Moriah

by Monchinski, Tony

  “He died in my arms. I was holding him.”

  “I’m sorry, Riley.”

  “Me too.”

  He gritted his teeth and hissed as Riley pulled his bootlaces tight.

  “Do you know what he said to me?” She remembered clearly. “He kept thanking me.”

  “Thanking you?”

  “For going with him.” Riley was standing and Dee looked up at her, the woman’s curly, brownish hair against the bluing sky. “For coming with him, out here.” Her pretty, honest face. “He thought—I guess we thought—we’d find Bear, maybe Bear would have some answers for him.” The blue of her eyes would do any sky an injustice.

  Dee looked away from her. “He loved you very much.”

  “And I loved him so much, so, so much.”

  “He knew that.”

  “Yeah, I know he did.” Riley crossed her arms and rubbed them with her hands, the air chill. “You know, I was going to tell him,” she touched at her stomach, “I was going to tell him something and I never got the chance.”

  “What were you going to tell him?”

  “Just how happy I was to have gone with him. Outside of New Harmony. Not happy about how things turned out, obviously…” Images—of Thomas, the mutants, of Evan and Troi walking away from them—flashed through her mind before she banished them “…but happy I was there with him, that he was there with me.”

  “Why are you holding your stomach when you say that? Your belly hurt?”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “There was something else you were going to tell him, wasn’t there?”

  “How do you…?”

  “Call me perceptive. So what was it?”

  “I was pregnant.”

  “Was?”

  “I lost the baby.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible.” Dee plucked a blade of grass from beside where he lay. “I’m sorry. Who’s was it?”

  “A guy I was seeing.”

  Dee nodded at this. “You were going to tell Anthony because he was your brother and you could tell your brother anything, right?”

  “Exactly.” Riley looked for the horses but they had long disappeared from sight. “I miss him so much, Dee. I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “I know.”

  “I feel so selfish, saying all this to you…” Riley looked down on the bald-headed man in his oilskin Drover. His chin was beginning to shadow with stubble. “You’ve lost everybody in the last few days.”

  “Not everybody.” Dee held the blade of grass up and looked at it. “I’ve still got Bruce and Kevin.” I’ve got you, he thought but didn’t say it.

  “I just feel like it’s all my fault. If I hadn’t shown up…”

  “I get why you feel that way,” Dee put the grass down. “But you know none of us feel that way. They took Victor. We went and got Victor back.”

  “But Tris—”

  “Tris went out just the way she always wanted to. You heard her yourself. A ‘worthy’ death. She’d outlived her expiration date.”

  “It doesn’t upset you? Their dying?”

  “Sure it upsets me.” Dee was silent for a moment. “Its upsets me terribly. I’ve been out here my whole life, Riley. You know how I hooked up with them? Bruce found me when I was this little kid, roaming around all by myself. I’d had people, sure, there were people taking care of me.”

  “What happened to them? Zombies?”

  “There’s shit happened before that I just don’t remember well.” Uncertainty painted Dee’s face. “Don’t know how I made it that far by myself. I know there were people who looked out for me, and then they were gone. And I know they didn’t die nice. But the details I can’t remember. Maybe that’s a good thing.”

  Still some way off, Kevin was approaching them, a tail of toilet paper trailing from the roll he carried.

  “My point is,” Dee continued, “this is all I’ve known. People I care about dying around me. It hasn’t been as bad as it was earlier on, but man, it hasn’t been easy.”

  “Are you afraid of dying?”

  “No, I don’t think I am. I don’t want to die, but I hope when it comes…I hope I handle it well. I hope I’m with people I know and care about, people who know and care about me.”

  “Well,” she smiled at him, “there’s still Bruce and Kevin.”

  He smiled back at her. “There’s almost another five thousand of them up ahead somewhere, if we ever catch up to them.”

  Riley waved to Kevin and he bore his AK aloft.

  “Yeah, Dee, but Africa? Really?”

  “I don’t know what we were thinking.”

  * * *

  In the afternoon they spied apartment towers on the horizon and rode to them. Long relinquished to ruin and decay, they stood lonely sentinel, dilapidated eyesores. Where a trio had once risen, there were now only two, the third reduced to a jagged massif of rubble and rebar. The remaining buildings stood twelve stories each, chambered by blackened, gaping holes, as if pummeled by a furious god. Concrete walls were scorched black above vacant windows. They had stood there through it all: through the rise of the dead and the fall of the living; through the end of the world in which they had been built.

  “If a lot of people lived here,” Riley speculated, “shouldn’t there be more cars?”

  Only two dozen decrepit hulks dotted the former parking lot, sun-bleached and rusted out. They’d dismounted in the shadow of the towers and strode among the foot of a building, their approach rousing no interested parties.

  “When it happened,” Kevin remembered, “everyone was trying to get out of places like this.”

  They chose the more stable looking of the two buildings. A beer truck was sunk a close walk from its entrance, trays of bottles and cans scattered. Propped against it, a skeleton’s mouth was locked around the tattered remains of a cigar.

  Shrouded in dust and gloom, the lobby yielded before their flashlights. Walls of tarnished mailboxes stood untouched, the layer of dust thick and undisturbed on the floor. Only one elevator was open. It gave onto a yawning shaft, at the bottom of which a skull sat atop a pile of bones.

  “That makes for a good murder hole.”

  Riley looked up where Dee’s light illuminated a ragged opening in the ceiling, near the door to a stairwell. Murder hole? It was the first time she’d heard the term but she immediately understood what it meant. Whoever commanded the view from above could fire down on anyone where she and Dee stood. The second stairwell they had found was clogged with furniture, impassable. Anyone seeking access to the upper stories—themselves included—would need to pass beneath this opening to reach the stairs.

  Kevin and Bruce took turns driving the quads into the lobby, turning them around to face outside before cutting the ignitions. Together they explored the stairwell, finding it deserted. The door to the second floor opened onto a desolate hallway, a section of the floor yawning open above the lobby. The third and fourth floors were barred and blocked, sealed shut. When they cracked the door to the fifth floor corridor, a rushing in the dark brought their flashlight beams down upon the refuse-strewn floor.

  Six months at most when it’d changed, a baby zombie skulked towards the door on hands and knees. A keening wail issued from it as it came. The flesh of its knees had been worn away while blackened, varicose veins spider webbed its skin.

  They shut themselves in on the stairwell, leaving the thing where it was, whining against the stairwell door.

  The sixth floor was as quiet as the second. The landing on the seventh floor was obstructed with furniture and junk, cutting off the rest of the building from them and they from it. Aiding Dee on the stairs had them sweating and they chose an apartment on the sixth floor. The corridor was bare except for sheaves of paper scattered about the dusty floor. The apartment itself was mostly empty, the majority of its furniture gone, conceivably lugged to a stairwell to bar entry.

  “How’s it going, Bruce?”

  “I think I can smell myself, De
e.”

  “We could all use a bath.”

  “No. I mean I think my wound is infected.”

  “I don’t smell anything. Kev, you smell anything?”

  “No.”

  A balcony overlooked the beer truck and the other tower. They made camp on the floor of the room just inside the patio doors. After they’d eaten, Riley stood on the balcony watching the day fade. Bruce came out and stood with her.

  “Zombies going to come tonight,” he rasped matter-of-factly. They looked out on the land abutting the apartment complex, a mass of trees broken only by a fragmented road, the same road they had come in on. “We’re safe for the night. Getting out in the morning will be fun.”

  Riley drew the final watch. The sky was greying when she relieved Kevin on the patio. He handed her Dee’s minocular. For an hour or more there was little to see or hear. At one point she thought she detected a cry in the far distance. Soon thereafter the birds started talking to one another. In the dawn’s light she saw something scurrying below, between the cars. A rabbit? She tried to track it with the minocular but lost it at the beer truck.

  There were forms shambling along on the road, zombies. Riley knew that as long as she remained quiet, the undead would remain ignorant of her presence six stories above. She watched the beer truck closely. Where had the rabbit gone? She didn’t want to imagine it down on the ground with those things coming close. As the men started to wake, Riley excused herself and listened before she stepped into the hall. The dust on the floor was disturbed only where she and the others had unsettled in the night before. It carpeted the remaining length of the hallway floor, untrodden.

  She walked down the stairs, eyeing the door on the fifth floor landing. Wherever the baby was in there, she couldn’t hear it.

  Outside, a chill gripped the morning. Riley crossed to the beer truck, intent on the rabbit. The zombies on the road were clear to her, the sky above lighter. She moved in the shadows between the building and the truck, lost to their eyes. At this distance, their moans and protestations were faint but unmistakable. It sounded like there were more of them up there than she would ever like to meet.

  Broken glass bottles, cans and kegs had spilled from the truck. Riley took care not to step on or kick any of them. Because Dee, Kevin and Bruce were wounded, the zombies were in their vicinity. Riley bore no open wounds, so the only way they would detect her would be if they saw or heard her. The cargo bays were deep and high. She shone her light into one, empty. The rabbit could be hiding anywhere inside.

  “Yeah,” Riley said to the skeleton sitting there, the cigar stub clenched in its jaw. “How you doing?”

  Behind her, the shadow of the beer truck was cast on the apartment building as a vehicle’s headlights pinned it from the road. Riley crouched down and risked a glance around the side of the truck.

  She did not like what she saw.

  * * *

  “We’ve got company,” Bruce announced on the balcony. A dozen pick-up trucks and two flat beds turned in from the road. A Howitzer rested on one of the flat beds. A delta tricycle—one wheel in front, two in the rear—weaved in and out between the pick-ups.

  “Who are they?” Dee had limped over on his own, doing his best to conceal himself inside the apartment while gazing out onto the scene shaping up below.

  “What warlords are near here?” Kevin squatted next to Bruce on the concrete balcony, peering over the railing.

  “Tolman?” Bruce sounded doubtful.

  “Nah, he doesn’t come this far north.”

  “Fucking look at them.”

  They passed the monocular between them. The marauders had halted their vehicles at a distance from the other side of the beer truck. Men and women clambered out of the trucks and off the flatbeds. Most of them wore dark eye shadow, their hair dyed black with auburn and blonde streaks, fingernails painted black. One man wore a Viking motorcycle helmet with black horns. A woman in black parachute pants and a bikini top was painted yellow with black spots on her arms and shoulders, lending her a leopard-like appearance. There were fifty or sixty of them on the ground and they were loud, the motorcycle tricycle the only vehicle still moving, circling the area.

  “It’s the fucking Village People,” Bruce observed.

  “Now that guy—” Kevin spoke of a man whose fat, hairy belly parted his leather vest, the man’s face made up in black and white corpse paint “—is pretty scary looking,”

  “I’m not seeing a lot of guns,” Dee whispered from the balcony door. And aside from a dozen shotguns and a few pistols, the marauders’ weapons appeared primitive in the light: baseball bats and cudgels, clubs and knives. Despite the apparent dearth of modern weapons, there was no shortage of fishnet stockings, black leather thigh boots, and dark eyeliner.

  “You get a load of that cannon?” Kevin remarked. The Howitzer’s barrel aimed away from them, back at the road. “That’s all they need.”

  “They have no clue we’re here.” There was optimism in Bruce’s gravelly inflection.

  “Hey,” Dee asked from the balcony door. “Where’s Riley?”

  * * *

  They stole away from the others, two of them seeking privacy. One had a Harajuku girl look going, dark make up over a white painted face, knee-length black skirt over knee-high stockings of the same color. The other wore a miniskirt and her face was made up to resemble a fox, whiskers painted on her cheeks, her hair cut short in a bob. They laughed at something the one said and couldn’t keep their hands off each another as they approached the beer truck.

  They laughed again at the skeleton with its back to the truck. The cigar had come dislodged and rested in its lap.

  The cargo bay door screeched as it rolled up and open. The girl with the fox getup bent over, bracing herself on the lip of the bay door. Her companion lifted the fox’s skirt over her hips and proceeded to go down on her from behind. Fox girl was starting to gasp when she looked into the dark of the truck bay and saw—

  Riley’s foot snapped out of the dark and caught her in the head, knocking the fox nose rubber banded to her face askance. The girl’s companion, startled, stood up, staring down the barrel of the revolver in Riley’s hand.

  “Not a word,” Riley warned, but the gothic Lolita screamed, her voice surprisingly deep. Riley shut her up with the side of her hand to the face. The cry had been drowned out in the roar of the motorcycle and the bustle of people. Zombies were staggering in off the road and the marauders were dealing with them, toying with them, laughing and gleefully ducking outstretched arms. A shotgun blast sounded as one zombie got too close.

  “Get up,” Riley told fox girl. “The both of you—” she moved the revolver from one to the other “—we’re going to walk back to that building. If you try and run or yell for help—” she glowered at the Harajuku girl “—I’ll shoot you both. Come on!”

  They were almost to the apartment building when the companions of Riley’s two hostages noticed what was going on. A hue and cry went up and excitement turned from the zombies trickling into their midst to the drama unfolding.

  “Move!” Riley urged, walking backwards now, the .45 revolver pressed to the back of the GothLoli, her free hand pulling the fox girl along. She kept them between herself and the other men and women. “Faster!”

  “Kitty!” someone cried out clearly. “She got Kitty!”

  A giant broke from the pack, uttering a high-pitched streak. His ratty beard was forked and rubber banded, his meaty arms jangling out of his furry vest as he raced towards them. He wore studded leather forearm vambraces and hefted a war hammer, which he looked eager to use.

  The ground in front of the brute boiled up as the cracks of a rifle sounded from on high. The man stopped where he was and looked up to the sixth floor balcony. He gave another shriek—its pitch incongruous with his size—and repeatedly smashed the ground with his maul, venting his frustration on the earth.

  “Don’t shoot me!” Riley called up to the ceiling in the lobby. “It�
��s me! I’ve got two of them.” A flashlight beam shone down on her and her prisoners.

  Dee’s voice growled back from the aperture, “Get upstairs, Riley.”

  * * *

  “Did you search these guys for weapons?”

  “No.” Riley told Bruce. She stood against the wall, her heart only beginning to slow. Kevin had slapped plastic cuffs on the two women and knelt between them, searching them. “Bruce, keep an eye on that cannon.”

  The marauders were milling about outside, trying to figure out what to do. Shotguns boomed intermittently, dispatching zombies. As they procrastinated, more undead poured in, drawn by the clamor. The Howitzer continued to face away from the building.

  “Garden shears?” Kevin looked at their Goth detainee. “What were you going to do with these? Trim our hedges?” He threw the shears away across the room.

  “Where was she hiding those?” Bruce croaked.

  When he was satisfied that they were disarmed, Kevin stood.

  “Who are you?” Neither answered him.

  “You with Tolman?” rasped Bruce. A look passed on the fox girl’s face. She’d affixed her canid nose back in place, her own nose and mouth bloody where Riley had kicked her. “Didn’t think so.”

  A shotgun discharged outside.

  “Man,” Bruce remarked, regarding the Harajuku girl. “You know, you’re a real rough looking broad.”

  “She’s not a woman,” said Riley.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  Kevin lifted the woman’s black dress with the muzzle of his AK. “She’s not wearing underwear,” he told Bruce. “And she’s got testicles.”

  Bruce uttered a damn. “Let me try talking to them. Riley, keep an eye on things down there.”

  He came in and squatted down in front of them. “Hey, Raggedy Ann, you going to talk?” The cross-dresser looked away. “Didn’t think so. How about you? You’re not going to talk either, are you?”