Plague of the Undead

by Joe McKinney

  He glanced at Bree and just as quickly looked away. She hadn’t cried since they brought her back. She had taken a seat against a fifty-five-gallon drum and hugged her knees and stared off at a spot only she could see. In the starlight, Jacob had caught the emptiness of her stare and withered before it. He knew somebody needed to try and reach her, but the thought of speaking to her terrified him. He just knew he would say the wrong thing, and that he would probably only make it worse for her, and that crippled him.

  The same was true with Kelly. She’d been open, letting him hold her, but she hadn’t said a word either. She spent most of her time sobbing, either to herself or into his shoulder, but then she would suddenly lash out and bang her fists against her thighs while her face twisted in rage. All of it left him feeling helpless.

  Eli had asked him what they were going to do now, and he’d been unable to answer. He’d tried to mask his indecision with anger, but he was sure he hadn’t fooled anybody. He’d failed them, and they all knew it.

  “We need to get out of here tonight,” Eli said. “If we don’t get out of here, we’re gonna die here.”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” Jacob said. “We could all get killed before we make it ten feet from here.”

  “Are you kidding? We can easily make this. Look at there, they don’t even have guards posted. They’re all down there getting wasted. You guys could slip off that way. I’ll steal some horses and meet up with you. We’ll be on the way back home before they even know we’re gone.”

  “But they’ll follow us. They have Nick’s maps. They’ll know where we’re going.”

  “Then we’ll go somewhere else. Or we’ll ride like mad and keep a pace they can’t match. But, Jacob, come on, we have to get out of here.”

  “They have dogs, too.”

  “Yeah, and we can find sticks or something to take care of those.”

  “I guess . . . I don’t know.” Jacob put his face in his hands. This was so hard. He felt miserable. “I’m so sorry, you guys. I’m so sorry.”

  Eli threw up his hands in a What the hell? gesture.

  “What are you sorry for?” Nick said. He’d been sitting on a plastic egg crate, watching the young girl with the hacking cough. She was still curled up in a fetal ball, and even though the temperature had dropped dramatically with nightfall, she was sweating badly.

  “I’m sorry. This whole thing . . . it was a bad mistake. I’m sorry. We should never have come.”

  “Jacob, come on,” Nick said. “What would Taylor have done? That’s what we need to ask ourselves. What would the old man tell us if he were here right now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what he’d say,” Eli said. “He’d tell us to do everything we could to protect Arbella. He’d tell us we should die trying, if we had to. We need to get out of here, and we need to warn the folks back home. And we need to do it tonight.”

  Jacob didn’t respond. He felt like he couldn’t. Nothing he could say would come out right.

  “What the hell?” Kelly said. “Jacob, what the hell is wrong with you?”

  She sounded shrill, but he didn’t dare tell her to keep her voice down. He could barely hold her gaze.

  “Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you? Where’s all this it’s all my fault crap coming from? Since when do you get to play martyr?”

  “I’m not playing—”

  “Like hell you are. You’re sitting there acting like all this is your fault. Well, I say bullshit to that. Every single one of us volunteered to come on this expedition. I’ve been begging for this since I was seventeen. We all agreed to the route, to all of it. Stop moping, Jacob, and fucking grow a pair.” She glanced over at Bree, and then at the clothesline, where a few bits of flesh still clung to her husband’s skeleton. “Some of us have lost a lot more than our pride. We need to make a decision.”

  Nick leaned forward. “Jacob, come on, buddy. Eli’s right. This is what Taylor would do.”

  Jacob felt like he was on autopilot. He nodded without even realizing he was doing it. “So we’re ready to go? No supplies, no weapons. Just like this?”

  Off in the corner, Bree stood up.

  The others looked surprised, but stood up as well. Only Jacob remained seated.

  Finally, he stood up, too. He looked around the group, and though they looked ragged and beaten and tired beyond measure, they were nonetheless determined. He felt a rush of pride in them, even as he continued to hate himself for the weaknesses he’d shown.

  “Eli,” he said, “go and get us some horses.” It was spring, so he looked toward the southern horizon to find the constellation of Virgo. Out in the grasslands, with no electric lights to pollute the sky, the stars were bright and the night sky a blaze of blues and gray and molten reds. The Milky Way was like a paint stripe across the sky. He pointed to the star that marked the reclining virgin’s left breast. “There. We’ll follow Spica, in Virgo. We’ll keep that line until you come up on us.”

  Eli glanced toward the horizon until he found Spica, and nodded. “Okay, got it.”

  Jacob and the others ducked down into a crouch and moved as quietly as they could toward the edge of the clearing.

  No one stirred. No one raised a hue and cry.

  They reached the high grass of the prairie and tried their best to melt into it.

  Only then did they get the first indication that something was wrong. They heard a man’s voice yelling, “Runner! Runner!” and then the sound of a struggle.

  Jacob looked back to see that one of the slaves had tackled Eli. The two men were rolling around in the grass, not so much fighting as wrestling.

  The slave managed to pin Eli to the ground and began yelling to beat the devil. “Help! Help!”

  “What the hell?” Jacob said. “No. No.”

  It took a long moment, but eventually several drunken riders descended on the scene. They were feeling rowdy, but they seemed to know better than to get into the middle of a slave brawl.

  Casey showed up a moment later.

  The slave on top of Eli had held his tongue until Casey appeared, but he spoke up as soon as he saw the leader of Mother Jane’s Boys.

  “He was gonna steal some horses,” the slave said. “I heard him. Him and the others, they were gonna steal some horses and head south to Spica.”

  “What’s Spica?” Casey said.

  The slave took a moment to answer. “I don’t know. They said they’d meet him there. They went off that way.”

  Casey followed the direction of the man’s gaze. “That true?” he yelled, head thrown back. “You out there, Jacob? If you are, you best show yourself. I won’t kill ya if you show yourself.” He turned to the rider behind him with a drunken grin. “Gonna fuck him up, but I ain’t gonna kill him.”

  Down in the grass, Jacob could only pound his fists on the ground in bootless rage. What was he supposed to do? They were helpless here, pretty much no options at all.

  “We cut our losses,” he said. “We surrender.”

  “No!” Kelly said. “They’ll kill us.”

  “They know we’re here,” he said. “We don’t have anywhere to run.”

  “But we can’t give up.”

  “We’re not giving up,” Jacob said. “We’re living to fight another day.”

  He stood up, his white shirt turned silver by the starlight. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the others doing the same.

  “Come on back,” Casey said. “Come on, this way.”

  They trudged back up to camp. They’d made it perhaps fifty yards, and Jacob fumed at the coincidence. They’d made it maybe fifty miles under Taylor. Under his leadership—because it was bullshit to pretend at this point that they’d been co-authors of this plan—the survivors had made it roughly two percent of the distance they’d made under Taylor. Because it had been Taylor who led them, he realized that now. He’d only been a puppet, if that. In truth, he was probably less than that.

  He certain
ly felt less than that right now.

  One of the younger riders, one who was tremendously drunk, climbed down from his horse and pulled the slave off of Eli.

  When Eli tried to charge him, the rider produced a pistol and pointed it at his chest.

  “Yes?” the rider said. “You had something you wanted to say?”

  Eli said nothing. He raised his hands in the sign for surrender.

  Casey rode forward then and scanned the Arbella survivors. “I give you guys a week,” he said. “We probably shouldn’t even bother to feed ya.”

  He nodded toward the slave who had alerted them to the escapees.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Walker,” the slave said.

  “I didn’t ask you what you do for us, I asked you your name, son.”

  Laughs from the assembled riders. And more were coming down from the back of the caravan, men and women, all of them laughing like they’d been lit on fire with booze.

  “My name’s Walker, sir. Chris Walker.”

  Casey leaned back in his saddle and sighed. He almost seemed magnanimous when he spoke. “Well, Chris Walker, you think you might want to be one of Mother Jane’s Boys?”

  “Yes, sir!” Walker said. “You know it.”

  “You think you could kill a man who’s broke the peace of our camp?”

  “Yes, sir. In a heartbeat.”

  “A heartbeat? Well. All right then.” Casey leaned back on his saddle and pulled a pistol from his waistband. He twirled it on his finger, catching it so that it ended up with the butt of the gun pointed at the slave. “Here you go. Take this.”

  Walker, the slave, didn’t seem to know what to do. He took a few steps toward Casey, but didn’t reach out for the weapon.

  “Go on, take it.”

  The slave reached out for the weapon and took it in his hands.

  He held it like it might break, clutched to his chest, uncertain about what he was supposed to do.

  “Go on,” Casey said, motioning toward Eli. “He was gonna steal our horses, right?”

  “He was.”

  “And the horse is what?”

  “The horse belongs to the rider,” Walker said, like it was something he’d learned at his catechism.

  “Can you do what’s got to be done, Walker?”

  Walker looked stunned, like somebody had just thrust a major award into his hands. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can.”

  “All right then. Put a bullet in that little shit’s head. Let’s be done with it.”

  Walker stepped up next to Eli, leveled his weapon, and without the slightest preamble or hesitation, fired a single shot into Eli’s face.

  Jacob lunged forward, but Nick held him back.

  “Don’t,” Nick warned.

  Casey glanced at Jacob and smiled. “You folks should get some sleep. Probably gonna have some tract work for you come the morning.” He gestured at Walker. “Put that one on a horse. He’s one of us now.”

  And with that he turned and rode away.

  21

  The next morning, at first light, one of the free women came into the slave corral and hollered for them to wake.

  Jacob climbed to his feet. He’d slept little, and he was exhausted. He was thirsty, and so hungry he had the jitters. The ringing was gone from his ears, but his head still ached. They’d used some of the bandages and disinfectant in Bree’s med kit to wrap up his arms where the dogs had bit him, and now they were soaked through with blood. It hurt so badly pulling them off, his hands started to shake.

  The wounds were bad, and deep, too. He should have had stitches, but Bree was obviously in no condition to do it, and Kelly was a mess, too. Nick had tried, but he had the grace of a bull and all he’d managed to do was make a few of the wounds messier than they already were. In the end, Jacob had given up and just wrapped himself in bandages. He would have to do that again pretty soon and just hope for the best.

  From behind him, Kelly groaned.

  She was staring at the clothesline where Barry and Max’s skeletons were still lashed to the end posts. They’d been picked nearly clean, but they were still black with blood and little bits of cartilage still clung to the bone.

  “Oh, man,” Jacob said. He turned to Nick and motioned toward the bodies. “You think we can find some shovels around here somewhere?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Nick said.

  Four of Mother Jane’s Boys were coming up behind them. One of the older men, a big-bellied man with sunburnt arms and a huge gray beard, said, “Ain’t no slave getting buried around here. Just take the carcass out in the tall grass and leave it there. Something’ll come along and eat it.”

  “And you ain’t gettin’ no shovels, neither,” said one of the others. He was half the age of the fat man with the beard, but otherwise looked just like him. Father and son, probably, Jacob thought.

  “It’s scrapers for you this morning,” the older man said. “Now go on out in the grass there and do your business. Be quick about it.”

  “My business?” Jacob said.

  “You gotta piss or take a shit, now’s the time to get it done.”

  “What about food?” Nick asked. “What about water?”

  “You get water once you start working. As to food, slaves eat at night.”

  A few minutes later, Jacob and the others were given thin plates of hard plastic and told to scrape the sides of the caravan’s many vehicles. The ravens had perched all along the caravan during the night, and just about every vehicle had thick runners of bird shit dripping down the sides.

  For Nick, it was too much. “That’s stupid,” he said. He threw down his scraper. “I’m not doing that. I won’t.”

  “Nick . . .” Kelly said. “Careful.”

  The woman who had given them the scrapers didn’t reply. She just took a step back and called to a man standing nearby.

  “Bobby, a little help.”

  Bobby came over. In his ratty jeans and the filthy T-shirt and the baseball cap with a tractor on it he was wearing what seemed to be the uniform for Mother Jane’s Boys. And like most of the others, he was a powerfully built man with a big gut and arms like slabs of meat.

  “That one,” the woman said, and pointed at Nick.

  “Go on and shoot me, if that’s what you gotta do. But I’m not your slave. I won’t do shit for you people.”

  The man advanced on Nick, who raised his fists.

  Nick was fast with his fists, Jacob remembered that well enough, but Bobby was faster. He moved quickly for such a big man, and when Nick took a swing at him, he dodged it with surprising ease.

  Then he moved in close with a flurry of uppercuts to Nick’s ribs. He stayed away from the face, focusing on the body. Jacob watched the beating with sickness in his heart. He couldn’t even jump in to help. Other riders had come up to watch the show, and all of them had their hands resting on the butts of their pistols.

  Nick was coughing up blood by the time the man stopped hitting him. When it was done, Bobby picked Nick up by the back of his shirt and pressed his face into one of the runners of bird shit dripping down the side of one of the wagons. He grabbed Nick by the hair and moved his head up and down the side of the wagon. Then he tossed Nick to the ground and said, “Congratulations on your first cleaning.”

  Nick rolled over onto his back, holding his ribs and moaning in pain.

  “None of them eat or drink until that one works,” Bobby said.

  By mid-morning, Nick had recovered enough to get back on his feet. He couldn’t lift his arms over his shoulders, but he did manage to work his scraper a little. Enough that water was finally brought to them.

  Jacob felt broken to his core. He was utterly demoralized. He couldn’t even look at the others. Every time he tried, he felt so sick he wanted crawl inside a hole and hide. The dog bites on his arms bled through the bandages, but he didn’t do anything about it. He wanted the pain. And he suspected the others wanted him to hurt, too. Despite what Kelly had said the nig
ht before, he knew they blamed him for this. How could they not?

  The thought of it overwhelmed him like a fever, and he thought for the first time that he understood why Lady Macbeth had scoured her hands to the bone and never gotten that damned spot out. Like her, the blood on his hands was not ever going to go away.

  Somehow, whether accidentally or through some subconscious desire to be away from them, he’d lost the others. He looked around and realized he’d moved down the row of wagons, scraping and scraping, without paying attention to the world around him. Now he looked around. Off to the west the sky was darkening, as though rain was headed their way, and gray tattered clouds moved across the horizon like columns of smoke. The town of Sikeston, birthplace of all his troubles, slumbered quietly in its desolation in the near distance, and it occurred to him, as his gaze wandered over the empty buildings and overgrown streets, that desolation could be part of one’s internal landscape as well. He’d never realized that desolation could be contagious, or that it was possible to hurt so badly.

  He heard men laughing and ducked behind one of the wagons. There were voices coming from the other side of the RV next to him, and among them was that of Casey and Mother Jane. He got down on his stomach and crawled under the RV. There were crates on the ground on the other side. He could see people sitting on them, or their legs at least. And beyond them, seated in her lawn chair under a fold-out awning, one of her ravens perched on the back of the chair, was Mother Jane.

  “This town was a bust,” Casey said. The man was pacing back and forth in front of Mother Jane’s chair. He would come in and out of Jacob’s view every few seconds. He looked worried and upset. “We lost five good men, and we didn’t find those parts we was looking for. Without that pump in working order, we’re gonna have to find some other way to get clean water.”

  “We’ll find another pump, Casey. If not here, then in Dexter, or the next place. It’ll be all right.”

  “So then, you’ve decided? We’re heading west again?”

  “No, I ain’t decided. That’s what we’re here to talk about.”