by Jack Hamlyn
She came at me so silently.
That’s what scared me about them most of all: the silence.
I brought up my purloined .30-30 and squeezed off a quick round when she was five feet from me, close enough so that I could smell graveyards on her breath. The slug easily blew her head apart, her brains and skull matter spattering the window at the end of the corridor, oozing down the glass and throwing blobby moonlit shadows against the walls. She went down in a heap.
I turned and made for the stairs. In my panic, I had completely forgotten all the footsteps down there. As I got to the top of the steps, I froze.
I had been wondering whether the lodge was a Boy Scout camp or a Girl Scout camp.
Now I knew.
Coming up the stairs were dozens of young girls in various states of dress and undress. They were not walking up them, but crawling up them like hungering rats. An absolute swarm of them. Their eyes were wide and white like wax coins, their mouths hanging open. Moonlight gleamed off their teeth, drool hanging from their mouths in ribbons.
I would never know the exact set of circumstances that had turned these Girl Scouts into ravening corpses or their troop leader that I had gunned down, but I guessed they had been caught up in the Awakening like so many others. When Necrophage raised its ugly, microbial head, they had probably tried to wait it out here and it got them one by one. All those sheets on the floor of the main hall below were witness to that. It had been used as an infirmary of sorts. The entire lodge was a pest house.
I was in a situation.
With blind panic, I popped off two or three rounds into the advancing, slug-like hordes. It did no good. I ran back down the corridor, found a room and locked the door. As I did, I heard the living dead approaching, the incessant march of feet. The dinner bell had been rung.
They hit the door so hard that it shook in its frame.
They beat on it.
They scratched it.
They pummeled it with their fists.
I backed away, feeling impotent with my lone rifle. I had to get out of there or they’d tear me apart and stuff themselves with my guts. I went to the window. It was painted shut. I kicked it out with my boot after five or six good stomps. As I climbed out, the door burst open and the Girl Scouts from hell filled the room like flies.
I dropped down to a porch overhang.
They crowded at the broken window to watch me. They were gnashing their teeth. Hungry, always so damn hungry. I climbed off the overhang and dropped to the ground. As I did so, I had ugly visions of breaking my legs and being slowly bitten to death. I jumped to my feet and grabbed my rifle…and just in time.
A girl zombie was standing there.
In the moonlight, I saw more of her than I wanted to.
Like the others, she had probably been eight- or nine-years old at the time of her death and, also like the others, she had chewed off her lips in the manic frenzy of Necrophage death throes. She looked up at me with her dead white eyes, her mouth a bloody ragged hole. Dark, shiny hair pulled into braids framed her pale, mottled face. She was a horror, an absolute horror…and not just for the obvious reasons. This was deeper, more grotesquely entrenched: she had no soul; her innocence had been horribly corrupted. Whatever sweetness, charm, and purity she once had had been contaminated and perverted. She was a hungering dead shell.
That’s what I saw and felt in those few harsh, hysterical moments when I looked down at her. She had been some mother’s cherished baby and some father’s adored one. She made life’s little cruelties and frustrations bearable. She was their future and their hope.
Now, she was a ravenous ghoul. And therein lies the true evil of Necrophage.
She reached for me and I stumbled back.
I saw ropes of saliva hanging from her mouth.
There was no time to get a shot off. I swung the rifle like a club and I heard her head crack like ice. She dropped away. I swung around and there were four or five other Girl Scout zombies (they might have been called “Ghoul Scouts” in one of the cheeky monster magazines I read as a kid).
I got away from them and two more came at me.
I hit them like a lineman bursting across the line of scrimmage, knocking them aside. And, in doing so, I almost fell into the arms of another who was opening her mouth to sink her teeth in me. I cracked her in the face with the butt of the rifle and she snarled like a dog. I saw more walking corpses moving in the shadows.
I was in a nest of them.
The next few minutes were wild and hallucinogenic.
They seemed to come from every direction, little girl zombies pressing in with white, grasping fingers and bared teeth. I knocked them out of my path…hitting, kicking, and punching my way forward, swinging my rifle like a bat and shooting when I had the chance. I stumbled free of the horde, clawlike fingers scratching my arms and scraping across the back of my neck. In the end, there were so many that I had no choice but to jump into the river.
They had me ringed in and were moving slowly, relentlessly forward.
So I dove in, losing my rifle in the process. The waters were deep and chill, easily over my head. I surfaced about ten feet from shore. They gathered on the grassy bank, watching me, but not coming after me. There must have been at least thirty of them…silent, waiting, and deadly. The current was swift. It was trying to pull me downriver. I fought my way across, swimming with everything I had. I reached the other bank and pulled myself up and out.
I was exhausted, but I ran. Heavy and dripping wet, I ran and ran, crashing through the brush until my legs just gave out and I collapsed onto the soft, mossy ground.
I couldn’t move anymore.
I slept.
DESPERATION
I woke hours later.
Peering up through the trees, I could see that the moon had moved across the sky. I suppose, under the circumstances, I should have woken in panic, but I didn’t. I opened my eyes, remembered instantly where I was and how I had gotten there. The calm that pervaded me was cool as blue ice. I was easy and relaxed. Despite my nap, I was sore, limbs aching, my back filled with needles from sleeping on the ground. My body was chilled from being soaked and exposed to the night air.
I had no reason to be calm.
I was lost.
The sky had gone hazy and I couldn’t pinpoint any stars. The moon was barely peering out from the clouds up there. I kept trying to re-trace my steps, but my head was full of fog and I couldn’t trust my memory. Too much action, too little sleep. I sat there on the ground for the longest time, trying to figure things, but it was hopeless.
Finally, I just got up and started walking.
My plan, what there was of it, was to work my way back to the river and follow it at a discreet distance, until I came to a road I could reconnoiter from. After I wandered around in circles for about thirty minutes, getting more lost, I gave up. I couldn’t find the fucking river.
So I started walking again, trying to move in a straight line by using a sort of line-of-sight navigation. I would pick out a tall tree or a hill, what I could see of it, and simply head towards it. I went on like that for about two hours, up and down hills, through cuts and creeks, bashing my way through brush until the sun came up. The forest was deep and the day was overcast, so it was all pretty much shadowy and repetitive. I kept going by line-of-sight all morning. By the time the sun was overhead, a hazy disk sunk in gray clouds, I simply gave up.
I was screwed.
I was lost in the goddamn woods with nothing but damp, well-worn, mildewy-smelling fatigues on my back. The only weapon I had was a knife.
I was sore, aching, bruised and cut.
I had mosquito bites on my mosquito bites.
My neck was bitten from chiggers and black flies.
I was hungry and thirsty.
I wanted to curl up and fucking die.
I fought my way through a reedy swamp, found a log on the high ground. There I sat. I was absolutely beaten and tired. If you’ve read this far
, you know I don’t give up easily. I’m a magnet for abuse and degradation, but I keep right on going, plugging along like some dumbass bloodhound that can’t recognize the fact that it has lost the scent.
Well, I had sure as hell lost the scent.
And I recognized it.
I was finally used up.
So I sat there, feeling poorly physically and very sorry for myself. Maybe I would have sat there until I rotted or took root, but fate intervened.
I was drifting off sitting up.
I was half-dreaming I smelled a log fire.
Not only that, but bacon. I could’ve swore I smelled bacon smoking. I still wasn’t convinced that I wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating. In my desperation, I slapped myself in the face. It sounds extreme and melodramatic, but I did it. I slapped myself and slapped myself hard.
The smell remained—stronger, richer, more pervasive.
My mouth filled with drool, I started off through the woods, tracking that wonderful aroma to its source. I made more than one false start, going this way and that. Soon enough, though, I was on the scent, stumbling through thickets and splashing through creeks, fighting my way up hills and down vales. My grandma used to say that it doesn’t take a starving man long to find the kitchen table. How right she was.
Scratched and bruised, my DPM fatigues filthy and torn, I broke through a stand of brambles into a clearing. My face was scraped raw from thorns, leaves and pickers stuck in my hair. I saw a narrow, two-story farmhouse that was weathered gray and ramshackle. The upper story windows were boarded over, the paint flaking, vines growing up the sunward side. I saw a few old shacks at the treeline, some overgrown fields beyond.
I’ll admit I was spooked.
Standing there, at the edge of the forest, I was nearly shaking from the balls of my feet to the crown of my skull. I didn’t know what it was about the place, but I had a real bad feeling. It felt like I was being watched.
Hunger had driven me to make mistakes.
I had come crashing through the woods and there I was, just standing dumbly like some green fool waiting for someone to draw a bead on me. It would have been real easy. I could almost feel the crosshairs.
I was reckless but I didn’t care.
There was a fire burning behind the house and I went right to it. I spotted the side of bacon slow-smoking above it. By that point, drool was running down my chin. There was a carving knife stuck in a maple stump by the fire. In retrospect, it was all a little too convenient. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. I grabbed the knife and cut myself off a thick slice of bacon. It burned my fingers but I didn’t even care. I tore into it with my teeth and it was pure ambrosia. Maple-smoked, sweetened with honey and brown sugar, its taste was unbelievable. It seemed to melt in my mouth. Once it got to my stomach, I could feel soothing fingers of warmth spreading through me.
I sat down, licking sweet grease from my fingertips, feeling better than I had in days.
That’s when I heard the distinct sound of a rifle clicking off safety behind me and a voice said, “Enjoying yourself, son?”
HILLBILLY HENRY
I started to turn slowly around and the voice said, “Don’t recall telling you to do that, boy. Now just sit still. That’s it. Just face the fire and we’ll have ourselves a little chat. How’s about that?”
How’s about that?
Well, I didn’t have much say in the matter, so I just nodded. I suppose I was waiting for him to shoot, for buckshot to pepper my back and scatter my spinal vertebrae like tumbling dice.
“First off—” it was obvious from his voice that he was a man of years “—first off, I say, I don’t know how they do things where you’re from, but around here you don’t trespass on a man’s land without introducing yerself and you don’t touch his eats without being invited.”
“I’m sorry. I just—”
“There you go again doing what I didn’t tell you to do. Talking right out of turn. And just when I was starting to like you. Now, shet up, hear?”
I nodded.
“Better.” I smelled smoke and figured he had just lit up a home-rolled cigarette. “Now, being that you’re so damn hungry, I want you to eat. Never let it be said that Henry Camberly ever denied a starving man a full belly. Now take up that knife. That’s it. Pick it up.”
I held it in my hand.
“Now cut yourself a slab.”
I did.
“Eat it.”
I did.
“Salty, ain’t she? Getting dry, are you?” He laughed. “We can fix that. First, though, put that knife back where you found it. Good. Now stand up.” I heard him smacking his lips. “Now, boy, do exactly as I say or I’ll bury yer carcass. I want you to unbuckle yer trousers and let ‘em drop so I can look on you, see how pretty you are.”
“Not gonna happen,” I said.
“Do it.”
“No.”
“I said, do it!” he cried and I could feel droplets of his spit spray against the back of my neck.
“No.”
“I’ll kill you!”
“Then kill me,” I said.
You probably think I was tempting fate and the good graces of my hillbilly friend a bit too much, but I’ll let you in on something: I knew he didn’t want to kill me. If he’d have wanted that he would have done it right away. He had the weapon, the time, and the opportunity. Since The Awakening and the crash of civilization, I had learned a few things about people. With no laws or police to impede them, no barriers but their own ethics and morality or lack of the same, if they wanted to kill you, they did it right away. They didn’t chat it up with you or invite you to supper, they shot you dead. That’s how things were handled. When they started talking to you, it humanized you and made it that much tougher to pull the trigger.
So, this guy didn’t want to kill me.
Maybe he wanted to enslave me, or worse things, but he didn’t want me dead.
I waited.
He waited.
“Calling my bluff, are you?”
“You might say that.”
He chuckled. “Son, I ain’t interested in plowing your backfield, believe me. Back in the day when I had such yearnings, it was with women. Mostly.”
Mostly?
“I need to know if you’re infected, son.”
“I’m not.”
He ignored that. “Those that are, get the signs. Bruising and purple streaks on and around their asses. I’ve seen it. So, please, just lower your pants. It’ll take five seconds.”
I sighed and did. I figured if he tried anything, he’d have to get in close and then I’d have him.
“Satisfied?” I said.
“Yup. Pull ‘em up. You ain’t my type.”
He laughed again and I laughed with him. I couldn’t help myself. Without waiting to be told, I turned around and got a good look at Henry Camberly. I figured he was seventyish, but wiry, lean, and well-muscled from a life of manual labor. His face was craggy and windburned, his hair long and white. His beard was the same color. It hung down below his chin in a shaggy mop.
“Now we can trust each other,” he said, grinning, showing me his yellow crooked teeth.
He asked me where I had come from and where I was going and what my name was. I gave him a very basic outline.
“That’s ten, twelve miles from here as the crow flies, son. If I had a working truck or even a saddle horse, I’d take you there myself. Sadly, ain’t got neither. Tell you what, though. You spend the night here. I need the company and you need the rest. In the morning, I’ll provision you up and point you in the right direction. Sound fair?”
It did and I told him so.
I figured I had finally found a friend.
NIGHT IN THE NARROW HOUSE
When darkness fell, we went inside and sat in what he referred to as “the setting room.” Like the rest of the house, it smelled dank and musty like mildew and seepage. He lit a fire in the hearth and got a few candles going. They threw guttering, oily shadow
s against the walls which were yellowed and dirty. The furniture was simple and old, the stuffing trailing from a lime-green sofa. There were a few askew black-and-white photographs in homemade birch frames tacked over the peeling wallpaper, a few more on the mantle. A clock with a cracked crystal ticked above the hearth, flanked on each side by the heads and antlers of whitetail deer.
I finished off another slab of bacon and washed it down with well water that was cool and clean. Henry wrapped up the rest of the bacon for me to take in the morning on my journey. He said he had another side put up and had already eaten his fill.
“Years back, you know, they used to call it sowbelly,” he told me. “Once it’s cured and smoked properly, you can carry it in your poke for days and days and it won’t turn on you. Fellow like you, with all the walking you got to do, well, it’s just the thing. Veggies are fine and bread’s a good treat, but it’s meat that is the friend to a hard-working man. Meat that’s juicy and rich.”
He broke out a box of home-rolled cigarettes and a bottle of applejack. He grew his own tobacco and distilled his own liquor. The smokes were harsh, the ‘jack like paint thinner, but I enjoyed both a great deal.
We drank and smoked and Henry talked.
He told me about farming, canning vegetables and pickles, trapping muskrats—“mugrats” to him—and weasel, setting snares for rabbits, laying crops and alternating your fields to keep the soil healthy, keeping the worms out of your apples and the weevils out of your cornmeal. He knew it all. I figured he was like Tuck’s friend, Bobby Hughes, self-sufficient to the bitter end. While all the nutso, paranoid survivalists were stockpiling weapons and canned food, the real survivors were learning how to make everything from shoe leather to butter and how to grow potatoes to tobacco. When the paramilitary types died off, they would be the ones that endured.
Henry kept pouring the applejack into me and I didn’t refuse.
I was pretty lit, but warm inside, feeling no pain. Very relaxed. He talked on and on, as if he hadn’t had an audience in many months. Somewhere during the process, I had stretched out on the sofa and he had tucked a feather pillow under my head and pulled a crotched coverlet over me. He kept talking, his voice wrapping me up in a warm cocoon. Outside, it was raining, lightning flashing and thunder booming.