by Joe McKinney
“Yes?”
“All those vehicles have radios. My guess is a great many of the people in our community have radios as well. Possibly TVs, too. I want all of that confiscated, Aaron. I want anything that can be used to acquire lies spread by our government confiscated. Can you handle that for me?”
“Absolutely,” Aaron said. “I’ll have it done tonight.”
“Excellent. Shall we go up together? I’d like to address the Family now that we’ve got our new public address speakers installed.”
Aaron nodded happily, and together, they made their way up to the Pavilion.
CHAPTER 31
They were in the back of the bus, all of them huddled around a map of West Texas they’d laid out on a card table.
Kyra and Robin were on Jeff’s left. Kyra was looking better. Her lips had some color, and her eyes didn’t look as rheumy as they had before, but she had gotten a lot of sun, and the burn was starting to show in her cheeks and on her forehead. To Jeff, it looked like she wasn’t out of the woods yet.
Jeff said, “I say we head over here, to Van Horn.”
“No,” Kyra said quickly. It was the first time she had spoken since they’d all gathered around the map and her voice was little more than a croak. “No,” she said again. “You can’t go there. That’s where I came from. The infected, they were all over the place.”
“Well, yeah,” Colin said, “but you got out, and you’re…Well, you know.”
The others looked at him.
“I’m just saying,” he added quickly, showing them his palms. “I mean, we’ve got to go somewhere, right? It’s here, in this little town, or it’s to one of these other places where they have thirty or forty thousand people.”
Kyra was quiet for a long time. Colin looked at Robin, then at Jeff, and shrugged.
He said, “I mean, right? If she got out, there can’t be that many of them in town.”
Robin had her arm over Kyra’s shoulder. Kyra shook herself free and turned toward Colin. Only then did they see that she was crying.
“My uncle died getting me out of town,” she said. If she’d enough strength to scream she probably would have. As it was, she managed only a harsh-sounding bark before collapsing back in on herself.
Robin put an arm around her and whispered her name.
Kyra let herself be taken in and held.
“You can’t,” she said from under Robin’s arm. “Please. Don’t go back there.”
Kyra tried to rise to her feet and couldn’t. Robin rose and grabbed her under her arms and tried to lift her. Jeff said, “Here, let me help,” and took Kyra’s other arm.
Together, they walked her to a bed in the back and made her comfortable.
“Is she going to be okay, you think?” Jeff asked.
Robin nodded. She pulled a blanket up under Kyra’s chin and waited silently.
Kyra fell asleep almost immediately.
Robin and Jeff stood there side by side, watching her sleep. Jeff could feel the heat coming off Robin next to him. Her arms and face were glistening with sweat, and her bangs were soaked. She had picked up some sun also over the last few days, and her cheeks were glowing with it.
She caught him looking at her and took his hand and held it as they walked back to the map table.
Colin was saying, “I don’t see that we’ve got any other choice. We need supplies. That means groceries, bottled water, medical supplies, even a few more guns and some ammunition. Where else are we gonna get that stuff?”
“He’s right,” Robin said.
Katrina looked troubled. She had her hand on top of Colin’s and she turned and looked at him. “But what about what Kyra said?”
“What else are we going to do?” he countered. “We need those supplies if we’re going to wait all this out.”
“Maybe we can park the bus outside of town, and one or two of us can go in on foot,” Jeff said. “You know, sort of a scouting party.”
“That’s a good idea,” Robin said.
There was a lull in the conversation as they sat and stared at the map. Jeff took a bottled water from one of their coolers and drank from it. They still had water and a decent amount of food, but he knew that it wouldn’t last forever.
“Hey, do you hear that?” Robin said.
They all looked up, listening. It was a deep but distant rumbling, and at first Jeff wasn’t sure what it was. But as the sound got closer, he knew.
“Motorcycles,” Colin said.
“Yeah,” Jeff agreed. “Sounds like a lot of them.”
He went to the front of the bus and peered out the windshield. A few hundred yards away, but closing fast, was a team of motorcycles and two pickups. They were trailing a long cloud of yellow dust, and it was hard to get an accurate count, but he saw at least eighteen of them.
As the convoy got closer, he could see the men were armed.
He ran back to the others and said, “Okay, we need to hide the girls.”
“What?” Robin said.
He told them what he had seen. By the time he was done, the motorcycles had surrounded the bus and they could hear voices outside. Somebody was banging on the door.
“We have to hide them,” Jeff said to Colin. He turned to Robin. “Those guys, if they recognize you…I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
He was hoping she wouldn’t argue, and she didn’t. She seemed to grasp his point immediately, and she turned to find a hiding spot with the others without another word.
More pounding on the door.
They heard voices outside, yelling.
The bus had hidden luggage bins along the driver’s side under the seats. The girls climbed into the bins, and Jeff, as an afterthought right before he closed the bin door, tossed in an armful of bottled waters for them.
The riders were kicking open the door now. Another moment and they’d be inside.
Jeff kneeled down and smiled at Robin. “You guys be quiet in there, okay.”
Robin didn’t speak. She rose up and kissed him on the mouth.
Then she slipped back inside.
When he stood up and turned around, there were men coming through the black partition.
They all had guns.
One of the men pushed his way past Jeff and went back to the bar, where he stopped and looked around.
“Just you guys?” he said.
“That’s right,” Jeff said.
The biker stared at him. “Bullshit,” he said. “What’s with all these chick clothes you got?”
“We had our girlfriends with us when we left L.A. They didn’t make it.”
The biker reached down and picked up a black lacy thong. “Huh, too bad. Where’re you guys headed?”
“Van Horn,” Jeff answered. “We were gonna get some supplies and then try to make our way north to the Colorado safe zone.”
The biker nodded. “Ain’t nothing much left of Van Horn. Pretty much the whole town’s been killed or turned into one of them fucking zombies.”
He went to the bar and held up a bottle of Grey Goose vodka. He seemed impressed.
“You boys are traveling in style,” he said. He poured himself a glass of vodka and took a drink, grimaced, then smiled. “Yes, sir, in style.” He put the cap on the bottle and tossed it forward to one of the other bikers. “Me and my friends here, we were down around Acuna when all this shit happened. Man, you should have seen Mexico. We watched it from across the river, and I ain’t never seen anarchy like that. Anyway, we made it as far as Van Horn and realized that most normal folks pretty much done bugged out. Ain’t nothing around here but them fucking zombies, and we took care of that.”
“You got rid of the zombies in Van Horn?” Colin said. “All by yourself?”
The biker laughed. “Wasn’t that big of a deal. But yeah, we did it all by ourselves. The town’s pretty much quiet now.” He looked at the other bikers and a wicked smile passed between them. He said, “Well, it ain’t exactly quiet.”
Jeff groaned inwardly. This was going downhill fast.
“So you guys are running things there now?” Colin said. “In Van Horn, I mean.”
The biker turned to Colin. “Yeah.” The word wasn’t exactly a question, but even still, he didn’t quite seem to know what to make of Colin.
Jeff did, though. Colin the deal maker. He knew what was about to come out of Colin’s mouth, and he hoped it wasn’t going to get them all killed.
Colin nodded at Jeff and said, “My friend and I were on our way to Las Vegas when this started. We were planning on heading into the desert and partying with our girls until it blew over.”
“Yeah,” the biker said. Again the word was not quite a question.
“Well, listen, if you guys are running things in Van Horn, maybe you can help us. Maybe we can help each other.”
“How are you gonna help us?”
Colin smiled. He was gaining speed now, in his element. “When was the last time you and your friends did some serious high-grade acid? I’m not talking that bunk shit some idiot cooks up in his basement. I mean the real stuff, pharmaceutical grade.”
“I’m listening,” the biker said. “But boy, you’d better start getting to your point real fast.”
“We’ve got enough top-shelf dope on this bus to keep you and your friends tripping for the next week. I got fifteen sheets of acid with a hundred tabs apiece. And I’ve got six hundred hits of X, too. I see you like that Grey Goose. I can even sweeten the deal with four cases of that.”
A grin was spreading across the biker’s face. He had been carrying a shotgun across his shoulder, but now he swung the gun down and fingered the safety behind the trigger guard.
“And you want to trade me what for all this righteous dope?”
“We need supplies. Enough groceries and water to get us up near the Panhandle.” Colin paused for a moment, just long enough to let it sink in. “What do you say?”
The biker stared at him. The smile was gone now. He said, “Where’s this dope at?”
“In my bag over there,” Colin said. “The red one. Behind the bar.” He nodded at a red nylon duffel bag near the biker’s feet.
The biker reached down and picked it up, put it on the bar, and opened it. Inside were several large sheets of acid sandwiched between pages of aluminum foil and a couple of Ziploc baggies of ecstasy. Then he pulled out a pillow-sized baggie of marijuana and whistled.
“You didn’t say nothing about this.”
“I figured if you guys were down around Acuna, you probably had some of that already.”
The biker opened the baggie and stuck his face inside and took a deep, nasally breath.
“Damn,” he said. “We’ll take this shit, too.”
He stuffed everything down inside the duffel bag and walked back to the front of the bus.
“Okay,” Colin said. “Sure. Do we have a deal?”
“Possibly,” the biker said. “For now. One of you guys get behind the wheel. You can follow us into town.”
Jeff drove. Colin sat beside him. Two of the bikers had gotten out of the pickups and were riding behind them. They were both armed with shotguns and pistols.
IH-10 split off just ahead, with the main road continuing to the east while a smaller surface street jogged slightly to the north. They were being caravanned into town, flanked to the front and the rear by the pickups, while the motorcycles swarmed all around them. Jeff slowed the bus to keep time with his escorts, and together they rode into the main part of town.
At first, Van Horn looked just like every other desert town they had passed through. There were a few shabby, dusty buildings huddled into the dirt, and row upon row of worn-down-looking trailers off in the near distance.
But that was where the similarities stopped.
The street was lined with poles that had been jammed into every available patch of dirt. Each of the poles had a severed head impaled on it.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jeff said. The bile rose in his throat, but he closed his eyes and forced it back down.
When he opened them again, the impaled heads leered back at him with gaping mouths and wide, surprised eyes.
“What in the hell happened here?” Jeff said.
“I don’t like this,” Colin said.
Ahead of them, the town opened up into a small square. There were motorcycles parked along the curbs and a bonfire burning on the lawn. Bikers were milling around the square, drinking and laughing. Beyond them, a crowd had gathered around a gazebo, and it looked like that was where they were being led. In a way, it reminded Jeff of the giant keg parties he’d attended at CU Boulder before he’d dropped out of law school.
“Colin, this sucks.”
“I know. Just keep going, okay?”
“You don’t sound very sure.”
“I’m not, Jeff.”
One of the bikers was waving them over to the curb. Jeff turned the wheel and coasted into position, the brakes squealing as they came to a stop. Someone else beat a fist against the door, and the bikers behind them spoke for the first time.
“Showtime, fellas. Let’s go.”
They were led to the gazebo. Someone had secured barbed wire around the outside of it so that it was completely enclosed. Inside was one of the infected, a woman in a blue dress that was shredded on the top so that only a scrap of it still went over her shoulders. The rest draped down over her hips, wet and crusty with dried blood. There were cuts and bite marks all over her chest and face.
The bikers stood around the edges of the gazebo, teasing her. As she tried to reach for them, they were throwing cigarette butts and beer cans at her.
Somebody had backed a cattle truck up to the far side of the gazebo, and Jeff could see more of the infected inside it.
“What in the hell are you guys doing here?” Colin asked.
The bikers assigned to guard them just laughed.
“Just having a little fun,” one of them said.
Suddenly, a cheer went up from the bikers surrounding the gazebo. Jeff and the others turned to see what was going on and saw a man being pulled along a path to the front of the gazebo. He was wearing a cop’s uniform, and he had been beaten badly. A thick rope of bloody spit hung from his busted mouth, and his eyes were bruised and puffy. His hands were secured behind his back with handcuffs.
“Oh, no,” Jeff said.
One of the bikers opened a door to the gazebo and they threw the cop inside. He tripped and fell, landing on his face.
Another cheer went up from the bikers.
The cop seemed to grasp what was happening, but he was having trouble getting to his feet. Jeff groaned at what he knew was about to happen.
Slowly, the cop rolled over onto his knees.
The zombie in the blue dress turned toward him and moaned. Her hands came up, the fingers clutching at him. The cop seemed to be having a hard time lifting his head, as though the bikers had tied an anchor around his neck. He lifted his blackened eyes up toward the approaching zombie, and the sight of that blood-soaked woman must have been enough to wake up his last bit of strength, for he managed to get one foot under him, and he rose to his feet. Then he ducked his head and rammed his shoulder into the approaching zombie’s chest, knocking her backward into the gazebo’s wall. They both fell to the ground as a cheer rose from the bikers.
The cop rolled onto his back, his face twisted in pain and rage. But the zombie was unharmed. She flipped herself over onto her stomach and slowly got to her feet again. The cop tried to crawl away from her, but he was too badly hurt, and when she fell on him, his screams didn’t last long.
Colin turned and threw up in the grass next to Jeff.
Jeff looked away.
The biker they’d tried to deal with on the bus was standing over by the gazebo crowd. He had Colin’s red duffel bag open on a bench in front of him and he was showing the contents off to some of the others. One of them said something and they all laughed. Then the biker turned to Jeff and smiled. One of the others
opened the aluminum foil and took out a black perforated gelatin sheet. He tore off a big corner of the sheet and handed it to the biker from the bus.
A moment later, the biker was standing in front of Jeff and Colin. He looked at both of them in turn before finally settling on Jeff. He held up the corner of the gelatin sheet. It looked like about ten hits. “This shit’s pretty good, huh?”
Jeff didn’t answer.
“Let’s see how good it is. Open your mouth.”
Jeff didn’t move.
Something hard bumped up against the back of Jeff’s head. He turned just enough to see that it was the muzzle of a shotgun.
“Open up,” the biker said.
Jeff opened his mouth and the biker jammed the sheet inside.
“Close your mouth.”
The shotgun bumped Jeff’s head again and he closed his mouth around the tabs.
“Swallow it,” the biker said.
Jeff forced it down.
“Good boy.” Then he pointed to Colin. “I want this one right up front where he can see.”
The guards pulled Colin away, and Jeff was left standing on the grass next to the biker.
“Why are you doing this?” Jeff said. “It makes no sense.”
“You sound like you’re a pretty smart guy,” the biker said. “You go to college?”
Jeff nodded.
“Where?”
“Harvard.”
“Harvard? No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Wow. Hey, that’s something. Me, I didn’t go to school. I got my GED while I was doing ninety-six months in Huntsville for check washing. You know what that is?”
“No idea.”
“It’s where you use a chemical solution to wash the ink off people’s checks. After that, you change who it’s made out to and the next thing you know you got yourself a check made out to whoever your ID says you are. Simple. Course it doesn’t really matter now, does it? Nobody’s gonna be writing checks anytime soon, right?”