This Dark Earth

by John Hornor Jacobs

  No one looks happy.

  “Uh . . . well, let’s get far enough ahead for another bump,” Jasper suggests.

  Sounds good to me.

  Keb spots the rider first and is off like a flash, revving the bike, making his front wheel pop off the pavement. The man had been sitting on an ATV, idling, surveying the road. A sentry. The moment he sees us, he drops his binoculars and wheels around and bolts south. Keb points at the retreating figure, looks to me, and I nod. The best rider among us, he disappears down the interstate, moving around burned cars and SUVs.

  Jasper revs his bike, but I hold up my fist in the stop signal. He guns it down. Even through his visor I can tell he’s disappointed.

  In an hour, Keb returns. He’s bleeding from a graze on his arm, but he’s got a man trussed and over the backseat of his bike. We pull ahead of the horde and stop but leave the bikes running.

  Keb pops his helmet, shakes out his lengthening dreads, and says, “Check it, Lil P.” He walks over to the man and points at his pants, his jacket. “Army. A slaver, no doubt.”

  The man mumbles through the gag that Keb has on him.

  I point at it. “Let him speak, if he has anything to say.”

  “Awright, yo highness. Awright.”

  When he can speak, the man looks at me wide-eyed. “Slavers? We ain’t no slavers.”

  Keb, Jasper, and I glance at each other. News to us. The woman could have been lying, but I seriously doubt Wendy would’ve faked the shackle. And Mom said that the other one, Jennifer . . . she’d been raped many times. The evidence was all over her body.

  “That right? Not slavers? You mean you don’t have a bunker full of girls? Your own little whorehouse?” This from Jasper. I’d never heard him so bitter. Or intense.

  And that makes me pause. I’ve always thought of Keb and Jasper as outlaws, wild men constrained by no law. Seeing how disgusted Jasper is with this man, it makes me reconsider him. And Keb. And Bridge City. People want order, order and stability and, if not righteousness, then at least individual respect where the strong can’t abuse the weak.

  I think back to the night before last on the bridge. Frazier’s last sound as he fell.

  The soldier is grimy, greasy-haired, and nearing starvation.

  “Almost got away. Little four-wheeler. He tried to go off road, took a spill, and I snatched the little bitch up, easy as shit, Lil P.”

  I look back toward the . . . horde. We need a word for them. Getting closer and closer. We’re gonna have to move in the next few moments.

  A lone revenant—a girl, it looks like, at least through all the bloat and char—shambles up, out of the brush on the shoulder. Keb runs over to her, kicks her down, and stomps on her head until she stops moving. He’s snarling as it happens, and I see the man watching him.

  “So, you say you and your little group aren’t slavers, huh?” I try to keep my voice light.

  “No! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Where are you located, then?”

  He shuts his mouth and looks around. I nod at Keb and Jasper.

  Jasper unslings the man and dumps him onto the concrete. We remount our bikes.

  “Ain’t you gonna untie me? Hey! I told you I ain’t involved with that! Untie me!”

  The moaning is so loud now, it’s hard to hear anything other than the slaver’s blubbering.

  “You don’t seem to get it. You’ll tell me everything I want to know, or you’re zombie food. There’s no deals to be made. There’s no angle for you. It’s total honesty. Or death.”

  He doesn’t take long to decide.

  “You won’t leave me here?”

  “No, we won’t.”

  “Lil Prince, don’t go making promises you can’t keep.”

  “Shut up, Keb.” I turn back to the slaver. “Spill it.”

  He starts to talk, but Jasper interrupts, grabbing the man and slinging him over the back of his bike, facedown.

  “Too late, fellas. We need to skedaddle. Our tagalongs are getting a mite close.”

  We fire up the bikes, roll maybe a few hundred yards more down the interstate, as slow as thunder. On the bright side, the horde is getting back into a tight cluster after straggling through the breach.

  We have to do some spring cleaning before we can stop. There’s a little group of zeds coming toward us from our front sector, as the old members of the G Unit might say. We stop, fifteen feet shy, drop our visors, cinch our gorgets, and get our headknockers up. Once everyone is ready, we wade in. There’s a sketchy moment when two of them grab my swinging arm, but Jasper’s there, crunching skulls with his tent hammer. Keb’s a blur with the crowbar, jabbing with the forked end, clubbing with the curved.

  When the last zed is down, we clean our bludgeons, store them, and once again dump the slaver onto the concrete, this time in the middle of the putrid remains of the cluster we’ve just wiped out.

  Strange. When I was a kid I would dream about doing stuff like this—

  The slaver blubbers again, but we ignore him. Keb turns up the mirror on his bike, and I can’t see any problem with doing some more blow. I’ve been up thirty-six hours now, and I can feel it. A line or two will hit the spot.

  We do the lines, and I walk back to where the slaver lies on the asphalt. I’m thrumming all over, energized, and he looks at me with wide eyes as I rub the residue of cocaine over my gums like I’ve seen Keb and Jasper do. It numbs my teeth, which is bizarre, not as a feeling, but the fact that it feels good. I could use some water. My mouth is tacky.

  “So, where were we?”

  He’s crying now, for real, terrified. No more bravado, like Wendy, no more posturing. He knows he’s a hairbreadth from shambling.

  I squat. He’s facedown on the pavement, eye-level with the black pulp of the strangest fruit known to man: zombie noggin.

  “Hey. Hey, man.” He quiets a little. He needs to hear what I have to say. “Listen. Tell us everything. The slaves. Your plans about us. Where you’re located. You spill it all, right now, I promise I will let you go unharmed.”

  “Lil P, you can’t do that shit, man.”

  “Goddamn it, Keb. I can do whatever the fuck I want.” I stand, walk over to where he’s watching me. “Don’t contradict me again. Why do you think they put me in charge of this mission?”

  I’m angry, but Keb gives this half-amused, half-distracted shrug, as if he’s saying, Hey, what’s it to me?

  What he does say is, “It’s cool, Prince, it’s cool. I’m here to bring you back home in one piece, doctor’s orders. It’s your ass when you get there, though.”

  I turn back to the slaver. My skin’s itching a little, and I scratch at my arm as I get in the slaver’s face.

  He doesn’t need any more prodding.

  He spills it all or, at least, everything he knows. A mean son of a bitch named Konstantin is in charge. It’s hard to get a clear picture of the man from the slaver. The slavers don’t have any heavy armaments except a couple of .50 cals mounted in the rear of Jeeps. Of the near fifty Bradleys they have—New Boston was a motor depot, after all—none of them will start, and there’s no one there with the wherewithal or tech savvy to make them run again.

  They couldn’t figure out why the Bradley’s wouldn’t start. Thought it had something to do with the radiation that caused the zombies.

  Idiots. And they don’t even know about the EMP.

  Jesus.

  They heard our ham radio broadcasts and have set up camp on the Fulton Bridge over the Red River a few miles out of Texarkana. They’ve got chain-link murderholes set up at the south end, and they just spear the zeds through the fencing and then go in and clear them out.

  They plan on moving north, through Hot Springs, toward us, in winter, when there’ll be less growth and more visibility.

  They don’t think we’ll give them any trouble. They don’t know about the G Unit or the Bradleys—a couple of things we didn’t mention, of course.

  When h
e’s done, I pull a knife. Put it at his throat.

  “The slaves.” I prick him hard enough to make him start to bleed. Actually, I stick him harder than I mean to, and the tip of the knife slips a half inch into the soft underside of his jaw. It’s too easy to slip. Too easy to go further than I want.

  The shamblers are closer now, moaning and making wet, phlegmy sounds.

  He gives me a look that’s half pure hatred and half self-disgust. The blood is coming now from his jaw. I might’ve slipped the knife all the way into his mouth. No way to tell, really. “Yeah. There’s around sixty women. And they’ve started luring men into camp with promises of food, booze—” He glances from me to Keb to the shamblers getting closer and louder every second. “I ain’t got nothing to do with that! I don’t. I’m just a scout.”

  “You’re taking men now? What do they do?”

  “Latrines. Bait for the murderholes. Labor.”

  About what I figured.

  “And you’re coming for us to get more? Is that right? You need more slaves?”

  “They need more workers to build walls. Without ’em, they’ll be stuck with just layers of chain-link.”

  Yeah, buddy. Say they all you want, but you’re still a goddamned slaver.

  “One last question.”

  Jasper waves. “Hey, gents! It’s time to move. You got maybe a minute.”

  “Last one. You fuck any of the women?”

  He looks into my face and his eyes go all shifty. “Yeah. Couple of times. It’s how they keep us in line. Reward us. If we work hard, we get to visit the whoreho—the women’s tent.”

  I hold up the knife. “It’s a good thing you told the truth. Otherwise I would’ve staked you, you filthy little shit.”

  I spit in his face.

  Then cut him free.

  Keb looks at me like I’m crazy, and Jasper shakes his head like I’m a retard. Maybe I am.

  The slaver wastes no time racing off. He’s favoring one leg, but he clears the interstate and the trees before I can get back to my bike.

  “That was a motherfucking mistake, Lil Prince.”

  “Probably.” I don’t know what I’m becoming. It’s too hard to think with the cocaine making my head pound and my heart hammer. “I gave my word.”

  To Knock-Out, not some worthless slaver.

  “Who the fuck are you, man? Why’s your word so important? Huh?” He waves his hand behind us. The zombies are maybe fifty yards away. “Look at this shit. You ain’t got the luxury of having pride, man. Your word ain’t shit.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand this, Keb. But if we don’t act human, we won’t be human.” I twist in my seat, look back at the horde of zombies shambling toward us. “Without that, without something like honor, or commitment . . . fuck . . . without knowing something sure other than we’re going to die, what the hell are we? We’re just like them. Just hungers running crazy.”

  “The zeds are real. The slavers are real. Pride don’t matter when you’re shambling. All that other stuff is make-believe bullshit, Lil P.”

  “Maybe, Keb. But if we don’t act like it’s real, then it never will be.” I slam down my visor, kick start the bike, and roll, south.

  Eyes bright, tails bushy, thanks to the blow. Starting to consider divvying up the remainder between the three of us so we can each snort to our own heart’s content, but I don’t know what we’d put it in. Or if Keb has any more of those hundred-dollar bills. We make another pit stop, snort some lines with an efficiency that comes from habit, and roll on down I-40, southwest. Taking it slow. But it’s hard. With my heart racing, cocooned in the roar of the motorcycle, I want to gun the damned thing. Put this mass of undead far behind and breathe fresh air.

  But we can’t. We watch the road, we watch the zeds shamble after us. And we have to roll slow.

  Flash of light to my left.

  The explosion takes out Jasper and his bike in a blossom of yellow fire and smoke and for an instant I’m lost and then I’m ripped from my bike and tumbling head over heels through the air. Something tears at my back and my helmet hits the ground, hard.

  I have, burned into the undersides of my eyelids, a vision of Jasper in three pieces, spraying blood, each piece of him twisting away from the others.

  No clue about Keb.

  I lie in the grass, on my back, looking at the sky, watching the smoke rise above me. All I can think of is getting up, moving away from the zeds coming for us, but I can’t seem to get my arms and legs to move the way I want them to. They move, but there’s a lot of pain, and I’m so clumsy, I feel like I should just lie here until I can get my limbs to move together. But the zombies are getting closer.

  I push my body up and a big bloody chunk of Jasper is right next to me. Or it might be Keb. I don’t know.

  I look back at where we came from. The wind blows smoke from the burning wreckage across the interstate and into the tree line, obscuring the undead. Maybe it will keep them off me, distract them.

  No, here they come, through the smoke. Close. Thirty feet, maybe.

  I stand. It’s really hard to move and my ears ring, like when the big guns on the Bradleys fire. Deafening. I thought the Harleys were loud.

  What the fuck caused it? An RPG? A mine?

  I walk. Away from the zeds and the burning wreckage. Something’s wrong with my ankle and the pain is starting to come through now, bright and shooting and in the end it’s gonna kill me.

  Might be shambling just a little faster than the shamblers.

  There’s a buzzing and I don’t know if it’s my ears still ringing or it’s something else.

  I walk. I hear the shamblers behind me. Soon I’ll be able to smell them.

  A crackle.

  My helmet muffles everything, so I pop the visor. Gunfire. The buzzing of motorcycles.

  I trip on some debris, hit asphalt, and roll. The hatchets dig into the meat of my pecs and abs but stay attached. Joblo will be happy to learn his Velcro did the trick. Doesn’t look like I’ll get the chance to tell him, though.

  I tumble down the shoulder into the high grass and force myself onto my hands and knees.

  The shamblers stand above me, on the pavement. Some look my way and slump down the hill. Others peer ahead, in that blind, fumbling way the zeds have, toward the highway. I put a hatchet into my left hand and, with my right, rip a .9mm from the Velcroed holsters. The sound isn’t much of a concern right now.

  I take aim, fire. Aim. Fire. Aim. Fire.

  I miss one before the end of the clip. Most of the shamblers peeling off the road to gobble me are prone now, but there’s a thousand more where they came from. And the pistol reports have alerted them that I’m being scrumptious over on the interstate shoulder.

  Maybe two hundred more turn and begin to shamble toward me.

  I run. My ankle is screaming, and I’m having trouble keeping my balance, but I can handle the pain. It’s better than the alternative. I feel something tearing down there and know I won’t be able to run for very long. Maybe a few more seconds. In that time I can get far enough away to at least eat a bullet.

  I won’t shamble. I won’t turn like Dad.

  I’m away from the shamblers, and they don’t look too happy about the situation. If they could run, they’d be hauling ass to eat me. But all they can do is gimp along, gnashing black teeth.

  I rip the other .9mm from its holster and place the barrel in my mouth. The gunmetal tastes oily and I remove it on instinct, it tastes so bad. I don’t want to die. But I won’t shamble. It’s hard to put it back in my mouth.

  I’m looking at the mass of zeds when the zombies start to dissolve and the air around them fills with a black mist. It’s like tea bags being dunked in steaming water. Then I hear big chain guns, .30 caliber or larger.

  A pair of motorcycles pulls in front of me. The riders hop off and have pistols out and in my face faster than I know how to deal with. They’re yelling something but I’m still looking at the zeds behind them.
Tea bags in water.

  Maybe I should let them shoot me. At least I wouldn’t have to taste the gun oil again.

  Knock-Out wouldn’t approve.

  I drop the gun and they knock me down, truss me like a hog, and sling me over the back of an ATV.

  Looks like I’ve found the slavers.

  It’s an hour or two ride, and we’re going fast, leaving the zeds behind, the thousands of dead, to mill around and look for someone else to chomp on.

  I hope no survivors wander through that area. That stretch of interstate is gonna be kinda rough for years. If you think about all the individual lives those zeds represent, each one with a life and a history and a bank account and family up until the Big Turnover, it’s like a whole town on the hoof, and I feel a great loss as the sound of their lowing diminishes and passes away. There go ten thousand aces in the hole.

  When we pull into the slavers’ camp, I twist uncomfortably to check out their fortifications. Chain-link, mostly. Piled-up cars too. If we had gotten here with the zeds, the fences would have crumpled under the weight of the horde. The zeds would have wiped out the slavers.

  A thought strikes me. What about the women? They would’ve been zombie-chow too. At least that didn’t happen. Silver linings and all that.

  They drive through many layers of chain-link fencing until we get to the bridge. They’ve set up tenting, much like we have at Bridge City.

  Everything looks a little disordered here. All the men are in fatigues and armed, heavily. They look at me with cold, uncaring eyes.

  Yeah, well, fuck you too, gentlemen.

  The ATV rolls to a stop outside a big tent like the one Mom, Wallis, and Knock-Out operate from. Two slavers snatch me up under the armpits, hoist me into the air, and bring me into the tent.

  There’s one of those folding chairs set up and they dump me into it, hands still tied.

  A man, small, with short-cropped hair brushed forward like Caesar, pulls up a stool and sits down in front of me, puts his hands on his knees, reversed, so that his elbows stick out at sharp angles. He’s hard with muscles, and he’s angry.