Snareville

by David Youngquist

  “Hey, look,” said one of them. “It’s Jerry Garcia.”

  “Naw,” another replied. “Too young. He’s a blonde Tommy Chong.”

  “Chong’s old, too. He looks like Garcia.”

  Another argument began. I was wrong about this crew. Less Mad Max and more Beavis and Butthead.

  “Boys,” I broke in, “we either gotta leave now or move faster before the deaders come for dinner.”

  “We’re not boys. We’re Bone Crushers. Watch your mouth, asshole. I’m Worm. This’s my crew.”

  The leader sported a sky-blue Mohawk that stood up tall from the top of his head. War paint covered his face, and his outfit, like those of the others in his bunch, was made up of chains and leather. I supposed he probably scared the hell out of some types of people.

  “Worm, is it? You name yourself after your dick or your IQ?”

  He bristled. “Nobody talks to me that way! Now you're gonna die, and we're gonna take that pretty truck of yours!”

  Yeah, he was dumber than I thought.

  I slapped the roof of my truck. Twenty-five Raiders stepped from the cabs, all armed with AR-15s stoked with thirty-round mags.

  “Do I have your attention now?” I asked.

  Worm just nodded.

  “Now, as I was saying, we’re down to about eight minutes before the Zeds come to investigate. We work together, or we leave.”

  Out of necessity, an agreement was reached.

  We pulled around back to the shop area. We backed in two of my trucks, plus Worm’s old pickup and Jeep. A few guys set up a perimeter outside. Ten of my crew members disappeared inside the store to do our shopping. Five of Worm’s groupies did the same. The rest of us stayed outside to man our positions.

  It wasn’t long—five minutes, by my watch—when the first Zed stumbled around the corner. I dropped her with a head shot that splattered her black brains all over the blue wall.

  More corpses followed. My crew and I had made this run a couple times, and we didn't have too many problems. But we'd done it quiet. This time, Worm and his crew drew way too much attention.

  Before long, the Zeds converged on the parking lot from all directions south and west. My crew is trained for disciplined fire. We only take head shots, and only when the deaders are in range. One hundred yards or closer. Worm's ragtag bunch of scavengers, on the other hand, just threw a bunch of lead downrange and hoped they hit something. Pretty soon, a hundred or better deaders were stumbling our way.

  After five minutes of holding them off, I ran into the shop to see how far along we were. Not far enough. We’d have to come back when this shit storm died down.

  Back outside, the gunfire intensified. More Zeds. I went back out to check on the progress.

  Two of Worm’s scavengers nearly ran me down as they backed out their beat-up Cav. Another three stood beside my trucks. I turned around to see Worm’s Jeep and the pickup blast out from the garage door. The vehicles peeled around the corner, and the car took up the rear. His guys on the ground screamed after them. Two of them took off running as the vehicles hit the street. I don’t know if they really expected to just run right through the swarm of deaders, but they didn’t make it.

  The Zeds fell on them and started their meal in no time flat. Their screams rose above the moans of the swarm. My crew members know the rule: you get infected within rifle range, you die. Our bullets shattered the skulls of Zeds and scavengers alike. Left behind to stand with us, one of Worm’s boys turned his gun on me. Young guy. Looked Mexican. Eyes painted black, tall Mohawk painted purple, leather vest held together with chains. Yeah, the Mad Max look was gaining popularity these days.

  “Don’t blame me, kid,” I said. “I’m not gonna let them join their new buddies and come after us.”

  The guy lowered his MP5, then swung it toward Worm's convoy as the runaway vehicles blasted down the street. A stream of curses followed the bullets. Neither did a thing. I could still hear Worm laughing as they raced away.

  Asshole.

  I leaned across the hood of my truck and put the red Aimpoint dot on the back of Worm's skull. They were at fifty yards and pulling away. Seventy-five. I took the slack out of the trigger. One hundred. Worm turned to shout something out the window, and I fired. One hundred and seventy-four grains of diplomacy took the back of his head off. The round splattered idiot brains on the driver and punched a hole through the windshield.

  The driver fought for control of his rig, squealed around a corner, and was gone. I looked at the guy they'd left behind.

  “They call me Danny Death,” I said, “and I don’t deal too well with morons. Let’s go see how the rest of the crew is doing.”

  He followed me around the corner to the shop while the rest of my crew held back the swarm. Inside, most of the group was loaded into the trucks. We hadn’t grabbed much this time, but we couldn’t stay.

  “Where’s Jen?” I shouted at Bill.

  “Still inside. She wasn’t far behind us. Don’t know where she went.”

  “Damn,” I muttered as I ducked into the store. “Wait for me! I’ll be right back.”

  Worm's boy stuck with me. We dashed through the store. I knew what we were looking for, and I headed for the far side. I hoped I wouldn’t pass her in the dark, but figured I’d see her flashlight. Sure enough, halfway there, I saw her light come bobbing from the back of the store as she ran toward us.

  “What the hell’s going on? We need to go now!”

  “Your son is using my bladder for a kickball.”

  I did a double take. “Oh. Well, c’mon. Things’re getting' hot out there.”

  “So I hear.”

  The gunfire outside kicked up another notch.

  “You pregnant, lady?” the Mexican kid blurted.

  Jenny laughed. “Slightly. Birth control is in kinda short supply around here.”

  The kid swore as we ducked back into the tire-and-lube shop. The garage doors stood open wide. I yanked one down, shoved Jenny into the cab of the truck, and grabbed the kid under the arms to lift him into the bed. Through the leather vest, I felt boobs.

  “Hands off the software, asshole!” she snapped.

  “Sorry, I… didn’t realize,” I stammered.

  I heard Jenny laughing inside the cab as I slapped the roof. Bill sped out of the garage. Beth pulled the door down behind us. I keyed the radio, called my crew back, and we left town the long way. I didn’t want the Zeds to get any ideas about where we might be from and come knocking on our door back in Snareville.

  An hour later, we rolled into our first checkpoint ten miles from Wal-Mart. We burned all that gas just for a half-assed supply run. I was still pissed.

  We swung through town in my truck and headed over to the old high school.

  “Whatchoo gonna teach me, Mister?” the girl asked as we rolled to a stop.

  “Nothin’ right now,” I said, “but it looks like we’re stuck with you. Your buddies left you, and I’m not turning you loose out there by yourself. You’re welcome here, but you’ve gotta spend a week in quarantine.”

  “Quarantine? Fuck that. I’ll take my chances out there.”

  She started to leave. We insisted she stay. After a brief struggle, we got her disarmed, took her inside the school, and locked her in a classroom. She cussed us out the whole time.

  “What a cunt,” I remarked to Jenny as we walked over to Kenny’s office for our after-action report.

  Jenny grinned. “You love it, and you know it. Bet she’s even got a set of whips she’d love to use on you.”

  “Funny,” I said without a smile. “She stinks, too. Wonder when the last time she had a bath was.”

  Jenny shrugged. “It’s tough out there, baby. Not everyone’s as lucky as we are. Probably a lot of traumatized survivors doing the same thing her group’s doing.”

  “Great.”

  We reported to Kenny One Shot about our unsuccessful raid and determined we'd have to go again soon. But we had enough of what we
needed to get us by for now. We weren’t in dire straits, but we needed to stock up on supplies and clothing for the women who needed them. Sure, a lot of the guys needed new clothes, too. We’d worn out a lot of what we started with, but the repairs were easy. It was maternity clothes we were really after.

  For the rest of the week, I kept fence patrol on the dead-watch from three to seven o’clock in the morning. Everyone took turns riding fence, four of us per shift per night. Two rode horseback clockwise from one starting point, and two rode counter-clockwise from another. That way, we always had someone on at the fence.

  I had George with me—dogs have good noses—and rode Charlie. Both horse and dog adapted to the new routine pretty quickly. We spotted a number of Zeds as they wandered close to the fence, and we dropped them before they could call any of their buddies. Things got pretty quiet in a hurry. Outside Princeton, we stopped seeing deaders.

  I ended my ride each night at the high school. She called herself Bitch, I learned, and along with the black, studded collar around her neck and the attitude she wore, the name fit. I usually took her breakfast, which consisted of eggs and hash or eggs and fish or oatmeal. By the fourth day, she'd finally showered, so my eyes no longer watered while I talked to her.

  I felt kind of responsible for her, so once she was out of quarantine, I invited her to stay at our house. The three upstairs bedrooms were full. All our girls were pregnant. A lot of women around town were knocked up these days. We had one small bedroom downstairs that was still empty, and Bitch was welcome to it.

  A couple of weeks after Bitch moved in, I walked around the corner of the house to find four women, one of whom I didn’t recognize.

  “Danny!” Jenny shouted. “Come here!”

  I came up as she was speaking Spanish to the girl, and they both turned to me. I still couldn't quite recognize the girl, but I knew who it had to be.

  “Bitch?”

  “Bitch is gone,” Jenny said with a smile. “This is Pepper. She volunteered to go on a run with you to the store and get the rest of the maternity clothes we need. The girls will put in their orders this morning, and you can go tomorrow.”

  “Pepper?”

  She was wearing a gray sweatshirt and faded jeans, both of which looked good on her. She must have found my beard trimmer; she'd shaved her head. The heavy, black paint was gone from her eyes. She still wore the rings in her nose and lip, but overall, she didn't make a bad picture.

  “Yes, Pepper," Jenny said, grinning now. "Girl’s got a habit of eatin' jalapeños off the bush.”

  “Okay, that fits.” I glanced at the fire we had burning to distill our water. I could just see the studded collar as it went up in smoke. “What’s this about a store run in the morning? My crew has other things going on.”

  “Just you and her. She knows what to get. You can take your bike.”

  I smelled a trap. “Just two of us? We’ll need more guns than that.”

  “I can cover for us,” Pepper said. “That bike in your garage is faster than the trucks. We buzz in, get what we need, and buzz out. That simple. And I need undies, too. Only thing I’ve got is what I’m wearing, and Jen loaned me the bra.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Danny, we got very few supplies on that last run. Barely any maternity stuff.” Jenny tried to stand on her own, and Pepper pulled her up by the hand. "We’ll make a full run next week, but I need the right kind of bra now. My boobs hurt. My clothes don’t fit right. We need enough stuff to get us through the week.”

  “Kenny doesn’t like us to go out alone.”

  “I’ll talk to Kenny, and you won’t be alone. You’ll have Pepper.”

  I looked at the girl. She smiled at me. Yeah, it was a trap.

  “Fine. Get together with the other girls and make me a list.”

  The next morning, I rolled the Harley out of the garage. I'd fired it up a few times over the summer, and I'd puttered around town on it a time or two, but I hadn’t taken it out past the barricades since all this began. The tank was still full as I rolled the motor over. The big, black Softail rumbled under the morning sun.

  Tony’s riot gun hung over my shoulder. Two pistols rode my hips, and a half dozen mags shared my pockets.

  Pepper hopped off the front steps to the house and swung aboard the Harley behind me. She wore her MP5s in a harness across her shoulders. She wore a different sweatshirt, and she'd put on a pair of hiking boots borrowed from Jenny. She tucked a number of canvas shopping sacks into the saddle bags of my bike. It’d be a different story getting them back home once they were full of supplies.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “Si. Ready as I’m gonna get.”

  I looked up at Jenny on the porch. She smiled and blew me a kiss. I waved back, let out the clutch, and rolled from the driveway. I had one foot in a bear trap, all right.

  I eased through the last checkpoint over the canal on the main road out of town, then I gave the bike some gas and powered up the hill like it wasn’t there.

  “What’s the fastest way to get to Wal-Mart?” Pepper shouted over the wind.

  “It’s straight through town, in theory,” I yelled over my shoulder.

  “Why in theory?”

  “Full of deaders and stalled cars."

  “We got a bike. Take the sidewalk.”

  “You got a death wish?”

  She laughed in my ear. “Trust me. I got your back.”

  “Great.”

  I bypassed the last section road to go around town. Snareville is south of Princeton, where Wal-Mart is on the north end. Through town, the jaunt was nearly four miles. I hadn’t taken that route since May. We always go around. Always go in the trucks. Always go in with at least two squads. Now here I was, riding into town on my Harley with a crazy lady piggybacking me. Just the two of us, and Jenny at home.

  I stopped at the edge of Princeton. The Pentecostal church stood behind me. Our town radio station, off the air for months now, lay to my right.

  “Sure you want to do this?”

  Her breath brushed my left ear, heavy over the rumble of the bike.

  “Yes,” she whispered. I felt her reach around with her right hand to pull one of the MP5s from its holster. “Any time.”

  I eased into town. Nothing sounds like a Harley—nothing. Mine wasn’t all that loud, but I didn’t want to put out the dinner call until I had a better lay of the land.

  We rolled down the first few blocks with no problems. It was spooky quiet. At the town square, the road started to bog down. I saw vehicles backed up four blocks to the first stoplight. I trundled onto the sidewalk and gave the bike a little throttle. Not a lot of room to dodge if I needed to.

  The exhaust report bounced off the silent brick walls downtown. I popped into second gear, getting nervous about this whole thing. I could see the intersection of Main Street and Route Six coming up ahead. It always was a busy stop, and now it was jammed with cars from both directions. Here, none had crashed, but they were backed up out of sight. Apparently, folks had just given up and tried to hoof it.

  I started to wonder how many of these ex-motorists made it out of town, then I saw the first small cluster of deaders. They shambled down Route Six as I navigated the jam. When the Zeds saw us picking our way through, they moaned and shuffled faster. Pepper opened up on them as they approached, and they dropped like wet concrete.

  The next few blocks of Main were clear, and I made good time. On the sidewalks, Zeds strolled along in a horrible parody of everyday life. I don’t know if they talked or not; if they did, I couldn’t hear them over the bike.

  Pepper started to raise her weapon a couple of times, but she didn't need to. For the most part, these deaders ignored us. Only a few even turned our way. Maybe they figured they couldn’t catch us. Maybe they'd just eaten. No telling.

  Down near the ice cream stand, I saw something I’ll never forget. A young Zed stumbled along. She must have been in her early twenties when she died. Long blonde hair, e
yes gone dead white like all the rest.

  She pushed a stroller in front of her.

  From what I could tell, it was empty, but it was coated with blood. Cushion, sides, wheels, everything stained dark. The girl wore a light blue maternity dress, bloody from the chest down and billowed around her like an obscene flag in the breeze.

  I heard a choked sob behind me, then the safety clicked off the MP5. Pepper's bullets tore into the girl, and the impact sprayed black blood all over the sidewalk. The corpse twitched and jerked under the impact. One round broke her hip, and she went down. Pepper shifted her aim, and the deader’s skull came apart. The gun clicked dry.

  We rode the rest of the way in silence. I saw no Zeds in the parking lot at Wally World, so I rolled around back. Pepper jumped off the bike and opened the door so I could pull in. She kept quiet as we gathered up the shopping bags.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She turned, walked past the grease pit, and pulled open the door to go inside the main store.

  We flipped on our flashlights. No electricity ran here, and only the skylights let in any sun. We couldn’t see very far into the store, but lucky for us, all Wal-Marts tend to be set up the same. Pepper led me into the women’s section first, and we stopped at the racks full of underwear.

  Dropping her bags on the floor, Pepper shuffled through the first few items. She pulled a dark red set of panties from their hanger, held them in one hand, and found a bra to match. I started to say something as she stripped right there.

  “I don’t think anyone’s watching,” she retorted.

  I shut up. She peeled off her borrowed jeans. The panties she had on were full of holes. The white cotton was stained with blood on the left side, where she’d been wounded at some point. She shucked those off and flung them into the gloom. I looked away as she pulled on the new set. The waistband snapped into place before she slid out of her sweatshirt. Shifting from foot to foot, I couldn't help but notice she wasn’t wearing a bra. That went on next. Then she stood there for a moment, trembling in her grubby socks and new undies.