by JJ Zep
The morning was already hot, the mercury heading north even as the shadows shortened. The dusty air rasped at Charlie’s throat. He resisted the temptation to take a pull from his quarter-full canteen. Best to save what he had for when he really needed it. He’d left his spare water bottle with Skye. He’d also left her a note in case she woke up in the cab of the Toyota while they were gone. He and Wackjob had pushed the vehicle off the road and into a shallow arroyo. They’d camouflaged it with brush as best they could, hoping that the bushes would also provide a modicum of shade. But he didn’t like the idea of her alone out there. Anything might happen and even if nothing did, the cab of the truck was going to be an oven before long.
“Awful quiet,” Wackjob said, scanning his eye along the embankment.
Charlie had been thinking the same thing. The last time he’d been here, for the evacuation, the place had been overrun. They’d barely gotten out with their asses in tact. Now, it was a ghost town. They’d yet to see a single Z that was still walking. Charlie almost wished he had some juice left in the I-Pod so that he could send out the “PIED PIPER” and see if that would draw some of them from cover. Right now the MP3 device was nothing more than a useless lump of metal in his breast pocket.
“You think maybe the Z’s have moved on? Gone looking for a new food source?” Wackjob asked.
“You ever seen a Z that was smart enough to do that?”
“Ain’t ever seen a Z that was smart enough to play dead,” Wackjob said.
“Oh they’re smart enough to do that, alright. Far as I know the Z’s go into a kind of hibernation when there’s no ready food source. That’s likely what happened here. They’re probably all stacked up like cordwood in these houses just yonder. All it’s going to take is a whiff of our sweat to get them walking again. So I suggest we rock ‘n roll and be out of here before that happens.”
“Amen to that,” Wackjob said.
They walked for a while in silence, their boot heels tapping out a staccato on the blacktop. Presently, Charlie caught a glimpse of the warehouse. The chain link fence that had stood in front of the building had collapsed and a section of the roof looked like it had caved in. But the place was still standing which was a blessing. Why then did Charlie feel like every muscle in his body had just been ratcheted tighter? Why were his nerve ends jangling?
“You smell that?” Wackjob said from behind him.
Charlie didn’t at first, but then a faint stirring of the breeze brought the scent his way, the stench of kerosene applied to a garbage fire.
three
The holding cells sat at the front of the prison, just behind the administration block. Jojo was shoved roughly into one of the units, the door slammed shut behind him. Litherland had left minutes before, taking Buckland and the firing squad with him and assuring Jojo that he should consider this a stay of execution. Jojo still had no idea what this was about. Why had he been spared? What was in the note from Harrow? None of it made any sense.
What was apparent though was that the battle, which Jojo had assumed to be over, was far from won. Over the last few minutes, the bursts of gunfire had become more frequent, more sustained. There were heavier weapons too, mortars and what sounded like an 88-mil. And there were shouts and screams both from outside and within the prison. Had the shack dwellers somehow gained an advantage over Harrow? Jojo didn’t think that was possible. Colonel Duma was a wily old bird, but in Jojo’s experience underdogs hardly ever won military battles.
Jojo got up from the cot and crossed to the bars at the front of the cell, pressed up against them and tried to get a look down the corridor.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Anyone? What the hell’s going on out there?”
His voice bounced back at him from the opposite cells. If there was anyone in the admin block, no one replied. Jojo trudged back to the cot and slumped down on it. He supposed he should be lucky to be alive. But what was the point of that if, like Litherland said, this was only a stay of execution. More than likely, Harrow had decided to hold back until the battle was won. Then he could stage a series of mock trials and deal with all the conspirators publicly, a warning to anyone with designs on challenging him in the future. Yes, that sounded about Harrow’s speed.
And what? His father’s annoying conscience voice sounded in his mind. You’re going to sit here on your cot waiting until they come for you? You’re going to give up that easily?
“And just what do you suggest I do, dad?” Jojo said to the empty cell. “Pick the lock, walk through the walls, shoot my way past the guards with my finger?”
Jojo lay back on the bed, threaded his hands together behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. His father was right, though. He should be doing something about his situation, not meekly accepting defeat. What though? What was he going to do?
From elsewhere in the prison came the loud clank of a steel door being opened. Now the sound of voices raised in argument, a thud and a shout. Jojo got up and walked to the bars again. The sound of running feet reached him, now screams and the whiff of smoke.
He pushed up against the bars, craned his neck until he could make out the steel door at the end of the corridor, the door separating the cells from the admin block and reception. White smoke was seeping under the door. Jojo could already feel it tickling at his throat.
“Hey! Anyone out there?”
The smoke was thickening up, creeping across the floor like a dense fog, then dissipating upwards as the next wave slewed across the linoleum. Tears sprung up in Jojo’s eyes. The tickle in his throat was transformed into a rasp. A hacking cough escaped him, doubling him over.
Down!
He realized suddenly what he had to do. Get down on the ground where the smoke was less intense. Jojo dropped to his knees, to his belly. He crawled to the cot, got a handful of blanket and pulled the mattress from the frame. The smoke was dense enough now to obscure the bars at the front of the cell, and with no windows in the room it was only going to get worse. Lying on the floor was going to be only a temporary respite, very temporary at that.
Jojo pulled the sheet from the bed, got a corner of it between his teeth and pulled, tearing off a strip of fabric. He folded that into a rough triangle, pulled that over his mouth and knotted it behind his head. Somewhere close, an alarm jangled into life. Jojo pressed his cheek to the cold floor and took in shallow breaths of tainted air. The smoke was thickening up at ground level, wavering before his eyes like flurries in a snow globe. He felt suddenly very tired, his lids droopy, closing.
“I’m sorry,” Jojo said. Not sure what that meant or who he was apologizing to. “I’m sorry.”
The alarm bell was supplemented by an electrical crackle. That was followed by something that sounded like a defective firecracker.
“Ppfffttt!”
In the next moment, an explosion rocked the cellblock, not loud, but close enough at hand to send a shudder running along the floor. Smoke swirled around Jojo and he lifted his head long enough to see the cell door rattle open.
Surely that couldn’t be. Surely –
Get moving, his father’s voice instructed.
And so Jojo did. He started crawling towards the open door that he was certain was an optical illusion.
four
Charlie dug in with his elbows and pulled upward. The crest of the embankment lay just ahead, the long grass littered with broken masonry and flakes of sooty gunk that smelled strongly of kerosene. There were bones too, blackened and oily to the touch, some with chunks of gristle still attached. Charlie had already picked his way past rib and finger bones, an ulna, a couple of skulls, one of them child sized. He reached the top of the embankment and stopped, looked across at Wackjob and fought back an insane desire to laugh. Wackjob’s face was smeared with soot. He looked like a clown who’d been caught out in the rain.
Charlie raised his head slightly and peered through the grass at ground level. The wall was a few feet away, buckled and listing but still standing, blocking
his view. He pulled himself over the crest of the embankment and crawled for cover, stopping against the wall and waiting for Wackjob to do the same. There was a collapsed section some twenty feet to his left. He flashed Wackjob a signal, then sprung to his feet and made for the gap, running crouched over, his rifle clutched loosely in his hand.
Reaching the gap, Charlie dropped onto his knees then onto his belly, his military training kicking in instinctively. You never peered around a corner at head height, not if you wanted to keep your brain matter inside your skull. From his position at ground level, he looked into the yard, taking in the garden. The first thing he noticed was that the grass on the other side of the wall was flattened, trampled that way by the passing of many feet. Elevating his view he could see a row of skeletal, fire-singed palms, the blackened walls of the pool house, the edge of a large rectangular swimming pool. The pool appeared to be filled in with some charred substance, whatever it was that had been burned here.
Charlie rolled across the face of the gap, came up on one knee with his rifle pressed into his shoulder. He now had a view of the main house, a two storey of cubist design, its formerly white walls dusty with soot. Three upper windows and a veranda looked down on the garden. Charlie studied each in turn, trying to pick out the sniper that might be hiding there. He saw nothing to arouse suspicion.
He directed his eye back to the surface of the pool, stopped, drew in a breath that reeked of cooked kerosene. An arm protruded from the mess, its fingers clawed, reaching for the sky in a gesture that seemed like a desperate bid to escape. Jesus! Had they held some mass cremation here? Or worse, had they burnt someone alive? That question was immediately answered in the negative. The fingers on the hand were moving, squirming like maggots in a corpse.
“You see that?” Wackjob hissed.
“Z’s,” Charlie said. “Someone dumped a bunch of Z’s in the swimming pool and set them alight. Let’s get in closer and take a look-see.”
He stepped through the gap, quickly rescanning the potential sniper points, the pool house and the upper floor of the residence. Then he jogged towards the pool, stopping short when the rank stench of kerosene and charred flesh hit him. Whoever had held this cookout hadn’t operated by half measures. How many Z’s had been incinerated here? Hundreds? Thousands?
His gaze was drawn again to the animated hand, fingers still fidgeting. That wasn’t the only movement in the pit, he now realized. The whole pile was alive. A denuded skull chattered its teeth; a half-burned leg twitched as though to ward off an itch; a fist slowly opened and closed; a milky eye rolled in a socket. Now a head pushed its way to the surface and a one-eyed, no-legged monstrosity began dragging itself towards them.
“This is some fucked up shit,” Wackjob said. He brought the butt of his rifle down and caved in the thing’s skull. “Who did this? The town’s been deserted for months.”
“Probably someone moved right in after we evacuated the place,” Charlie said. “Cleared out the Z’s, burned up their corpses in funeral pyres like this one.”
“Eaters,” Wackjob said, the word barely leaving his lips when a sound came, the rumble of vehicles heading along Frank Sinatra Drive to the beat of monotonous, bass-heavy music.
five
Jojo got a hold on the bars and pulled himself along the floor. His head and shoulders were now in the corridor, but still he half convinced himself that this was a hallucination, that the cell door was actually closed, that he was still lying on the bunk, slowly asphyxiating. Then the steel track gouged painfully into his hip and he realized that this was real, that there might actually be a way out of here. That he might actually make it out alive.
He rolled onto his side and peered into the smoke filled corridor, half expecting to see the guards rushing towards him. Instead he saw only white smoke, tinged now with a flicker of red and gold. He was looking into the admin block, he realized, beyond which lay the reception area, and freedom. A surge of excitement welled up, then was dampened when a barrage of throaty coughs rattled his body. A few more mouthfuls of this smoke and the cell door may as well have stayed closed. He needed to get out of here, needed to get moving now.
Jojo took in a gulp of the slightly less tainted air at ground level. He gained a handhold on the bars and pulled himself to his knees, then upright. He began staggering towards the end of the corridor. The security door stood buckled on its frame. To its right, the electrical fuse box arced and sputtered. He dropped to his knees again, fetched a breath of air. He squinted his eyes against the smoke, peered through the gap that the explosion had pealed back at the foot of the door, saw immediately that he had a problem.
The flame he’d seen earlier was more than a flicker. The admin block, filled as it was with wooden furniture and piles of paperwork, had been turned into an inferno. There was no way he was getting out through there. Perhaps fate had marked this out as his last day on earth after all. Maybe this was how it was meant to be.
He’d no sooner had that thought than he rejected it. He wasn’t dying here. He was getting out, getting away, getting back to his family, to Ferret. He sucked in some air, expunged most of it in a coughing fit. The makeshift bandana slipped from his face. The tang of acrid smoke stung his nostrils.
Think, Jojo, think.
He pulled the bandana back over his mouth and nose and was immediately grateful for the scant relief it gave. Now if only….
Of course!
The idea hit him like a slap to the forehead, something he’d learned during his training. He crawled quickly into the nearest cell, pulled the mattress from the cot and the coarse blanket from the mattress. The blanket was thick, military issue, perfect for what he needed. He carried it to the basin, turned the faucet. Nothing. The latrine then. Jojo shuffled towards the bowl. He thrust his hand in and it came away wet. The water wasn’t going to be enough though, not enough to drench the blanket, like he needed. He took a step back, raised his boot and applied it to the edge of the steel toilet bowl. On the third kick it twisted away with a squeal of metal. A spurt of water issued from the broken plumbing then slowed to a trickle. It would have to do.
six
There were three vehicles, two ancient pickups and a Humvee, all of them painted a messy, matt black. The Humvee had a roof-mounted fifty, a man with a grease-smeared face and knotted black hair standing up in the firing hatch with his hand on the trigger. More men were clustered on the backs of the pickups. Charlie counted six of them, scrawny, bedraggled creatures in filthy clothes that draped their bodies like loose-fitting skin. They looked more like alien beings than humans.
The convoy slowed to a crawl, the hip-hop drowning out the sound of the engines. Then the lead pickup turned and swung broadside in the road, mounted the center island and shuddered to a halt. The other two vehicles followed suit, all of them now facing head-on to the wall where Charlie and Wackjob lay concealed. The man on the fifty swung the weapon menacingly left and right, while the others dismounted from the pickups and took up positions in the road, not making any attempt at cover.
“Stupid fuckers,” Wackjob spat.
Charlie sighted along his rifle, picked a target. The man, like the others, was scrawny and pot-bellied, with a scraggly beard and filthy hair. His clothes were a strange ensemble that included a dress coat, track pants and a battered trilby hat. He held a shotgun in his hand. A bandolier was slung across his chest. At this distance the shotgun wasn’t going to do him much good.
“Say the word boss,” Wackjob mumbled under his breath. “Say the word.”
“Hold fire,” Charlie said. “Let’s just see how this plays.” He had little doubt that the Eaters knew he and Wackjob were there. Why else had they stopped at exactly this spot?
The music blasting from the speakers was killed suddenly, leaving behind a merciful silence. In the next moment that silence was supplanted by a booming voice. “Who we got hiding up there?”
Charlie looked at Wackjob, brought a finger to his lips. He looked back acros
s the garden, wondered if they should slip out that way, make their way back to the I-10. That wouldn’t work he realized. The Eaters probably would have anticipated such a move and would have posted men out front. Even if they hadn’t, he and Wackjob were on foot. They’d soon be chased down.
“You Corporation men?” The voice was gravelly, tinged with barely suppressed humor. “That why you boys is hidin’ out like a couple of yellow bellied ol’ dogs? You boys afraid of the big bad Eaters?”
Charlie flashed Wackjob a look, but it was too late. Wackjob had already taken the bait.
“We’re Rangers motherfucker,” he yelled. “So you’d best mind that tongue of yours, lest I come down there, pull it out by the root and shove it up your unwashed ass.”
“Tempting though that sounds, I’m gonna have to pass,” the voice chuckled. “Rangers you say? You the pussies that got chased out of this town by a bunch of Z’s?”
“We didn’t get chased out of no place,” Wackjob shouted back.
“Wackjob, for fuck sake,” Charlie hissed. “Leave it be. He’s just trying to get a rise out of you.”
“He’s already got that going on. I say we take them, boss. Wipe the floor with their asses.”
“You want to get into an argument with that fifty?”
“They ain’t got no ammo for that gun.”