then jumped back. Actually, he mostly stumbled as the surge against the door clipped his boot and caught him just enough to make the man lose his footing and end up on his butt.
Once more I could hear Vance shouting something, but I was in no position to look, much less offer any help if the man had gotten himself into trouble. Seven undead came stumbling out. Luckily, they had absolutely no coordination or awareness of the corpse that dropped to the ground almost directly in front of them. Four of the zombies fell in a tangled mess.
The three that didn’t fall were trying to decide which way to go so they could go around the rotten meat barricade that lay in their path. I used that time to jump in and stick the nearest one.
This one had been a huge woman. Not just obese, but easily over six-feet-tall. Her sagging skin gave her thick folds of flesh that flopped as she toppled. For some reason, my eyes locked on that for just a moment. She had bites up and down both arms and one on her right cheek that allowed a piece of her face meat to flop wildly as she moved. There was something about her that tried to register in my mind, and I cocked my head as I couldn’t help but study her. That allowed the next zombie to stagger forward and within range of my dripping blade.
The next one was a man in oily coveralls. I was now starting to guess that perhaps the employees and their families had come here perhaps to try and fortify it. But obviously, from the injuries I was seeing, I had to figure that at least one of them had been bitten.
No sooner had I begun to form that possibility when what I would now be convinced was the cause behind these people’s demise stepped through the doorway. A little boy of perhaps seven years old peered out. He almost seemed to survey the scene as he stepped into the open yard.
He was chubby, and despite the altering that death causes in all the muscles relaxing and giving the face an almost melted appearance, I could see a similarity in this child’s features and that of the huge woman I’d just dispatched.
As soon as I yanked my blade free from the coverall-clad zombie, black fluid dripping from the blade’s tip, the child changed into just another zombie and lunged. Out of reflex as much as anything, I stabbed out and drove the blade into the open and mewling mouth of the zombie child.
Marshawn shoved a zombified woman back that had somehow slipped up behind me and then spiked her in the forehead with a nasty crunch that seemed to vibrate my back teeth. We ended the last few and it was then that I realized that I hadn’t heard from Vance for a while.
“You two boys are something special,” Rag-and-Bone Man said with his usual cheer as I ushered him in through the gate. A large ring of keys hanging on the wall allowed us to not only open the padlock on the gate, but it also let us hand the proverbial keys to the kingdom over to the man who literally danced a jig.
“As promised,” Rag-and-Bone Man hooted as he handed over six of his weapons to us.
I examined mine and was pleased to see that they all had a leather tether allowing us to sling the spare over one shoulder. It was also in that moment that I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach.
Marshawn seemed to have the same realization at that moment. “Vance!” he blurted.
We both ran out the front door into the street. What I saw made my heart lurch into my throat and my blood turn to ice.
Vance was standing in the middle of the street. All around him were the mob of zombie children that we’d seen and run from earlier. The thing was, they were all just standing around the man. None of them were attacking.
As I watched, the man seemed to be saying something to the children. We couldn’t hear it, but his lips were definitely moving. I had no idea why they hadn’t done anything to him, but I was seeing with my own two eyes as this man stood in their center untouched.
Well, not exactly untouched. Every so often, one of the zombie children would reach out and touch the man. Either gently pawing at his coat or running one of their hands down his arm.
Adding to this macabre scene were the dozens of cats winding in and out between the children’s legs. I glanced over at Marshawn to see that he was equally at a loss. I could only speak for myself with certainty, but I’d never seen anything like this. I was making a guess that Marshawn hadn’t either.
“Hey…Vance,” Marshawn fi
nally hissed.
The man’s head popped up and his expression was a really odd mix of happiness and confusion. There was something in his eyes that had me instantly worried. I hated to admit it, but it was almost an overblown Hollywood expression of madness. I was convinced in that very moment that something had broken in the man’s mind.
“They’re all here,” the man said in a voice that was creepily flat considering his expression.
I flashed to an old documentary I’d watched years ago about the Jonestown mass suicide. I remember hearing Jim Jones calling for all his people to just willingly kill themselves and their children and being sickened by the nonchalance in his voice. This was very much like that.
“The children,” Vance gushed in a voice that only served to confirm that he was teetering on the edge of hysteria. “We tried to get to them. The bus got stuck and we were on the phone with the driver, but then we lost them.” He spread his arms wide over the cluster around him. “They’re all here. The lost children!”
I could hear his voice on the edge of breaking. How was he not seeing the horrific injuries on them all? Some were so young, so small that the injuries looked all the more horrific. I saw more than one missing one or both arms, indicating they’d likely been caught in the middle of some nightmarish tug-o-war.
“Why don’t you come on over here, pal?” Marshawn said calmly.
I knew that if I opened my mouth right now, I wouldn’t have sounded nearly so composed. Already my bladder was threatening to burst again.
“The children!” Vance repeated.
“Are dead,” I gasped, and then clicked my mouth shut as a few of the undead children turned around, finally seeming to notice us.
Vance’s expression tightened, and I could see him scanning the group he was standing in the midst of, but it was clear by what could only be called wonderment on his face that he wasn’t seeing them. Not really.
Almost as an illustration to that point, he reached over and ran his hand through the hair of a little girl missing an eye. There were blade handles of knives jutting from her body, and her mouth was a dark mask of dried blood.