I look at Gus, and his face is hard, mirroring Lucy’s. She’s got a look like an eagle’s, fierce and uncaring. She’s grinding her jaws, making the fine cords of her long neck stand out in relief.
I want to cry for them, this grim mother and somber child, since they can’t do it for themselves. They need someone to burden their grief. To show them it is okay to weep, to feel for them the horror that’s descended on us all.
Lucy looks at me and sees the tears streaming down my face. She comes over and stands by me. My burns are on fire. I want to scratch my ears, the back of my neck. She takes my hand and looks at me, her gray eyes luminous and questioning and large in the perfect clarity of her face. She kisses my cheek.
Then she looks back to the fence and the shamblers waiting there. It’s as if she’s thinking, This is the reality of life. This is everything there is, and I can understand it, if I try. The end of the world. The undead. I can understand it. I can understand everything. I accept it.
But that’s Lucy. I’ll never be able to understand her fully. I never want to. There are some things beyond comprehension, and saying that the evil upon us is just a virus, or a bad decision from an army general that ended our world, will never excuse or forgive it.
But I am beginning to understand what Meemaw meant. Sometimes life is too big for one person to understand. And you need to use something, a phrase, a song, a snippet of ribbon, to encircle and contain it.
Everything is everything.
3
WARFARIN
Tessa cared for the men. Their needs, all of them. They called themselves the G Unit. Twenty men under the command of Captain Hugh Mozark. Each man was young and scared and suddenly lost in the world.
The EMP wiped communications and the zeds ravaged the cities. The G Unit, like their forefathers before them, moved across the Great Plains, and if not for the automatic weapons and the armored Bradleys, they would have been as helpless as pioneers in the face of a wide, untamed wilderness.
At night, when Tessa had satisfied the captain in his tent, she brought around water, MREs, jerky scavenged from gas stations and convenience stores. She’d walk the perimeter to each of the men on watch, each man staring out into the dark fields, waiting for the dead. They looked at her with little boy eyes, and she’d crush them to her big bosom and let them cry. She hated Captain Mozark with all her heart, but she couldn’t bring herself to hate these boys. These men.
Some men didn’t want mothering. Some would grip her, hands tight on her back or on her ass, tearless, and want to take her into the Bradley, or away from the others, and put her on her back and spread her legs, even though she was old enough to be their mother. They were young, and the world was dead, but they still had needs.
Terrel, Keb Motiel, Blevens, and Jasper, they needed her that way. Terrel had a long salty dick and kissed sweet. Keb liked to smack her ass and rub it on her back door, and she avoided him as much as she could. Blevens was shy and came fast. Jasper liked dirty talk and to suck her breasts; he wanted her as a mother and a lover, and she tried to keep him satisfied, because he was bull-thick, heavily muscled, and could be dangerous if angered, or protective if sated. For one so young, he had a raw animal grace to him and knew how to move.
Lt. Quentin Wallis, second in command, didn’t want to cry or to fuck, but he wanted to make sure they lived, all of them. And even though she was twice his age, Tessa loved him. He looked like Cass’s daddy: tall, slim, and intelligent. Black as sin and noble as a king. Looking at him made her stomach flutter. She wished Cass was alive so she could have him. Cass was his match. But now she was dead.
And for that, Captain Hugh Mozark had to die.
They’d moved across the burning plains of Kansas, down into Oklahoma, toward the Ozarks. The cities still smoked a month after the end of everything, and their effluvium—vultures wheeling, smoke curling—drew crooked pillars up to heaven.
Tessa and Cass hid for nearly a month in the convenience store. They’d found it empty of both the living and the dead. Drawing down the aluminum-mesh doors, they hid in the back room, behind the register, eating cold food and drinking sodas and building a nest of wrappers. The dead rattled the mesh and moaned.
“Momma, why’d God leave us here like this?”
“God didn’t leave us, baby. This ain’t the work of God. It’s the work of man, that’s for sure.”
“But he let it happen.”
Tessa took up dipping tobacco in their convenient prison. Years before, she’d broken herself of smoking; six months of mood swings, shouting matches, and late-night ice cream. Cass, then a girl of ten, remembered that time with a mixture of fascination and wariness, like a biologist living in close quarters with a particularly vicious and intemperate big cat. But now she was back using. She preferred Skoal Apple Long Cut to the other brands, and her Skoal supplies were getting low. Taking a can from her pocket, she twisted off the top, dug thick brown and pink fingers into the dark tobacco, and stuck the pinch in her bottom lip. It tasted like apple orchards burning.
“Everything the Lord does, everything he lets happen, it’s for a reason. It ain’t our job to question him. It’s our job to work through it, baby. To keep our faith.”
Cass looked away from her mother, like she had when she was a girl, rolling her eyes. She put her disdain on display for Tessa.
“God don’t give a shit about us. Or if he does, he hates us, sending the dead to eat the living. It’s unnatural, Momma. And if God hates us so much to make something unnatural, I don’t love him no more.”
It was too easy for Tessa to slap, an old habit, a reflex. She never spared the rod and tolerated no insolence or back sass. Even now. Her hand came out, quick and open-palmed, and left behind nothing on Cass’s cheek except a tear in the corner of her eye.
Cass, wiping her face with her sleeve, stood from their nest of wrappers and said, “I can’t stay here no more, Momma. We gotta get out. Go to the mountains or something.”
“Baby, the streets are full of ’em, the dead folks. The army will come. The police.”
Cass laughed, a sound so lost and dejected Tessa couldn’t believe it came from her own daughter.
“Five-o?” She turned away from Tessa and looked at the front of the store. The undead had moved away from the gate days ago and hadn’t returned. But they’d seen them moving in the streets. “The police ain’t never helped us. You know that. They shot Boo.” The old bone of contention still had flesh. Cass’s boyfriend, Boo, Boo whom Tessa forbade Cass from seeing after she’d caught them in bed together. Breaking and entering, the officer called it when Boo was shot dead climbing from a house with a silent alarm. But it only left Boo’s body broken and ended Cass’s trust of authority.
“Take a deep breath, Momma. You smell that? It’s rotten meat. Rotten people. Piss and shit in the corner. Our piss. Our shit.” She pointed to the walk-in freezer. They stayed in the back room because the flies were angrier near the walk-in and thickened the air like black smoke.
Tessa breathed, but all she smelled was the scent of burning apple orchards and tobacco. Her mouth, full of brown saliva, pursed. She spit.
“We will, baby, we’ll leave. It’s late now. Let’s have a drink and sleep here tonight. We’re still safe. There’s a thousand places in this city but tonight, right here—” She pointed at the floor, firmly. “Right here is still safe. We know we ain’t gonna go hungry. We know we’ll have something to drink. To eat. That we won’t be eaten.”
“That ain’t enough, Momma. Not for me.”
They carried rifles and knapsacks full of clothing. They carried MREs and iodine pills. They wore full battle rattle and carried gas masks and vials full of Neumune pills to combat radiation sickness. They carried pictures of their loved ones and mementos of the homes that were forever gone.
In a pocket in her skirt, Tessa carried a tight, childproof bottle labeled Tylenol but full of gray-green cylinders of d-Con. She’d pilfered it from the convenience store. W
arfarin, the d-Con box had read, was the primary ingredient. Deadly to rats. Call poison control if ingested.
In the day, as they moved across the plains, Tessa stayed in one of the two Bradleys, ordering and inventorying the rations, checking water, scanning the radio. The ammo, and whatever men could fit, rode in the other Bradley.
Mostly, Tessa simply sat still and swayed with the movement of the armored vehicle while the men flanked them on motorcycles and ATVs, ranging backward and forward, taking out any stray zeds. It was as if with the rising of the dead, they’d gone back a hundred years or more, crossing the plains on machines instead of horses, with Bradley Fighting Vehicles instead of wagons.
Tessa rocked with the movement of the Bradley, listening to the static—the ever-present static—on the radio and the distant pops of rifles. Ammunition wasn’t a problem for the G Unit. Nor was food. It was the dead. It had been fifteen days since they’d heard from another living soul. She kept her hands in her skirt.
And she carried her hatred of Hugh Mozark.
He’d come into the Bradley the day after they picked her up. The tall, beautiful officer stood behind him in the backlit door, looking in. Wallis.
Mozark turned, waved a hand, and said, “Lieutenant. You may go.” The beauty had stood straight and saluted.
Mozark filled the space. Hard faced and short spoken, he looked at her. She’d made herself smile, even though she’d come to kill him. She smoothed her dress. Tried to cover her breasts a little, even though she made sure she had showed enough to get the G Unit’s attention. Cass was born when Tessa was young, sixteen, and now she was thirty-five and she’d never been pregnant again and had heavy breasts and deep hips. She knew what men wanted.
“What’s your name, ma’am?”
“My name’s Tessa, sir.” She smiled again and pushed her arms together, making her tits swell. She had nothing except her body. And a bottle in her pocket. No daughter anymore, since the captain found her. So in the end she had nothing.
He looked her over slowly, with a lidded gaze. He wasn’t tall or short or fat or thin. He was perfectly ordinary, she thought, looking him over. Cocoa butter brown with a complexion to match her own, freckles on his cheeks in a way that reminded her of Morgan Freeman but without the nobility, and a short-cropped afro going gray at the temples.
Standing in front of her, head bent just a little in the Bradley’s compartment, he unzipped his fatigues and pulled out his cock. It was unremarkable, if thicker than some she’d seen. He flipped it with his hands, toward her face, like a dog wagging a tail.
She took it in her hands, warmed it in her palm and pulled back the foreskin, licked its head, and then did what he wanted. She put it in her mouth. He tasted gamy and wild. She thought of biting it off, and for a moment, while he pushed it into her as far as he could, holding the back of her head, she imagined him castrated, squirming and bloody, on the metal floor of the vehicle. But he might live through that and she definitely wouldn’t. She’d do worse than unman him. He’d turn zombie before she was through. And he’d suffer first.
His cock pulsed in her mouth and the back of her throat, and when he came, she had trouble breathing. But she wouldn’t swallow that part of him. Never.
“You’re an old-school nigger.”
She coughed up his semen and wiped her mouth.
“You,” she said, voice hoarse. “You’re as black as me.”
“I don’t even have to ask you, you suck me off. You’re like clay, ready to be shaped. Ordered. Ready to obey.” He grabbed her breast, massaged it roughly until it came out of her top, and then he pinched the nipple until she yelped and tried to move away.
“All I require of you is to be what you are, obviously, already.”
“Tessa. My name is—”
His fist caught the side of her face. In a world of abusive men, she’d never let any of them lay a finger on her. She knew how to hurt him with a gun or a knife. But she had nothing except her body now, and the bottle hidden in her skirt, and she didn’t want to die yet, not before she could finish her task and lay her burden down. Rid this world of a living monster. Punish him. She touched her cheek and tried to look at him meekly, tried not to let him see the real intention in her eyes.
“Your name is bitch, or woman, or whatever I want to call you, understand?”
His dick was soft now, and he started to tuck it back into his pants, then stopped.
“Clean me up. Show me you understand your situation.”
Face swelling, she used her hands, and he didn’t stop her, didn’t make her use her mouth again.
“You’ll give any man in the unit a tumble. Or head. You’ll feed us, take care of our clothes. You’ll bring me my dinner separate and stay with me until I tell you to leave. Only then will you take care of the other men’s needs. I won’t go after any other man. Your pussy better be clean for me. I don’t follow any man. Understand?”
Tessa nodded.
“You’ll stay in the Bradley while we scavenge. You know how to write?”
“What?”
“Are you literate? Or are you a stupid nigger who only knows how to fuck and suck dick?”
“I can write.”
“You’ll listen to the radio. Scan the stations. Write down frequencies and messages, if any. Quentin and Reeves will show you how to operate it. If you can’t get it, we’ll throw your black ass out. We won’t kill you. No. We’ll just leave you.”
“That’s killing me. But if these boys can run the radio, I sure as hell—”
This time he used his left hand, planting his fist into her stomach. She’d have to remember that: he could hit just as hard with either hand.
There was nothing to say to Mozark, and she had no air to speak with anyway. She coughed and wished she could get the taste of his come out of her mouth. She’d take a dip when she was alone, if she could find some.
“We’ve made camp, woman. Get up, and get some food ready for the men. I’ll expect you in my tent later.”
Tessa woke up in a nest of wrappers and the smell of her own feces and urine in her nose. The convenience store was dark, but it was a clear night, and moonlight streamed through the lowered grate at the street. She and Cass had drunk most of the wine coolers from the walk-in and earlier, before bed, had progressed to the sweet Boone’s Farm wines. Her mouth felt fuzzy, and her head pounded. She rose and went to the corner where they’d recently begun to relieve themselves; the toilet, ever since the water stopped running, was too full to use anymore.
When she returned to the nest of T-shirts and wrappers, paper towels and other soft items they had scavenged, she realized that Cass was gone.
“Cass? Where you at?” Her voice sounded scared, even to her. “Cassandra? Baby, where are you?”
Turning, she went to the front of the store and stared out into the moonlit street. The zombies were moving, down the wreckage of the old Vinita main street and toward the cornfields on the edge of town. Even now, at night, she saw the familiar faces of people she once knew beginning to rot and slough off: Cindy Cottar from the five-and-dime now missing her nose and half a cheek; Fred Anderson from Citizen’s Bank who had declined her home-equity loan, limping away on a footless leg; Stephanie what’s-her-name from Cass’s hair salon missing hunks of flesh from her arms, legs, and most noticeably, her neck. And more, all of them shadowed and wreathed by a black cloud of flies, maggots pooling in their mouths and eyelids, dripping from ears and spilling from open wounds.
Above the shuffling noise of the undead, the constant buzz of flies, she could hear in the distance the faint hum of something she couldn’t quite place.
A thrumming, insistent sound—she realized it was a machine. A big truck or off-road vehicle, maybe. An earthmover, maybe. It grew louder, and she could make out the higher-pitched whine of motorcycles or ATVs.
She ran to the back of the store, snatched up her purse, stuffed some cans of Skoal and one of the cleaner T-shirts from the floor into it, and went to
the alley door behind the register in the storeroom. Cass must’ve gone this way to investigate the sound. The metal grate at the front of the store rattled far too much for her to have used it. They’d have been swarmed by zombies and Tessa would’ve awoken.
Weaponless when they’d first arrived, Tessa had found a broken old mop and stripped it of its gray cotton head. Now, in her flight after Cass, she grabbed it from the nook behind the alley door, snapped it over her knee, and stuck one half into the space between door and sill. If she and Cass needed to return, they’d still have a place. The other half of the handle, a jagged two-foot spear, she clutched in one white-knuckled fist.
The air was cooler here, and fresher than inside the store, even though the cloying stench of the dead hung in invisible streamers around her head. In some ways, the dead smelled better than her own shit.
She walked, quietly as she could, down the alley and toward the growing sound of engines buzzing in the corn.
“Zeds on the horizon! Zeds on the horizon! There’s a cluster approaching camp, Lieutenant!” Jasper yelled. He lowered his binoculars and looked over his heavily muscled shoulder, back inside the perimeter, toward the command tent and Lieutenant Wallis and Tessa, boiling clothes in a galvanized tin basin, and the few off-duty men able to relax and sleep.
The camp lay miles from any town, so the cluster of undead was strange. They found stragglers on the plains, and occasionally a small group, but a cluster meant something larger than twenty. Enough to batter their three-strand barbed-wire perimeter and pose a danger to the men. Especially at night. But the barbed wire was there just to slow them down enough for head shots—it snagged their flesh, what was left of their clothes, and set the tin cans hung from the wire to clattering. Sometimes they’d tumble and take other zeds down with them until the barbs ripped free of their flesh and they could rise again. They always rose again. It was obvious, at least to Tessa, that had they lived near Kansas City or Oklahoma City or Little Rock or Dallas or any metropolitan area, their defenses would never work, but they stayed in the farmlands and headed toward the mountains. They’d be all right as long as the barbed wire was there to alert them and the men remained vigilant.
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