by McBain, Tim
The speech went on like that, but Decker zoned out, watching faces in the crowd instead. The people all nodded and smiled and looked on Dalton with wonder in their eyes. Nobody remembered how it was before. Dalton wasn’t concerned with peace and love in the old world. He was into separating fools from their money, which he did to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. A fraud. A cheat. Disowned by his church and his wife at the height of the scandal, though Decker wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out he had found a new church and a new wife in the years after that. He looked to be well on his way to acquiring both here in the post-apocalypse.
When the appropriate time came, the preacher fell quiet, and people began to make their way up to him, a handful at a time streaming out of the crowd and standing before the man in white. He placed his hands on them, yelling gibberish. His face went red, veins bulging and throbbing from his neck and forehead.
As he touched them, the people tumbled to the ground and writhed around, convulsing like epileptics. They arched their backs and twitched their shoulders. An old woman shook her head back and forth violently. A teenage kid pointed his toes and kicked his feet just like he was trying to do the backstroke on the ground.
While the other onlookers around him gasped and cowered and cooed and squirmed in their seats and brought their hands to their faces to cover their mouths, Decker crossed his arms over his chest and watched, his expression lifeless. Blank. He wondered how many of the people on the ground were in on the act and how many were so desperate to believe that they flung themselves into these hysterics without even fully realizing they were faking it. He knew that was possible. Some mass delusion taking root among these people, some self-fulfilling catastrophe stomping out all rational thought.
He stood on instinct, without any premeditation. He weaved through the crowd and walked to the front, feet kicking through the tall grass where the land sloped down toward the river. He joined the line waiting to be healed by supernaturally-induced seizure.
His jaw flexed as he moved up to second in line, and a strange vibration came over him as he drew within arm’s length of Ray Dalton. He’d shaken the man’s hand once months ago, and they’d fought off the raiders together, but otherwise he’d had no real contact with him. To be so close to this being, this manipulator that controlled everything and everyone within his realm, filled him with some blend of awe and disgust.
He still wasn’t sure if Dalton was the one that made the call to send him out among the zombies a while back. He pressed Mustache Rick for information, but it didn’t go anywhere. He had to stop short of confronting him outright so as to avoid tipping his hand.
And now he squinted to try to read the lines around Dalton’s mouth, the look in his eye as they faced each other. Tried to get some clue one way or the other about how the man felt toward him.
The preacher nodded a greeting to him as he moved to the front of the line, and Decker nodded back out of reflex, sort of regretting it after. He didn’t want to submit, to give any sense of acceptance of Dalton’s authority, but he already had without even thinking about.
The preacher lifted his hands out to the sides again, palms facing forward. His robe whooshed when he gestured, the draped folds flapping like the sides of a dog’s mouth. Dalton locked eyes with Decker through his glasses and yelled a few gibberish words with great gusto. His face twisted up, wrinkles and puckers forming along his chin and forehead and cheeks. At the climax of his nonsense speech, he lifted his hands over his head and brought them down on Decker’s head, the heels of both palms thudding into his forehead and giving a single shove.
Decker just stood there, though he had to admit that something about the pageantry of the whole thing made him feel quite a bit of peer pressure to just play along. He could see himself dropping to his knees and flopping over to the side, kicking his legs a little and writhing a bit. It would be so easy, would relieve that feeling that all eyes were watching him, sizing him up, judging him in this moment.
But no. No thanks, he thought. The whole lot of them could feel free to judge all they liked. He cared not.
Dalton stepped closer, craning his neck so their noses almost touched and rotating his head back and forth as though finding new angles to look deeper into Decker’s eye. He smirked a little after a moment, a knowing curl of the lip, subtle and quick enough that Decker didn’t think anyone at a distance would have been able to read it.
Then his hands shot up above his head again and crashed down, this time the left cradling the back of Decker’s head while the front full on pushed his forehead as hard as he could. Decker’s head tilted back due to the force and Dalton squeezed his skull between his mitts, pressing downward, essentially trying to muscle Decker into losing his balance to go crashing down.
Decker’s knees buckled, but he caught himself, planting a hand on the ground, his legs and spine and neck going taut, resisting the older man’s effort to fold him up and discard him. Dalton shook with the strain, his lips jerking up and down over his clenched teeth. He couldn’t stop Decker from standing back upright.
He didn’t think now, ripping his head out of the preacher’s grasp and swinging a right hook that Dalton managed to duck under. He was somehow unsurprised to find the old man a capable fighter. He stalked right at him like a brawling boxer, hands up to protect his chin. Dalton circled away from him, his knees finally getting high enough that he no longer appeared to be floating around within the robe.
Dalton tripped on the flap of fabric encasing his legs, and Decker caught him with a jab. A straight left shot that snapped the preacher’s head back. He swung his right at the toppling figure in white, but someone tackled him just then.
The crowd swelled around him in a circle, angry faces glaring at him. Dead eyes. Restless feet and arms twitching. Fingers splayed as if to grab. The mob of humanity moved as one organism, closing in to swallow him and eliminate the threat. One foot flicked out of the mess of legs, kicking him in the ribs. The pain stabbed and swelled, growing so big he could only picture his ruptured spleen and squished liver intermingling into a sauce in his gut.
“Get back,” Dalton said, his voice a sharp tone rising above the others. “This boy doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
The chatter died back, and the crowd parted to reveal the preacher as he got to his feet. A little trickle of blood still seeped from his nose, but it wasn’t too bad. He dabbed at it with his fingers. The robe seemed to take the brunt of the fall, coming away with a rip to match its new mud and grass stains.
A man’s voice called out of the mob:
“He can’t get away with something like ‘at. I won’t stand for it! None of us will.”
Dalton grimaced and squinted at Decker. The crowd got quiet, waiting for their leader’s verdict.
“He doesn’t know any better, but he can learn yet,” Dalton said. “Send him to the hole.”
Another scoop of dirt arced off the blade of his shovel and landed on the flat land somewhere above him. He chopped at the ground again, downward strokes to break up the tightly compacted soil here some eight feet down. It was the color of sand and compressed so tightly that it was almost as hard as a rock.
He didn’t know who started the hole as a form of punishment. It must have been another of Dalton’s ideas. A way to break people’s wills, especially the rebellious ones, without actually turning them further against the group. The idea was pretty simple. The accused digs under the eye of armed guards with orders to kill if anything other than digging transpires. The shovel flings soil. It does not stop. Day or night. No food. No rest. They did hard labor until exhaustion broke them, made the rebellion seep out of them along with all of that sweat. People walked out of this hole sorry for what they’d done, having let go of their anger entirely. Just happy, relieved to be out from under the strain. And the message sent to everyone was as clear as could be. Questioning authority was a fruitless endeavor, a hole to nowhere.
But Decker knew he wasn’t like the others
. They could work him like a dog. They could pummel him. They could punish and torture his body, beat the shell that encased him until it bruised and bled and broke, but they could never touch what was inside. Never. His passion and curiosity would persist no matter what anyone said or did to him.
Oh, he might tell them what they wanted to hear. He might sing and dance and jump on command so they’d trust him once more. But only to get what he wanted. He finally knew what that was. They would come to regret this, he thought. They’d regret not killing him when they had the chance.
The point of the shovel bashed at the ground over and over, and little wisps of sand floated up in clouds like beige smoke concealing his ankles, and the one they called Jones smiled.
Erin
Moundsville, West Virginia
266 days after
This blackout didn’t last long. At least she didn’t think it did. She came to on her side, cheek mashed into the floor.
Holy shit.
It worked.
She was free.
Her hand looked like some gory special effect from a horror movie — skin peeled away to reveal bone and muscle and connective tissue, all of it shiny and slicked with blood. She flexed it and almost puked at the pain it brought on. Just as she tucked her hand against her chest, she heard footsteps approaching the door.
Her eyes searched wildly for something she could use as a weapon, but she found nothing. She’d have to fight, bare-handed. Tooth and claw. Like an animal.
She heard him fumbling with the padlock and tried to decide the best way to set it up. She scooched closer to the door, flattening herself against the wall.
Something metallic clicked and rattled. She held her breath.
The door swung open and Erin watched his form darken the doorway as he took a step into the room. He stopped in his tracks, noting the empty place next to the pipe where she should have been chained.
This time he had weapons. A hammer dangling from his hand. And something else hanging from his belt. From this angle she could only see the polished wood handle.
His moment of confusion was her window. She kicked out with the flat of her foot as hard as she could, aiming for his knees.
He let out a yelp of pain or maybe confusion as he toppled over. The hammer fell to the ground with a clunk.
Erin threw herself on top of him. She went straight for his eyes, jabbing her good thumb into the flesh, trying to find purchase, trying to squeeze past his eyelids.
He pushed at her face, at her chin, scrabbling like an animal just as much as she was. And then his hands found her neck and started to squeeze.
It was instinct that stopped her from clawing at his face. Her hands went to her throat, trying to pull and scratch him away, but he was so much stronger and wasn’t letting go. The world started to pulse. Red flashes of light. Her chest burned. She heard strange noises: a crash and then a splashing liquid sound followed by a whoosh. She wasn’t sure if it was just in her head. The sound of dying, maybe.
The red took over for a moment, blinding her to everything else. No sight, no sound. Nothing.
And then she was on the floor again, in the dark. Coughing, wheezing, gasping for breath. Her throat was on fire, her neck ached and throbbed.
What happened?
The door was closed again and the man was gone. He must have choked her out and left.
Something was happening outside of the room. There were noises coming from beyond the door. A crackling sound. Something familiar, but hard to place in this context.
And then she smelled smoke.
Fire.
The house was on fire.
She had to move, had to go. Now.
She dragged herself to the door and kicked at it, using her foot like a battering ram. It didn’t come down on the first kick like she’d hoped. She was weak from the fight and everything else. But it bounced a little on its hinges, and she kept at it, driving her foot into the wood with as much force as she could muster.
There were other sounds now. The man was howling. Or she assumed it was him. Was he on fire? She hoped so.
She hoped he burned.
Three more kicks and the bottom hinge of the door came off. Her foot connected with the wood one last time and the padlocked latch fell away, leaving the whole thing hanging askew by the top hinge.
An eerie light filtered into the room. Coiling and writhing with the smoke. With a clumsy crawling motion, she moved forward. Her hand bumped into something on the floor to her right.
The hammer.
Her fingers wrapped around the wooden handle. She tried to ignore the stains that looked like blood. She hefted it in her hand, feeling the weight of it.
The smoke made her eyes water. She needed to move. She considered tucking the hammer into her waistband but wanted it at the ready. Instead, she dragged it along with her as she crawled. She was taking no chances.
She poked her head past the threshold, trying to still her heart by telling herself it was just another house and just another scavenging mission. She wasn’t buying it. A thick haze of smoke filled most of the basement. Combined with the dim lighting, she could only see about ten feet in either direction. But in front of her, she could just make out the foot of a stairwell.
Just as she moved toward it, there was another crash of glass shattering. And then another sound, a strange one she couldn’t place right away. She realized it was the glug-glug-glug of liquid spilling from a container. This was followed by a pause and then a whump. More fire.
Time to go, she thought. Go, go, go.
She scrambled to the stairs, knees bumping the unfinished wood. It was an awkward climb, made more difficult by the fact that a lot of the smoke had concentrated at the top of the stairwell. She pulled her shirt over her nose and tried to hold her breath when she reached the door at the top of the steps.
With her good hand, she floundered at it, feeling along the edge until she found the knob. It was locked. She wrenched at it, tried to force it, but it held. She gave one half-hearted shove with her shoulder. A useless effort. This was not a flimsy door like the one on her cell. Even if she were able to break it down, by the time she managed to do so the fire would have rendered her into beef jerky.
Through the smoke, she gazed back down the stairs. God, she didn’t want to go back down there. She really, really didn’t. But there wasn’t another option.
She scooted down the steps on her butt, like she used to do when she was a kid. At the bottom, she grasped the handrail and pulled herself into a standing position.
Flattening herself against the wall, she leaned around the corner, trying to get a sense of the layout and where the man might be. Beyond the room she’d been held in, there was a corridor that seemed to open into a larger space. It was hard to tell for sure through the smoke and gloom, though.
Over the crackling of flames, she could hear feet scuffling over the concrete. Grunting. A rattling sound.
Feeling like she was headed to her doom, she moved down the hallway, hammer raised and ready to strike.
She limped along, the rattling noise growing louder. She came to another padlocked door. Like hers, it was barely more than a garden gate. The padlock shook with the force of someone pounding and scraping at the wood. Smoke poured through the cracks and from underneath the door. This room was on fire. And there was someone inside.
Erin swung the hammer at the padlock once, twice, and then the entire latch fell away, clattering to the floor. She tried pulling at the handle, then realized this door opened into the room. She pushed then, bumping into whoever was behind the door. She shoved harder, and then the smell hit her.
Death.
She couldn’t believe she could smell it over the smoke, but there it was.
She froze in the doorway, turning this over in her mind. The way her gut clenched, part of her already knew, but her brain was a beat behind.
An arm wrapped around the edge of the door, and the color was wrong. It was the hue of a dead
fish that had been in the water for a few days, criss-crossed with black veins.
Before she could move away, bony fingers clothed with rotted flesh latched onto her arm.
The dead shuffled toward her, a room full of them.
Baghead
Outside of Little Rock, Arkansas
9 years, 129 days after
His wound smelled like burnt meat. He couldn’t decide what kind. Veal, maybe. Veal with cabbage, he thought, though he’d never had the combination. It almost made him hungry at first, reading like some charred Cajun dish for just a moment, but the nausea came out after that to cancel the hunger out.
The car was moving now. The vibrations of the tires on the road traveled up through the frame of the car, quivered the seat he lay upon, and tingled up and down his spine. It reminded him of those motel beds with the coin-operated “magic fingers” massage option. Those had always fascinated him as a child, and some of that wonder stuck with him to this day even if the reality of the magic fingers was a total let down. Turned out there was nothing magic about a vibrating mattress. Like most things back then, it was just a way to separate tourists from their quarters.
He could tell it was light out even through his eyelids. His closed eyes showed him more red than black, and that was the tip off.