This Dark Earth (20 page)

Riders. Horseback. And the dead, hundreds of them, following after.

I think she’s
a man at first. She’s dressed like a man. She holds her body like a man, ready to fight.

When she gets to the gate, she holds up one hand, palm out, and hails us.

“Guards! My name is Wendy! This here’s Jennifer. We need shelter.” She shifts in the saddle and slaps her horse’s neck, sending dust flying. “We’ve got info, from the south. News you need to hear.”

Frazier scrambles to find the notepad that Wallis gave us with the words we’re supposed to say, but I know it by heart and just say it without waiting for him.

I say, “Rider, we will allow you to enter if you swear, by all you hold holy and dear, that once entering our gates, you will do no harm to any living soul dwelling on this bridge, on pain of death. If you agree, make noises in the affirmative.”

Wendy, hands going to her dual pistols, bellows, “Will we be allowed to keep our weapons?”

Shake my head. “Can’t promise anything. We’ve never confiscated anything from anyone. But there’s always a first time. And if you’re holding something the quartermaster deems necessary to our community . . . well—”

“Well, what, boy?”

“We’ll take it.” I shouldn’t say things like that, but I have trouble, sometimes, separating what I should say from what needs to be said. Maybe I’m like Mom. “You dense, woman? There are what looks like two hundred dead on your trail. You’ve brought them here. You are in no position to make demands. Now, you got maybe sixty seconds to decide if you
want to agree and come in or stay out there and try to make your way beyond the horde of revs that’ve come calling.”

She glares at me. It’s like the glare I gave Frazier earlier. I hope mine has a little more threat.

Finally, she glances at the woman riding with her, looks back at me, nods.

“Go ahead and say it!”

“Fuck.” She spits. “We accept.”

“You may enter.”

Me and Lindy pull the pins again, lift the steel gate, and slide them outward. The women and horses come into the murderhole, the animals tossing their heads and nickering. The zeds are right on their asses, ready to chomp, making a horrible ruckus.

It’s gonna be a long day.

The husky woman
who looks like a man—Wendy, she said her name was—looks me over when I come down from the ramparts. The zeds they brought are banging furiously on the steel gates, so I draw her inside the second gate, right at the Motor Pool. Ellroy stays with the other woman, helps her down from her horse. She’s skinny, and might be pretty if she’d raise her head. Maybe.

Frazier gives me a sour look, and Lindy says, “What? You ain’t gonna help us get rid of all these zeds? You better help with this.”

“Yeah, yeah. Taking these guys to see Wallis and the Council. Be back soon.”

“It doesn’t matter
what we do,” Mom says to Wallis when we walk in. “People are going to start dying of cancer. The nuclear strikes pushed shitloads of radioactive material into the atmosphere. America, China, Europe, the cancer rates of the people who survived are going to skyrocket. And until civilization rights itself, which I don’t see happening in the next century, there won’t be any hospitals. So we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with the dying. We need to encourage suicide.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Why? As far as we can tell, everybody turns revenant when they die. We’re all infected. If someone dies inside the Bridge City . . . it’s an untenable situation.”

They look up at the woman and me as we enter. Mom cocks her eyebrow at me.

Knock-Out, who’s cooing to the baby, smiles and winks. Keb, standing guard, puts his hand right on Wendy’s breast and says, “Weapons on the table, mister.”

She doesn’t blink. I can see him figuring out that this is a woman. He takes his hand away from her chest.

She pulls two pistols, a sawed-off shotgun, a machete, some kabob skewers, a butterfly knife, and a long military-looking dagger from her person and dumps them on the table, one by one. Her back is straight, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say she’s mad. Or has a corncob stuck up her ass. Or both.

“Gots to frisk ya,” Keb says, and gives her the once over, moving down her body. He stops at her shoes and lifts the cuffs of her jeans.

There’s a shackle on her ankle.

Strange.

She walks up to the conference table and pipes right up.

“I’m Wendy. We come from Texas, me and my wife.”

Wallis glances at me and I shrug, then nod.

“Who’s in charge here?”

I can tell she’s trying to make herself sound tough. Either that or she really is that tough. I haven’t met a lot of people living on this bridge, but someone pretending to be tough scares me more than someone who is. You can’t trust the way they’ll act.

“We are. My name is Quentin Wallis. This is Dr. Ingersol and her husband, Jim Nickerson.”

“Not husband. Consort, maybe. Knock-Out. Folks call me Knock-Out.”

Wendy glances at him and then back to Wallis. He’s stopped wearing his uniform since Mom insisted, but you can’t hide the soldier in civilian clothes.

And he still keeps the hair high and tight.

“And absent is Joblownski, who’s in charge of Engineering. He’s a member of the Council.”

Wendy clears her throat. “So, this here settlement is a democracy?”

“No.”
Mom shifts and crosses her hands over her lap. “It’s a shared dictatorship. We don’t canvass the populace for their opinions, and they don’t vote on major decisions.”

“So, you just tell them what they’re gonna do?”

“Yes. Right now, at this point in our . . . development . . . that’s how it has to be.”

“And these brutes I see standing about, they’ve got the look
of military about them. They make sure the people keep in line? They make sure folks do what you want them to do?”

Knock-Out brings Ellie over to me, lays her in my arms. She puts a chubby hand on my cheek and pinches me, hard, squealing. Her little fingernails are sharp.

Sometimes Knock-Out amazes me with how he picks up on things.

“Ma’am,” Knock-Out says, “it’d save us all a bunch of time if you’d just tell us what you’re getting at.”

I clear my throat. Mom raises her eyebrow and gives me the look.

Wallis says, “Go ahead, Gus. Speak.”

Careful here. I say, “Wendy? Can you tell us about what’s on your ankle?”

She flushes. If she looked angry before, now she looks ready to pop. Her face is furious, if only for a moment, then is suffused with blood and she looks ashamed until the blood drains away, taking on the aspect of stone. Cold and remorseless.

She says, in a dead voice, “Slavers down in Texas. And they’re heading north. This way. They know about you.”

Wallis sits up straight. “What did you say?”

“There’s slavers coming this way. We escaped, me and Jennifer. I killed . . . I don’t know how many. Took as many of their horses as I could round up and rode hard, north. Toward you.”

She sways a little. Mom stands, moves around the table, and puts a hand on her cheek, checking for fever.

I turn to Keb. “Go get the other woman. Jennifer. Bring her here, and tell Frazier and Ellroy to take the horses to the
inner stable. Round up more men to man the North Gate. We need more hands at the Wall for the zeds on their trail. We’ll figure out what to do with the horses later.”

“There’s fifty pounds of moldy oats in a bag on one of the mares. That should last them through a couple more days, but they need—”

Keb looks lost.

“Go on, Keb. We’ll figure it out.”

Wallis and Knock-Out are looking at me strange. Ellie gives a gurgle and goes to sleep. I watch her go, just like a little sunset in my arms.

Mom sits Wendy down at the conference table, brings over a bottle of Evian—a big gift. She cracks the seal on the cap and pours her a glass.

Wendy knocks it back.

“How long has it been since you’ve slept?”

She shrugs. “A week. Lost track. Since before we escaped. Caught some z’s on horseback, but not for long. Lost three horses on the ride.”

Knock-Out brings a tray with glasses to the table, a Johnnie Walker bottle blunt and amber in the light from the tent flap. Twists the cap and pours some for the woman. “I need you to tell us what you know. About the slavers.”

She sniffs the alcohol. For a moment, she looks around at all of us, her eyes going from face to face. She was tough before, now she’s lost and confused.

She says, “They took us outside of Rockwall. The undead from Dallas had mobbed and were roaming in migrant bands. Jennifer and I had holed up in a bank, living off
vending machines, sleeping in the vault. We were hungry, but—”

“Safe,” I say, remembering. Hard to forget spending a lifetime folded into a Pinkerton safe while your father claws at the door and gibbers for your blood.

She doesn’t even nod. She looks at me, sucks her teeth. I take Ellie to the crib in the corner. Mom meets me there and lays her down. Ellie doesn’t make a noise.

“Then they drove by, in armored trucks, a line of ’em. And police cruisers, talking on their PAs. Don’t understand how they could’ve avoided the EMP, but maybe they were . . . I don’t know . . . shielded or something. They told us they were gonna lead the undead away. Down Main, away from everything, and then shoot them. They said any survivors needed to head to the Chili’s on I-30, where a transport would pick us up. Maybe five hundred dead folks were following, just trailing along. Once they passed, it was like it had just rained and washed the leaves from the street. No zombies anywhere.

“At the Chili’s, there were men. They looked nervous, I remember. This was two and a half, three years ago. They had an eighteen-wheeler. They were all cops or army guys with big guns. They told us to get in. It felt wrong, but we got in anyway because the zombies were starting to come back—this was outside of Dallas and it was still burning, so there were millions of dead stumbling around, black and stinking from the nuclear strike—”

She stops, brings the whiskey to her mouth, and breathes into the liquor. I can see the moisture from her breath fog the glass. She swallows some and winces.

It’s a long while before she continues. Mom looks at me, worried. Knock-Out places a hand on Mom’s shoulder. Wallis steeples his long fingers and is still, watching, listening, thinking. I can’t tell if he’s as scared as I am.

“We drove north for hours. In and out of days, seems like, but might’ve been just a few hours. When we stopped, they circled the armored vehicles, keeping us in the cattle cars, waiting, while they rested. They didn’t realize that someone was sick. When she turned, she killed most of the people in the other transport before they responded. They shot everyone, even the living folks. From then on, we had armed guards.

“Next day, we pulled into New Boston—north Texas—an army depot there. It’s fortified, row after row of chain link. They separated the men from the women, put the women in a locked barrack, and put us in a holding pen. Jennifer—”

She breaks. I see it happen, I’m watching. Her face crumples, and I’ve never seen anyone as helpless as her, ever. I’m sorry now I was hard on her at the gate. I shouldn’t have been.

“They wanted the women for their brothel. Sixty men, they became slavers just to get laid. They never let the girls see sun. They rounded up the men, walked them out to a field.” She looks down at her hand, the glass in it, as if discovering something new. “The men. They shot them.”

Her voice itself is like a gunshot.

“How did you—” Mom is wondering what everyone is wondering.

“They stopped me going into the pen. They stripped me. Two of them held me down—” She sobs once, loudly, and then shivers. “But they didn’t put me in with the other
women after. They laughed and beat me. Put me to work, being their dog. They had this collar, for the Dobermans that walked the perimeter. They put it on me and shocked me with a remote. Like a goddamned dog. That’s what they called me. Dog. Bitch. I would’ve . . .”

Knock-Out pours her more whiskey. She rolls the glass in her hands as if warming it, but she’s just looking into it, losing herself. She’s not here with us anymore, she’s somewhere else, somewhere back in Texas. She’ll always be there, I think.

“I would’ve tried to . . . tried to . . . something. Kill them. Poison them. But they had Jennifer. I couldn’t kill myself. I couldn’t abandon her. So I waited and wore the collar and did what they told me to. I stayed their dog. I cooked their food. After the water went out, I carried their buckets of shit to the cesspool. I did their laundry. I tended their livestock.” She drinks the whiskey, puts down the glass, raises her hands in an open gesture. “They didn’t rape me again.”

Before she looked like a man, but now, with the tears, she looks like a boy, maybe someone my age. It’s hard to imagine what she’s been through.

“They heard your broadcasts on the ham radio. They listened to your messages about the tactical superiority of bridges. They listened. There were more and more zombies coming every day, and it took more and more resources to wipe them out, so when your broadcasts came—telling how to distill water, to purify it, to fortify a bridge, to make a murderhole—they began preparing to move. The depot, all of us. North. I heard they were planning on wintering in Texarkana, some bridge there.

“The night before they were going to move, I was able to get us out . . . it seems so long ago. But it was just last week.”

She’s done crying now. Her voice is hard, but she’s not trying to be tough. She’s just telling it like it happened. I like this woman. I didn’t like the woman at the gate.

She says, “At night, they would shackle me to a wall. I was entertainment to them. They took one of the doghouses for the Dobermans, sprayed it out with water, and threw some wool blankets in it. That was where I slept for a long time, until I started stinking. Then they didn’t want me touching their food or washing their clothes. The big man there, Konstantin, he ordered them to give me a hutch near the brothel. They had these little portable buildings, like folks used to keep in their backyards for storing lawnmowers. This was my home. A glorified doghouse. But they let me wash and started making sure I had better food. At night they would chain me in, padlock me to a wall.