by James Davis
“May I look?” Harley motioned toward the scar on her temple and she nodded, reluctantly.
He walked to her and touched her lightly on the chin, tilting her head to get a good look at her temple. The scar was a black oval in the shape of an expanded thumbprint, as if the stranger had burned his fingerprint into her flesh.
“I don’t even know where I am.” Kara said as Harley examined her temple. “I walked around town a couple of times and I saw a few people but when I tried to talk to them, they ran into their homes. I think they were blinkers because they looked scared, like I was a neand or a zombie or something. Me, a neand. It’s just crazy. I found the old city hall and found out this is Price, but I don’t know it.”
“It’s about 70 miles from the Utah Hub.”
“That’s it?” Kara grinned wildly now. “Thank god! Could you help me find my way back? I don’t know what he did, but I’ve got to get back. I’ve got to find a way to get my linktag back. Alain will be so worried.”
“I could.” Harley said, getting up and going back to his backpack and saddle bag. “In the morning. Do you know who this man was? Any idea?”
“None. I asked him who he was and he said he was Prince Albert in a Can. He seemed to think it was pretty funny, but I don’t have any idea what he was talking about. Do you?”
“No.”
“He said he was just a wanderer on the path, which is why it startled me so much when you said you were a wanderer too. Do you know him?”
“No. This is the first I’ve heard of him,” Harley lied.
“Why would he leave me here of all places? He gives me food and my uniform and my rifle and beer, when I don’t even drink beer, and not a drop of wine when I could really use a good glass of wine. Why would he do that?”
“An offering,” Harley muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Kara sat back down on her bed and smiled and Harley was surprised to discover he found her quite lovely. “You could stay in one of the rooms across the hall and we could get a start toward the Hub tomorrow, do you think?”
Harley picked up his bags and threw them across his shoulder.
“Harley.” Kara smiled at him, and it was a genuine smile, the fear had all but evaporated from her smooth face. “Thank you. Thank you for finding me.”
Harley shifted the bags and then drew his sidearm in one quick motion and shot the young woman in the chest. The pulse blast threw her against the wall and passed through her body and the thin wall behind her. As she crumpled to the floor her lips twisted from a smile to a dark circle of surprise.
Harley walked to where she had fallen and reached down to pick up the pulse rifle. Kara reached up for him and she clutched his right arm. He looked into her dying eyes and was surprised to see they were gray. She smiled, and a thin line of blood escaped her lips.
“The end,” she whispered.
“The end?”
Kara gripped Harley’s arm even harder and tried to pull herself upright. She failed. “The end is coming,” she gasped.
Harley frowned as her grip slipped and her arm fell to the floor. Her eyes were no longer gray. They were black with death.
“For you I think it’s already here.”
He took her pulse rifle, holstered his blaster and went across the hall to find a room where he could sleep.
Chapter Three
Zombie Happy Meals
The Rages brought a storm into the dead city in the middle of the night; three hours after Harley killed the lost woman who told tales of a gray-eyed man and sobbed about missing a husband she had never touched.
The wind hit the city first, hurricane strength winds that picked the rubble off the streets and flung it across the valley, ripped trees from their roots and lifted the roofs off several of the older buildings in town. The rain started half an hour later, pounding rain that came in waves. Harley watched from his hotel room as the roads turned to rivers, and when the wind threw a mangled bicycle through his third-story window, he pulled the blankets and pillows off the bed, went into the bathroom and closed the door. He slept in the bathtub. The storm lasted until mid-morning, but he was able to sleep through most of it. While he slept he dreamed and as with most of his dreams, he dreamed of his mother when he was a little boy and he thought that perhaps he had been happy then, but it was a dim memory and he couldn’t be sure. It seemed like he smiled more then, but he was young and weak and maybe he smiled so he wasn’t beaten, instead of because he was happy. It was murky in his mind.
But the memories about his mother weren’t quite so murky. He remembered her vividly. He muttered her name while he slept fitfully in the bathtub, because he missed her and knew that he had not done right by her and that he should change that before it was too late. She was still on the reservation, and he hadn’t spoken to her in more than four years. She was all alone there unless she had hooked up with another deadbeat and if she had she was worse than alone. He remembered going to work with her at a little country store and he sat on the floor behind the counter while she worked. He spent most of his day just sitting there on the floor watching his beautiful mother with long, black hair and the sad eyes, thinking that when he was bigger and stronger he would take care of her and make sure none of the bad men ever beat her or cursed her again. But in the end he had grown up and left her and the reservation behind. In the end, he had become a bad man himself.
When he woke the storm was still raging, but it had lost its fury and he knew it would die soon enough. He was hungry but wasn’t sure he could get food through the Link with the Rages underway. He thought about going next door to eat some more of the chicken, but the sight of the dead woman on the floor might make him lose his appetite. Instead, he went downstairs and rummaged through the hotel diner. The freezers were still working and the water was still on but the tap puked dirty brown for several minutes. While there wasn’t much in the freezer to interest him, he found some vegetables that he thawed and steamed and ate at the reception desk, looking out the windows at the flooded streets. The cats and the coyotes had all run away when the storm hit. Harley counted himself lucky that he found cover before the Rages. The desert between Price and Huntington would be rivers of mud now.
The wind and the rain finally lifted as morning turned to afternoon. Harley took a moment to slip on his eyeset and track the weather on the Link. It was moving east, a broiling black cloud that sparkled with lightning. He was heading north and there were no other storms on the horizon. While he was linked he made a quick scan of Price. He didn’t know Price as well as he should. He had passed through it for years and years but never bothered spending much time in the city. There just wasn’t much of a reason to bother. Even when people cared to try, the city had been gasping its last breaths. But now he needed to know it well enough to find a ride. There wasn’t any sign of animal activity, but in the daylight he wasn’t terribly worried anyway. Once he started through the mountain pass he would have to be more alert because the mountains were thick with deer and elk, mountain lion and bear. They would be on the hunt.
There were still almost 1,200 people living in Price. At one time the city had been home to 18,000, but most had left in the Exodus. Of those who were left he wasn’t surprised to find most were pilgrims, but there were also more than 200 blinkers, which he found a little odd. Blinkers wanted the comforts of a Hub. A blinker looking for the country life was an oddity.
“Intrestin.” Harley put his eyeset back in his pack. Most pilgrims wore their eyeset throughout the day to be in constant contact with the Link. Harley used his sparingly. He didn’t need that much information flooding into his mind. He certainly wasn’t interested in sharing his thoughts with the rest of the world.
He buttoned up his pack and slipped it on his shoulders, picked up his saddlebag and left the hotel in search of a ride.
The storm had done its damage. Water still trickled down Main Street, and there was now a small lake in what used to be the
parking lot of Wal-Mart. Harley knew as he approached the river things would get worse and hoped the flooding hadn’t washed away the road. There was a cottonwood tree toppled across the street, its fall broken by three old NG automobiles. Part of the old city hall had collapsed and there was the pitched roof of a building sitting on the lawn of the prehistoric museum. With shattered trusses bared and shredded shingles it looked like the skeleton of some great beast.
Harley walked two blocks west and stopped when he saw a young boy throwing rocks at the windows of a long abandoned clothing store.. The boy didn’t see Harley at first and when he did he was about to throw another rock. He didn’t throw it, but he didn’t drop it either.
“Whatcha lookin’ at?” The boy asked. He was wearing an eyeset, but his clothes were filthy and his hair was unkempt. He looked like he wasn’t more than 10-years-old.
“You.” Harley said.
“You a neand or somethin’?”
“No. Why do you live here?”
The boy shrugged. His T-shirt was thin and his collarbones were sharp little points beneath the material. “Folks don’t care for the Hub. Not our kind.”
Harley nodded. “They let you run around the city without a weapon. Aren’t you afraid of animals?”
“Ain’t no animals to speak of.”
“Cats? Rats?”
“Got me a stick to beat ‘em with. They ain’t so bad in the daylight. At night, they’re worse. Bunch of cowards. Cats and rats.”
“Is there any place in town where you can still get a hot meal?”
The boy wrinkled his brow. “If you’re not a neand, why don’t you just order something and have a stork deliver it?”
“I’d just rather not. Thought it might be nice to eat a meal with someone else. You hungry?”
The boy didn’t answer for a moment, and Harley knew he was on the Link. “Mom says I can’t, you might be a boy lover. But the McDonald’s is still open. Neands mostly eat there. Food’s not very good. You know where that’s at, McDonalds?”
Harley nodded. “I know.”
“K then.” The boy turned and started to walk away. He still hadn’t dropped the rock, but he did pick up his stick.
“I’m looking for transportation. A car, truck, motorcycle. Know where I can get one of those?”
“Everywhere that sells somethin’ like that closed.” The boy called back.
“Was there a place here that used to sell old cars?”
“Like antiques?”
“Like antiques.”
“There’s Krantz, down there. There’s still some cars in the lot, but they’re dinosaurs.” The boy pointed to a side street and then turned and ran away.
Harley adjusted his pack and walked where the boy had pointed. At the end of the next block, there was a squat building in the middle of an overgrown parking lot with a faded sign that read Krantz Classic Autos. The building looked like it had suffered some damage in the Rages but the dozen automobiles in the parking lot looked fine. They were all antiques, just like the boy had said. Harley found two that looked like they still ran on gasoline and several that ran on NG. What he was looking for was something electric that had been retrofitted to feed off an energyband. He found it in a dilapidated Ford pickup with a dent in the quarter panel. The tires were airless and still had good tread, but the most important thing was it was old enough that its system didn’t bond with the owner through the Link. That little bit of technology had singlehandedly eliminated most automobile theft in the world. What was the point in stealing a car if its computer system wouldn’t power up unless it recognized your Link?
Retrofitted with an electric motor that fed off a powerband, the old Ford didn't need Link access to run. Harley spent half an hour combing through the dealer's office until he found the vehicle's access tag. When he activated it, the truck drew power from his powerband and hummed to life. He threw his saddlebag and backpack in the passenger seat, secured his sword between the seat and arm rest and draped his holster and sidearm to the passenger seat head rest where he could quickly pull it free if needed. He pulled out onto the street and navigated around the debris of a dying city on his way to McDonald’s.
The McDonald’s was in the corner of the Creekview Center on the old State Route 6 business loop. The golden arches had been destroyed in the storm the evening before or perhaps an earlier storm, it was hard to know for sure. There were 20 or so cars in the shopping center parking lot; most of them had shattered windows. There were two cars in the McDonald’s parking lot and both looked like they had at least moved in the recent past. Harley parked the truck, pulled his holster free from the headrest and strapped it on as he opened the front door and stepped inside.
McDonald’s looked like it still served the public, as few as they may be. The tabletops were a little worn, but they were clean and music softly whispered in the background. The ventilation system was working and lightly tickled Harley’s short cropped hair beneath his hat as the glass door slid shut behind him. Everything appeared as it should be, but he felt a familiar prick of anticipation and adrenaline anyway. When he stepped up to the counter, he understood why.
The cook and the cashier were sprawled dead on the floor behind the counter. They were being eaten by zombies. There was a female and a male Wrynd and they were both ripping enthusiastically at the cook and cashier’s necks. The zombies were moaning and slurping and completely oblivious to Harley and the blood pooling around them as they ate. The woman looked to be in her mid-20s and while she tore at the plump cook’s fleshy neck her fingers were digging at his chest. Her fingernails were long and pointed and were doing a fair job of opening a hole in the dead man. She was after his heart. As Harley stood there, she stopped chewing and started to focus on tearing the dead man open. All Harley could see of her as she fed was her profile, but it was impossible not to notice under the blood and the gore dripping from her face that she was smiling and that once, a lifetime ago, she had been lovely.
Harley thought to turn around and slip back out before they noticed him but found that he could not. He cleared his throat instead.
“You two about done with your Happy Meals?”
The male zombie, a Wrynd who looked also to be in his 20s, stopped chewing on the dead woman’s neck and let his hands slide out from underneath her shirt, where Harley suspected they had not yet begun tearing away flesh, but more likely appreciating it. He licked his lips as he looked at Harley and Harley looked back into his black eyes with disgust.
“Can’t you see we’re eating?” The zombie screamed.
“I see it.” Harley put his hand to his sidearm and waited.
The male Wrynd lowered his head, then roared and leapt to his feet. He was very fast and almost before Harley could respond the zombie was standing on the counter and reaching clawed fingers toward his face. Almost. Harley drew his blaster and pointed it directly between the black eyes of the zombie and waited to see if he would need to pull the trigger. He didn’t…yet. Harley kept the blaster pointed between the Wrynd’s eyes and watched as reason seemed to blink back into the blackness of those eyes, and the zombie hopped back down and managed to smile.
“Is that you Harley?”
Harley holstered his weapon but kept his hand on it, just the same.
“Ralph.” Harley nodded to the young zombie. “Didn’t think you cared for fast food.”
The zombie named Ralph laughed and wiped some of the gore on the sleeve of his torn shirt. “Funny shit Harley. Ain’t that funny shit Nina?” He looked at the female zombie who was no longer feeding but still absently tearing at the dead man’s chest. “Fast food.”
Harley tried not to show his disgust, but it was difficult. He took two steps back, so he didn’t have to see the dead man and woman on the floor and what the zombies had done to them. Harley had a long list of things he hated. The Wrynd may not be on the top of the list, but they were damn close. Bunch of drug addicted psychopaths.
In every city on the planet and e
specially in the Wilderness you could find a Wrynd tribe somewhere, hiding in the shadows, preying on people stupid enough to go where they shouldn’t. Most people just called them zombies. While the Wrynd were a lot of things, one thing they weren’t was the undead. They were certainly alive, if you could call their existence living.
The Wrynd Horde was the result of the latest and greatest drug experiment designed to make humans more than humans. It had been floating around for 10 years or so, a synthetic drug rumored to have been developed to make a super human. It worked beautifully, but with some unfortunate side effects. Those under the influence enjoyed euphoria coupled with incredible reflexes and almost superhuman strength, but they also had a tendency to display erratic, extreme aggression and an insatiable desire to tear their opponents apart and feast on their flesh and blood. It turned the veins and sclera black. Society called them zombies, but they preferred the name Wrynd, after the inventor of the drug. Elias Wrynd had tried and failed in his formula to make a super human 520 times. Wrynd521 was his final attempt, final because he had injected himself with the drug and eaten his associates. Whatever idiotic secret government agency developed the drug shut down the experiment with Elias Wrynd’s death, but not before its formula was leaked on the Link. Now the drug was everywhere and the Federation didn’t seem too keen on eliminating the problem, which Harley found “intrestin.”
The Wrynd were more organized than you would expect psychotic, flesh eating, zombie drug addicts to be. They ran in packs, or tribes and each tribe had its own Wrynd king. They were autonomous, but swore allegiance to the High Wrynd King, who may or may not exist and may or may not organize and run the supply network. The drug was now simply known as ink because of its nasty side effects to the veins and sclera.
The Federation now classified the Wrynd as a cult, right along with the organized religions of the world. They didn’t use weapons, other than their teeth and nails, which they devoted a lot of time to refining. Most Wrynd went to a medprint to have new teeth and nails printed and implanted to make them more ferocious. They usually spent a lot of time dreaming up tattoos of something horrific they could paint across their bodies. Harley thought they were fools, but when they were high on ink, or in the throes of what they called the “flare” they were among the most formidable fighters he had ever seen. They hunted humans when they could but would attack anything and Harley had once watched a middle-aged Wrynd with a weight problem attack a mountain lion. It hadn’t ended well for the zombie, but he had held his own far longer than Harley would have thought possible. All in all, Harley was grateful they didn’t use weapons. It helped to level the playing field.