Kill Town, USA

by Joseph N. Love

  “Well. That’s enlightening.”

  “You could have told him we were here.”

  “You’re ghosts, you know? You slipped through a giant crack. No one knows who you are. No one knows about that,” he pointed to Audrey’s arm. “No one needs to know. They’ll want you dead.”

  “And you don’t? They’re coming to you for orders.”

  “They think I’m in charge. I’m not. I told them we needed to quarantine ourselves. We were the ones to take charge. They asked me what to do, and I said what I thought. Get rid of the ones who ain’t right in the head. They come and ask me what to do, but they make up their own minds out there. My word ain’t scripture.”

  He turned to his wife and waved her over. “Claire, come here a minute.” She stepped forward and set the lamp on the desk. “Raise up them pants. Go on.”

  Slowly, the thin woman with the graying brown hair rolled up the hem of her pajamas. Her calf was mostly black. There was a wide hole above the ankle. The wound was coated in lint from her pajamas.

  “The fat boy out in the barn did that. The one Georgie shot. Crawled up behind her while she was getting cat food out of the freezer. I figure my main concern is staying with her. Not getting out. Not killing her.”

  “Your kids?”

  Matthew shook his head. “They don’t know. They’ve turned real mean. They’d kill her if they knew. It’s been a week.”

  “Claire?” Audrey whispered. “What’s it like?”

  “Like my leg’s asleep. Like I’m waiting for another day.”

  Claire unrolled her pajamas and took the lamp from the table.

  “I am cold. Though I think everyone is nowadays. The lamp keeps me warm.”

  I nodded. “We would like to be on our way. We’re keeping you from being with your wife. Your family.”

  He nodded. “I don’t mind it. It’s funny in a way.”

  I didn’t think any of it was funny.

  “You two stay here tonight. We’ll make you some food and you can leave in the morning. Or you can leave tonight. But you have to eat.”

  Matthew grunted as he pushed himself away from the desk. He and Claire went to the kitchen. Stopping by a door, he pointed to it. “This is the bathroom for you. We still got water. If you want a hot bath, you’ll have to heat some water on the stove first.”

  Claire and Matthew went to work lighting an ancient wood stove, measuring out flour and sugar, and carrying in trays of food from a snowdrift outside. Audrey and I rested on the bed, squeezing our heads together on the tiny pillow.

  “You ought to take a bath later.”

  “You don’t smell so great yourself,” she jabbed my ribs.

  “It’ll make you feel better. We need to clean that wound.”

  “I’d like that. But…”

  “But?”

  “I can’t move my arm much. It feels asleep like Claire said. But it burns.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  Claire and Matthew brought us two steaming plates of pork and cornbread with strawberry jam and a puddle of butter.

  “We’ll need some water put on while you’ve got the stove hot.”

  Claire backed out of the room. “I’ll put on two pots. The water’s awful cold.”

  “Thank you,” Audrey said. “For the food, too.”

  Matthew had a cup of coffee. He stared into it as he leaned against the counter.

  “You happen to have any more ammunition for that Winchester?” I asked.

  “I do. I’d be happy to give it to you,” he swirled the coffee mug.

  “I’d be happy to barter for it. I don’t expect it free.”

  “We do plenty of raids. We don’t need to trade. I’ll set you up with those nine-millimeters and the Remington, too.”

  “How long did you plan to keep the county quarantined?”

  “Until one side wins. We don’t have a plan.”

  “What about food?”

  “Everyone for themselves.”

  “Just give up the barricades. Let it go.”

  Matthew nodded. “They think they’re keeping it out. One crew goes around putting up fences. Another crew is in charge of a containment area. Another patrols the county roads. Lots of crews. A job for everyone. Most of these people haven’t felt half this useful their entire lives. People want to work.”

  “What do they do when they find someone who’s been infected?”

  “Shoot them.”

  “All of them?”

  “If they’re infected, yes.”

  “Just out on the streets.”

  “Partly.”

  “Partly?”

  “Some in houses.”

  “They’re going in houses?”

  “Of course. They take a bus and load it up with people who might be infected, drive them to the high school.”

  “Why the high school?”

  “It’s big. The football field holds lots of people.”

  “You’re penning up people who might be infected?”

  “They don’t take chances. If they picked up you two, you’d wind up there,” he pointed at me. “Her bit the way she is and you with her. They’d just as soon kill you to be safe.” He gulped the remainder of his coffee and dropped the cup in the sink. He stepped into the doorway. “I’ll get you that ammunition. Give you a fighting chance.” He wandered out of the kitchen and Claire took his place.

  “I believe your water’s about ready,” Claire said.

  AUDREY CLOSED HER EYES as I ran the warm water over her head, rinsing the dingy suds from her hair. Her hand, arm, and part of her shoulder had turned light purple. Pressing against the wound with the rag, it oozed a black ribbon that bobbed like thread in the water.

  I was sad to see her naked. To bathe her. The body is a strange thing. Her breasts, hips, smooth and flawless skin. Just flesh. It is a revelation of life when the body loses its sensuality.

  “What do you think of death?”

  “What?”

  “About all this. Those people aren’t alive, but they’re walking.”

  “They’re dead inside. They don’t breathe. They don’t think.”

  “They seem instinctual. Like they want to eat. It’s very animalistic.”

  “They’re just wandering.”

  She stood up, took a towel from the lacquered shelf and crimped her hair. She wrapped herself in the towel and leaned into me. We stood for several minutes in the flickering candlelight, glad to have each other. I helped her put on her bra and shirt. Then, I helped button her pants. She smelled like the bar soap. Faintly of roses but mostly lye.

  We laid in bed, her wet hair against my face. I pulled a few strands from my mouth.

  There was an embroidered cloth over the doorway I hadn’t seen before. I read it aloud:

  “He who pours contempt on nobles made them wander in a trackless waste.”

  “Battle hymn of the poverty stricken,” Audrey said. She leaned across me and blew out the candle on the bedside table. We were wrapped in darkness and alone. Wandering in the trackless waste.

  If I wandered, I did so alone. Audrey was not part of it. Soon she wouldn’t be part of anything. Same with Sewell. And Claire. The vigilantes and the infected locals. I couldn’t get the scripture out of my head. The house was long asleep, but the embroidered cloth echoed.

  I carefully slid out of bed and walked to the kitchen. I felt for the rifles in the dark. Then, the ammunition. Blindly, silently, I loaded the Winchester. I loaded the Remington and the Glocks. There was a mountain of ammunition on the table.

  I held a Glock in each hand. They felt like bricks.

  I pulled the slides.

  The house shook with gunfire. Not my gun. Surely not my gun. I felt the barrels. Cold as night.

  Another shot shook the air. An earthquake of the ether.

  The hallway flashed. I saw Georgie’s tiny outline behind it firing straight into an open door. Audrey got out of bed, bed springs popping and I heard her hand working the kn
ob. Georgie tiptoed down the hall and passed right in front of me, the butt of his rifle caressed the back of my hand. I watched him raise the rifle to the bedroom door. To Audrey.

  Click. Slide. Click.

  When the world ends, survival is the right and all else is the wrong.

  I shot the boy in the back of the head. The rifle clattered to the floor. I set the Glocks on the kitchen table and eased into a chair.

  “Get the flashlight from the pack,” I said coldly.

  “Jack? What happened, Jack?”

  “Just get the flashlight. Don’t turn it on.”

  She did as I asked. Carefully walking around Georgie’s body, I took the flashlight from her in the doorway.

  Claire and Matthew were curled together. Mai had a pillow over her head, a .22 rifle leaned against her nightstand. I went back to the kitchen and pointed the light at the boy. Audrey didn’t react. Maybe she thought it was a dream.

  “There is nothing here for us,” I said. “We cannot stay in this house any longer.”

  We filled the backpack with ammunition, leftover cornbread, and a few jars of preserves. In a clay dish by the door, we found two Ford keys. I took both. We stole Matthew’s truck, camouflaged and outfitted with mud tires and a steel bear cage.

  The console held maps of Marshall, bordered by the French Broad River and a highway. The master map showed substations, water towers, dams, warehouses, schools, surveillance locations, crews, meeting points, and patrol routes. More importantly, it detailed blockades, shift changes, radio frequencies and pass codes. Carefully, I backed out of the driveway. We headed slowly toward the first checkpoint.

  “So,” Audrey sounded upset. “We’re heading to the river?”

  “We can’t drive out of here.”

  “We’ll swim?”

  “We’ll find a boat.”

  She shook her head.

  “This is unreal, Jack.”

  “I know.”

  “No. Not this,” she pointed out the window. “But this idea. We don’t have a boat. We don’t know where to find one. We’re liable to drown. To get shot. To tip over. I don’t trust you.”

  We rode in the gentle hum of the exhaust. The truck was finally warm. I turned on the heater and held my hands up to the vents. “I didn’t ask you to trust me. I didn’t say I had a great idea.”

  “I thought you had all the ideas,” she was serious.

  “I’m as lost as you. But I come up with an idea and I don’t doubt it. I’ll make it work. If you can make something else work, we’ll do that.”

  “You’re…”

  “What?”

  “So much like Watts.”

  I stopped the truck and turned on the dome light. The clock on the dash said it was three in the morning. “I’ll be honest with you. From here on, I don’t have a plan. If you have an idea, any at all, I’m willing to try it. Does that make me like Watts? Because Watts was a coward. I could tell that the second I saw him.”

  “Only a coward shoots a little boy.”

  “Did you want to go back? Did you want to look at his sister? His parents? Did you want him to shoot you, like a coward hiding in the dark? I wasn’t going to let it happen. But you can go back and stay there and wait for whatever’s next.”

  Her eyes swelled but she didn’t look away. Fat tears splashed across the front of her jacket. “I hate it here. This isn’t a place I know anymore.”

  “We’re lucky he didn’t go to our room first.”

  She nodded.

  The first checkpoint was at a Presbyterian church past a sharp bend in the road. Before the curve, I stopped in the road and killed the lights. I let the truck idle around the curve until the church came into view. Stadium lights mounted to booms were powered by a generator on the ground. It puffed a silent, silver exhaust. I drove slowly into the ditch.

  I checked the map and turned up the radio. It chirped.

  I picked up the mouthpiece. “Ascension unit check-in.”

  “Ascension unit, check.”

  “Howell, Huff, and Gerard?”

  I watched a guard answer the radio. He paced the large white door of the church. A pair of binoculars and a rifle hung from his neck.

  “Negative, Huff’s reassigned tonight. Manhunt.”

  “Howell?”

  “Check.”

  “Gerard?”

  Static.

  “Gerard?”

  “Uh, he’s in the john. I’ve got his radio.”

  An orange portable toilet sat shrouded in the church’s shadow. I rested the barrel of the rifle on the edge of the window and aimed at Howell, who stopped in front of the doors to stare at the sky. The moment his skull sprayed against the white door we heard his delayed voice, “Hello?” on the radio.

  I reloaded and aimed at the portable toilet. But Gerard was in no hurry. Surely, I thought, he must have heard the gunshot.

  But there was no sign of Gerard. I fired at the port-a-john several times up and down. Still as a summer lake.

  We came to a bypass, a four-lane highway barricaded with barbed wire and chain-link fence. A rickety checkpoint was fashioned out of an old Sno-Cone stand. More stadium lights and generators were set up, and as we approached the guards trained them right at us. The checkpoint was lousy with guards wearing camouflage jumpsuits and Carhartt beanies. Their arms rested on top of their rifles. The men just shuffled around. Matthew Scudder was right. It was the most useful these people had probably ever felt. One by one, the men spotted the truck and waved. I drove straight for the checkpoint, the Winchester propped up on the dash.

  “Radio check, Scudder,” the radio crackled.

  Audrey tossed me the receiver and I answered in a whisper, “Check.”

  “You just wake up?”

  “Yeah, another long night.” I slouched in the seat and flipped a row of auxiliary switches for the lights, blinding the guards. We rolled past the Sno-Cone stand awash in white halogen.

  “Be advised, we haven’t seen the salt truck yet.”

  “Copy.”

  Audrey held up a small yellow notebook, a hundred or so pages covered front and back with numbers, addresses, and names. “Look,” she said, “the real yellow pages.”

  “What is that?”

  She looked closer, flipping through the first couple pages. “Oh. Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a list.”

  “What kind?”

  “Look, here’s Sewell and his wife,” she handed me the notebook.

  SEWELL, HOWARD M., 4865 GOCHIE FORD FARM ROAD, QUARANTINE, LENA C., SPOUSE, POSSIBLY INFECTED, CULL.

  “It’s full of names,” she opened the console and pulled out another notebook, and a third. “They’re all full. They must have everyone in the county listed here.

  “A cull log.”

  “It’s not right. There are innocent people locked up by madmen.”

  “There are dangerous people locked up, too.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “No.”

  I steered the truck toward the school road. The snow was mostly gray slush. The school was circled on one of the maps and labeled “Containment.”

  The high school was outfitted with lights on cranes and blocked off by barricades. Three rows of razor wire wrapped the fences. A lone man sat inside a tiny concessions booth keeping guard over the two gates. I sat up and aimed at the man, but Audrey slapped my forehead.

  “Don’t you see the guards up there?”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “They’re on the roof. They’re on the lights. They’re all over.”

  I squinted. Sure enough, portly guards stood on the roofs, shifting foot to foot and rubbing their hands together.

  I drove straight, auxiliary lights burning. The guard waved. I tapped the horn and we made our way inside the compound. I followed the road to the main building. Gas tankers were parked in the lot to fuel generators. Million-watt bulbs turned the campus into a movie set. Watchmen patrolle
d the sidewalks, fingers off their triggers and up their noses.

  We toured the campus. Everywhere we drove, we were greeted with happy waves by guards. They thought we were Matthew Scudder, Revolutionary. Leader of the New World. And everywhere we drove, we came across more guards.

  We stopped in front of the football field. Hastily fastened to the top of the fence was more razor wire, sagging in some places and taut in others. A lookout had been made out of the announcer’s box, and the floodlights shined brightly on the field. A couple thousand infected strangers were locked inside. Their skin was gray and black, bubbling with maggots. Their faces were gaunt, mouths agape and drooling black blood.

  “Do you see that?” She pointed to the bleachers. “Jesus. Do you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “That woman under the stands. Right there.”

  I saw her. She was in a nightgown and clinging to a girder.

  “Can those things climb?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like that woman, Jack!”

  “I don’t think they can climb. If anything, they’re clumsy.”

  “She’s not one?”

  “Not yet, looks like.”

  “We have to get her down. Jack, we have to help her.”

  “We can’t go in there.”

  “She’s stranded.”

  I drove behind the stadium, drawn by headlights hovering back and forth, blinking behind a patch of spindly trees. We came across a bulldozer pushing buckets of dirt into a hole. We made out the hands and feet of the damned. Their limbs jiggled as the bulldozer scraped by.

  “Shoot him. Shoot the driver,” she said.

  “What good’s that?”

  “Watch. He pushes the dirt to the hole, he makes a pass to the dirt. When he’s facing the stadium, just shoot him. The bulldozer will drive right through the fence.”

  Audrey was right. With every other turn, he aimed straight for the football field. I rolled down the window and aimed at the driver. I followed him for several bucket loads, mesmerized by the spinning lights atop the machine. When he faced the stadium again, I fired. I missed, nicking the steel cage around him. The dozer twitched to the left. I made the next shot, but the bulldozer was off course. It headed toward the corner of the field, chugging along.

  The yellow and dirt-brown dozer plowed through the razor wire and chain link fence. The metal poles bent under its tracks and there was a satisfying snap as wires whipped through the air. It plowed through the swarm of bodies in the corner of the field. Their hands reached out of the bucket and groped for release. The others ambled straight for the opening in the fence. A tornado siren howled. Guards barreled out of the announcer’s booth, assault rifles aimed at the muddy field. The guards fired madly at the Heathens, but there were too many. The Heathens swarmed the bleachers, and the guards desperately scrabbled back to the booth. Or so they tried. The Heathens weren’t fast but they were many. They were inescapable. They tore the guards apart. It was a free-for-all. The guards thrashed and cried. They didn’t want to die. They didn’t want to become what they loathed. But it was all in vain.