Cattle (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  “Even if the herd just stretched a couple miles, we’re still talking about a hell of a lot of chompers.”

  “Oh, yes. Tens of thousands, at least.”

  “So you think I should warn the zombies?”

  Muriel laughed bitterly. “You probably shouldn’t ask my opinion on that right now,” she said. “Right now, I couldn’t care less if they swarmed over us like a plague of locusts.”

  “Muriel…” Brent murmured, leaning his head to the partition. “I’m sorry about… you know.”

  “I know, sweety. I’m sorry, too.”

  Two of her finger’s slipped through the chink in the wall, and she touched his brow lightly.

  They withdrew.

  “I’m going back to sleep now,” Muriel said. “I place my fate in your hands.” He heard her shift quietly around on her bedding, and then she said, almost as an afterthought, “If you’re going to warn the zombies, you should tell your friend, the redheaded one. He’s working here in the facility now, as a guard.”

  Her words bolted through him like an electric shock. “What?” he gasped. “Muriel! What did you say?”

  Muriel’s lips returned to the hole in the wall. “Your friend, the one who kept them from eating you that day at the farmhouse, he started working here last night. He was stationed at the head of the guard walk, with one of the regular guards. You didn’t know?”

  “No!” He felt like he couldn’t breathe, as if a great invisible hand were squeezing him like a Koosh ball. “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Oh, yeah. I saw him up close both times. Heavyset man, great frill of kinky orange hair around his face. Bushy beard. He’s working here now. He was wearing one of their green uniforms. He was stationed by the door to Hinkle’s office. The… uh, lobby, I guess you’d call it. It looked like they were training him for guard duty.”

  “Okay,” Brent said, almost too stunned to speak. “Thanks, Muriel. I’ll… I’ll see if I can talk to him. Good night.”

  “Good night, sweety.”

  Brent paced around his cell for a while, too excited to sleep, too confused to concentrate on anything meaningful, like cleaning or even a game of solitaire. Once again, Muriel’s mysterious redhead had reared his undead head. Of course, it could just be a coincidence. Muriel’s ginger zombie might not be Harold, but Brent didn’t think so. Coincidence could only be stretched so far before it snapped, like a piece of chewing gum drawn out from clenched teeth. His zombie benefactor had to be Harold, but if he was, what kind of Harold would he be? Would he be like the others, driven to brutality by unremitting hunger, or would he be like the zombie who had tried to free Muriel, still in possession of his finer human sentiments?

  Only one way to find out, Brent thought.

  26. Ghost

  When he got up the next morning, Brent loitered in the common area, doing busywork so he could keep an eye on the guard walk. He tried to be sneaky about it so the guards on duty didn’t get annoyed or become suspicious that he was up to something. He wiped the counters, rearranged the few items they were allowed to keep in their pen. He even scrubbed the dried blood off the wall and floor where they had bludgeoned Jamie to death. He paced. He smoked, leaning nonchalantly against the counter as he talked with Ian and the kid, glancing surreptitiously into the guard walk whenever he noted activity among their jailors.

  It wasn’t long before the guard on duty noticed his suspicious behavior.

  “Here, what are you looking at?” the zombie snarled when it spotted Brent peering in the guard walk for the third time that afternoon. It was the cyclopean zombie that had killed Jamie with the ballpeen hammer, the one who had the disgusting habit of picking its own peeling flesh from its face and eating it.

  Brent had hoped the creature would be less apt to notice his loitering, seeing as how it had only the one eye. The creature usually stood with its empty eye socket turned toward the men’s quarters while it watched the women with a less than benevolent leer on its rotting face-- not that it could ever do anything with them. Zombies were impotent, Muriel had told him. Though one of them would decide to give it the old college try every now and then, their dicks were as dead as the rest of them. The only thing they ever accomplished was traumatizing the poor women they tried to rape.

  Just another reason they were so cross all the time.

  “Well?” Cyclops demanded, glaring at Brent through the chain link.

  “I’m not looking for anything,” Brent said. “I’ve just been restless. I’d like to go outside.”

  He wasn’t lying. He was restless, and he did want to go outside, but he didn’t believe the zombie gave two shits how he felt or what he wanted. He was simply giving the creature something to deny him.

  “You heard what Cooley said,” Cyclops grinned. “You’re never going outside again. Not after that stunt your buddy pulled last time.”

  “Jamie wasn’t my buddy. And it’s not my fault he stabbed Vickers,” Brent whined. “If you guys let us outside, I promise to behave!”

  “Fat chance!” Cyclops said, and when Brent opened his mouth to object, the creature snapped: “Don’t ask me again!”

  Brent pretended to be intimidated, which seemed to satisfy the creature. It allowed him to continue to check on the guard walk, too. He just had to affect an expression of terrible longing, and the guard was content to let him gaze wistfully from his cell, thinking he was yearning for a walk outdoors.

  It enjoyed his suffering.

  Jealousy, Brent thought. Pure bitterness and jealousy. They hate us. They hate us for what we are, for what we have: life, living.

  Perhaps God had visited the Phage on mankind, Brent thought. To punish them for what they’d become: consumers. Greedy, gluttonous, insatiable consumers. His parents had believed that. They had believed the Phage was the wrath of God spoken of in Revelations, and Brent was not too certain they were wrong. The Phage was certainly Biblical in scope. Old Testament Biblical.

  After their brief exchange, Cyclops leered at him, its teeth like old chipped ivory, every time he went to the door and gazed out. It picked at the sores on its face and ate the bits that came loose, laughing silently at him the whole time. Brent’s expressions of longing would probably have given it a raging hard-on if the creature were still capable of such a thing.

  The Phage didn’t turn us into monsters, Brent thought. It merely stripped away our pretenses, ripped off our masks and revealed us for what we truly are.

  Brent wasn’t sure what kind of shifts the zombies worked. He had never really paid much attention to their comings and goings. They did not tire like living humans did. He knew that from his years in the wild, running from them, observing them from hiding. He presumed they worked in eight hour shifts, as the guards changed regularly throughout the day; he’d just never bothered to watch them very closely.

  Shortly before dark, he noticed that a new guard had come to relieve Ole Cyclops. This zombie was short and stout, with relatively fresh looking flesh and short-cropped sandy blond hair. It could have been mistaken for one of the living if not for the pallor of its skin and the smattering of pitted sores that stippled its cheeks and neck.

  Brent was loitering near the door when shift change occurred and heard Cyclops say to Sandy (that wasn’t its real name, just the nickname Brent had decided to give it): “Keep an eye on 404 tonight. He’s been acting funny.”

  “404? What’s he doing?”

  “Keeps pacing the cell. Watching the guard walk.”

  “Think he’s up to something?”

  “Ah, who knows? Says he wants to go outside.”

  Sandy laughed. “I’m sure he does!”

  Their exchange made Brent nervous. He had hoped to look for Harold without attracting any attention. People who attracted attention there tended to get dead—like Jamie, who was probably ground chuck by now (gave a whole new meaning to the word “manwich”, didn’t it?). Then Ole Cyclops said something that made Brent’s heart jump in his chest: “You trainin
g the new guy tonight?”

  “Not tonight,” Sandy said. “He’s with Gracey tonight. He’ll be down here tomorrow night, but Brooks will be training him. I’m off tomorrow night, and it’s about time, too. I’ve been working overtime since Heath’s leg fell off. He won’t be back until they make him some kind of prosthetic.”

  “We’re all falling apart now that they’re rationing the food,” Cyclops groused. “I’ll be glad when the council gives up on this cockamamie idea of farming the meat. They just can’t make enough babies to keep us fed. We don’t try something new soon, the Phage is going to eat us from the inside out. I haven’t had fresh meat in three days.”

  “It’s better than before,” Sandy said. “I remember what it was like before. Always on the hunt, trying to run the meat down myself, and they fought back. I got two holes in my guts from trying to run them down by myself. No, this is a lot better. This is progress.”

  “Maybe,” Cyclops said, though it sounded more like “agree to disagree” than maybe. “Well, you have a good night, Hank. I’m heading home. Gonna soak these rotten feet in some Epsom salts.”

  “Skin still coming off ‘em?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Death’s a bitch, man.”

  “It sure is.”

  Rather than blip himself immediately on Sandy’s radar, Brent sat down with Ian and the kid and played some cards. Ian had been trying to teach the kid how to play poker. He wasn’t making much progress, though, mainly because Max had never played anything other than Go Fish with his grampa’s old deck, which had been missing several cards. Communication was another barrier. Like Muriel had said, the kid and his girl seemed to have a language all their own. Plus, the kid didn’t like losing, and he had a terrific temper. Thankfully, Ian found his fits of rage amusing. At one point, Max actually banged his head on the table in frustration.

  “I thinkee’s just fibbing stuff up!” the kid complained to Brent.

  Brent checked their cards. “Sorry, kid. Three eights does beat a pair of jacks.”

  Max threw his cards down with a cry of disgust.

  Brent sat in on several hands, losing every one of them (mostly to keep the kid pacified, and thus, quiet), then announced in an overly loud voice that he needed to stretch his legs for a minute.

  He rose and casually circled their cell, glancing up the guard walk when he strolled past the door. Thankfully, Sandy was not looking in his direction. The zombie was staring into the women’s quarters with a rapacious leer that put Ole Cyclops’s ogling to shame. Brent didn’t know if the guard wanted to fuck them or eat them—or both.

  Brent looked to the far end of the guard walk, squinting in the dimness, and felt his breath catch in his throat.

  There, at the far end of the corridor, dressed in an olive guard uniform and talking to another zombie, was his old friend Harold!

  For a second Brent didn’t believe his eyes. Didn’t want to believe them. He wouldn’t wish such a fate on his worst enemy. But there was no mistaking. It was Harold. Short, plump, that wild mane of frizzy red hair. He would recognize the man anywhere. And he ought to have. He had travelled with the man for the better part of two years.

  Harold Killian was undead, and he was working as a guard at the facility!

  Brent tried to cover his surprise by stretching his arms over his head, but Sandy (aka Hank) had finally taken notice of him. “Now what?” the zombie growled, turning toward Brent.

  “Nothing,” Brent said, trying to look innocent. He returned to the card table and sat, his mind racing.

  Ian and the kid were arguing over their hands-- the kid had a full house, Ian a flush-- but Brent barely heard them. He was thinking about Harold, and what the man’s presence might mean for him there.

  Muriel had said that Harold kept the Reapers from eating him when they captured him at the farmhouse. That had to mean his friend still felt emotions like loyalty and friendship, right? Not just hunger and anger and jealousy, like the rest of the undead. But they had been separated so long—months now! Plenty of time for Harold to acclimate to his new existence. Perhaps he wouldn’t be so fond of Brent now. Perhaps he had changed, became like the others, bitter and cruel. Brent didn’t know how the transformation worked, why it made the undead so hateful and violent. Perhaps they were all nice when they initially reawakened, and the unrelenting hunger drove them to madness, drove them to be vicious and cruel. The only way he’d know for sure was by talking to his friend, but that didn’t look like it was going to happen any time soon. Harold was working the gate of the men’s quarters tomorrow, or so Sandy had said, but he would be with one of the other zombies. Harold was in training, like any other profession. It might be weeks before Brent got a chance to talk privately to his old friend.

  But according to the kid, the giant herd of zombies would be there in four days.

  Brent didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what he could do.

  Tomorrow, he thought. I’ll figure something out tomorrow.

  Harold was too far away to see clearly tonight. In the dim lighting, Brent could only just make out his face. But Harold would be closer tomorrow, and Brent was pretty sure that if he saw Harold up close he would know if his old friend was still his old friend.

  It seemed important to him that he knew, herd or no herd.

  Meanwhile, he would interrogate the kid some more, see if he could find out anything else about the giant herd the boy had supposedly seen. For some reason, he couldn’t help thinking the kid was lying about it, or exaggerating.

  But the most important part was this: it seemed there was an opportunity to escape somewhere in all these unrelated events. He could sense it congealing in the back of his mind, like some unformed creature in a primordial tidal pool. He was not sure what kind of beast it would be when it crawled out on dry land, but he was certain it wasn’t just wishful thinking, and the possibility made his heart sprint in his chest.

  Escape…!

  27. Plan

  Brent dreamed that night he was back in high school. He was playing football, out on the field, his parents in the bleachers cheering him on. It was a bitterly cold November night, the moon a pearly bright button in a sky so deep and starry a person could almost imagine infinity. It was the last game of the season, the last game of his high school football career, fourth quarter, just seconds left on the clock, and the score was tied 28-28.

  This is it, Brent thought. This is the one that counts.

  It didn’t. Not really. He had already gotten a scholarship to Western Tennessee University. Only it did count, because Brent believed that every game counted. What was the point of playing if you didn’t do your best? That was a philosophy his father had drilled into his head growing up and it was a philosophy he had adopted as his own, not because it was his father’s but because it made sense to him.

  Dale Tucker, their quarterback, addressed them in the huddle. “All right, guys. Let’s give it all we’ve got. We don’t score a touchdown this play, we’re going into overtime, and I for one am tired of freezing my balls off tonight.” He called the play then—a center rush-- and they formed up on the line of scrimmage.

  “404! 404!” Tucker bawled, and Brent shifted to his left

  The center snapped the ball. Tucker took three quick steps back, faked a pass, then turned to his left and shoved the ball into Brent’s arms. Brent tucked the ball against his body, lowered his head and shot off like a bottle rocket.

  The end zone was just twenty yards away.

  Defensive tackles crested toward him like a tsunami of human flesh, all of them impossibly big. He couldn’t recall what school they were playing tonight, but some of the tackles were two or three times his size, way too big to be playing high school football.

  The defensive tackles smashed into the floodwall of his offensive linemen with snarls and grunts, their momentum violently arrested. Brent threaded his way through the narrow passage created by his linemen. The opposing team’s middle linebacker slipped pas
t Brent’s defenders and launched himself at the running back, but Brent lowered his body and crashed into the massive linebacker’s chest, then twisted away to the right in a flawless spin move, realizing only after he had eluded the linebacker that the player was dead, the face behind the grill of his helmet rotten and lashing with worms.

  No time to think about that. No time to think at all. The crowd in the bleachers was going wild, cheering him on, pushing him toward the end zone with the kinetic energy of their combined voices, their combined excitement, a thrumming, throbbing roar.

  His mother and father were on their feet, yelling right along with everyone else. His father was dressed in a heavy brown coat and long scarf. His mother was waving a pennant with their team mascot, a hornet, emblazoned on the bright yellow triangle. Cheerleaders were leaping and kicking on the sidelines, their bare legs slim and tan and muscular. And there was Muriel, leaning over the rail and waving him on.

  “Go!” he could see her screaming. He couldn’t hear her in the roar of the crowd, but he could read her lips. “Go! Go!” she yelled, waving him on.

  He saw Roo there beside Muriel, jumping up and down behind the railing, and behind her, the other women confined with them in the Manfried breeding facility. They were all cheering and waving yellow pennants.

  He knew it wasn’t right. They shouldn’t be there at his ball game. He wouldn’t meet any of them for another thirteen or fourteen years. Roo was just a toddler when he was a senior in high school. The Phage was still several years away. The world was how it used to be: alive, intact, and sane.

  But of course I’m dreaming, Brent thought, and then it all made perfect sense to him.