“What’s he want with us?”
“I don’t know,” Diego said. “But I’m sure he’s found some new lucrative business to replace his former income.”
Cheryl had all sorts of nightmarish visions swirl in her head. They could all be on their way to a forced existence of labor or sex slavery. She couldn’t imagine that any of them would submit to either circumstance, and vowed to make sure her friends knew not to hold back their resistance on her account.
When they discussed ways they could take down the three men who were guarding them in the trailer, they came up with some creative ideas that had promise, but in the end, they all had the same dismal conclusion: they were locked inside the trailer until someone let them out from the outside. Even if they took their guards hostage, Camacho and the other two might just decide to kill them all instead of making any sort of bargain. They were considering the idea anyway when one of their guards seemed to get an inkling of what they were talking about and began shouting at them to shut up. Then, he forced them all to separate.
They drove for what seemed like a couple of hours, passing through vast tracts of land that were wild and untouched by man, and other areas blackened by fire. Various spots, especially those close to small towns had signs of previous carnage such as abandoned vehicles or bodies. Every few miles, they drove past another lone, wandering ghoul or a pack of them who swiveled their decrepit heads to watch the truck pass.
Whizzing by a sign announcing the town of Eagar, Cheryl saw that it had been altered. The ‘g’ had been marked over with a black, spray-painted ‘t’, so it now read Eater. Cheryl thought the name was appropriate as they drove through the town. There seemed to be more Eaters there. There were perhaps a few hundred lining the streets as they passed, reaching towards the truck with moans of desperation.
Soon after that, they crossed the state line into New Mexico. She was so exhausted from standing and trying to keep herself upright over bumpy roads, twists, and turns, she’d considered many times sitting down in the muck. But, every time she got her lungs full of the nasty scent inside the trailer and looked down at the filth she was standing in, she changed her mind.
“Diego,” she said, risking the wrath of the guards. “Why don’t you ask them how much longer?”
He asked them in Spanish, and only got the response, soon from the older one.
About forty minutes later, they pulled into the town of Quimera. They passed a couple of abandoned gas stations with faded banners flapping in the breeze, a grocery store with smashed windows, a car wash, a bank scorched by fire, and a pizza parlor who’s tin roof looked like it had been peeled back by dozens of hungry Eater hands.
Some young men stood on a street corner, armed with guns, baseball bats, and a crowbar waved to them as they drove by. Camacho or whoever was driving the cattle truck gave the horn a toot.
What are we doing here? Cheryl worried. What do they want with us?
There was a glimmer of hope after she’d seen that this was an inhabited town. Even if it was a run by a gang of some sort, maybe they had some newfangled society, a hierarchy, and order. If they’d been imported for slave labor, it could mean a chance for gaming the system, winning the favor of their captors, or eventual escape.
All of those somewhat shiny thoughts slipped down the drain when the cattle truck pulled into the driveway of the City of Quimera Police Station. If the building had once been a symbol of law and order before the epidemic, it was now something entirely different.
The small, square windows in the front of the adobe building were completely smashed out. Dark blood stains decorated the wall to the right of the door in butterfly-like hand prints. The flag poles out front flew the red, white, and blue United States flag and the red and yellow flag of New Mexico, but the rectangles of cloth had been ridden with bullet holes and were tattered on the edges where they’d been flapping in the wind. Those sights were unnerving enough at a police station, but there was something even more disturbing.
Skulls.
Cheryl counted fourteen. They were lined up on the tops of rebar spikes that had been driven into the brown turf on either side of the sidewalk near the door. They were bleached bone white, but a few still had dried scraps of flesh or tendrils of hair clinging to them. Most appeared to be male, but a couple looked female.
She was mesmerized by the sight of them, and couldn’t stop staring. At first, she thought they’d come from Eaters who had been put down and could be some kind of sick trophies attesting to someone’s body count. Then, she realized that none of the skulls showed any sign of head trauma. There were no bullet holes in them, no crevices from the blade of an axe, no sign at all that these remains had simply belonged to ghouls who had to be dispatched.
They parked in the circular drive in front of the building. Before she could nudge Aidan and express her worries, there were shouts from Camacho and his men as they exited the cab. Aidan wasn’t paying any attention to them or the skulls. As he peered through a hole in the trailer wall, his gaze was focused on the row of police motorcycles parked near the flag poles. They were Harley-Davidsons—five white Electra Glides and one black Road King. Their bodies were dented, crusted with caked dirt, and a couple had what looked like blood splatters on the windshields. All of them looked like they had seen better days.
Camacho’s men chattered excitedly as he went to greet a man emerging from the building. The man in the tan felt cowboy hat wore a heavy gold chain around his neck, a sweat-stained shirt with pearl buttons and faded jeans. He had a crooked nose with a bulbous red tip, a handlebar mustache, and deep set eyes underneath a heavy brow. He approached Camacho with outstretched arms and gave him a bear hug followed by a hearty pat on the back.
The two of them talked for a few minutes until the men inside the cattle truck began shouting and banging on the metal wall. Camacho signaled his two men beside him, and they walked to the back of the truck. After lifting their bandanas to cover mouths and noses, they unlocked the doors. Before opening them, they shouted something to the three men inside who then turned around and shouted to Cheryl and the rest of her friends.
What’s he saying?” Cheryl asked.
“They want us to move to the back of the truck,” Diego said.
When they didn’t move right away, the men became agitated, shouting again in Spanish, and pointing their guns at them.”
“They say they’re going to shoot one of us if we don’t move back.”
With much trepidation, they inched towards the back of the truck. The cattle truck doors opened with a squeal. Camacho’s men hopped out and shut the doors behind them, leaving Cheryl and her friends to speculate about what was going on when they joined Camacho and the vaquero. The men talked for a couple of minutes before disappearing into the building.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Zach moaned.
They all went to the rear doors and began to shove on them and fumble around for some sort of release they could move from the inside.
“There’s no use,” Cheryl said. “They’re locked from the outside.”
Vinnie began to hyperventilate, his chest heaving up and down. Then, he began to gag from inhaling so much of the foul air. “We…have…to get out of here…now!”
Zach and Aidan walked the perimeter of the trailer on both sides, looking for any panel that had loose welding. After going the entire circumference three times, they gave up.
“What we going to do? What are we going to do?” Vinnie cried.
“Shut up!” Diego said. “You’re not helping anything.”
Aidan held up a hand, trying to quiet them. “Look…when they come back to let us out, maybe we can rush the doors and knock them down.”
“That’s if they decide to let us out and assuming there are only one or two of them there with guns when they do it.”
They argued for another half hour, worrying about whether they’d have a chance for escape and growing weary of waiting to find out their fate. Finally, they sa
w a couple of figures come out of the building. It was the young rookie and the stocky one that had been in the truck with them. Instead of coming towards the truck, they held the heavy metal doors to the police station open, waiting for someone else to emerge.
“What are they doing?” Cheryl said.
They all watched and waited.
The man in the cowboy hat emerged. He walked backwards and held a long stick. On the far end of it, a fleshy red blob dangled from the end of a string. From inside the building, there was the sound of rattling chains, followed by an all-too-familiar cacophony of moans.
Cheryl and the others watched through the holes inside of the cattle trailer as a chained mass of Eaters emerged. They were all in various states of decay. Some were still oozing, fresh, bloody while others looked like little more than rag-covered skeletons. All of them moved forward, following the bait.
Gleefully, as if it was some sort of game, the man urged them forward, leading them down the sidewalk. Camacho and his men brought up the rear, keeping their guns trained on the writhing mass of dead flesh. When the group neared a painted red line on the concrete, one of the men signaled Camacho with a raised hand. He grabbed a loose chain from the leg of one of the Eaters in the rear of the group and hooked it onto the loop on the side of a concrete pylon. The group jerked to a halt.
The man with the stick broke into laughter. After verifying that he was out of reach of any of the groping hands, he swayed the bait back and forth over the heads of the decrepit group. He watched them reach for it in desperation, trampling each other and knocking each other down in an attempt to reach whatever the bloody thing was.
Diego stifled a laugh.
Cheryl might have thought it comical too if it wasn’t so morbid and their own lives weren’t hanging in the balance.
Aidan couldn’t take the suspense any longer. After Comacho gave the hungry group wide berth and came near the truck, he shouted at him. “What’s going on? We want out of this stinking thing. Let us out!”
Comacho held up a hand and gave a little wave. “Patience, my friends. Just a little longer.” He smiled a wide golden grin that seemed diabolical.
Cheryl thought about what Diego had said earlier. Camacho had been a coyote. Maybe that was slang for a human smuggler, but Cheryl knew that in Native American legends the coyote is always a trickster. Her anxiety didn’t go down one little bit by the assurance that they would be released soon.
When her friends urged her to beg for their release, she shouted to Camacho complaining that she and the others had to go to the bathroom, since they’d been in the trailer for hours.
“Very soon,” he replied again. Then, he went back to playing the game with the Eaters as they took turns passing the tree branch and bait from man to man.
A few minutes later, a vintage brown Chevy van, detailed with rusted yellow and orange stripes pulled up next to the cattle truck. The driver was a balding man with his remaining wisps of corn silk-thin, dark brown hair plastered over the top of his scalp, and his belly was rounded as if he had been living off of large quantities of canned frosting and peanut butter since the start of the epidemic. He exchanged a greeting with the man in the cowboy hat and Camacho. After a few minutes of animated gesturing and loud outbursts between them, the van driver went back to his vehicle and got a box from the passenger seat. He handed it to one of Camacho’s men, and that man placed it in the cab of the cattle truck.
The van driver went to the back of the van. He hesitated a moment before opening the doors. The van was rocking, moving from side to side, and occasionally shuddering from the movement of someone inside. The motion was so violent—Cheryl imagined it was a wild animal. When the van driver signaled for a Camacho’s men to cover him with their guns, it didn’t seem unreasonable that a bear, wolf, or mountain lion might spring out as soon as the doors were opened.
The man opened the doors. Instead of some wild animal, there was a mound of writhing human flesh inside. It was an unimaginable number of Eaters for that small space. They were like heaps of living garbage, piled on top of each other, filling the entire van area behind the netting that separated the space from the front seats. Their hands were bound behind their backs with ropes, and their mouths were muzzled with leather straps—many of which had been partially chewed through. The heads visible towards the rear of the mass were very old, dried-up looking like leather-covered skulls, but Cheryl knew that didn’t make them any less deadly. As long as they had jaws and teeth, they were just as dangerous as any freshly turned ghoul.
Sensing more freedom of movement, they began to writhe and inch their way out of the van. The driver, Camacho and his men, and the cowboy man from the police station watched as they shoved, wriggled, and eventually fell onto the pavement head first—a sight that caused those around the van to guffaw with laughter. But, as the Eaters began to rise to their feet, their talk turned more serious. Most of what they said was in Spanish, but she was able to decipher a word here and there. From the van driver: roundup…misery…took a bite…nasty. And from the police station cowboy: Easier to move them.
Snarling and moaning with outstretched claw like hands, the stumbling nightmares came towards the men. No one panicked. The van driver simply stepped back a few feet, took some sort of remote out of his pocket, and pressed a button.
The Eaters fell like dominoes as they crashed to the ground, motionless.
Zach said it first. “How are they—”
“They must have some sort of implanted EM box that’s not visible.”
“But why?” Cheryl asked. “Why not just kill them? Why keep them alive?”
“Lots of reasons,” Aidan said. “None of them good.”
Camacho’s youngest man stood a few yards away from the others, leaning against the cattle trailer. In his native tongue, Diego whispered. “What are they going to do with us?”
“No se,” he responded.
“What are they going to do with them?” Diego asked, pointing to the moaning group still chained to the pylon.
The young man chuckled, smiling just enough to show a little pink gum line below the black stubble on his upper lip. Diego translated what he said.
“It’s a favor,” he says. “They help to keep Quimera clean by taking them outside the city and…” He made the sign of a gun with his fingers, put it to his temple, and pulled the trigger.
The young man’s smile widened as if it was something he was looking forward to.
“Why do they transport them alive?” Zach asked. “Why not kill them here then dispose of them?”
Diego whispered again to the young man then explained his answer.
“He says the townspeople here are too upset by seeing their loved ones murdered. When they are still the walking dead, it’s like a perpetual Dia de los Muertos where they can honor them as well as fear them. Anyone who puts a bullet in the head of a family member is ostracized.”
“Strange,” Cheryl said. She had more thoughts on the subject, but they were quelled as two of Camacho’s men come towards the back of the cattle trailer.
“I hope we’re not getting some new passengers,” Aidan joked.
Vinnie’s face became grim. “What? They can’t put them in here with us! What if you’re right? What if they don’t let us out?” he asked in a panicked voice. “What if they put them in here with us? What if they—”
“Shut up!” Zach told him. “Freaking out isn’t going to help anything.”
To their relief, the doors were opened and one of the men motioned for them to come out with his fingers.
They all went to the ledge and prepared to jump out at once.
“No…no…no!” the man yelled as he raised a palm towards them. “Uno por uno! One at a time.”
Vinnie hopped out first. He was forced to turn around so he could be handcuffed with a zip tie. Cheryl went next, followed by Zach, Aidan, and Diego.
When they were all cuffed, they huddled together, worried about what was going to happen
next. Like back at Hector’s, it seemed futile—there were just too many men with guns and they were unarmed.
Cheryl tried to keep herself from gagging as they awaited their fate. Outside the truck, the air wasn’t much fresher than it was inside, because they were perilously close to the agitated group of Eaters attached to the pylon who smelled so bad, they seemed to be surrounded by a black cloud of gaseous fumes.
Camacho gave them a smile as if he enjoyed prolonging their misery. A few minutes later, he gave a signal to the man in the cowboy hat, and his own man behind the group of chained Eaters. They were released and urged towards the cattle truck with the bait. Once they reached the back of the trailer, the man holding the stick cut the bait off with a knife from his pocket and tossed it into the trailer. The Eaters scrambled inside, pulling each other by their chained ankles, and began to fight over the piece of flesh like a mass of crazed fans in a stadium lunging for a foul ball.
They watched as the van driver took out his remote again. He activated one of his skeletal captives. The man in the cowboy hat affixed a new piece of bait onto his stick and tempted the female creature inside the cattle trailer. After he activated the next one, Camacho and one of his older men started urging Cheryl and her friends towards the police station. As they walked, she noticed a bird sitting in an oak tree in front of the building. It was either a raven or a crow—she couldn’t tell which. It watched them with its black beady eyes as if it was calculating how much time was left before the humans would leave so it could swoop down and scavenge for any tidbits they’d left behind.
Goodbye, she said to it in her head. She watched it as long as she could, envying the freedom it had from its perch. If only she had its wings…
Chapter 10
Police station? Cheryl and the others entered the building. There were no men or women in uniforms, no friendly receptionist to greet them, not even a security checkpoint for visitors. Instead, the place looked like a flophouse. There were mattresses and rolls of bedding in the reception area and up and down the corridor they were led into next. Trash littered the floor, and graffiti covered the walls. It was a relief to be free from the smell of the Easters and the suffocating stench inside the cattle trailer, but there was a new smell that was at least as bad…and perhaps worse. It was acrid, smoky, and somewhat pungent. It took a few seconds for Cheryl to identify it as the odor of charred human flesh.
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