The Dead (a Lot) Trilogy (Book 1): Wicked Dead

by Odentz, Howard

  Because she was eighty-two, that’s why.

  Oh no, I thought as I realized what had just happened. Dorcas wasn’t going to run at all. She was going to stay right there and face whatever those people with the guns had to dish out. I gritted my teeth. Not with me, she wasn’t. Not today. Not now. I needed her. She was brave, and smart and good and she didn’t deserve any of this.

  I closed my eyes and held my breath and listened.

  The helicopter was still behind me. I could hear the blades slicing through the air. That meant that Dorcas was somewhere behind me, too. I got to my feet, turned and started carefully walking back through the woods, shoving every scary image that popped up in my mind into a little ‘discard basket’ in my head, just like the ones on computers. I didn’t have time to be scared. I didn’t have time for monsters. There was a real person somewhere in front of me and she needed my help.

  I told myself that every step I took was one step closer to being out of the darkness and away from the things that hid in it. Every foot that fell in front of the other was one step closer to another human being. Once, my teeth almost chattered out of my head when an owl hooted somewhere above me. I imagined great, big cartoon eyes watching my every move. Back in sixth grade, a guy brought a bunch of animals into school to show us the things that lived in the woods in New England. Cute were the squirrels and the chipmunks and the baby raccoon. Frightening was a great horned owl that had lost an eye so it couldn’t be reintroduced into the wild. It had sharp, scary talons like the bony claws of a skeleton.

  That’s what was above me now. Those bony, scary, sharpened claws, ready to swoop down and tear another chunk of scalp out of my head, just like Roger had done.

  Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. The words yammered in my brain. I didn’t have any time for fear. All I needed to do was find Dorcas. She was lying in the dead leaves somewhere in front of me and if I just listened hard enough, I’d be able to reach her.

  Just listen.

  Listen.

  Then I heard her voice ahead of me and I let out a sigh of relief until I realized what she was saying.

  “Can’t a lady take a leak in peace?”

  Oh no. No, no, no. Dorcas had walked out of the trees and right up to the people with the guns. Was she insane?

  I dropped to the ground and crawled the rest of the way through the woods until I was about ten feet from the road. I didn’t care about snakes anymore. I didn’t care about bears or owls or deer with sharpened antlers intent on goring me.

  All I cared about was Dorcas.

  “Are you okay, ma’am?” said a guy’s voice.

  “Did you just ma’am me?” snapped Dorcas. “Please tell me you didn’t just ma’am me.”

  Whoever he was, he stuttered a little. “I . . . um . . . are you okay . . . um . . .?”

  “It’s Millie,” she said. “Millie Ludlow. And what are you doing messing with my van?” Dorcas didn’t even give the guy a chance to respond. “And point those things at your peckers, not at me.”

  Gotta love her.

  I squinted through the brush and saw two guys who looked like they lifted weights with Jimmy slowly lowering their guns to the ground.

  “Can we ask where you’re heading, Mrs. Ludlow?” the guy said.

  “Guilford,” said Dorcas. “I got family there, if anyone’s still alive.”

  The other guy, the quiet one, took a step forward and handed Millie a piece of paper. “Have you seen either of these two?” he said.

  Dorcas studied the piece of paper. I didn’t have to see it to know it was the picture that Diana had taken from my mom back at Site 37—the same one that Cheryl The It had shown Trudy Aiken. It was of my parents, Trina and me at the beach.

  “I see four,” she said. “Maybe my eyes are a little rusty.”

  “Have you seen any of them . . . Ma’am . . . er . . . Mrs. Ludlow?”

  What happened next was the worst thing imaginable. “Sure I’ve seen them,” she cackled. “And the boy? He’s back there hiding in the woods right now.”

  My heart cracked in two. How could she do that to me? How could she rat me out? Could I really not trust anyone?

  Then Dorcas brayed out a laugh, snorted, and hawked up a wad of phlegm. She spat it right on the ground in front of the guy closest to her.

  “Listen, fellas. I don’t know where you get off scaring the bejesus out of an old lady in that fancy flying machine of yours. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s no one even left to keep a look out for. Of course I haven’t seen these people. I’ve been driving around the back roads for the past week trying to find anyone with a pulse.” Dorcas pulled out three cigarettes, lit them all, and handed two over to the guys with the guns.

  It was totally cool of her, so much so that they actually took them.

  “Frankly,” she continued, “I’d say you were a sight for these old eyes of mine—if it weren’t for the guns and the twenty questions.”

  The two guys looked nervously at each other. “So . . . you haven’t seen any of them?” asked the guy with the photograph, like he just lost a bet.

  “Nope,” she said. “The only person I’ve seen in the past week besides the dead ones was a hefty woman about yay wide.” Dorcas held her arms out almost as far as they could go. “She was running her mouth off about heading up to Ashburnham for some foolishness or other. Who the hell goes to Ashburnham ‘cept maybe if you’re buying goats or some such nonsense.”

  I could almost see their ears prick up like dogs.

  “A heavy woman?” One of them asked her. “Do you recall her name?”

  “Sure I do,” she said. “I don’t have dementia, you know. It was . . . let me see. It was . . .” Dorcas’s voice trailed off in thought. She dragged on her cigarette and let a puff of smoke swirl around in the air between them.

  “Was is Trudy Aiken?” Okay, you can take the bad guys out of the fatigues and lab coats, but they’re still bad guys, and now Dorcas knew it.

  She just stood there. I could only imagine the crafty cogs of her brain working out a lie that was just believable enough to stick. “Judy sounds familiar,” she finally said. “Or it could have been Prudy. I had a girlfriend named Prudy once and let me tell you, she was no prude. That girl was easier than a—”

  “No. Her name was Trudy.”

  Dorcas fell quiet again, taking long, gut-wrenching drags off her cigarette. Finally she said, “I don’t recall. The girl I ran into was a biggun, though. Not in that solid kind of way. More like Jell-O.”

  The two guys exchanged glances again then looked back at the helicopter where they had left the other two behind. The one who had been talking to her said, “Listen—we have to go. Try and stay indoors if you can. Hopefully this whole mess will blow over soon. Until then, staying inside is your best way of keeping safe.”

  “What do you mean?” spat Dorcas. “You aren’t here to save me?”

  They looked at the ground. “No ma’am,” the guy said to her. “We’re under strict orders.”

  Dorcas blew out another gust of smoke and folded her arms over her chest. “What kind of strict orders? Who’s orders?”

  The other guy, the one who hadn’t been talking much, muttered something. “Shut up, Charlie,” snapped his friend.

  “No. Let him say what he has to say,” rumbled Dorcas.

  “No one over sixty,” Charlie said. “We’re only sanctioned to bring back people under sixty.”

  Dorcas stood there and stared at them until they both couldn’t look at her anymore. Instead they averted their gazes to someplace else. I just hoped it wasn’t toward the ambulance.

  “Well go screw yourselves,” she snapped. The two men turned around and trotted back to the helicopter. “You hear me,” she screamed after them. “Go screw yoursel
ves. Go screw yourselves and your under-sixty foolishness.”

  I watched through the brush as they crawled back into the helicopter with the other two. The blades began rotating faster and faster until the whole thing lifted into the air, turned, and headed back toward Guilford, or at least that’s where it looked like it was heading.

  Dorcas stood in the middle of the road. I could see the glow of her cigarette as she puffed on it, let it fall to her side, then puffed on it again.

  “You get all that, Tripp?” she finally said loud enough for someone hiding right inside the woods to hear.

  I stood up and made my way to the edge of the road. “I can’t believe you did that, Dorcas. Why did you do that?”

  “You didn’t leave me much choice, now did you?”

  My ears turned red. “You mean because of the snake. I yelped. It was a girly thing to do.”

  “It was a girly-boy thing to do,” she croaked. “Besides I hate those critters, especially the big, black ones. My daddy used to kill them in the yard with a shovel.”

  “I didn’t have a shovel,” I said.

  Dorcas dropped her cigarette to the pavement and ground it into the ground with her foot. “No one over sixty, huh?” she muttered. “No one over sixty, my ass. This broad can run circles around them any day of the week and twice on Sundays.”

  The funny thing was, she was right. She was right and how.

  27

  WE STOOD THERE in the darkness for about a half hour. It was Dorcas’s idea. She wanted to make sure that the helicopter was far away. We were mostly quiet. A few times she muttered some stuff about not being ready for the glue factory, whatever that meant.

  Off in the distance, the van’s hazards flashed on and off, on and off.

  “I suppose I should go get the van, right?”

  A pile of ash spilled off the end of Dorcas’s latest cigarette.

  “No one over sixty, huh?”

  “I’m sorry, Dorcas.”

  “What do they want to do, cut me in two and count the rings?”

  “They’re just stupid.” It didn’t matter what I thought or what she thought. There were people like Diana someplace making up new rules, and they didn’t ask for our input. Besides, Diana was like almost sixty, herself. Was she obsolete, too?

  The dark closed around us like a glove. I suppose a poxer could have walked right up to me and taken a taste before I even knew it was there, but somehow, we weren’t thinking about that at the moment. The last four hours had left us a little shaken. They had been filled with zombies and psychopaths and helicopter freaks with some sort of agenda that still revolved around me and Trina.

  To top it all off, Dorcas had been told, up close and personal, that she was no longer an important part of the world—like her life didn’t matter anymore. I suppose when we were back at Site 37, Diana hadn’t been kidding around. She said she was going to find whatever it was inside of me that protected me from Necropoxy and synthesize it to rebuild our race for those who were worthy enough to call themselves a part of it.

  Dorcas was just told, loud and clear, that she wasn’t worthy.

  “I’m getting the minivan,” I said. This time I wasn’t asking permission. “You take the ambulance. I’ll follow you back.”

  “You sure I can handle it?” she muttered.

  “Yes,” I said. “Just like you handled surviving the past week, and dealing with the poxers on the bridge, and saving me from Roger Ludlow and those guys in the helicopter. Yes, Dorcas—I’m sure you can handle it just fine.”

  I didn’t wait for her to respond. I took off down the street, the minivan’s keys still jangling in my pocket. The woods pressed in around me on either side of the road, but I just focused on the blinking lights and didn’t think about what could be hiding behind the trees.

  What’s the worst that could happen—a poxer could come after me? Been there, done that, over it.

  When I got to the van, I plopped myself into the front seat, turned off the hazards, locked the doors because, you know, scary squirrels, and started the engine. Then I did a three-point turn, which is another reason I would have definitely passed my driver’s test, and drove back toward the ambulance.

  I found Dorcas still trucking her way up the road. I pulled down the window and said, “Need a lift?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Dorcas, come on. What the hell do they know anyway?”

  She grumbled something which almost sounded like a growl. I braced myself for the inevitable wad of phlegm that followed, but this time she didn’t spit.

  “Dorcas?” I said in a small voice. She stumbled a little and her arms shot out in front of her like claws.

  Oh, no. What was happening? I was just with her.

  “Dorcas?”

  She turned to me and snarled like a . . . like a poxer.

  “On no,” I cried. “No.”

  Dorcas lunged at the car. It was all in slow motion and that much worse because it was dark. She was so close that I didn’t even have a chance to think. I slammed my foot on the breaks and threw both arms over my face. You can bite me anywhere, bitch. I’m immune, but not on the face—anywhere but the face.

  Dorcas didn’t bite me. Instead she started laughing—that deep, throaty, mucus-filled laugh of hers.

  “Gotcha,” she roared, her hands gripping her stomach. She doubled over and belly laughed like what she had done was the funniest thing ever.

  She punked me.

  “That’s so not funny,” I snapped. “I can’t believe you just did that. That is so, so not funny.” She kept braying like an old mule, the laughter spilling out of her like vomit.

  “Grow up, Dorcas. Just grow up.”

  She stopped laughing then, but a smile spread across her ancient face, making it crack into a million pieces.

  “Never,” she said. “I’ll never grow up. Not ever.”

  28

  SWIFTY’S WAS DARK. The headlights on the ambulance lit up the little fishing bear on the steps and made its polished wooden eyes look like they were watching us. In the sudden light, I could see people on the front porch. Jimmy was there with Trina. She was sitting on a wooden rocker and he was next to her in his chair.

  “Who’s in the deathmobile?” she said as I got out of the van.

  “Dorcas.”

  “Nifty ride,” said Jimmy. “And if no one is going to mention the irony, let me be the first.”

  “Hey, what can I say, I’m awesome.”

  “Yeah, Tripp,” said Trina in a flat monotone. “You’re the bomb.”

  “Next time you bring back an ambulance, I’ll give you a gold star, deal?”

  “Whatever.”

  The front door opened and Prianka stepped out, her dark hair framing an even darker face. “You’re late,” she said.

  I looked at my watch. “Five hours. I think that’s pretty good for almost being eaten by a poxer, killed by a crazy dude, and captured by helicopter people.”

  “Helicopter people?” Trina gasped. “Again?” She stood up and walked to the far end of the porch away from everyone. Jimmy let her go.

  “No worries, we’re fine,” I said after her. “No really, we’re just fine.” She didn’t say anything. She just stood there leaning up against the railing.

  Meanwhile, Dorcas turned off her headlights and climbed out of the ambulance. She stared at all of us on the porch. “So what did we miss?” she croaked.

  “Nothing good,” said Jimmy, his hands in his lap. “Go inside and see for yourself.”

  Dorcas made her way up to the front door. Prianka took a step to one side and let her by. As she reached for the knob, she turned and found my face. “You did good, kid.”

  “So did you, old lady.” Her faced cracked a smile ag
ain, then Dorcas snorted and went inside.

  “How’s Mom?” I asked Trina tentatively, more than a little afraid of what she might say. As expected, she didn’t answer me. My sister was in a stellar mood. When Trina gets like this it’s best to leave her alone. As a matter of fact, I was starting to learn that when any girl gets like this, it’s best to take three giant steps backward and turn the other way. I sighed and Jimmy just shrugged in that way that meant that she’d get over herself soon.

  “They’re not dead yet,” he said. “The bleeding’s stopped, but there’s something else weird going on now.”

  “What?”

  Prianka took a step forward. “It’s their eyes,” she said.

  “What about their eyes?”

  “Poxer eyes,” she said. “They’ve gone gray.” Prianka stood with her arms wrapped tightly around herself. I pulled her to me and her arms unfolded around my shoulders. It felt nice, and for the first time I realized that I was almost a head taller than her. Prianka was always so much bigger than life that I just assumed she was ten feet tall.

  “What do you mean a crazy dude?” asked Trina. Okay, she was back with the living. That didn’t take long.

  “No biggie,” I said. “This guy was holed up in the pharmacy.”

  “A survivor?” said Jimmy.

  “Well, if you can call what he was doing ‘surviving’. His wife poxified, so he locked her in the basement and fed her with Slim Jims all week. He ran out, so he thought Dorcas and I would make good Happy Meals. She’s too tough and I’m too lean, and neither of us have any fiber.”

  “Seriously?” said Trina. “Gross.”

  “That’s gnarly,” said Jimmy. “What happened?”

  “Dorcas shot him.”

  “No way,” he gasped.

  “Dorcas is the man,” I said. “She’s got our backs.”

  “Dorcas is a man,” said my sister. Just like that we were all relatively back to normal or whatever was now passing for normal.