The march back to their cell was unreal. Brent felt that the walls around him would melt into some other setting, as they did in dreams, and he would be in college again, or in some deep, still wilderness or home with his mother and father. He waited for his surroundings to shiver into trees or mist or the sports motif of his boyhood bedroom wallpaper, but the supermarket remained obstinately solid, drearily real.
The smell of the place, after being outside for a couple of hours, was a fresh shock, and he kept seeing Jamie stabbing Vickers in the neck, over and over again. Ian walked beside him, looking just as shell-shocked as Brent felt, while two guards dragged Jamie through the corridor ahead of them.
Vickers’ murderer had apparently flipped his wig. He was just hanging in their arms, allowing his legs to straggle loosely behind him, bare feet turned inwards. They had changed him after bringing him inside, stripped off his clothes and put his boxer shorts back on him like they were dressing a child.
He babbled nonsensically the entire length of the building. “You gotta close,” he gibbered, making a sound that could have been laughter or maybe could have been tears. “That’s all that matters, when you get down to brass tacks. You gotta close. A man’s gotta put food on the table, you know. A fella’s gotta eat! You gotta CLOSE, man! You gotta CLOSE!”
Vickers was dead.
Brent repeated the words in his head, hoping they would latch onto something solid, but they remained disconnected, free floating, like sky lanterns drifting in the night sky.
He hadn’t realized how close he had gotten to the big ex-biker in the last three weeks or so. Despite their rivalry, they had become good friends. And now he was gone. Like Harold. Like Naomi. Like his mother and father. Like everyone he had ever known and loved. Dead and gone, devoured by the monster the Phage had turned the world into.
The guards carrying Jamie paused at the end of the corridor while a third sentry unlocked the door to their billet. Brent glanced into the women’s quarters as he waited to go in and saw that most of the women were staring in his direction. The women did not know what had happened outside, but they had heard the shouting and the gunfire, and they had certainly taken note of Vickers’ absence.
For some reason, their quiet watchfulness only increased Brent’s sense of unreality. They reminded him of department store manikins. Or ghosts.
A small group of women, with Maudelle at the center, were talking in low, rapid voices. Mourning had stretched Maudelle’s face like taffy. He imagined judgement in her eyes, and his cheeks flushed. He knew her condemnation existed solely in his mind, but he felt guilty all the same.
In a way, it was his fault.
Both men, Jamie and Vickers, had confided in him privately—Jamie in his paranoia, Vickers in his illness. Brent was the only one of the three who had actually known all the facts, and yet he had done nothing with that information, and now Vickers was dead and Jamie had lost his mind. He could only wonder if there were some part of him, some ruthless plotter in his subconscious, who had withheld his knowledge in the hopes that just such a thing would happen? But how could he have known that Jamie was about to crack? Brent was just as surprised as everyone else.
Survivor’s guilt, he decided. His brain was simply trying to justify his feelings of shame and remorse.
The zombies dragged Jamie into their cell. For lack of anything better to do with him, they dropped him on the floor and withdrew. A rifle prodded Brent between the shoulder blades and he walked inside. He gave Jamie a wide berth as he entered. He circled around to the card table as his cellmate slowly raised himself to his hands and knees.
Ian walked silently to the butcher’s station and vanished inside.
Brent sat, shook a cigarette from the pack sitting on the tabletop and lit it. He had developed quite a habit in the last few weeks. Then he realized it was Vickers’ pack, and he almost took the cigarette from his mouth. He forced himself to suck on it, felt the warm smoke fill his lungs, and exhaled.
Jamie was still babbling, but at least he had lowered his voice. He did not sound quite so crazy. “I did… what had to be done,” he wheezed. “It was him or one of us. Someone had to get his hands dirty. Someone had to close the deal.”
Brent started to reply, but before he could speak, Ian exited the butcher’s station. The young man was dragging Jamie’s mattress behind him. Jamie sat back on his knees and laughed, and Ian wheeled around and shouted, “You ain’t sleeping with us anymore. You’re banned from the bunkroom, motherfucker!”
Jamie laughed even louder. A witchy cackle. “Banned?” he cried. “You can’t ban me! We’re locked up in here together, dumbass!”
Ian turned his back and grabbed ahold of the mattress again. He tried to tug it the rest of the way from their sleeping quarters, but the door had swung shut and caught against it. The harder he pulled, the tighter the mattress got wedged in there.
“Get a load of that moron,” Jamie snickered, cocking a thumb in Ian’s direction.
“I agree with Ian,” Brent said, rising from the table. “You’re sleeping out here from now on. You can’t be trusted.”
Ian stepped back, eyeing Brent with gratitude as he approached. Brent held the swinging door open while Ian tugged the mattress the rest of the way out. Brent took the back corner in his hands as it slid past. Together they moved Jamie’s mattress into the center of the common area.
“I only did what needed to be done!” Jamie protested. He clambered to his feet, a pleading expression coming over his face. “Come on, guys! You know they were gonna get rid of one of us. Vickers was the oldest. It only makes sense!”
“You could have gotten us all killed!” Brent shouted.
Jamie’s attempt to justify his actions, his let’s-be-reasonable tone of voice, was more infuriating than his crazy-talk. Brent wanted to punch the real estate broker in the face. No, he wanted to wrap his hands around his throat and squeeze. He could feel his cheeks sizzling, the veins in his temples bulging out. “You know how those things act when they smell blood!” he exclaimed. “We’re damn lucky they ain’t picking us out of their teeth right now!”
“Cooley keeps them on a tight leash,” Jamie said dismissively. “You saw what he did to those guards that went all chomper on Vick—“
Brent did punch him then. His hand had balled into a fist, and that fist had flown out from the side of his body, before he even realized it was moving. He felt a burst of pain in his wrist and shoulder, heard the crunching sound of Jamie’s nose breaking, and Jamie went stumbling back against the partition. The wall that separated them from the women’s quarters shuddered down its entire length as Jamie collided into it.
“You broke my dose,” Jamie said, sliding down the wall onto his ass. He was cupping his nose in both hands, blood running down his neck and chest in a small torrent. “I thought we had a deal, man!”
“What do you mean, deal?” Ian asked. He looked from Jamie to Brent, nostrils flaring.
“We agreed to an alliance,” Jamie said. “Me and Brent. We was godda team up and take Vickers out, only I saw ad opportunity and took it before—“
“He’s lying,” Brent said to Ian, who was gawping at him in revulsion.
“I’m not!” Jamie declared.
“He wanted to make an alliance with me, but I said no.”
“And you didn’t tell Vickers?”
“I didn’t know he was such a lunatic!”
Ian eyed Brent suspiciously, then returned his gaze to Jamie. The sight of blood coursing down the man’s neck and chest seemed to convince him of Brent’s innocence. There was trust in his eyes when they rolled back in Brent’s direction. “What did he say to you?” he asked.
“He didn’t have a plan or anything like that,” Brent said. “He just wanted me to back him up if Vickers made a move on him, and he said he’d do the same for me if Vickers went after me. I never told him yes or no, but I thought it was pretty obvious I wasn’t throwing my lot in with him. I sure didn’t expect him to
shank Vickers in the yard.”
Ian nodded. “All right. That’s reasonable. We’re still good, Brent. You didn’t know what he was capable of.” He sneered down at Jamie. “None of us did.”
“Capable of?” Jamie snorted. “You’re trying to make me sound like some kind of comic book super villain. I’m not a bad guy. I just want to live!”
“Fuck you!” Ian shouted. “Vickers was my friend!”
“Fuck you!” Jamie shot back.
“No, fuck you!”
“Fuck you!”
Brent took Ian’s arm and pulled him away. “Come on,” he said. “This isn’t doing anyone any good.”
As they withdrew to the butcher’s station, Jamie began to laugh again, mocking them. “Go on, then! Be that way! You’ll see it my way eventually! You’ll both come around!” His voice became even more shrill as they neared the door. “What do you think you’re going to do? You’re locked in here with me! You’re both locked in here with me!”
He continued to yell after them for several minutes, but eventually he quieted. He got up and walked to the counter and washed the blood from his face and chest. “Broke my dose,” he grumbled under his breath. “Fucker broke my dose.”
21. Punishment
Brent and Ian tried to decide what to do with their murderous cellmate as Jamie sat outside at the card table, smoking and talking to himself.
“I’ll never be able to sleep knowing he’s in here with us,” Ian whispered, features writ large with anxiety. “I just won’t. Not after what he did to Vickers.”
“I feel the same way,” Brent sighed, “But I don’t see what we can do about it, bar killing him ourselves. And I’m not sure I’d want to try doing that. That guy is loco. He wouldn’t go down without a fight, and he’s just as likely to kill us as we are of killing him. He’s not big, but he’s crazy, and he’ll fight like a wildcat.”
“So what do we do?” Ian hissed.
Brent could only shake his head. “I don’t know.”
They were afraid he would try to buck them on his exile, attempt to force his way back into their sleeping quarters after nightfall, but after the women had come and gone, Jamie lay down on his mattress and sang himself to sleep. He sang some old pop tune from before the Phage, smoking and staring at the ceiling and laughing quietly to himself at odd intervals. He had pulled his mattress into the far corner of the common area, placing it next to the stainless steel counters that ran along the back wall, centered in the crosshatched light that angled in from the guard walk.
Maudelle, a young woman named Traci Hewlett, and a middle-aged woman named Bernice Mitchell had come to be serviced that night. Bernice submitted to Jamie so that Maudelle could confer with the other two roosters. She wanted to know what had happened in the yard that morning.
Ian and Brent described the events of the morning in hushed voices, passing the thread of their tale back and forth while glancing toward the door of the butcher’s station. Maudelle’s features seemed to grow longer and longer as the story progressed, and then they contracted. Her eyes, her lips, even the loose folds of skin on her neck, seemed to clench like a fist. “That dirty bastard,” she hissed. “Of course he would jump Vickers from behind! The coward!” She eyed the door with seething hatred. “I never liked him. Always thought he was hiding something. And I was right. He was hiding a black heart!”
None of the four had felt like coupling after that, but they had to do something. The guards would check the women at the door.
“Just, you know, do it with your hand,” Maudelle said to Brent, “and I’ll put it down there. They won’t know the difference.”
Later, as the women were processed from the room, Maudelle had turned to Jamie and said, “I believe it would be better for you if you killed yourself tonight. It’s not going to be good for you.”
Jamie had laughed at her as the guards escorted the women from the room, asking what she thought she could do to him. “You can’t do anything to me!” he jeered at her, sitting cross-legged on his mattress. “You’re nothing! Just warm meat with a uterus! Just try and fuck with me, old woman! Just try and see what it gets you!”
Brent had felt a little sorry for his cellmate, listening to him laugh across the room. It was the laughter of a man whose head is lodged firmly in the lion’s jaws.
Jamie was still giggling hours later, in between snatches of some song that was called either “Sweater Weather” or “Sweat Her Wetter”. Brent wasn’t sure which it was, only that he was pretty sure Jamie was singing it off-key. Not that he cared. Brent had been more into glam rock and psychedelic folk than the top of the pop charts back when there were still radio stations and working MP3 players in the world. He would take “Space Oddity” over “Hit Me Baby One More Time” any day of the week.
He wished he could speak to Muriel before he went to sleep, but he wasn’t going out there and talking to her through the wall, not with Jamie nearby, not the mood the guy was in. Guess it was bedtime then, but what to do about that? The door of their sleeping quarters didn’t lock.
“We need to sleep in shifts,” Brent decided.
“From here on out?” Ian asked.
“I don’t know what else we can do. Maybe he’ll come back down tomorrow. He’s a live wire right now, and I don’t feel safe sleeping with him out there.”
Ian nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s smart. I’ll take the first watch. When I get too sleepy to stay awake anymore, I’ll wake you up and you can take over for me.”
“That sounds good. You sure you’re not too tired?”
“Not right now. Not after today. Not with him out there.”
Brent crawled to his mattress and lay down. He pulled his thin sheet over his legs. “Give a yell if he does anything crazy,” he said.
“Oh, don’t worry, I will,” Ian replied.
Brent closed his eyes and saw Jamie stabbing Vickers in the neck with a sharp stick. It was a chunk of wood from one of the timbers he and Ian had loaded. He must have broken it off and tucked it into the sleeve of his coat. He saw Jamie clamp his palm over Vickers’ mouth, saw that sharp sliver of wood go in and out of his flesh like a sewing needle, opening the arteries in the biker’s neck. He saw Vickers slump down onto his hands and knees, blood squirting from the side of his neck.
Brent opened his eyes, his heart beating hard and fast in the dark. He could hear it pulsing in his ears, a fast whooshing sound.
Just relax, ignore it, think of something nice, he said to himself.
He tried to think of Naomi, the time they’d fooled around in the men’s room of the university library. It was the most exotic place they’d ever made love. He had taken her doggy style in one of the bathroom stalls while students and faculty walked in and did their business, then washed their hands and exited. No one had busted them, though he was sure a few eagle eyes must have noticed there were two pairs of legs in the middle stall, and all four shoes were pointing the same direction. But college bathrooms, he had come to find out, were a lot like Vegas. What happened in the washrooms…
Try as he might, however, Brent couldn’t summon Naomi’s face from the repository of his memories. The fantasy woman he was shagging so ardently in his imagination was a protean cipher, its form shifting from one moment to the next, each of them a reflection of the women he had serviced here in the camp, even Roo, which made him feel so terribly ashamed of himself he gave up trying to distract his mind with sexual fantasies.
It upset him greatly that he could not recall Naomi’s face. It had always come readily to him before, any time he needed to distract himself from his woes, any time he was lonely or afraid.
You haven’t forgotten her, he consoled himself. You’re just exhausted. Your brain is fried. She’s still in there somewhere. Your brain’s just too tired to sort through all the rubbish tonight.
It wasn’t much of a comfort, and he wondered how he would ever fall asleep without Naomi to distract him from his worries, but he drifted off before he was even
aware it had happened.
He was awakened by screaming.
Brent lunged from his bed, a yelp escaping his mouth. Across the room from him, Ian was scrambling up, too. Brent could tell from the guilty expression on the young man’s face—and the daylight slanting in the display windows-- that Ian had fallen asleep during his watch.
“What is that?” Brent exclaimed.
“I don’t know!” Ian cried.
They stumbled to the swinging door, burst into the outer chamber of their barracks. The sight that met them on the other side froze both of the men in their tracks: Jamie, clinging to the frame of the cell door, while several zombie guards tried to drag him from their quarters.
“Help me, guys!” the real estate broker squealed, his face twisted up in terror. “Help me! They’re going to kill me! Please, don’t let them have me!” He was crying, his knotted face red with exertion. The guards were pulling on his arms and legs, pulling his hair. One of them was trying to peel his fingers from the doorframe before he pulled the whole shoddily constructed partition down.
“Stay where you are!” one of the guards snapped, pointing a rotten finger in Brent’s direction. “Not one more step!”
“Please, guys,” Jamie sobbed, as they peeled the last of his fingers from the doorframe. “I don’t want to die!”
Brent raised his hands in the air, palms out. He tried not to grin at the doomed man, but he couldn’t help himself. After a moment, Ian mimicked the gesture.
Jamie’s red face quaked with rage. “Fuck you then! Fuck you!” Spittle flew from his lips as he cursed them, and then he was gone. Brent and Ian listened to them drag the man down the guard walk.
On the other side of the partition, the women began to chant. “Fresh meat!” they shouted, over and over. “Fresh meat! Fresh Meat!” At first it was just one or two voices (one that sounded suspiciously like Maudelle), but those lone voices were quickly joined by another, and then several more, until it sounded like every single woman in the supermarket was chanting “fresh meat” at the murderer.
Cattle (The Fearlanders) Page 12