Marco started unbuttoning his shirt. The crowd seemed to know where this was headed, and they stopped glowering at Hemingway and cheered and hooted for Marco instead.
“I was lost!” said Marco, undoing each button with stage musical flourishes. “I was loveless! I was weak! And when a walker got into the camp, I wanted to cower and hide. One walker, can you believe it? But then a flame entered my heart and grew into a fire. I charged that evil beast and fought it hand to hand—”
The front of his shirt was now completely unbuttoned. He reached back and whipped it off in one furious movement.
“—and it did this!”
Everyone in Keats’ group gasped, while everyone in the crowd frowned and shook their heads as if reliving a great tragedy. From Marco’s left shoulder down to his wrist was a deep groove of brownish pink scar tissue. It looked like half his arm was missing.
“Lord, what pain. And I had no idea they were so strong! I struggled, kicked it with my legs, but it just tore into my arm like a drumstick. When they finally got it off of me, its face was so red with my blood that I couldn’t help but faint. My last thought was to hope they’d put a bullet in my brain so I wouldn’t come back as one of those things.
“But then, many hours later, I woke up. The doctor who stitched me up, may she rest in peace, said she did it out of instinctual obligation. No way I would survive. But I did. They tied me up and kept me under guard for a whole month, and I never turned.
“It was the flame that kept me alive. The flame of love.”
There was a commotion as the doors to the church opened and two huge men, Cochise among them, escorted a struggling figure down the center aisle. The captive’s hands had been bound, and a black hood covered his head.
“And my love protects you, too,” said Marco as his men brought the captive before him. “That is, if you’re willing to accept it.”
He yanked the hood off the prisoner. It was Flak. Gone was his sexy demeanor. He looked panicked.
“What the fuck is this all about?” he said.
“There may come a time when our love needs to be tested,” said Marco. “John ‘Flak’ Watt, you’ve been a good soldier. You work hard. But last night, something happened that tested your commitment. Your love.”
“Goddammit, it was a stupid, little thing! Nothing happened!”
Lady jumped up and began to whine and scratch at the floor.
Flak’s eyes widened. “Tell him!” he yelled towards the crowd. “Tell him I didn’t hurt you!”
The door to the church basement opened. A man walked backward out of it while holding a pole at waist-level. At the other end of it was a walker.
The walker was not one of the years-old rotters that could barely crawl through the weeds; it had turned recently and looked to have been a pretty good-sized man before death arrived.
Jamie stood up. “He’s right!” she said. “He doesn’t—he doesn’t deserve that! I punched him, and he stopped!”
“Dear girl, you’ve got a heart of gold,” said Marco. “But Flak here will be perfectly fine since I’m confident that his love is pure.”
Marco stepped down and sat in one of the first pews. Like a well-directed stage play, several groups of people came out from side doors and positioned the wooden structure that Keats thought was a statue base. In fact, it was a fighting ring.
Flak now stood ten feet from an undead beast that was missing half the skin on its face. He could see its teeth grinding to dust as it snarled at him.
“Since you’ve been a fine lieutenant,” said Marco, “there won’t be any handicaps. Just one on one, you and the former Mr. Lane here. Remember, you love, and you are loved. A bite means nothing to one whose love is pure! I’m proof of that.”
Before anyone else could protest, Marco stepped aside and nodded to the guard. He twisted the pole, unlatching it and setting the creature free.
Flak was a good fighter. His favorite weapon was a billy club he used with deadly precision.
But now he was bare-handed. He had no room to maneuver, to duck and dodge. He expected the walker to charge straight at him, which it did, but he wasn’t expecting the quickness with which it seized his hair and chomped down on his shoulder.
His scream pierced the silence of the church. Many of the onlookers covered their eyes. Marco, however, yelled, “You can still get him! Pop your leg back!”
Amazingly, Flak heard him and swung his leg back like a mule. He knocked the walker off balance and threw him to the ground. Then, while grasping his wound, he stomped on its head until it collapsed into mush.
Blood streamed from between Flak’s fingers as he pressed down on the bite and looked out into the crowd with a look of fear. “Help,” he said.
“I have helped you,” said Marco, ducking into the ring. He clasped Flak by the shoulder. His lieutenant winced and screamed. “The love I’ve shown you will heal that wound.” Then, to his soldiers: “Take him to rest.”
An older woman in one of the pews stood up and began clapping rhythmically. She sang a hymn, one that Keats, never much of a churchgoer, didn’t recognize. But apparently, it was a popular one, as nearly everyone in the church joined her in song:
God’s got a great big love
We got a great big God
Gotta love God cause we gotta stay good
So, we gotta open up our arms
Duck and Katie clapped as well. Keats nudged Hemingway and started clapping. The rest of the group followed his lead.
***
There were probably lots of cults in the world nowadays, thought Keats as he sat in his shelter’s living room. Seeing the dead rise and eat the living reinforced a belief in the supernatural, and who knows how many people were just going through the motions of prayer and devotion in order to stay alive?
But Marco’s people wore expressions of genuine love. Maybe they were right. Keats had never seen anyone survive a walker bite, not without amputation.
He went out the front door. Sitting in an old car was their minder/guard/spy. He nodded to him and walked out into the street.
It was twilight. The air was not much cooler than the day’s, and the mosquitoes were beginning their shift. He saw a person on a bicycle and two people working in a garden, but most of the population seemed to live closer to the center, near the church.
After cutting through a couple of yards, he came to the fence that encircled the compound. It was about ten feet tall and topped with barbed wire. A hundred yards down the line was a guard tower made out of an old bucket truck. Someone inside it stood with a rifle on his hip.
From far in the woods came a scream. It was high-pitched and forced, like a song off key. It was not the scream of someone caught by a walker, but it was unsettling nonetheless.
A Rottweiler ran up from the brush beyond the fence and bashed against it. He growled and snarled at Keats but didn’t bark.
Keats squatted to get eye level with him. Before Lady, he hadn’t seen a dog since before the outbreak. If there were any stray packs, they stayed far away from people.
This wasn’t a stray. His coat was clean and black, his body stout and healthy.
“How do you survive out here, buddy?” said Keats.
The dog bashed the fence and gave a low, quick bark.
Keats wished he had a treat for him. He stood up and was about to leave when something seized his arm.
***
Convincing Bart to come in the house and repeat what she’d said to Keats in the woods wasn’t easy.
“You think I want the love test?” she said. “Or sent to Siberia?”
The information, Keats told her, needed to come from a long-time resident. He wasn’t sure everyone would believe it if it were just him.
Eventually, she agreed to do it. Nervously, she stood in front of the group and said, “It wasn’t a walker that bit Marco. I was here when it happened. There was this guy, William. He was always strange. One day he just lost it. Chomped down on Marco’s arm like it
was a turkey leg.”
“I’ve seen people alive one second and turn the next,” said Tommy. “Maybe he had a stroke and died right there, standing up, then turned.”
“When they yanked him off, he was still babbling and talking about the end of days. He wasn’t dead.”
“You said ‘they’,” said Pike. “Why hasn’t anyone else told the truth about what happened?”
“They’ve all gone away, one by one. They went out on runs and didn’t return. Or a walker surprised them in their sleep.”
“No witnesses,” said Hemingway. “Except for you.”
“I was upstairs in one of the houses,” said Bart. “I saw it from the window.”
“You’ve never told anyone else?” said Pike. “Why us?”
“Because I want to get the fuck out of here. The people here are as mindless as the things out there. You saw them, how they break into fucking song when someone gets their neck ripped into.”
“You could play along if that’s all it was,” said Pike. “We all could. It’s not like Flak was completely innocent.”
“You think that was about her?” said Bart, pointing to Jamie. “Flak didn’t get the love test because he tried to rape you. He got it because he violated one of the biggest rules here. Marco gets first dibs on all the females.”
Jamie’s face curled like the news made her sick.
“Well, fuck that, then,” said Pike. “We’re busting out of here.”
“They’re not going to let you leave like that,” said Bart. “But there’s another way. You know what Siberia is? How they keep walkers away from the fence? It’s a shack out in the woods. If you mess up, but not bad enough for the love test, you get sent there to make noise all day and draw walkers.”
“Jesus,” said Keats. “How do they keep them from busting down the door?”
“It’s reinforced with concrete slabs. The only way in is through a storm drain access. Goes to a hatch 100 feet away. The people there get a supply run every month.”
“You think he’d trust us to make the run?”
“If you earn it,” said Bart.
“So,” said Pike, “we stick around for a couple months until he gets to know us and trust us. No big deal, except for the women get raped.”
“There’s another way,” said Bart. “The love test.”
***
Early one morning, about a year after the outbreak, Hemingway was sleeping in a small cave on the side of a cliff when something hit him in the face. Startled, he sat straight up and nearly fell out of his hole.
Twenty feet below him stood a scar-faced man holding a handful of stones. He had two other people with him, and they all looked the same: Filthy flannel shirts, holey jeans cinched with rope, and gaunt faces.
“Sorry,” said the scar-faced man. “A rude way to wake up, I know. My name’s Teddy. This here’s Curtis and Bobby.”
“Why shouldn’t I take my rifle and make a new entrance on the top of your head?” said Hemingway.
“Sorry again, but we got it already.” Curtis held up Hemingway’s assault rifle by the barrel.
Christ, thought Hemingway. They must have scaled the cliff and gotten it while he was asleep. That’s what he got for going too long without rest—he slept so hard he didn’t hear the danger, and now it was too late. But then why—
“Why not just kill me, then?”
“We’re not like that,” said Teddy. “But we do need to survive. So, we figured, you look pretty healthy. Maybe you can show us where your food stash is?”
“Well,” said Hemingway. “I’d rather share what I got. Lemme see, I think it’s over there—”
The edge gave way as Hemingway shifted his weight. He tumbled down the side of the cliff in a whirl of rock and dust and slammed into the ground face first.
“Oh, shit,” said Teddy, as he walked over. “I think he’s dead.”
He was not. Hemingway slowly pushed himself up, hung there like a drunk, then suddenly vise-gripped Teddy’s windpipe, crushing it. Then he limped over to Curtis, who was trying desperately to figure out the AR-15. Hemingway yanked the gun from his hand and clobbered him with it. In his peripheral vision, he saw Bobby running at him with a knife, so he spun his leg around, tripped him, and stomped his face in.
The fall hurt Hemingway more than the fight afterward. He had to camp out at that cave for a week before he could fully move again, and in the meantime, his former robbers turned into walkers and nearly spotted him.
Hemingway told all this to Keats, Pike, and Tommy the morning after Bart’s revelations. He said it matter-of-factly as if relaying directions to a store, and he either didn’t care about or notice the looks of disquiet on his friends’ faces when he told them how brutally he had killed those people.
“And since then,” said Hemingway, “I’ve killed others, and I couldn’t even count all the walkers I’ve put down. So, this love test? No problem. But it’s afterward that worries me. What if he won’t let us make the supply run?”
“Bart says it’s a shit job,” said Keats. “Marco needs volunteers for it.”
“What about Katie and Duck?”
“We need to talk to them,” said Tommy. “See what they think about what Bart said.”
“I think Katie’s love is pure,” said Hemingway.
“We owe it to her to find out for sure,” said Keats, “but I think you’re right. She’ll probably be staying.”
“The best way,” said Hemingway,” would be to do some counter surveillance, cut a guard’s throat, and rip through the fence. But we’ll try your way first.”
***
Behind the townhome, Jamie sat in a swing set. It squeaked lightly as she slumped forward and wrote in a notebook on her lap.
Keats took the swing next to her. “What are you writing?”
She didn’t respond right away, which made Keats feel more like an annoying parent than a rebel leader in a post-apocalyptic zombie stronghold. He regretted invading her privacy, but he needed to let her know about their plans.
“Diary?” he guessed.
“God, no,” she said. “Like it or not, I won’t ever need help remembering this place. It’s fiction. I’ve had ideas in my head for as long as I can remember.”
“And now you’ve finally got time to write them down.”
She shrugged. “We could get eaten tomorrow. I wanted to leave something in case things ever get back to normal.”
Keats realized that she’d grown a few inches taller since he rescued her a month ago. Her jeans now stopped above her ankle, so he made a note to rummage through the upstairs rooms for some clothes.
“Can I read some?” he said.
He expected her to decline, but she was eager to share it. The opening scene featured a police officer driving his car underwater.
“It’s good,” he said, “but you know they couldn’t do that, right?”
“Really?”
“But it’s a story, so you can make it do what you want.”
“I want it to be realistic, though,” she said, suddenly angry. “There was this idiot at the shelter where I was raised. I knew he was full of shit.”
Keats watched her scribble some angry notes about her story. “You know we have to leave here,” he said.
“No kidding. I don’t want to get passed around like a toy, and I don’t want to worship that freak.”
“Can you pretend to, though?”
She looked down and kicked the dirt as she swung over it. “Are you going to make me hang out with him?”
Keats hesitated. “Not by yourself,” he said. “But if you can manage to hide your disgust a little bit...”
She jumped off the swing and held her hand out impatiently. Keats realized she wanted her notebook, so he gave it to her, then she stormed off.
Great, thought Keats. I’m just like a parent, only with less authority.
***
It was going to be Pike’s job to talk to Katie and Duck and see if they could be sa
ved from the savior.
She had her doubts about Katie, who looked eager to peel her jeans off for Marco already. But Duck’s case was tougher. He was intelligent, but he didn’t turn away from the horror inflicted upon Flak in the church. Should she write them both off as lost causes, or did she have a moral obligation to tell them what Bart had revealed about the town’s leader?
For now, she was going to train. She stood in the yard, no birds in the trees as the cool wind portended a change in weather. The clouds looked sick and congested as she snapped her spearhead from her sleeve into her palm while at the same time slipping a wooden pole from a sling on her back.
In less than a second, she’d attached the spearhead to the pole. She swung, jabbed, and slashed her spear at invisible enemies around her. She backflipped onto a low-slung tree branch. Improvising her routine, she believed, was key to staying sharp.
But sharp she wasn’t. She slipped and fell to the ground. She was lying on top of her spear when she heard the crunching of leaves as something moved through the brush. She tried to spring to her feet, but it was too late. A large silhouette appeared above her.
It was Cochise, his bald head slick with early rain, his smile a showcase of ruinous teeth. “Those are some moves you got,” he said. “You do more than just fight?”
***
When he saw the walker, Hemingway got scared.
Of course, he’d seen and killed plenty of them, but he took his body armor for granted. Now, dressed only in jeans and tee shirt, he thought about how it only took a small scratch to become infected.
The walker itself unsettled him as well. It was Flak.
Dried blood matted his golden hair to one side of his head. His ravenous eyes glimmered with what looked like tears. If there were such a thing as a soul, it still clung to him, mournful and furious.
“You can see his sadness, can’t you?” said Marco. “I tried hard to love this man.” He gestured for Flak’s handlers to position him into the fighting ring.
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