“Lovely place,” Herbert said, falling back on his hands and outstretching his legs until they cracked. “I think I’ll retire here.”
Seth ignored him as he brushed off the wet leaves clinging to his fresh shirt. He stood up and scratched off the dirt on his backside.
“I warned you. Shouldn’t be so dramatic. It’s a good way to get dirty.”
Seth outstretched his hand for Herbert to take, and Herbert took it. “Thanks.”
“Sirs, we’re close,” the driver said from his seat, craning his neck to address his passengers. He held the horses’ reigns tightly as though he worried that if he let go, they’d take off the first chance they could.
Herbert waved him off and said, “One more time. Let’s go over it.”
Seth, seemingly satisfied with his appearance, made his way back to the carriage. “Driver,” he called, and when the driver answered, he continued. “Do you know Sheriff Boone?”
He nodded with enthusiasm. “Uh, yep, I sure do. You’re here for his missing wife, aren’t you?”
“Joy, right?” Herbert asked, sounding surprised.
“Uh, yep, you’ve got it.” He swatted away a huge fly. “Beautiful woman. Terrible tragedy.”
“She’s only missing,” Seth said, hazarding a guess.
“Right, you’re right. We shouldn’t assume the worst. You think you’ll find her?”
“I heard some think she’s evil,” Herbert said as he came to his feet. He strolled over to the driver and stood there with his hands in pockets. Spill your secrets, he thought, sizing up the big man on his small seat. “What do you know about that?”
The driver furrowed his brows and looked to Seth for support, as though Hebert had become a dog that needed to be called off. “I only pass through the area. Everyone seemed to love her, that’s all I know. I met her once or twice. I never got any bad feelings about her.”
Herbert nodded and turned away, and with his friend, he climbed back into the coach. They sat in silence until the driver started the horses up again.
“The sheriff’s wife is missing?” Seth whispered, biting his thumbnail.
“Isn’t that who we’re supposed to be investigating?” Herbert tapped his finger on his lip. “Driver didn’t mention the little girl, Abernathy. He’d have to know about the little girl. Do you think they found her? We may as well just turn around. That’s why we’re here, after all. Come on, let’s not get involved.”
“The letter mentioned the Sheriff’s wife being the culprit; said the sheriff had killed a man in the Black Hills a few years back, so maybe he was involved, too.” Seth crossed his arms, flexed his muscles as he disappeared in thought. “No, I don’t think they found Abernathy. If Joy’s missing, and if good old vigilante justice isn’t to blame, then whatever took the girl likely took her, too.”
Herbert sighed and let out a tired groan. He bunched himself up against the side of the coach and, with his nose to the glass, looked out the window to the world beyond. “This isn’t a good place for people like us.” The woods grew darker as the horses picked up speed; the sight became a glistening blur, like an open wound seen in the last moments of an accident. “Too many doors have been left unlocked for far too long. You can feel it, can’t you? The heaviness of the other place forcing itself in. If they find out we’re here, Seth …”
Joy
Joy kept her eyes shut tight as Boone bound her in rope. She felt her throat tear wider as he flipped her over on the kitchen table and went to work on her wrists. He still had the same dumbfounded look on his face when he had split her with the knife and not a drop of blood came out. But she played her part all the same, and when he finally stopped shaking, he bought the act she’d spent so many years selling.
“I don’t know what you are, but you deserved this,” Boone murmured; like an act of contrition, he had been repeating the phrase for the last half hour.
When he pulled the sack over her head, she was glad she had long since lost the ability to feel. A normal woman may have felt an itch or a tickle, and the last thing Joy needed was to laugh and interrupt Boone’s ritual. And now that she was thinking about the way in which he was preparing her body, she began to consider the possibility she was not his first.
“I don’t know what you are, but you deserved this.”
Joy stole a glance at her husband when his back was turned. He had sweated through his shirt and seemed to be whispering a prayer. Boone had been right: She had chosen him, but her intentions hadn’t been nefarious. They were simple, shallow: he was sheriff, he had power, and if Joy could convince him she could be trusted, then he could convince everyone else to do the same.
“I don’t know what you are, but you deserved this.”
Boone turned around before Joy could close her eyes again. He stumbled back, grabbing the top of a chair for support. Taking out his knife, he stared at her body the same way one would a puzzle or problem. But Boone was not a careful man, a considerate man—subtlety was something he could neither see nor spell.
So he plunged the knife into his wife’s chest and left it there awhile.
Herbert
Seth had fallen asleep, which meant Herbert could rest as well. Despite having known his friend since infancy, Herbert continued to spend most of his days trying to impress him. For Herbert, he saw Seth’s favor as some unstable compound that, if left unattended, would simply vanish.
Smile some more and make it easy on me, Herbert thought, watching Seth’s head bob up and down with the bumps in the road. You take things too seriously. I mean, you’re right to, but you don’t have to, not all the time. He kicked off his shoes and stretched out his legs. Even when Seth slept, he looked serious, as though he were plotting their next plan of action with tools only the unconscious could provide. I shouldn’t put so much pressure on you. I shouldn’t act so reluctant.
Herbert North let out a sigh; he ran his hands across his face, pushing the sweat there into his hair. “This heat is getting to me, Seth. It’s cooking my brain, making me think all logically, responsibly.”
Seth Barker rubbed his nose, grunted, said, “That’s good,” and went back to sleep.
It never failed to amaze Herbert how quickly their names and the services they provided circulated the country. As far as he knew, they had no friends or acquaintances in Marrow, and yet here they were, travelling down its squelching roadways because some sad stranger had asked them to. It was work he was meant to do—he’d been certain of that the very moment Seth pulled back the fold and saw what lay in the margin. But whereas he’d envisioned a city to police, he instead ended up with a continent.
“One day, they’ll stretch us too far,” Herbert mumbled as he looked out the window, “and we’ll break. You think that’s what they want, Seth?” He kicked the toe of his friend’s shoe. “To send us all over the globe, sacrificing a few of their own along the way until we can’t take it anymore?”
Much to Herbert’s surprise, Seth opened one eye and said, “If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead. No grand scheme, Herbert. Just monsters doing what monsters do, and people like us making sure they don’t do it as much as they’d like.”
When the screaming started, they knew they’d reached Marrow. Both equipped with a knife, revolver, and a pocketful of powders, Herbert and Seth burst through the carriage door.
“Stop here!” Herbert shouted to the driver. “Whatever it is, we don’t want it to know we’re coming.”
“Move it,” Seth said, pushing on Herbert’s back until he jumped from the moving vehicle. He fell when he hit the ground. “We’ll be staying at the home of Marie Riley. Bring our belongings there in the next half hour.”
Son of a bitch, Herbert thought as he stood up, wiping the mud off his ass as he watched Seth step gracefully down from the stopped carriage. “You couldn’t have waited five more seconds before throwing me off?”
“I got caught up in the moment. Quiet!”
They turned their heads toward the road, whe
re, a few feet beyond the carriage, a small, pathetic wall stretched across the land. There, they heard a rustling—an animal perhaps, or some sadistic sentry—and then, beyond that, more screams, followed by shouting, followed by gunshots.
“I think they’ve got it under control,” Herbert said.
“I think something is watching us.” Seth’s voice was cold, distant—his eyes the same as they travelled the length of the wall until it disappeared into the dim morning light.
Herbert took out his revolver and checked its chambers. “Well then we should go say hello.”
Herbert and Seth had been to many places throughout the course of their career, but Marrow was only the one that truly lived up to its name. As they pushed through the outskirts, they found the town sitting between two narrow streams, its faded yellow houses all soft and bloated upon the bone-white land. By the placement of the buildings, there seemed to have been a rigid order, but with the passing of time, much like the bending of a spine, things had become crooked and unsightly. If the town offered anything to the people of the world, it was that, even if it when seemed impossible, there always somewhere else worse to live.
“Do you see that, Herbert?” Seth whispered, pointing to the center of Marrow, where several citizens stood circled around something.
Herbert nodded and started forward. There were five, no six people at the town’s center, and a seventh, a drunk man perhaps, swaying back and forth inside the barricade of bodies. He strained his eyes and saw that the drunk was bleeding, and that there was blood pouring out of his wrist where a hand should’ve been.
Moving closer, he started to make out the words the townspeople kept shouting. “Stay back,” they pleaded and “Please stop,” they begged, but the man at the center paid them no mind. He swung his ragged stump, lashing the crowd with ropes of blood as though he were a priest blessing his flock. More shouts, more screams; the people of Marrow pushed, punched, and kicked the man, but the pain they inflicted meant nothing to him.
“Seth, we have to get down there. We—”
A gunshot thundered through the town. The man at the center reeled as a stringy, pulpy mass of brains and arteries blew out the back of his skull. He fell backward, cracking his head like an egg against the earth and sending the rest inside all over the townspeople’s’ feet. Gun smoke slithered around the crime scene, like a snake in search of fidgeting leftovers. The people of Marrow went silent and then began to part as their savior passed through the ranks to look upon what he had done.
“That’s the sheriff,” Hebert remarked, noticing the badge and the way the man walked, as though his overinflated ego was gumming up his gait.
“Suspect number one,” Seth said, as he picked at the bark of a tree. “Let’s go introduce ourselves.”
Herbert holstered his revolver. “You sure you don’t want to wait until we can catch him in a better mood?”
“He doesn’t strike me as a man with a better mood.”
Herbert and Seth ran into Marrow like two concerned neighbors who’d heard something awful from the house next door. The townspeople were beginning to disperse when they arrived at the center. Like the culprits they may have been, the people of Marrow stopped in their tracks and started looking guilty. The sheriff and another, a doctor by the looks of him, were hovering over the dead man’s body, arguing in heated whispers.
“Hi, how’s it going?” Herbert said, breaking the ice so hard he was about to fall through and drown.
The sheriff looked over his shoulder and spat. “How can I help you boys?”
Herbert’s eyes went to the corpse at the sheriff’s feet. “We were called here.”
Sheriff Boone went stiff and fingered the revolver’s trigger. “By?”
Seth ignored the question. “We’re investigators.”
“Of what?” the sheriff snarled.
“The things that shouldn’t be.” Seth was always vague when this inevitable question was asked, and somehow it was always enough.
“What do you know?”
The doctor cleared his throat until everyone was looking at him.
Herbert furrowed his brow as the doctor lifted the corpse’s shirt. Behind it, his stomach had been torn open, and his intestines beyond had been chewed to a paste.
“Boone, Eddy was dead on his feet,” the doctor said, “and even if he wasn’t, he should’ve been in too much pain to stand.”
“How long has this been going on?” Seth asked.
Sheriff Boone rubbed his eyes. “Eddy is the second. Marie Riley … she was last week.”
Herbert and Seth exchanged glances.
“She was dead on her feet, too, wasn’t she doc?”
“Other than the fact she had no feet to left to stand on … yeah. Her throat had been torn out.”
Herbert turned around to face the crowd that had gathered again. There were more now. With their worn-out clothes and worn-down eyes, they milled about as they waited to hear something which would make some sense of what had just happened.
“Marie Riley wrote us. She was the one who asked us to come.” Seth waited for the sheriff to panic, but he didn’t. “Missing kid and our driver said your wife has disappeared as well.”
Herbert nodded at his friend, but his attention was elsewhere. Toward the back of the crowd, he noticed a little girl of seven or eight watching them. She was pale, dirty, and despite the heat, shivering. She had long hair that was somewhere in between being damp and being encrusted with whatever wetted it. The little girl looked anxious, and like an anxious little girl, she sucked on the tips of her hair. But she looked pleased as she tongued each strand, as though fond of the sticky substance that coated them.
“Herbert,” Seth called.
“Yeah?” Herbert answered. He turned back around—“Sorry, what?”—but then the little girl was gone, and no one near where she’d been standing seemed to notice or care.
“What happened to your wife, sheriff?” Seth asked.
A murmur worked its way through the crowd.
Sheriff Boone cracked his knuckles as though imagining they were Herbert’s and Seth’s necks. He leaned in close to the investigators and said, “Why don’t you ask all them gathered around? I loved her, they didn’t.” He leaned back and then said loudly, “Let’s go inside and get you boys caught up on things.”
“Did you ever find Abernathy?” Herbert droned as he continued to search for signs of the little girl who’d vanished.
“No,” the sheriff said bluntly. “Never did find Joseph, Cali, Jessica, Maribel, Ethan, or Brian neither.”
Herbert swatted at a mosquito as it buzzed about his neck, eyeing the veins bulging from it. “What? What the hell is going on here? How long has this—?”
The sheriff interrupted with a laugh. He walked up to Herbert until he was looking over him, down on him—blocking out the sun that shone on them. “Aren’t you glad you came?” He smiled and clamped one large and sweating hand down on Herbert’s shoulders. “I’m sure glad you came. We’ll make it all better, won’t we?”
Sheriff Boone brought them to the inn, and that’s where Herbert and Seth sat now, their belongings on the table, as the foremost experts on the madness of Marrow bombarded them with anecdotes and theories.
“We’re a God-fearing people here,” Daniel Nathaniel, the aforementioned doctor, said as shifted in his lopsided seat. “Marie Riley … she feared enough for all of us.” He made the sign of the crucifix, as though he’d cursed her in his head.
That doesn’t make sense; Herbert thought and then said, “That doesn’t make sense. A God-fearing woman doesn’t employ men like us. She goes to the church, to the priest, not us.”
Seth nodded, and Herbert was glad to have his approval.
Roger Covert, Marrow’s mayor, finished off his drink and then held it out until the innkeeper came by to remedy the problem. “You wouldn’t think it, but lots of folk come by here. Strange folk, but nevertheless. They think us a bunch of rubes they can pawn off thei
r junk to. And, yeah, they do, not going to lie, they do. Not much happens around these parts, so even if its shit their hocking, it helps pass the time.”
“No judgment here,” Herbert said as he silently judged the lot of them. Dust cascaded onto the table; on the floor above, some god-fearing folk were fearing god all over their bed.
“It’s not unreasonable to think that someone referred the woman to you all,” Sheriff Boone added as he passed the table, pacing like an animal locked in its pen.
“The most devout do have a tendency of doing the exact opposite of what they should,” Seth said.
“They’re my favorite kind of people,” Herbert added, grinning. “It’s such a spectacle to break them. It’s almost cathartic.”
Seth leaned forward. “Was she in love with the man in the Black Hills?”
Sheriff Boone stopped, saw that everyone had noticed that he’d stopped, and then started up again. “Blake was a cannibal. Before all that came out, she’d taken a liking to him.”
As Mayor Covert drank from his cup, he added between slurps, “She thought she could convert him, change him. Thinking back … I’d call it an obsession, but I’m not sure there’s much of a difference between the two—love and obsession.”
“I’m not sure, either,” the sheriff mumbled.
The doctor picked at the blood underneath his fingernails. “Marie Riley was mighty upset with you, Boone, when you put a bullet in Blake.”
“I’m just going to be blunt with you,” Seth started. “Marie said your wife was evil.”
Sheriff Boone hung his head low and dropped into the nearest chair. He scratched the side of his face, plucked a few loose strands from his hair. “She spread rumors after what I’d done to Blake. Storm blew through … that was Joy’s fault. Kids started going missing … well, what do you know, Joy did it, too. She was a sensitive woman, Joy. All that talking ran her out of here. God, do I miss her.”
All Things Zombie: Chronology of the Apocalypse Page 33