This Dark Earth

by John Hornor Jacobs

  And man is the right word. Most women don’t chip in on the zombie disposal units, except for Sarah. Barb Dinews sometimes. They prefer scavenge units, which I’m not old enough for yet, even though I’m the tallest man here except for Jasper. But he’s freak-show large.

  Only fifteen or twenty women in all of Bridge City, so it makes sense, I guess, having so few on the Wall. They work the Kitchens and the Garden usually, grow tomatoes and basil and squash and cabbages and cucumbers. Shoot crows and seagulls and whatever other flying creatures pass overhead, looking for food.

  Always a line of men waiting to help the women, to tote and carry, fetch water, and just be near them. Reminds me of dreams. Dreams of school. Boys and girls. Recess.

  “We’ve got a damily, ten o’clock.” Blevens. Hurt his leg on the last scavenging trip, resigned himself to working the Wall, but not without a lot of bitching.

  Damily: a little undead foursome (or moresome) that clings together. Scary, really, that they group like that—two adults, two children, all dead, coming for us. Almost as if there’s something in them that they remember about being human.

  This damily is a nuclear damily—one zombie charred beyond recognition.

  Nuclear damilies are the worst. You get the stink of the dead and old charred meat smell.

  A twofer. I think that’s what they used to call it.

  Today, the damily shambles up and joins the twenty or thirty others gurgling and moaning. The smell is bad, but the sound is worse: gargling, moaning, gibbering, glugging, clicking, slobbering. Nasty things, always hungry and totally without table manners.

  We would set the table, years ago. Fork on the left, knife on the right. Napkin left. Glass left.

  Now I have a bowie knife on the left hip.

  “You think we can take out this bunch now? We’re gonna be at about capacity,” says Ellroy. That’s what all the men call him, but his name is Montfredi. They say he looks like a cartoon character, but I don’t remember the character, or even the cartoon. I think. Years since I’ve seen a television with electricity running in it.

  Working on something that might change that. I remember liking TV.

  Blevens waddles up to the outer rampart, favoring his injured leg, looks out at the group of zombies trying to get in. Wrinkles his nose, sniffs, and then gives a nod.

  “Let ’em in. There’s another damily on the highway. We’ll take care of these poor fuckers and leave them out here to gobble.”

  Me and Lindy move to the inset gates. No winches, the steel plates would be unmovable. As thick as my pinkie, they weigh almost five hundred pounds each, taken from the nearby foundry. I hate the weight, and the sharp steel edges can cut to the bone, but it’s better than the plywood and tin stuff we had before. Too flimsy. Sounded like a drumhead when the zeds really started pounding.

  Winch back the gates and the zombies shamble into the murderhole. They don’t notice when we move the gates back into place behind them, lock them down with pins, and pick up cudgels.

  I like a weighted ax handle for wet work. Lindy’s partial to a Louisville Slugger, its business end full of screws and bent-over nails. Used to have the nails sticking out, but they kept getting caught in the craniums, and when the brain-crushed zombies fell down, they nearly pulled him off the ramparts.

  The murderhole is a twenty-by-twenty space between the inner and outer gates, ringed by a walkway about six feet above the ground and connected to the rampart. The zombies’ heads are right at our feet level.

  This was all my idea. Some days I’m not too happy about it. Messy business, life. Unlife. Death.

  Smashing skulls while the dead try to grab your feet is definitely an art. The dead dead slump to the ground, and the living dead stand on them. So smashing skulls gets easier but more dangerous as you go along.

  This is why we’re all sweating our asses off in motorcycle armor.

  Takes somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour to smash all their skulls. Lindy and me are dripping at the end, and Ellroy brings us water while Frazier and Blevens—our elders—watch.

  Spring has sprung, they say. Think of it like a revenant. Eventually it’ll change, unless something is done. It’ll change. Seasons are like that.

  “Hotter than shit out here, boys.”

  “Least we don’t have to worry ’bout global warming anymore.”

  It’s hot. Feels like we do.

  I was a kid, someone told me it was cow and pig shit and the methane from the shit that caused global warming. I laughed—it was so silly. But then the dead rose. So anything is possible. On a summer day, when there’s forty, fifty of them banging on the gate, pushing to get in, to eat you . . . well . . . you can see the stink. You can see the gas rising from their bodies. Don’t see why they shouldn’t be like cow shit.

  Question is, why don’t they rot away? It’s been three years now. Why haven’t they rotted into nothing?

  I should ask Mom, but I doubt she could answer. Hell, Knock-Out could give me just as good of an answer, really. Her answers are always missing something. His answers don’t make sense, but they feel better. And the baby? Well, it’s nice having some family. Wish she could watch TV like I used to.

  I plan to give Ellie that. Television.

  Blevens opens the inner gate and begins to double-smash all the skulls. I drop down, pull on my smock, the rubber gloves, and grab the ones he’s double-smashed. You can’t be too careful. Everyone has a headknocker in their belt and a pistol on their hip. Pistols are a last resort. The noise makes the zeds flock something fierce.

  As fierce as the grave. They used to say that at weddings, I think.

  No weddings anymore. Not enough women. Or maybe nobody’s falling in love anymore.

  Teeth first. It’s horrible, looking into undead mouths, seeing the flesh hanging from black molars, but the metal, the gold and silver, are needed in Engineering, or so Joblownski says. Sometimes you have to smash a jaw with a hammer, just to loosen stuff up, and then pull out the goodies with pliers.

  The naked zeds go right over the wall, into the river, to float or sink downstream. Not the best solution. But there are six billion of them and probably a hundred of us.

  The clothed zombies, we take wallets, jewelry. We look at tags in the clothing. Wallis wants info about zombie migration, and unless we plant tracking beacons on shamblers, looking at wallets is the best we can do.

  “Got one from Jonesboro here. He’s one of that damily that came calling.” Lindy holds up an Arkansas driver’s license. “Man, that sucks for you, Mark Watkins.” He waves a wad of bills our way. “This sonofabitch has about three grand on him. He was fucking loaded. How bad does that suck, getting zombiefied holding three grand? Hope he got laid first.”

  Don’t say anything. What do I know about getting laid? Of the few women here, none of them seems ready to let me devirginify myself all over her.

  “Check his other pockets.” Frazier finally speaks up. He’s fat and pockmarked and doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself.

  “I doubt he’ll be holding any drugs,” I say. Frazier’s hair is long and braided into a white Viking.

  He looks at me and scowls. “I don’t give a shit what you think, you inconsequential little sparrow fart. Lindy, check the other pockets.”

  Feel like tossing the little troll over the side—and I’m big enough to do it now—but Blevens would try to stop me. My hands itch to do it, really. Mom and Knock-Out wouldn’t be too pleased, though.

  Huh. Guess it would be murder if I did that. Never really thought of it that way, but there it is.

  I could snatch him up and toss him over, easy. I’m six feet now, and I spend every day knocking skulls and sliding around steel gates. Or hoeing and lifting bags of dirt. Just yesterday, I split the seams of my old work shirt helping Keb move a flat bottom on the docks. Keb laughed and asked me if Mom had dated Jasper before I was born.

  I don’t really know what I look like now—I remember wiping steam from th
e mirror in my bathroom, a lifetime ago, and peering into my reflection, waiting for facial hair, and now I have it, peachy, fuzzy, all over. I hope I’m ugly enough to scare the shitbag, Frazier.

  And how do you get fat on the Bridge? We eat good, but there’s never any seconds.

  I stare back at him as long as I can. Think about tossing him and try to let that come through.

  “Forget him, man. He’s just an old, dried-up hippie.” Lindy wads up the money and stuffs it into a sack slung around his shoulders. For some reason, even though it’s worthless, he can’t bear to throw it away.

  I let reason win out. Reason. I feel like Mom.

  Anyway, I’ve never actually been in a real fight before. At least not with someone living. Not before the Big Turnover and definitely not after. That’s just wrong. But throwing Frazier off the Bridge might be fun. I’d like to see him splash.

  “Hey, guys. You need to see this.”

  I drop a zed over the side of the Bridge and then hike myself onto the rampart.

  “Holy shit.”

  “You ain’t kidding.”

  The damily on the way wasn’t a damily at all.

  Riders. Horseback. And the dead, hundreds of them, following after.

  I think she’s a man at first. She’s dressed like a man. She holds her body like a man, ready to fight.

  When she gets to the gate, she holds up one hand, palm out, and hails us.

  “Guards! My name is Wendy! This here’s Jennifer. We need shelter.” She shifts in the saddle and slaps her horse’s neck, sending dust flying. “We’ve got info, from the south. News you need to hear.”

  Frazier scrambles to find the notepad that Wallis gave us with the words we’re supposed to say, but I know it by heart and just say it without waiting for him.

  I say, “Rider, we will allow you to enter if you swear, by all you hold holy and dear, that once entering our gates, you will do no harm to any living soul dwelling on this bridge, on pain of death. If you agree, make noises in the affirmative.”

  Wendy, hands going to her dual pistols, bellows, “Will we be allowed to keep our weapons?”

  Shake my head. “Can’t promise anything. We’ve never confiscated anything from anyone. But there’s always a first time. And if you’re holding something the quartermaster deems necessary to our community . . . well—”

  “Well, what, boy?”

  “We’ll take it.” I shouldn’t say things like that, but I have trouble, sometimes, separating what I should say from what needs to be said. Maybe I’m like Mom. “You dense, woman? There are what looks like two hundred dead on your trail. You’ve brought them here. You are in no position to make demands. Now, you got maybe sixty seconds to decide if you want to agree and come in or stay out there and try to make your way beyond the horde of revs that’ve come calling.”

  She glares at me. It’s like the glare I gave Frazier earlier. I hope mine has a little more threat.

  Finally, she glances at the woman riding with her, looks back at me, nods.

  “Go ahead and say it!”

  “Fuck.” She spits. “We accept.”

  “You may enter.”

  Me and Lindy pull the pins again, lift the steel gate, and slide them outward. The women and horses come into the murderhole, the animals tossing their heads and nickering. The zeds are right on their asses, ready to chomp, making a horrible ruckus.

  It’s gonna be a long day.

  The husky woman who looks like a man—Wendy, she said her name was—looks me over when I come down from the ramparts. The zeds they brought are banging furiously on the steel gates, so I draw her inside the second gate, right at the Motor Pool. Ellroy stays with the other woman, helps her down from her horse. She’s skinny, and might be pretty if she’d raise her head. Maybe.

  Frazier gives me a sour look, and Lindy says, “What? You ain’t gonna help us get rid of all these zeds? You better help with this.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Taking these guys to see Wallis and the Council. Be back soon.”

  “It doesn’t matter what we do,” Mom says to Wallis when we walk in. “People are going to start dying of cancer. The nuclear strikes pushed shitloads of radioactive material into the atmosphere. America, China, Europe, the cancer rates of the people who survived are going to skyrocket. And until civilization rights itself, which I don’t see happening in the next century, there won’t be any hospitals. So we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with the dying. We need to encourage suicide.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Why? As far as we can tell, everybody turns revenant when they die. We’re all infected. If someone dies inside the Bridge City . . . it’s an untenable situation.”

  They look up at the woman and me as we enter. Mom cocks her eyebrow at me.

  Knock-Out, who’s cooing to the baby, smiles and winks. Keb, standing guard, puts his hand right on Wendy’s breast and says, “Weapons on the table, mister.”

  She doesn’t blink. I can see him figuring out that this is a woman. He takes his hand away from her chest.

  She pulls two pistols, a sawed-off shotgun, a machete, some kabob skewers, a butterfly knife, and a long military-looking dagger from her person and dumps them on the table, one by one. Her back is straight, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say she’s mad. Or has a corncob stuck up her ass. Or both.

  “Gots to frisk ya,” Keb says, and gives her the once over, moving down her body. He stops at her shoes and lifts the cuffs of her jeans.

  There’s a shackle on her ankle.

  Strange.

  She walks up to the conference table and pipes right up.

  “I’m Wendy. We come from Texas, me and my wife.”

  Wallis glances at me and I shrug, then nod.

  “Who’s in charge here?”

  I can tell she’s trying to make herself sound tough. Either that or she really is that tough. I haven’t met a lot of people living on this bridge, but someone pretending to be tough scares me more than someone who is. You can’t trust the way they’ll act.

  “We are. My name is Quentin Wallis. This is Dr. Ingersol and her husband, Jim Nickerson.”

  “Not husband. Consort, maybe. Knock-Out. Folks call me Knock-Out.”

  Wendy glances at him and then back to Wallis. He’s stopped wearing his uniform since Mom insisted, but you can’t hide the soldier in civilian clothes.

  And he still keeps the hair high and tight.

  “And absent is Joblownski, who’s in charge of Engineering. He’s a member of the Council.”

  Wendy clears her throat. “So, this here settlement is a democracy?”

  “No.” Mom shifts and crosses her hands over her lap. “It’s a shared dictatorship. We don’t canvass the populace for their opinions, and they don’t vote on major decisions.”

  “So, you just tell them what they’re gonna do?”

  “Yes. Right now, at this point in our . . . development . . . that’s how it has to be.”

  “And these brutes I see standing about, they’ve got the look of military about them. They make sure the people keep in line? They make sure folks do what you want them to do?”

  Knock-Out brings Ellie over to me, lays her in my arms. She puts a chubby hand on my cheek and pinches me, hard, squealing. Her little fingernails are sharp.

  Sometimes Knock-Out amazes me with how he picks up on things.

  “Ma’am,” Knock-Out says, “it’d save us all a bunch of time if you’d just tell us what you’re getting at.”

  I clear my throat. Mom raises her eyebrow and gives me the look.

  Wallis says, “Go ahead, Gus. Speak.”

  Careful here. I say, “Wendy? Can you tell us about what’s on your ankle?”

  She flushes. If she looked angry before, now she looks ready to pop. Her face is furious, if only for a moment, then is suffused with blood and she looks ashamed until the blood drains away, taking on the aspect of stone. Cold and remorseless.

  She says, in a dead voice, “Slaver
s down in Texas. And they’re heading north. This way. They know about you.”

  Wallis sits up straight. “What did you say?”

  “There’s slavers coming this way. We escaped, me and Jennifer. I killed . . . I don’t know how many. Took as many of their horses as I could round up and rode hard, north. Toward you.”

  She sways a little. Mom stands, moves around the table, and puts a hand on her cheek, checking for fever.

  I turn to Keb. “Go get the other woman. Jennifer. Bring her here, and tell Frazier and Ellroy to take the horses to the inner stable. Round up more men to man the North Gate. We need more hands at the Wall for the zeds on their trail. We’ll figure out what to do with the horses later.”

  “There’s fifty pounds of moldy oats in a bag on one of the mares. That should last them through a couple more days, but they need—”

  Keb looks lost.

  “Go on, Keb. We’ll figure it out.”

  Wallis and Knock-Out are looking at me strange. Ellie gives a gurgle and goes to sleep. I watch her go, just like a little sunset in my arms.

  Mom sits Wendy down at the conference table, brings over a bottle of Evian—a big gift. She cracks the seal on the cap and pours her a glass.

  Wendy knocks it back.

  “How long has it been since you’ve slept?”

  She shrugs. “A week. Lost track. Since before we escaped. Caught some z’s on horseback, but not for long. Lost three horses on the ride.”

  Knock-Out brings a tray with glasses to the table, a Johnnie Walker bottle blunt and amber in the light from the tent flap. Twists the cap and pours some for the woman. “I need you to tell us what you know. About the slavers.”

  She sniffs the alcohol. For a moment, she looks around at all of us, her eyes going from face to face. She was tough before, now she’s lost and confused.

  She says, “They took us outside of Rockwall. The undead from Dallas had mobbed and were roaming in migrant bands. Jennifer and I had holed up in a bank, living off vending machines, sleeping in the vault. We were hungry, but—”

  “Safe,” I say, remembering. Hard to forget spending a lifetime folded into a Pinkerton safe while your father claws at the door and gibbers for your blood.