Mutated

by Joe McKinney

  “Come on, Nate.” Her voice was smooth as ice cream.

  He glanced back at Richardson for just a moment, then at the girl, her breasts rising and falling slightly with each breath, her dress clinging to her erect nipples. He swallowed the lump in his throat and followed her.

  But no sooner had he made it through the flap when something heavy hit him at the bundle of nerves at the base of his neck. His legs turned to water beneath him and he slumped to the ground, looking up in shock at the two men who had materialized out of nowhere. He tried to raise a feeble hand to stop the second blow, but it did no good. His vision turned purple, then black.

  When he came to there were hands all over him, jerking his body from side to side as they dug into his pockets.

  “Hey,” he groaned. But he was unable to move. Somebody’s knee was in his back.

  The girl stuck a knife in his face. It was old and rusty, a double-edged stiletto with the handle wrapped up in duct tape. Nate had seen a lot of knives in a lot of hands while living on the road these last six years or so, and he doubted she knew how to use it. But of course that didn’t matter. The blade was only inches from his eyes and he couldn’t move his arms. He was a Thanksgiving turkey about to be carved.

  “Please,” he said, hoarsely.

  “Fuck you, sweetie,” she said. Her teeth were grinding together, her lips flecked with spit. The come-on he had seen in the bar was replaced by viciousness now. She looked like a hungry dog, ready to fight for its dinner.

  He felt the knife dig into the soft flesh of his cheek and a scream welled up in his chest. He was about to let it loose when the tent flap behind him snapped open. The two men grunted as they stumbled over Nate. In the confusion, Nate scrambled away from the blade and sat against a tentpole a few feet away. Richardson was standing at the tent flap. One of the men who had jumped Nate climbed to his feet just as Richardson reached into the waistband of his jeans and pulled out a black leather blackjack.

  The man let out a honking noise like an angry goose as he charged Richardson. But he never finished his attack. Richardson cuffed a backhanded swing across the man’s face, catching him in the chin with a noise halfway between a slap and the clink of heavy beer mugs knocking together.

  The man sank into unconsciousness.

  The other man watched his partner fall. When he looked back at Richardson, the blackjack was already connecting with his groin. He doubled over with a rush of air, falling to his knees. Richardson followed the blow with a downward slap to the back of the man’s head that put him flat on his face.

  “Fucking asshole!” the girl shouted.

  She charged Richardson, the knife waving wildly in front of her.

  It did her no good. Richardson punched her in the face with his blackjack and she sank to her knees, her hands cupped over the bloody bloom that had been her nose just a moment before.

  “Youth fucking bathtard,” she said.

  The blood was pouring out between her fingers, her face ruined.

  “Shut up, bitch,” he hissed, bringing the blackjack down on the side of her ear.

  Nate watched the girl sink into a heap on top of the tent skirts. He stared at her, then slowly became aware of Richardson standing above him, watching him. And behind Richardson was a heavyset woman, the same one he’d been speaking to on the opposite side of the bar. She was looking at Nate like he was a dog that had just rolled in something nasty.

  “Are you okay?” Richardson said.

  “Huh?” Nate said.

  Richardson pointed to the side of his head. “Your cheek . . . you’re bleeding there.”

  Nate touched his own face. His fingers came away bloody.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think.”

  Richardson nodded. “This is Gabi Hinton,” he said, pointing to the old woman next to him. “She and her husband own a trawler. I think they might be able to help us.”

  “That remains to be seen,” the woman said. She turned to leave, spreading the tent flap open. “You and Odie there want to follow me?”

  The Mississippi River moved sluggishly by. Sylvia Carnes and Avery Harper knelt in a stand of tall weeds next to the water, watching the commotion up on the docks. Soldiers from Ken Stoler’s compound, men Sylvia had known for years, were patrolling the docks with AR-15s at the ready. She knew they were looking for her, and she knew what would happen if they were found.

  She pulled Avery close.

  “What are we going to do, Sylvia?”

  “Shhh. Just keep quiet.”

  A man named Justin Roth stopped a few feet from the weeds where the two women were hiding and pulled the walkie talkie from his belt. “Yeah, this is Squad Nine, go ahead.”

  The voice on the other end was broken, but Sylvia did hear it say something about trouble over at the bar.

  “Squad Nine, copy,” said Roth. “We’re on the way.” Roth motioned to his men and then to one of the other squad leaders. Stoler’s soldiers, most of whom looked bored and itching for a fight, perked up at Roth’s command. From the weeds, Sylvia and Avery watched as the men huddled together, and then moved into the middle of the trading center.

  “What’s going on?” Avery asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sylvia said. “But I don’t like it.”

  Nate followed along behind Richardson and the old woman, feeling a little numb from his close encounter with death. The way that girl had looked at him, he had no doubt she’d wanted to drive that knife into his eye socket. Even now that the danger was behind him he could still feel his stomach churning with a charge of adrenaline. He scanned the faces that had just a few minutes earlier looked at him with the unabashed contempt one reserves for the stupid and was surprised to see that none of them would meet his gaze now.

  Nate shifted his gaze to the old woman. She wasn’t that old, Nate realized, just seemed that way at first glance. He guessed she was probably over sixty or thereabouts. She had large, deeply tanned arms and a bushy mess of hair that reminded Nate of smoke rising from her head. Her bottom wriggled and shifted beneath her brown linen skirt. But despite her weight and her age, she moved with confidence through the crowd, and as he watched it zipper apart for her he was reminded of a mama bear herding her cubs.

  That’s it, he thought, smiling. She’s Mama Bear.

  She led them out of the main section of the bar and into a dark, back corner. Nate followed with an odd sense of déjà vu. They saw a man sitting in a cloud of smoke, his white-bearded face illuminated momentarily by the orange glow of a lit joint. Right away, Nate caught the earthy, sweet smell of marijuana. Inhaling deeply, he sat down next to Richardson.

  Gabi leaned down and gave the old man a kiss. He was older than her, and even more rugged. His beard was bushy and unkempt, his dark eyes lit with the severe confidence of a lifelong sailor. He had both of his huge arms on the table, and to Nate his fists looked like bricks.

  “Hello, Sugar,” he said. He winked at his wife as he gave her a pat on her prodigious butt.

  She giggled as she slid in next to him. “Get your mind out of the gutter, you dirty old man. These guys want to talk business.”

  Right away the smile faded from his face. He put his joint down and examined Nate and Richardson. “I saw what you did to Mary and her brothers over there,” he said to Richardson. “That was good work.” Then his gaze shifted to Nate. “You, on the other hand. Boy, you ain’t got the sense God gave cow shit if you fell for that come-on-in-the-back-with-me routine. It’s a wonder you’re still alive, you know that?”

  “I, uh—” Nate said, fumbling over his words.

  Richardson came to his rescue. “You have a boat,” he said.

  “That’s right,” the man said. “I’m Jimmy Hinton. My wife and I are the co-owners of the Sugar Jane. Gabi here tells me you guys want to go downriver.”

  “We do.”

  “How far downriver?”

  “To a little town called Chester. You know it?”

  “Chester?” Hinton glanc
ed at his wife. “Gabi, I thought you said these guys were serious. Mr. Richardson, you have any idea what’s going on that far downriver? You two ever heard of the Red Man?”

  “We know about the Red Man,” Richardson said. He appeared amused. “Naturally we want to avoid any contact with him. But we would like you to take us to Chester, and we’d like to leave this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, well, what you need to understand here, Mr. Richardson, is that an emergency on your part doesn’t guarantee a sense of urgency on my part. And it occurs to me that your big challenge right now is to convince me why I need to drop everything I’ve got going on just to accommodate you.”

  Nate laughed at the man. “Everything you’ve got going on? Who are you kidding, guy? From where I’m sitting it looks like you ain’t doing much beyond sitting on your butt getting high.”

  “Say that again,” Hinton said, both fists on the table.

  “You heard me,” Nate said, rising to his feet.

  “Gentlemen,” Richardson said. He grabbed Nate by the elbow and pulled him back down to his seat. “Nate, please.” He turned to Hinton and said, “We understand your situation, Mr. Hinton. And you’re right. It is a seller’s market.” He reached down to his packs on the floor and put a long burlap sack on the table in front of Hinton and his wife. The rifles inside the bag clanked heavily.

  “What’s this?” Hinton said.

  “Payment,” Richardson answered. “Look inside.” Richardson waited for Hinton to open the bag. When the man let out an impressed whistle, Richardson said, “You can have those two now. You can have another nine when we board your boat.”

  “You have eleven of these things?” Hinton said. His voice dropped uncertainly.

  “That’s right. All of them that good. These aren’t refit jobs held together with duct tape. They’re all military grade.”

  “Military grade,” Hinton repeatedly, dreamily.

  “We have ammunition, too.”

  Hinton let out a laugh. He glanced at his wife and an entire conversation seemed to pass between them without a single word being spoken.

  “Okay,” Hinton said. “We can leave first—uh oh.” He nodded toward the opposite side of the bar.

  Nate and Richardson shifted in their seats. Across the bar, one of Ken Stoler’s squads was coming through the crowd. Hinton knocked on the table in front of Nate. “Looks like your little run-in with Mary and her brothers has brought down the law.”

  “Me?” Nate protested. But Hinton and his wife weren’t listening. They were already rising from their chairs and stepping through a hidden flap behind the table.

  “Where are you going?” Richardson said.

  “To the docks,” Hinton said. “Let’s just say we have our own reasons for not wanting to talk to Ken Stoler’s people. We’ll meet you at the Sugar Jane in one hour. Don’t be late.”

  “We’ll be there,” Richardson said. “You can count on us.”

  Hinton cocked an eyebrow at him, and a moment later he was gone.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jimmy Hinton and his wife ducked behind a vendor’s cart draped with tattered winter coats and watched one of Ken Stoler’s squads run into the bar. There was no mistaking the soldiers’ intent. They were looking for somebody, and it didn’t look like they were in the mood to do much talking.

  Stoler’s people were no strangers to Herculaneum’s free trading market. In the five years or so that Hinton and Gabi had been doing business here, he’d come to know Stoler’s people all too well. He’d done business with them many times; and, on one occasion fairly recently, lost a large shipment of beef bound for their compound to pirates up near the Iowa border.

  “Jimmy,” Gabi said, “we need to go.”

  “I know. I wonder what they’re doing there, though.”

  “They’re looking for somebody.”

  “Jesus, woman, I can see that.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Stoler had always been unpredictable, even when he got his money’s worth. But he’d been especially high-strung lately. Same with his troops. Jimmy supposed it was because the Red Man’s black shirts had finally broken and defeated the other compounds in the area. That would certainly account for Stoler and his people feeling on the defensive. Everybody was feeling a little bit afraid of the Red Man’s growing power in the area. But even still, Stoler’s people were behaving more like Nazi storm troopers than an embattled private security detail. Jimmy sensed restlessness in them. Uncertainty, maybe. Was there some kind of internal trouble in the compound, perhaps? Maybe in light of the Red Man’s recent successes, and Stoler’s seeming inability to stop him, his popularity with his people was waning.

  Jimmy suspected that was probably the case. And it was bad for business too. Everybody along the river was starting to notice that. Regardless of what he thought of Stoler and his people, he did have to admit that at least they always demonstrated a pragmatic streak when it came to commerce. They knew to leave this bar alone. It was where all the river business got done. If your cargo needed to go anywhere on the Mississippi, from Memphis to Minneapolis, you arranged for its transport in the bar at Herculaneum. Now the bar too seemed to be a victim of Stoler’s increasingly questionable leadership. Raiding the place would upset the delicate economy of trust that had grown up among the river pilots who made the place their home base. For Stoler, the effect was like pissing in his own pantry. Nobody would trust him after this.

  “I want to go, Jimmy.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think that’s a real good idea.”

  They slipped through the maze of carts and the crowds of dazed people, all of them moving slowly in the heat of midday. In his mind, Hinton ran through the list of supplies they were going to need. It would take three, possibly four days to make the trip, and they still needed canned goods, toilet paper, and an auger to fix the crapper on board the Sugar Jane, which had been stopped up for over a month now. They had less than an hour to get it all done, but they could do it. At least he’d had the forethought to gas up last night. That was going to make things a lot easier.

  “This is a good deal for us, right?”

  “Huh?” Hinton turned to his wife, the fragility in her expression taking him by surprise. After forty-six years of marriage, after having a child together, after losing a child together, losing a grandchild together, after walking hand in hand through the apocalypse together, he had come to look upon her as his rudder. She nursed him when he was sick. She satisfied him when he was drunk and horny. She had once pulled his unconscious body from a burning warehouse down in Bartlett. And after all that, he had almost forgotten that she could, at times, look so fragile.

  “Yeah, I think so,” he said. “You did good setting this up. Eleven military-grade rifles.” He shook his head in wonder, a smile spreading across his face. “This could be our ticket, Gabi.”

  “You mean it? We could really leave all this, head down to Mexico? Finally?”

  “You bet,” he said, still smiling.

  “Tell me again how it’ll be, Jimmy.”

  “I already told you,” he said.

  “Tell it again. I like to hear you tell it. Tell me about the island with the sand so white it looks like salt. And the fruit hanging off the trees. And the—”

  “And the fish so big and dumb they jump right in the boat. You don’t even need to put your hook in the water.”

  “Yes,” she said, breathlessly. She took his hand in hers and squeezed it. “Tell it to me again, please.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Jesus, woman, the things you put me through.” It had been six years since they’d lost their only daughter, Eileen, and her daughter, Sarah, to a zombie attack in Sarasota, Florida. After that, Jimmy and Gabi had taken their trawler, the Sugar Jane, and gone cruising, always staying one step ahead of the zombie hordes, and finally settling here on the Mississippi. For five years, they’d lived as river Bedouins, hauling pick-me-up cargo up and down the river in a never-ending loop.

  In many ways, their
marriage had taken on the same kind of circularity. They were both running from their memories of the past, never staying in one place long enough for the images of what they’d lost to catch up with them. They floated up and down the Mississippi, Jimmy telling Gabi about the island to which they would one day run. They would settle there, eating fruit from the trees, drinking booze with their toes buried in the white sand, eating pan-seared red snapper by a campfire at night. He’d told the story so many times that he could picture that dream island down off the Mexican coast as clearly as he could remember the way his granddaughter had squeezed his finger when she took her first steps. But like that memory, the island had always seemed like it belonged to another time, one that he and Gabi would never live to see.

  The eleven military-grade weapons would change that. They could trade those guns for everything they’d need to make the trip down to the wild zones of old Mexico. It might actually be happening for them; finally, after all these years, after all they’d been through together. And it was then, as they walked through the market toward the docks, and as Jimmy began reciting, yet again, his description of the island, that he suddenly realized the fragility he had seen on Gabi’s face just moments before was actually the fragility of a cherished dream birthing itself into reality. She was scared to let it see the light of day, for it was all that sustained her in this ruined world. If it died, so would she. And so would he.

  “Hello there, Jimmy Hinton. Where are you guys going?”

  A tall, bowlegged soldier stood in front of him. His name was Justin Roth, livestock manager for Ken Stoler’s compound, and now, apparently, a squad leader. Three other men, all dressed in the Union Field gray and black uniforms, stood by looking smug.

  “Hello, Justin.”

  Justin Roth raised a rifle at Jimmy’s midsection. Behind him, his squad did the same.

  “You have a lot of nerve showing yourself around here, Hinton.”

  “It’s a free trade market, isn’t it?” Jimmy replied, trying to sound unconcerned and not totally succeeding. His gaze darted across the surrounding maze of carts and the crowd of people milling about. He saw several other squads of soldiers searching the area. They could run for it, Jimmy thought, but they wouldn’t get far.