Then Carpetbag pulled a book of matches out of his hip pocket. The zombie knew what they were. She yowled some more with that ruined mouth. Carpetbag struck a match and touched it to her.
She burned. She burned like you wouldn’t think flesh and bone could burn, so we all had to hop back to keep from catching fire ourselves. I suppose zombies aren’t exactly flesh and bone any more. Whatever they are, they’re fire’s friends.
“Now we know how to kill ’em—well, to end ’em,” I said.
Carpetbag Booker whistled between his teeth: a low, flat note. “My mama learned me that zombies’d burn when I was jus’ a chile,” he said, wonder in his voice. “I ain’t thought about that for years an’ years, but I ain’t never forgot it, neither.”
“Good,” Wes said. “Good if we can make ’em hold still to get lit up, anyhow.”
“We’ll worry about that later,” Harv broke in. “We got out to help these folks, remember?”
Well, we did what we could. Harv and Wes knew as much about first aid as any ballplayer is likely to. They were the ones who tended sprains and sore arms and the like. They could bandage cuts and even splint up a fireman’s busted ankle and a woman’s broken arm. They couldn’t do anything for the poor son of a gun who was gunning the Model A when it rammed the fire engine. He’d gone straight through the windshield and busted his neck on the engine’s red-painted iron side.
Some of the Crawdads gave them a hand. The rest of us stood guard with our bats. If the zombies came at us one at a time, we could mob them and end them before they hurt us bad. And we did end a couple like that.
But then a whole wave of people—live people, human people—rolled down on us. “Run for your lives, you dummies!” a man shouted as he ran. “They’re right behind us!”
And they were. I don’t know how many zombies there were. Probably not so many as I imagined I was seeing then. The only thing I’m sure of is, there were too many of ’em for us to deal with ’em the way we had been. And if we couldn’t deal with ’em like that, they were gonna deal with us instead.
“Harv!” Fidgety Frank called. “Harv, we’ve got to get out of here right this minute. If we don’t, we’re gonna end up zombie food.”
“Can’t leave these folks here, or else they will,” Harv answered.
“Put ’em on the bus, then,” Frank said. “We’ll do it some kind of way. We—” He broke off then, because two more zombies were coming at us. Job Gregson broke the leg on one of them, so it could only crawl. Carpetbag lit it up. Half a dozen of us smashed the other one down before it could do us much harm. But more and more of the horrible things were running toward us.
Some kind of way is about how we did it. I’d thought we were crowded before, with Crawdads and us on the bus. It was way worse now. If any zombies had got on, we couldn’t’ve fought ’em off, on account of we couldn’t have raised our arms to swing a bat.
Harv made a U-turn on Broadway. He saw he couldn’t keep going north. Whatever happened at our boarding house was gonna happen without us. Same with the Crawdads’ hotel. We’d sort all that stuff out later, if we stayed alive long enough to do it.
We did make better headway going south. Now we were in the flow, not trying to buck it. Harv blared away with the horn, clearing people on foot out of the bus’s path. Sometimes they’d move aside in a hurry. Sometimes they wouldn’t, and he’d come about that close to running them down.
And then he let out a whoop. I was standing close enough to the front to let me sorta see out the windshield. Those two shapes ahead of us weren’t people. They weren’t live people, I mean. They were zombies, out to turn live people into dead ones.
“Prepare to ram!” Harv sang out. He might have been at the wheel of a battle cruiser, not a semipro ballclub’s bus. I just had time to grab the seat next to me before he hit those zombies. They went flying. I don’t suppose he killed them or ended them or whatever you want to call it. They didn’t catch on fire or anything. But they got pretty well smashed up. No matter how much they might want to go on killing live people after that, they weren’t going to be able to go anywhere to do it.
After a mile or so, he turned off of Broadway. I saw why a second later—there was a hospital down the side street he turned on to. Lanterns and flashlights and wills-o’-the-wisp lit it after a fashion. Outside the building stood cops and ordinary folks. Some had pistols, some carried rifles, and one guy cradled a Tommy gun. They wouldn’t kill zombies the way they would with ordinary people. Break arms or legs and you’d do some good, though.
Out the window, Harv called to them: “We got hurt people we need to drop off!”
I wonder how close he came to getting shot. A long-haired, bearded fella in a baseball suit—Lord, he was still wearing his cap—driving a bus with some brand new dents in the front end? They might’ve figured him for a zombie … or they might have started banging away without any figuring at all. Easy to be jumpy right then, mighty easy.
But they held fire. A burly cop with a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve came up. He looked us over, a revolver in his hand. Then he said, “You guys were in the Post tournament. I seen you play once.”
“That’s right,” Harv said. “Can you let us get to the entranceway to unload these poor folks?”
“Yeah, come ahead.” The cop turned around and shouted to his friends. Then he told Harv, “Once you do, keep heading south. Put some distance between you and this—this craziness.”
“I’ll do it.” Harv drove up to the hospital entrance. He took everything slow and easy, so he didn’t look dangerous. With so many frightened men with guns around, that seemed like a real good idea.
A nurse and a couple of doctors in white coats came out to give us a hand with the firemen and the people from that car that hit the pole. One of the docs had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I’m not sure he remembered it was there; it was almost singeing his lips. His eyes looked a million miles away, as though he’d seen too many horrors all at once. Well, on that black night I guess he had.
“Operating by candlelight,” he said to nobody in particular. He sounded as dazed as he looked. “The lights went out, and we fell back a hundred years. If we get a generator, or a wizard who can call light…”
I don’t know if they ever did or not. We shifted around on the bus now that it wasn’t quite so jam-packed. Harv pulled away from the hospital. We headed south, the way the cop told us to. Like everybody else, we were trying to get away.
* * *
We drove down US 85 to Castle Rock, thirty miles south of Denver. That took us most of the night. I have never seen a road so jammed as that one, not in all my born days. I guess we went faster than the zombies did, because none of them broke into the bus and tore us to pieces. But I don’t know why they didn’t. All of Denver was trying to get away down a highway that wasn’t wide enough for half of it.
Folks used both sides of the road to go south. That helped some, but less than you’d think. For quite a while, till they blocked northbound traffic farther south still, people who didn’t know about the zombie riots were still happily coming north, bound for Denver. They were happy till they ran into our southbound wave, anyhow.
Some of them ran into some of us for real. Harv drove past some nasty head-on smashups that blocked half the road and made traffic even worse than it was without ’em. If one of those wrecks had blocked the whole highway … Well, in that case you’d likely be looking at some other yarn right about now.
It was getting light, and we were just about to Castle Rock, when he pulled off the road and onto the shoulder. Off to the side was a field, or maybe you’d call it a weedy meadow. “I think we’ve come far enough,” Harv said. “We can maybe grab a little shuteye here and try to decide what to do next. House of Daniel is supposed to play in Greeley today, and if I can work out how to get there from here—”
“And if the zombies aren’t tearing Greeley to pieces,” Wes broke in.
“Yeah, that, too,” Har
v agreed. “If we can get there, and if the town’s still all in one piece, we’ll have ourselves a game.”
“We got train tickets from Denver back to Pittsburgh tomorrow mornin’,” Quail Jennings said. “Don’t look like we’ll be able to use ’em. Have to talk to the railroad, see how much extra they gonna charge us to change things.”
“They shouldn’t charge you a dime,” Harv said. “Not your fault you aren’t there. Not your fault the trains outta Denver aren’t on time, either.”
“You right, suh,” the Crawdads’ manager answered. “You right, but they ain’t gonna care. Any time they think they kin screw some extra money out of somebody, they gonna do it.”
Anybody who’s ever had to rearrange a train ticket knows about that. It’s not about whether the railroad’ll screw you. It’s only about how hard. That kind of thing runs all through too many different kinds of business. Maybe it’s not such a wonder the zombies rose up. Maybe it’s a wonder the people didn’t rise up with ’em.
Vampires suck the blood out of people in Russia, they say. Over here, the railroads and other outfits like ’em do the job instead. That could be why the vampires got the zombies boiling, if that’s what they did. They were jealous. They wanted the chance for themselves.
I wasn’t worrying about that when I got out of the bus. I was worrying about whether the zombies had gone crazy everywhere at once, not just in Denver. And I was worrying about my stuff, back at that boarding house we couldn’t get to. But the devil with stuff. Long as I was alive and able to play ball, I’d bring in a little cash, and sooner or later I’d buy more stuff.
We had a few blankets and things in the bus. Some guys lay on those. Some just flopped in the weeds. And some stood guard over the rest, in case the zombies came that far after all.
I was one of the guard-standers. I felt tired, yeah, but way too keyed-up to sleep. As the sky got brighter, you could see the smoke coming up from the north. Some of that smoke might’ve been from my burning stuff, or from Merchants Park. I couldn’t do anything about it any which way. In my baseball uniform, with my bat at the ready like a gun, I could imagine I was a soldier on sentry-go.
Or I could till some real soldiers in khaki and some cops in dark blue marched past us, heading north. Two or three of the soldiers had metal tanks on their backs and things like hoses in their hands instead of Springfields. “What are them contraptions?” asked a Crawdad who was standing watch with us.
I had a notion, but I wasn’t sure enough to say. Wes was: “Those are flamethrowers. When I was a green kid, I was in on the very end of the War to End War. Believe me, if anything’ll settle a zombie’s hash for good, it’s one of those babies.”
My punchy thought was No, it’ll turn ’em into hash, and overdone hash at that. I didn’t come out with it. You get really tired, it’s like getting drunk. All kinds of stupid stuff bubbles up inside your head. If you’re even halfway smart, you leave it in there and don’t show it off.
We did a couple of hours watching. Then Wes woke up some of the guys who were sleeping so we could get some rest. I didn’t know if I’d get any rest when I stretched out on the ground, but next thing I knew my face was on top of a weed and somebody was waking me up. It was Azariah.
“We’re gonna get rolling,” he said. “Harv wants to go down to Castle Rock and then head east on this road that runs that way.”
“Okey-doke.” I yawned. My stomach growled. “Maybe we can find something to eat, too.”
“Maybe so,” Azariah said. “C’mon.”
Traffic had thinned out some when the bus got back onto US 85 again. We made it into Castle Rock in about forty-five minutes. Castle Rock was a tiny town. All the folks coming down from Denver just swamped it. Not enough food, not enough places to stay, not enough anything.
The Pittsburgh Crawdads got off there, anyway. Quail Jennings gravely shook Harv’s hand. “I don’t thank you for beatin’ us, but I thank you for your kindness afterwards,” he said. “They got phones here, an’ a train station, an’ a CC office. We kin get back east from here. May take a while, but we kin.”
“You sure?” Harv said.
“I am,” Jennings answered. “Had plenty o’ time to think it through. Take a while, cost some money, but we’ll make it back where we belong.” His players nodded.
“Good luck to you, then,” Harv said, and they shook hands again.
Carpetbag Booker got off, too. “You only sign me through the tournament, Mistuh Harv,” he said. “You know that.”
“I do know that.” Harv nodded. “But I was hoping you’d stick with us longer once you saw the kind of ball we played.”
“It ain’t the kind of ball, suh.” Carpetbag sounded a little embarrassed, but he plowed on anyway: “Easier bein’ with my own kind—easier on everybody. Don’t git me wrong. You been fair with me. I ain’t never gonna say nothin’ else. Still an’ all, though … I gonna head East, too, only I don’t aim to go’s far’s them Crawdads. Gonna pitch fo’ the Kansas City Regents fo’ a spell.”
“Well, I wish you luck, too,” Harv said. Since Carpetbag wasn’t under contract, what could he do but make the best of it? “Maybe you’ll play for us again, or maybe we’ll take our licks against you on the road.”
“Could be. You travel all the time, an’ there ain’t hardly no good colored team that don’t,” Carpetbag said. “I would be pleased to go with y’all for a while some other time, an’ that’s a fact. Good luck to you, too. We licked the Crawdads. We licked ’em right out o’ their spikes.” He said that loud, so his old Pittsburgh team could hear.
I wondered if they’d jump him when he hopped down from the bus, but they didn’t. Away he went, head up, stride bouncing, never looking back. All by himself, he was bigger than any team he played for. Maybe he wouldn’t be if they ever let whites and coloreds play against each other in the bigs, but maybe he still would, too. He was one of a kind, Carpetbag Booker. I’m gladder than I know how to tell you I got the chance to play with him, even if it was only for a few games. Yeah, I’m from Oklahoma. I’m still glad. You don’t like it, lump it.
* * *
From Denver to Greeley, if you go from one to the other the straight way, is around sixty-five miles. From Castle Rock, if you don’t pass through Denver to get there, you have to drive around the other three sides of a big rectangle: east, north, and then back west again. The long way around? You bet.
Harv didn’t care. Most of the refugees from Denver kept going south, along the eastern edge of the Rockies. When we headed east instead, we could make halfway decent time. And we were getting farther from Denver with every mile we drove, just the same as they were.
Colorado is a funny state. The western part is mountains. The eastern chunk, though, it’s all prairie. Once you get a little ways away from the Rockies, you could’ve figured you were back in Kansas. Wheatfields and cows, that’s what it was. A little cool and a little dry to be Oklahoma, but it wasn’t all that different from the part of the country I came from.
We got stopped by two roadblocks before we got to Limon. That was where we’d start the northbound leg of our rectangle. The first block was cops. They looked over the bus to make sure we weren’t hauling any zombies or vampires. When they didn’t find any, or any coffins, they waved us on.
Eddie tried a laugh, but it sounded shaky. “Remember that bull session in New Mexico?” he said to me. “Ain’t gonna see vampire outfielders flying after fly balls in night games any time soon.”
“Well, that’s what they get for firing up the zombies,” I answered. We didn’t know for sure that was what had happened. But we’d heard it, and it seemed to make sense, so we believed it.
The second roadblock was about ten miles farther east than the first. It wasn’t the police. It was farmers and herders. The roadblock was hay bales and a tractor. The men carried hunting rifles or shotguns. A couple of them just had pitchforks. What good a pitchfork would do against a zombie, I can’t tell you. Maybe they made the
fellas toting ’em feel better, anyway.
Those cops had been men doing a job. The farmers were scared out of their wits. They made us all pile out of the bus. Then they searched it like you wouldn’t believe. If we’d given them the least bit of backtalk, they would’ve shot us. They might have been sorry about it afterwards, but that wouldn’t have done us any good.
“Them things, they’re out there, and they’re comin’ to get us!” one of them said. He wasn’t wrong, exactly, but he wasn’t exactly right, either. Didn’t seem to me there were enough people out here to draw either rampaging zombies or hungry, twisted bloodsuckers, but what did I know?
I’ll tell you what I knew. I knew I had a beard and longish hair in country where the menfolk didn’t wear ’em. That was plenty to keep me quiet. If a couple of them hadn’t heard of the House of Daniel, maybe even been to a game or two, we might’ve had a tougher time than we did.
Wes bought gas in Limon before we turned north. “Been a lot of people comin’ through here. I’m almost out of fuel,” said the fellow who ran the station. “Heard me a pile of crazy stories. Any o’ that stuff true, or do the city folks have the vapors again?”
“Some of it’s true,” Harv said as he paid him. “I’m glad you’ve still got the gasoline.” Limon was lucky to have one gas station. If it had run dry, where would we have got more? I had no idea. By the way Harv sounded, neither did he.
North of Limon, we came to another roadblock. This was more farmers, not cops. They didn’t seem sure whether to block cars going into Limon or the ones coming out. To them, Limon was a big city, almost like Denver. It was a place bad things could come from, even if they weren’t too clear on what kind of bad things those were.
“Gotta keep the devils away!” a farmer said. “I put some silver shot in with my double-aught buck.”
I’m sure silver shot won’t do anything special to a zombie. I’m almost sure it won’t do anything special to a vampire, either. But, while I’m plenty dumb for all ordinary use, I’m not dumb enough to argue with a spooked farmer not quite aiming a double-barreled shotgun at my belly button.
The House of Daniel Page 25