by Aaron Polson
Real old school, that head on a stick trick. Reminded me of something we read in Phelps’s class about the clans in Scotland and how they put the fear into the Romans when the Romans had most of Britain conquered.
Big D always handpicked his hunting party, and after his show of stupid heroism, Mack made the cut.
I watched them go from my perch on the southeast corner of the wall. The midday sun glinted from Mack’s blade. He held it in one hand, and the other swung at his side. He had his rifle slung across his back. Just before they were out of sight, he turned and looked back at the compound. I’d swear on my sister Reanne’s grave the bastard looked right at me.
~
The threat of death—a violent, painful death—lingered on everything like stink on shit, but most of our lives were spent in mind-numbing routine. Those of us in our twenties were used to a life filled with constant entertainment and information at our fingertips. The end brought an end to everything. Sometimes I felt like I was just waiting.
Waiting for the meatwads to come back.
Waiting to squeeze off those twenty-nine shells before they grabbed me with yellow-brown nails and started tearing. Waiting for their teeth and the sound of my own skin ripping open while the blood gushed out all warm and sticky. Sometimes, while on guard duty, I’d try to imagine just how much pain could go through before dying.
Sometimes I tried to imagine heaven on the other side.
It was hard to see heaven when you have such a good view of hell.
~
We heard the shot after they’d been gone for about an hour. I stood on my rickety perch and peered along the wall to the southwest tower. A guy we called Easy-E waved at me and pointed toward the woods. Inside the woods was a small creek and beyond that the highway. Big D and Mack and the two other guys had hiked that direction once they left the compound.
A single shot. A tiny little echo.
I waited for more, expecting a barrage and trying to gauge the distance from the sound of the gun. After a couple of concussions playing football, I lost a little bit of my hearing. A permanent hum always floated under everything. I couldn’t remember what real silence sounded like. Two more shots came after a few minutes—pop, pop—and then nothing.
“What the hell’s going on?”
I looked down at Lennie.
“Gunshots,” I said. “Coming from somewhere out in the woods.”
“No shit,” Lennie hollered. “Can you see Big D?”
I crept to the edge of the tower—it wasn’t much more than a platform of plywood on stilts—and tried to work my eyes into the wooded shadows. The wind shifted. Chill breeze brushed across my face. Clouds had begun to gather in the west. A thunderhead rose in a wobbly pillar to the top of the sky. Just as I was about to turn and tell Lennie the field was blank, I spotted a lone figure jogging from under the canopy of trees.
“One’s coming back,” I shouted. My gaze wandered to the southwest. Easy-E pointed his rifle at the figure, and his black silhouette looked for a moment like a plastic army man from a different life. His head leaned forward as his eye pressed against the scope.
“Mack,” he shouted. “It’s Mack.”
I forgot myself for a moment and slung off the platform. I slid down the ladder two or three rungs at a time. My boots hit ground with a thud, and I ran halfway to the south gate before they started to open it. The gates—made from the same corrugated metal as the walls—were rigged on a set of old car wheels to slide in place when enough force pushed one way or the other. They’d overlap once shoved as far as they could go, providing a reasonable amount of safety from the monsters outside.
A couple of guys heave-hoed just enough for Mack to slide through sideways. His face was streaked with sweat. A scratch above his right eye bled in a dark smear on his forehead and cheek. He still had his own rifle and the bandolier of ammunition, but no signs of anything from the others. When I guy died in the field, you had to scavenge the ammo. You had to if you could.
“They got him,” he panted. “They fucking got him.”
Lennie caught Mack’s arm and helped him to his feet. “Who? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Big D,” Mack said. “The flesh bags got Big D and the others.” His eyes turned upon me as he spoke, and I felt them push right through the ice in my gut.
Part 2: Shooting Star
Chapter 4
The council held a quick meeting that night to solve two problems. First, the issue of Big D’s death had to be sorted. The council—a group of five men and two women who’d been in the camp since the start—called Mack to an inquest of sorts. I managed to weasel my way in the back of the head hut—the biggest shack at the center of the compound. The inquest brought a crowd; nearly every member of the camp crammed into the tiny building.
After the council named a new honcho, I didn’t need to hear any piece of the inquest.
They’d made Donnie the interim head of the camp.
Mack wore a scowl like he’d swallowed a whole bucket of soured milk while they decided he wasn’t at fault for Big D’s death.
~
Everybody needed an ally after the end of the world.
Everybody needed someone to trust.
Sasha had this friend, Ellen, a girl Mack had tried to hook me up with in the past. It was Ellen who would save my life, in a way. Ellen kept me from being food for the undead.
Ellen was pretty, I guess. She held a certain kind of beauty in her features. She wasn’t Sasha—round and full and dripping with sex. Her eyes sort of took over her face, big and dark and ancient like the heart of an old tree polished to high shine, but the rest of her was thin and twiggy. She wore really loose fitting gear and covered any piece which might look the womanly part. Her hair, long and wavy, was usually done up in a braid, often tied to two braided strands round her head. You could see something really hurt in her face, not quite hidden in the lines which made their home on her forehead and around her eyes long before their time. Maybe it was the eyes or the way her cheeks were always sort of sunken in… I guess she had that lean and hungry look, too. Where Sasha oozed woman, Ellen spoke survivor, tough, unflinching.
She brushed against me as we left the head hut that night. Her big dark eyes held mine for a moment, and something passed between us. A thought, maybe. A vision of the future. She knew—God will witness to it. She knew about Mack and Sasha, maybe from something Sasha let slip when the two of them tossed gossip back and forth.
She passed a thought with her eyes and a slip of cardboard in her hand.
“Careful,” she whispered. Her fingers touched my forearm, the scar left from a hot metal burn I earned while in high school metal shop.
My fingers closed around the scrap of cardboard, and I clutched my hand to my side.
Later, after I’d slid into my bunk, I pried back those fingers and found the words “Armory. First light.”
~
There wasn’t much sleep for me that night. My brain went to work puzzling through Mack’s scowl, the fact he was the only survivor of four into the wild. Since I’d been a part of the camp, Big D had never wandered far enough to find a mess of flesh bags big enough to stop him. Sure, they’d hunt a lone rotter or two, but never a mob of them. A zombie—God how that word seemed too trite, too pop culture for what the bastards really were—by itself wasn’t much of a threat. The poor sons-of-bitches moved slowly enough and with enough stiffness in their rotten joints, they could hardly do much on their own.
In a group, they were murder. A wilderness of teeth.
Lying there awake that night, I figured that’s what caught Big D more than anything: they’d stumbled across a whole hive of meatwads and didn’t have enough to fight their way out. I remembered Ghost trapped behind the counter in Wal-Mart. I thought I understood.
It seemed to me like a trip I’d had as a kid, back when families did such things as take trips. We landed in Yellowstone or Grand Teton, somewhere in the upper corner of Wyoming.
The car ride took more than one day from before the sun to well into the deep shade of twilight. Mom bought Reanne and me a set of bells with elastic bands to wear on our wrists. Bears were supposed to hear the jingle and therefore not kill us should we stumble upon them out in the woods. I figured the salesman at Yellowstone Lodge really made Mom a sucker because a set of jingle bells wasn’t going to stop a bear, but a ranger corroborated Mom’s take: most hikers who were attacked by bears surprised the poor dumb brutes.
That’s the way it worked in the wild—at least had worked in the wild before I landed in the camp. Most of the undead bastards only attacked when they’d been surprised. In numbers, they brought chaos.
When I closed my eyes, I saw the whole lot of flesh bags tearing into Big D. Mack stood and watched with that shit-eating grin of his.
An eternity later, the eastern sky warmed, and I slipped out of bed to meet Ellen.
~
The armory—funny we called it an armory because most of us carried our weapons twenty-four hours a day—stood under the shadowed reach of the eastern wall. It was a short walk from the bunks, within shouting distance of the community hall. Corrugated metal and cast-off timbers made up the structure, like everything else inside our walls. We stored extra bludgeoning weapons there, mostly, bats and shovels and anything which might have use against the ruined men in the wider world. Nobody left a single live cartridge in the armory. Somebody had even brought two old flak jackets—the kind you might find at a military surplus store. They wouldn’t stop a big caliber gun, but might protect a guy’s chest. It’d be hard for the rotters to gnaw through, too.
Of course you couldn’t convince a zombie to only go for the ribs.
Ellen stood in the shadows of the armory doorway. Her pale face hung like a ghost in black air.
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad you’ve come.” She vanished into the shack.
My heart—already amped from the hour and lack of sleep—echoed in my head like a hammer against stone. I followed her.
Inside the armory, the air was thick and warm and tainted with a slightly rotten, moldy odor. I couldn’t see anything for a moment, and started when Ellen’s slender fingers wrapped my arm. She yanked me deeper into the darkness.
“You’ve got to watch yourself, Peter.”
My eyes narrowed. The outline of her face came into view. My heart slowed.
“Watch myself?”
She released my arm. “I don’t like what’s happened. Big D. Donnie. Smells rotten, you know? I don’t like…”She paused and tilted her head toward me. Her eyes were visible, barely, as light from a chink in the wall sparked in them. “Stuff that’s been happening.”
“You think Donnie did—”
Her hand pressed against my mouth, warm and soft.
“I don’t know what to think except I’m not ready to drop names like that. I just don’t know what to think. But you’ve got to watch yourself. Your buddy—Mack—he’s sticking his neck out pretty far. I used to think the dead caused the most trouble. No. Fuck no. It’s the living. The folks who are stuck together inside these walls… They’re the real monsters. We’re the real monsters.”
Her hand slid from my face. I wanted, selfishly, for her to let it linger so I could feel another’s skin.
“Politics,” I said.
She hesitated and then nodded. My eyes had adjusted as much as they would. Ellen’s face, lean with angles and enough softness to be beautiful, moved in the darkness.
“Politics. One thing the end of the world couldn’t stop…”
I groped behind me in the darkness and dragged my fingers across a rack of what felt like rake handles. “How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Too long. Almost since the end—or beginning—however you want to frame it.” She took a step toward the doorway and glanced into the courtyard. “What’s it been, just over a year and a half? Nearly two?”
“Nearly two,” I said. Suddenly, I realized this was the first conversation I’d had with a woman, any woman, alone since the world went to shit. “Why me? I mean, why are you telling me about this?”
She shrugged. “You’re Mack’s friend, I suppose. Sasha’s pretty in love with him.”
“You can’t tell me who or what—”
“I would if I could. Donnie’s survived three camp leaders since I’ve been here, but never taken the position for himself. If that doesn’t stink, I don’t know what does.”
“But he’s the leader now.”
“The leader,” Ellen said. “For now. Big D seemed to be grooming your buddy for second in command. Donnie wouldn’t have liked that. He’s been number two as long as I can remember. The flesh bags devoured the last honcho we lost—a guy named Griffon—in about the same manner as Big D’s death. We never saw that poor bastard again. But…”
She turned away from me.
“But what?”
“I’ve got this gut feeling like Big D’s not gone. Not really gone-gone, you know?”
My mouth was dry. Thoughts swirled together in a lump. Ellen—who the hell was she? Could I trust her? And most of all, what the fuck was I supposed to do if this Donnie guy set up Mack? Confused? Yes, I was, and more than a little. From the late night conversation with Sasha, to the Cheshire grin he had before the council meeting and sour-puss scowl afterward, Mack had been acting the guilty one.
“It’s just a feeling,” she said like she’d been reading my mind.
“You get feelings like that very often?” I asked.
Ellen exhaled through her nostrils in one quick puff. “Premonitions, you mean?”
“Whatever you want to call them. Do they hit you very often?”
“I’m not a freak or anything.”
“No one said you were.” My heart started to throb again. My hands began to sweat. “I didn’t mean—”
“Just keep your head up,” she said and strode from the armory door.
Chapter 5
She was right.
Big D came back less than a week later.
Part of him, anyway.
Rex and Lennie were manning the south towers that day. I was in the bunkhouse cleaning my gun after doing time in the gardens. Time was, I could close my eyes and tell you about every scratch and ding in the barrel, every swirl and dark line in the stock, and even the way the trigger looked, all smoothed and worn down with grease from my hands. I kept one small bottle of Remington oil and an old rag in my bag. The rag used to be a cloth diaper, I think. When I wasn’t on duty, I’d often run that rag over the shotgun’s barrel and over the stock, chasing away invisible dirt.
I heard their shouts and nearly dropped the gun.
They were muted, but the name—Big D—hit my brain as clear and clean as a church bell at ten paces.
“Big D’s back.”
I said the words without processing much, but my stomach dropped through my feet like a bag of ice hitting the floor before I made the door.
Others—half the camp at least, nearly thirty of us—stumbled toward the gate like a whole mess of flesh bags drawn by the scent of fresh meat. My eyes darted around, searching the other faces for some explanation. They fell on Ellen—they locked with hers for a moment, but the moment passed quickly like a summer breeze. She shook her head quickly and flicked away.
“It’s Big D,” Lennie shouted. He waved his rifle over the wall, pointing it like a spear toward something on the other side. “Open the gates—It’s Big D!”
Two guys grabbed the blocks on either side of the gate and began pulling. I fingered the trigger guard on my gun. We all had them—anyone who owned a gun, that is. Without looking, I worked three shells into the chamber. Some of my twenty-nine shells had been worked with my fingers so much the metal wore a high polish around the rim. The metal and wood groaned as they pulled back the doors. My heart throbbed until I felt my ribs rattle. My gaze swept over the crowd again, brushing past face after filthy, dirt-stained face, searching for Mack. More camp members filed in behi
nd the crowd.
Where was he?
Sunlight spilled across our faces as the gate split. Voices murmured.
The tree line made a near-black ridge behind a single, staggering figure.
Big D.
He’d been turned. He was one of them, the undead. I pushed toward the front of the crowd. Most folks backed away, stunned I suppose. Most of us had seen a loved-one turned before. It was the way of things in a dead world. Not that seeing a loved one with the blank eyes and snarling, undead grimace could ever be easy—something about Big D being a zombie was worse. He’d been our hope. Our leader. This staggering thing which stole his skin, his bones, terrified me like nothing had yet. He became a harbinger of our fates, a sign of the end to come for the rest of us.
Nobody raised a gun. My grip tightened on my rifle stock.
“Shoot him,” somebody yelled. I didn’t recognize the voice; maybe it belonged to me, my own voice.
I lifted the gun. It grew as part of my arm, an extension of my own flesh and bone. My eyes walked the length of the barrel and found range. Thirty yards. Maybe less. Still moving toward me.
Knock, knock, knock, my heart hammered my ribs.
Why didn’t the others shoot? Rex… Lennie… We all had guns—all of us.
Fifteen yards.
His teeth had yellowed and wore a dark stain. Blood?
Ten yards.
The side of Big D’s face had been torn open. I blinked sweat from my eyes.