by Alexa Dare
His eyes burned hot. He rubbed his chest to ease the ache of grief away.
“We bound you for our safety, Nora. We had a plan in place and needed to carry it out.” Merv eyed the woman with one brow cocked. “Stop struggling, and I’ll let you go.”
Merv reached for the rope binding her wrist, then pulled his hand back. “Do you have any idea what that boy of Yates and yours is up to?”
“He’s my son.” Nora’s tear-filled eyes searched all their faces in the grayness. “Yates did nothing to raise him.”
“The kid’s drawing pictures.”
“No.” Nora’s gaze sheened.
Merv jerked off his cap, sending his hair above his extra-tall forehead fanning like a wild turkey tail, and smacked the camo cap on his thigh. Spicy manly fresh cologne drifted about him. “Pictures all over the place. Even on a barge and on sides of barns.”
“Has anyone fallen sick?” Nora’s shocked face looked as if she’d been slapped.
“Not that I know of. Leastwise, not yet.” Merv shook his head and sighed. “I kept him with me as long as possible, tried to look after him, and ensured he stayed out of trouble to boot.”
The crawling charred men from the cave…
The memory prompted pains in Brody’s chest. He tried to breathe his way through the hurt. Failed. Shot up to get to his feet. Faltered. A numbing pain shot down his left arm. He grabbed his upper arm and collapsed to slide off the rock on to his knees.
Merv steadied him, kept him from hitting the ground.
Yells and screams echoed back in the direction of the copse of trees.
“Maybe they turned on one another.” Kneeling, Merv placed his hand, palm flattened, on Brody’s chest. “There are times things don’t heal right away. Sometimes not at all, because I’m human and can only do so much.”
Brody moaned at the warmth spreading through his upper torso from his Uncle’s hands.
Nora gasped. “Doc enhanced you too.”
“Something to do with magnets and our superior genetics and such.” Despite the yelling and gunfire only yards away, Merv closed his eyes.
Burning, like the hottest of fires caused him to arch his back. Head pressed against the ground, he raised his chest into Merv’s gentle pressure.
From far away, Nora asked, “Who else underwent enhancements?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Yates?” Nora’s dulled question dropped like a bomb in the forest.
“Don’t know.” Merv, the man who raised him and Cantrell after their parents died, hovered over Brody. In the shadows, the lines in the older man’s face looked chiseled.
“Man, it’s like buttered popcorn’s liquefied and smeared over my taste buds.” Brody licked his lips, savoring the extra salt.
“Got you a hankering, huh? Sometimes the healing sort of surges the senses. Some see words as colors and auras. Others get taste, some experience smells. Since I get nada in that department, I just wait for the hunger to hit afterwards.” He patted Brody’s ribcage. “Better, but not quite. When we get settled, I’ll replenish, then fix you up right.”
He, along with the twins, helped Brody once again to stand.
Wobbly footed, he stood as Darcy Lynn slipped her hand in his. “Did I hurt you when I jumped?”
“No way.” Brody swayed on his feet. “I must be really tired, is all.”
A man squealed and ran onto the rocky, briar-infested slope from the tank’s unprotected side. He flapped his arms as if he were a buzzard taking off.
Uncle Merv, like an old west desperado, pulled a pistol out of his side holster.
The chest pain eased, Brody said, “Wait. He’s running from something, not at us.”
A shot thwunked and ricocheted off the metal hull at the back.
Sparks flying, Merv ducked. He untied the rope from around Nora’s shackled wrist and yanked her downward out of the line of fire.
Bloodied men, naked or wearing only remnants of burned clothing, lumbered into the open.
“Uh, uh, uh.” Darcy Lynn pointed and reverse-honked a gasp.
This time, Uncle Merv shot.
A ringing from a gun going off too close filled Brody’s ears.
Rips and flaps of flesh swung from the moving bodies. Their mouths chomped and their teeth clicked and ground.
“The, uh,” Brody stammered, “men from the barge.” The unreal buttery popcorn flavor turned rancid and rotten in two seconds flat.
“Not men, at least not living.” Merv boarded the tank and held out his hand to Nora.
“Vincent isn’t responsible.” Nora’s face screwed up like she might burst into tears. Tucking her gloved hand in Merv’s, she let him haul her aboard. “He isn’t.”
The tank jerked into gear and moved forward. Merv hauled his own bulk along with Brody upright.
“Duck.” Junior’s voice echoed from the hole of the hatch.
“Gun’s coming around about face,” yelled Abe.
“Oh, great. Junior’s driving.” Hannah planted herself face down like a squashed moth atop the tank.
Brody, his chest surprisingly free of pain, lifted Darcy Lynn up to Merv. “If Vincent did this, it’s some sort of bacteria or virus or something, right?”
“Yes,” said Nora.
“Contagious?” Brody rubbed the inside of his wrist along his aching upper ribs.
“More than likely.” Nora swiped at her eyes, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, with her gloved fingers. “This is too out there. There has to be a realistic explanation. If so, there would be a cure. Where is Vincent? He was with you, for a while.”
Merv, on his way in a belly crawl to the hatch, glanced around. “Seems to have gone missing all of a sudden—”
Heralded by raw waves of human decomp, the bargemen attacked the man Uncle Merv hadn’t shot.
The dead people smell.
No movie.
Flat out real.
Brody climbed the side ladder rails.
Off to the side, the man batted them with his hands, punched, and kicked with ineffective hits. He screamed. One of the, dead ones ripped his throat out with his teeth, like a rabid dog shaking his head.
No more screams.
Two others clawed and ripped at the man’s belly until strings of intestines glistened like polished red stones in the sunshine.
The whites of skulls with lots of flesh boiled away shone bright in the sparse glow.
“This can’t be.” Nora clung to the tank top’s metal railing.
“There’s your son’s reality, Nora,” Merv called out from climbing into the hatch.
A crew of camouflaged zombies walked stiff into the small clearing.
While red, blistered, and boiled flesh hung off the bodies of the barge crew, the woodsmen’s skin was ashen and intact and their bodies held bite wounds and chewed away chunks of flesh.
“Friends of yours?” Merv called on his way into the hatch.
“Yes. Part of the militia group that brought me here.”
“Fast acting.”
No more shots fired toward them, yet gunshots drummed in the woods.
After a while of riding and no one talking in the heaviness of the fuel exhaust, they halted.
Black and charcoal smeared a sheer rock face.
A rock chunk the size of a barn side, then charcoal lines. In the sketch, a muscular dude wearing a baseball cap attacked another skinny dude.
“Brody.” Hannah gripped and squeezed Brody’s upper arm.
“Two men.” Brody’s nose grew cold while his earlobes warmed. “That’s all.
“Vincent’s mean.” Darcy Lynn covered Brody’s eyes.
Amid all the grief, something inside him crumbled like dried out sponge cake left uncovered for a week on the kitchen counter. For a few breaths, he let himself hide behind the little girl's cupped hands.
The picture of a man attacking a smaller bent over backward form covered the rock.
Familiar. Couldn’t b
e. Wasn’t.
The symmetrical angles of the dark lines formed a likeness—coincidence—of Brody’s brother’s face. The details, even down to the cap brim shaped in a precise half-circle curve.
The thin cheeks weren’t right though, nor the rings around Cantrell’s eyes.
Merv rose to mid-body out of the tank’s guts. “Your son’s been busy, Nora.”
“I’ll find him, Nora,” a man yelled from the woods. “And when I do, he’ll regret what he’s done to us. He and the rest of you are all that is unholy.”
“What’s unholy mean?” Darcy Lynn asked. “They are not really dead, are they? They’re pretend, it’s just a trick, like the beetle bug.”
No trick.
“And why is Brody’s brother hurting Brody in the picture?”
“Hush,” Hannah said from where she lay face down. One of her hands held on to the rail, while the other gripped the back of Darcy Lynn’s T-shirt.
The drawing of him in his brother’s grasp had a neck that had been ripped out. The hunk of ripped flesh hung from his dead brother’s teeth.
Abe banged on the metal. “Best roll, while the calm in the weather holds.”
A faint breeze stirred pine and honeysuckle in a fleeting promise.
“We’re going to need one of them to examine. I can do the bio tests, and you can handle the brainwave aspects.” Nora hung on. “You and I will figure this out.”
Brody darted his gaze to that area of rock.
“Either way, we must find out what’s going on. No matter the cause, we have to find out. Find a cure.”
“Brody,” Junior called from the hollow tank belly.
“Yeah?” His mind refused to engage. “What, Junior?”
“Thanks you guys for coming for me. With the dead walking, I’m glad I’m not closed away and alone. At least we’re together.”
“If we locate the proper gear, we could go to the observatory.”
“Ugh.” Hannah nodded. “Irene and Louise took us when we were seven or eight. Boring.”
“The telescope is the best in the region.” Abe said and shot his sister a glare.
“What if you recreate what you did at the camp with your disruptor blast?” Nora clutched the fingers of her free hand against the metal top as if she might pry the armor open like a can opener. “Except on a bigger scale. If we can get up to the satellite dish, you could make all magnetic fields go down in one big mega blast. If you set off a blast, the EMF balance of nature might reset to their natural levels. No more storms, possibly no more zombies. They’re not alive, so it’s doubtful their brains would reboot. Together we could put a stop to this.”
Abe clasped Brody’s arm. “Don’t listen to her. She can’t be trusted any more than her son.”
“Where exactly is Vincent?” asked Nora.
“You’re his mother, you should know.” Hannah shot a glance down the length of her nose, then refused to look at Nora again.
Brody felt sorry for Nora. A bit.
Well, he did, but the surge of sympathy, like Mildred Cope’s chocolate pecan pie at a church picnic, didn’t last more than a few minutes.
“I can’t sense where he is any longer, can you?” Nora looked about as if her son might step out of the shadows any second.
“No, it’s like he’s just…gone.”
An idea tingled. Brody smacked his palm on metal in quick bangs. “Uncle Merv, we need to head to Rocky Top, but first we have to stop by my shop and a medical clinic on the way.”
From inside the hull, his uncle snorted. “Not asking for much, are you boy?”
“The whole shebang,” Brody said, his voice low and his eyes filling hot with tears. “I’m asking for it all.”
“You really think you two can fix this mess?” Merv slowed the tank, allowing solid puffs of exhaust smoke to swarm the outer hull.
“I think we won’t know if we don’t try.” Brody stared into the faces of his fellow exiles.
“We veer east first, then on to old Rocky Top.” The tank’s motor revved, and they chugged along faster. “First, we round up us some guns.”
Nora’s gaze sought the Rocky Top’s tall peak.
Dang, one giant EMF blast, then no more electronic devices, at least in the tri-states, if not the region.
For how long?
With that one mega blast to disrupt the EMFs, the world of gadgets and devices that Brody dwelled in, made his living within, and knew ended.
Worth it though, since the blast, in theory, should reset the off-kilter elements.
No way of knowing if it would work, but what other options did they have, with the weather gone amuck and the dead not dead?
They were going to have to trust Nora, and to a young man she’d almost killed on more than one occasion, that was so not a good thing.
Chapter 13
Hours later due to the steady but slow pace of the tank, at the big old white and silver trailer that was Brody’s shop, Brody and Merv rounded up electronic parts, while Abe kept an eye on the tank and Nora.
Right before dark, with a hatchet blade Merv loaned him, he stood near a rickety wooden porch in the weak yellow glow of the generator-powered porch light and hacked at an old broom handle.
Should the zombies show up, he’d be ready.
The woman set out to trick Brody, but Brody seemed focused on bringing nature back into balance so he didn’t seem to notice how wily she was.
With a sidelong glare, Abe sucked in apple-blossom tinged tugs of anger and chopped the handle tip. With each hack, his fever lowered and his anger heated up.
She better not try to talk slick with Abe. As mad as he was, if he looked straight at her, with her being the cause of all this mess, and whoosh, he would fry her, like potato slices in cooking oil, but good.
Before he and Brody went into the trailer shop, Merv tied her wrists again, so Nora was anchored to and standing beside the tank’s hull.
“You know where Vincent is, don’t you?” Nora glared laser focused hate toward Abe and Junior.
The ten-year-old sat on the planked porch steps and scratched at the upper inside of his homemade mud cast. Intent on inspecting his handiwork, only a lift of his chin showed he even heard.
Abe grunted in answer.
In the feeble light of the one-bulb porch, he shoved the end of the broom handle harder against the ground. In short swings, he chopped the tip of the handle into a rough spear.
Hannah and Darcy Lynn emerged from the trailer with a backpack stuffed with lots of protein bars. The two girls handed them out, while Irene filled more jars and jugs from a makeshift water barrel at the trailer’s far-end.
Abe took a vanilla and a cinnamon one, likely no more flavor than over-spiced cardboard, and shoved them in the khaki pants that kept riding too far down his hips.
Seems Brody’s uncle had used one of Brody’s designs to tweak the tank’s motor and fuel system.
The big motor used a gallon of water mixed with one tablespoon of gasoline. In the real world, if things weren’t topsy-turvy, the hybrid design might make the Thackett’s the richest dudes in the valley.
The burned half of Irene’s face looked even less inflamed today.
The healing burns should have lessened Abe’s guilt at causing the house fire, but the fact that no one spoke of his and Hannah’s other guardian stuck like a thorn caught in the ankle band of a sock.
Unseen, but ever present, the burning guilt seared his mind.
“I can’t get a sense of where my son is, can you?” Nora’s make-nice tone caused him to clench his molars and jab the stick harder to the earth.
“Nope.”
“Reckon he somehow got back into Briar Patch. Inside that special-built room of his.” Junior peered out from a dirt-smeared face. “Otherwise, we’d know, right?”
“You caused the mountain to fall?” Abe asked.
Junior nodded. “To stop the quakes.”
“You’re quite a resourceful young man,” said Nora.
“Did he mention to whom?” Hissing-like, Nora’s voice reminded him of how a snake might speak if one were to speak.
“Nah.” Junior rolled one shoulder. “He kept going on about his reason for existing.”
Cheeks burning as if his fever spiked tenfold, but giving in to the need to stoke the angry embers deep inside him, Abe said, “Junior could bring the rest of the mountain down to block the quake line, couldn’t you Junior?”
A tilt of his head and a keen gaze served as Junior’s silent answer as the younger kid studied Abe. He slid a glance toward Nora and back. “Reckon I could.”
Through the grayness, Abe stared toward the spiked bare branches of a dried-up cherry tree. “A fire inside the mountain might help the collapse along.”
“You’re children.” Nora stared at them as if she’d just figured out what a mess she might have made. “What sort of monsters have you become?”
“Homegrown.” Junior grinned.
The tiny ends of the spindly tree branches flared. Wisps of cherry wood smoke rose.
“Local made.” Abe chuckled.
“Oh, pretty. Like a lighted tree.” Darcy Lynn giggled.
“Abe,” Irene said, “now’s not the time for this.”
“She and her project did this to us. We were happy before she had us kidnapped. Louise was alive, and we were all together.” Shame at the hitch in his voice heated Abe’s neck and face. Hateful tears burned like acid in his eyes.
“Oh, Abe.” Irene’s face, so close to healed, looked sad and broken in the rising wind. “Louise’s death wasn’t your fault. You mustn’t blame yourself.”
“If not mine, whose? Who else am I supposed to blame? Besides her.” Abe ground the stick in hard to the dirt and glared at the withered tree.
The cherry wood burst into flame.
“We ain’t got marshmallows or the time.” Merv opened a squeaking screen door. “Put it out. Now.”