by Jon Schafer
He quit singing when the wagon was fifty feet away and the one in front suddenly cut to his left and headed quickly back to the wagon. Without any food in sight, the dead stopped and whined as they looked around. Seeing Steve and his crew, they started to head in their direction but were halted when the person in the driver’s seat pulled up on the brake and stood.
Her face hidden by the cowl of her robe, she said in a clear voice, “Welcome to the underworld, I’m Delightfully Grimm.”
“I’ll bet you are,” Tick-Tock said quietly.
Steve poked him in the ribs with his elbow and asked her, “Are you coming from Jasper?”
With a slight tilt of her head, Delightfully Grimm said disdainfully, “But I have introduced myself, now it’s your turn. And to make it easier, you may simply call me Grimm.”
Steve was stunned by her formality and it took him a second before he said, “Good morning, Grimm, I’m Steve and this is Brain and Tick-Tock.”
“Now that we know each other,” Grimm said with a slight nod, “we can commence with the pleasantries. In answer to your question, I would just as soon go into Jasper, as you would want to drag your balls over a mile of chipped glass. It is full of my children that I haven’t been able reap, so I avoid it like the plague.”
“This chick is crazier than a shithouse rat,” Brain said below his breath.
“I’ve dealt with this before, Steve,” Tick-Tock said. “Let me handle it.”
Ignoring him, Steve asked, “Is there a way through though?”
Waving her hand at the empty fields on both sides of the road in a majestic gesture, Grimm replied, “Do you see anything around you that’s still living? There are over a million of my children massed to the east and they have gone through this area like the proverbial plague of locust. They have eaten everything living and left me with the pickings of all that is dead.”
Catching on to what she was saying, Steve said, “So you’ve been travelling up and down the highway checking for gas and food in all the cars.”
“And trucks,” Grimm added with a light laugh. “Our generator takes diesel fuel, so that’s mainly what I’m wandering this onerous road in search of.”
“Have you run into anyone else?” Tick-Tock asked. Trying to be more formal to match Grimm’s speech, he added, “In your travels and wanderings about the countryside?”
“You make it sound like I’m a Hobbit in search of Mordor,” Grimm said with another laugh. “I am simply a fragile young woman with a great big blade and a bunch of guns, trying to survive.” Pointing to the back of the wagon, they watched as the person who had been leading the dead down the highway flipped a tarp off an M60 machine gun that had been hidden in the cart and put the stock to his shoulder.
Grimm said, “He cocked it long before we reached you pilgrims, so it’s ready to -,” at this, she paused and gave a chilling laugh before continuing, “- rock and roll.” In a stern voice, she said, “If you mean us harm, it would be best if you just stepped aside and let us pass. We don’t want any trouble, but we’re more than able to handle anything that comes our way.”
Steve paused for a second as he studied the man behind the machine gun. From what he could see of his face and eyes shadowed by the cowl, he looked more than ready to mow them down in a hail of .30 caliber bullets.
Clearing his throat, he was about to tell her they were just passing through when Tick-Tock interrupted him by saying, “Hey Grimm, we introduced ourselves like civilized people and you introduced yourself, so what’s up with your buddy. Doesn’t he have a name?”
Grimm considered this before smiling and saying in a friendly voice, “That is Igor. He doesn’t speak, so I am his voice. And if you make any move to try and harm us, he will cut you in half.”
“All we’re trying to do is make it to an aid station or a military base,” Brain spoke up.
Tick-Tock made a motion with his hand telling him to shut up as Grimm said in a thoughtful voice, “You don’t look like brigands, but one never knows. Maybe we should just kill you. I have run into many people on the road who are not what they appear to be.”
Tick-Tock quietly said to Steve and Brain, “I’ve got this,” then raised his voice and spoke to Grimm, “But why would one try to be something they’re not?”
Grimm laughed and replied, “Now you sound like a line from the movie Untouchables with Kevin Costner, but you didn’t get it quite right. If you want to convince me that you mean us no harm, I want you to do the Hokey-Pokey.”
Now it was Tick-Tock’s turn to laugh. “You mean, like…you put your right foot in, you put your right foot out?”
Grimm nodded.
“Then I’d rather die,” Tick-Tock said in a flat voice. With a raised eyebrow, he added, “If you want to play a real game, we need to play Duck, Duck, Goose.”
At this, Grimm laughed so hard she almost fell back onto the bench seat of the wagon. When she recovered, she said, “How about we dance to ‘Go You Chicken Fat, Go Away’? Do you remember that one?”
After studying Tick-Tock for a second, she said, “I think I’m going to trust you for now, but if you make any strange moves, I’ll kill you where you stand.”
“Agreed,” Tick-Tock said. “And that goes both ways.”
“And since you’re three men alone, if you try to screw me, Igor will kill you,” Grimm said. Turning slightly, she called out, “Igor, you can leave the 60 but keep your other items of reaping handy.”
Wondering what else Igor was carrying, Steve told her, “There are more than three of us.” He decided to leave out the part about Cindy being immune, but added, “There are twenty-four of us total. We’re heading for Fort Polk. We thought it would be safe there.”
Grimm nodded and said, “Three or twenty-four, I don’t care. I’ve met people on the road who’ve told me that Polk is open but you’ll need wings to get there. Between here and there are about a million of my children waiting to eat you.”
Coming to the conclusion that at the very least Grimm was unstable, Steve decided to level with her anyway. Moving forward a few steps, he said, “We have to get to Polk. We have someone who’s immune to the virus. We found her in Clearwater and we think she might hold the cure to the disease. We’ve brought her all this way trying to find some kind of military base. Do you know if there’s another way around Jasper?”
Igor said something that sounded like, “The chosen one,” before Grimm’s voice drowned him out by saying, “There isn’t another way to get there that I know of, but you’re welcome to come back to my place. It might be on the dark side, but we have cake.”
“And cookies?” Tick-Tock asked.
Steve gave him an odd look, so he waved him off and said quietly, “I’ve got this.”
“And Kool-Aid,” Grimm told him with a laugh.
Steve said quietly, “What are you doing? I don’t think we can trust her.”
“We need a place to hole up until we figure out what to do next,” Tick-Tock replied. Raising his voice, he said to Grimm, “We would very much like to come to the dark side and have cake and cookies but we need some kind of assurance that we’ll be safe.”
Grimm flipped back the cowl of her robe before shaking out her long, raven black hair. Now that she had revealed her true self, they could see she was in her early twenties with perfectly formed features and pure white skin.
With a deep throaty laugh, she picked up her scythe while asking, “And what could be safer than an insane asylum?”
***
Tick-Tock rode on the bench seat next to Delightfully Grimm as the wagon rolled west on Highway 190. She had obviously survived on the road for months, so he wanted to pick her brain. Anything he could find out about this dead world he found himself in might save his life. Although they were now heading away from Fort Polk, he’d convinced everyone that this was the best course of action. Steve had been hesitant at first to follow a crazy lady who thought she was the Grim Reaper and her sidekick named Igor, but in the en
d he realized they had no choice.
The wagon led the way with Denise following in the Dodge Ram. Strung out behind them were two minivans and two trucks they’d managed to find to carry their supplies and the others.
Tick-Tock pointed to a line of abandoned cars at the side of the road with their doors standing open, “Did you find anything good in these?”
“Water, a few guns and some food,” Grimm answered. “The main thing I seek is diesel fuel. We have a generator but we can only run it a few hours each day due to our lack of gas.”
“How many people are at the asylum?” Tick-Tock asked.
“There are only five of us left,” Grimm answered. “Some ran away after the dead came back to life and a few were bitten. I reap all those who get bitten.” Pointing to Igor, she said, “He is my third assistant. The last one got too close to my oxen and was eaten.”
“What about a radio?” Tick-Tock asked, “Do you have a CB or a ham radio or anything? We’ve been using a CB but haven’t heard anything.”
“I have a ham radio,” Grimm told him.
At this, Tick-Tock perked up until she said, “It gets AM and FM, and has a cassette player. I feed it bacon and it plays my music. Before my children started to die and come back, I listened to it often. Now I only get one station out of some military base in Texas. They play no music and are only on once a week, so I only use it when I listen to my tapes. We do have a CB, but we can’t pick up anything except some distant voices. You can’t make out anything they say, but it’s nice to know there are people out there.”
He lifted his chin, indicating the dead leaning forward in their harnesses as they trudged after Igor, “How did you come across them?”
Grimm laughed and said, “The dead are plentiful, it’s the living that are rare. I find my children here and there but most of them travel in groups that are too large for us to deal with. I capture the ones I can and keep them in shoes, and they pull me along on my quest for fuel.”
Tick-Tock took a closer look at the dead and could see that they also wore a mish-mash of clothing and had hiking boots on their feet. In amazement, he asked, “You dress them too?”
“Of course,” Grimm replied. “It would be immodest to do anything less. I also make sure they have good boots. When I first started using them, they wore their poor little feet down to nubs.” Nodding to the scythe that lay between them, she added, “And then I had to reap them.”
“You any good with that thing?” Tick-Tock asked.
“I can cut a gnat off a fly’s ass with it,” she said with a laugh.
Hefting his M4, Tick-Tock said, “So can I.”
This made Grimm laugh again before she said, “You are very easy to talk to. Why is that?”
Tick-Tock shrugged and replied, “A long time ago, I used to work as an orderly.”
Grimm turned toward him, her face shadowed by the cowl as she asked, “In a home like mine?”
Tick-Tock nodded and said, “For two years I worked at the Bellevue Mental Hospital while I went to school.”
Turning her attention back to the front where the dead toiled at their labors, she said, “Then you understand us. That’s why it’s so easy to talk to you.”
“So how did you end up in an insane asylum?” Tick-Tock asked.
Grimm thought about this for a moment before saying, “It started when my manager at the bank was talking about promoting me. He called me in to his office and told me that if I wanted to move up, I had to dress for the position I wanted, not the one I was in.”
“And?” Tick-Tock asked.
“The next day, I showed up in my Cat Woman outfit,” Grimm said.
Tick-Tock laughed and asked, “How did that work out for you, Grimm?”
“They told me to be more normal,” she said. “I told them that normal is a washing machine setting. My crimes against the state were for simply being unique and sarcastic.”
Tick-Tock was still laughing as Igor led the dead pulling the wagon onto a side road.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Russellville Arkansas:
Major Jedidiah Cage restrained himself from slamming his fist down on the radio operator’s desk when his call was cut off. He’d been trying for days to reach someone in command in Washington DC, so he could tell them what Doctor Hawkins was doing, but no one would talk to him. He was constantly met with aides telling him that the person he was trying to reach was unavailable. On top of that, communications were still sketchy at best, and most of his calls dropped before they went through.
He turned to Staff Sergeant Fagan and handed him the headset, saying, “Maybe you’ll have better luck. It’s your guy we’re trying to reach anyway.”
Sitting in front of the satellite radio, Fagan placed a call to the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff while Cage donned a spare headset and plugged it in before muting the microphone. After a few minutes they were connected, but before the aide who answered the phone could even say hello, Fagan jumped in by screaming, “Do you know who this is Marine? This is General Breckenridge of the western command. My Major has been trying to reach the Commandant for days now and all he’s getting is static from your people. Now unless you want to be doing sewer rat duty in Minneapolis by the end of the day, I suggest you get the man on the line right now.”
The Captain at the other end sputtered out an apology and promised he’d have him talking to the Commandant within minutes.
While they were waiting, Cage asked, “Who in the hell is General Breckenridge?”
Fagan shrugged and said, “No idea, sir. I just made him up. Marines aren’t the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree. I figure with everyone getting eaten, no one knows who’s in the chain of command anymore. Most generals’ names begin or end in ‘ridge’ so I figured it might work.”
Cage heard a voice though the headphones say, “This is the General Eastridge, the Commandant of the Marine Corp, but I don’t know who I’m talking to since there is no General Breckenridge in my command.”
Putting his hand over the microphone, Fagan said to Cage, “Maybe not all Marines are dumb, but I got the ‘ridge’ part right anyway.”
Removing his hand, Fagan said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but we served together in Iraq and Afghanistan, sir. This is Staff Sergeant Fagan of the 10th mountain.”
There was a pause for a few seconds, so long that Cage thought the Commandant had hung up, when he finally heard his voice come through the headset, “Yes, Fagan, I remember you well. We did a couple joint operations between third herd and the 10th. If I remember correctly, we saved your ass from a bunch of turbans on the Pakistani border.”
Fagan said, “I thought it was the other way around, sir.”
Both men laughed and then the Commandant got to business by asking, “What’s the meaning of this call, Staff Sergeant?”
Jumping right in, Fagan said, “I was recently transferred to a research facility in Arkansas, and the reason I’m contacting you is because of the tests one of the doctors here has already done and another that he’s planning on doing, sir. They’re pretty disturbing. It seems he’s using human subjects.”
This was followed by a pause, which lasted long enough that Cage thought the line had been dropped. He was about to tell Fagan to try calling again when the Commandant said in a low voice, “I’m well aware of all the aspects of the tests dealing with the Malectron.”
At that moment, Cage realized that Doctor Hawkins’ operation was known of and approved by the highest levels of the military. He instantly regretted his decision to contact someone in authority to try and stop it. With one phone call, they had put their careers, and their lives, in jeopardy. When you questioned the orders of a superior officer before Dead Day, you found yourself stationed in Iceland or Alaska. Nowadays, you found yourself with a flashlight and a pistol crawling through the sewers in one of the Dead Cities.
About to tell Fagan to let him apologize and try to explain the call away, he was surprised when the Staff
Sergeant said in an accusing tone, “And you approve of this, General? I thought you were better than that, sir.”
Cage waited for the verbal explosion and his immediate reassignment to New Orleans, but it never came. Instead, General Eastridge sighed and said, “I don’t approve of any of it, Staff Sergeant. I was against using humans to test the Malectron from the moment I heard about it. The problem is, the rest of the Joint Chiefs see it another way. The Chairman is basically running the country now and Doctor Hawkins has his full approval.”
“But not yours, sir?” Fagan asked.
With an audible sigh, the Commandant said, “There are a lot of things going on right now that are way over your pay grade, Fagan. In case you don’t realize it, we’re at war.”
“I just came from Orleans, sir. I know exactly what’s going on. What we’re fighting for is the same thing we always have been, freedom for the people of the United States. Maybe now its freedom from getting eaten by the dead, but the Constitution is still in effect.”
The Commandant laughed sadly and said, “The United States exists in name only. And as for the Constitution, it was being abused and used against us through the last ten administrations. Right now, the Malectron is our best bet to get everything back in order. And as for the people of America, they only have whatever rights the Joint Chiefs give them and that’s it.”
“The right to be used in an experiment as lab rats?” Fagan questioned.
This caused the Commandant to pause. After a few seconds, he asked, “What are you proposing?”
Flipping the switch on his microphone off mute, Cage said, “Sir, this is Major Cage. I’m in charge of operations in Russellville.”
“Good afternoon, Major,” the Commandant said. “It’s good to know that someone is holding Staff Sergeant Fagan’s leash. Once again, what are you proposing?”
“There is an alternative to the Malectron,” Cage told him. “We have a doctor here who’s close to finding a way of eradicating the dead, but we need your help, sir. We need to find people who are immune to the virus. One would be great, but more would be better.”