This Dark Earth (24 page)

By dawn, we’ve
hit Little Rock. The shamblers, at least the ones caught in our headlights, are coming out of the brush, rolling down inclines and shuffling up exit ramps. We’re going five miles an hour. A fast jog, really. When they get in
front of us, we either run the bikes right at them, knocking them silly with the ironwork crossbars, or we try to avoid them. It’s not too hard, but it’s getting harder with every mile we get into the city.

One manages to grab part of Jasper’s chassis and we drag it a couple of hundred feet, leaving a black skid mark on the pavement.

It’s the clusters of cars blocking the interstate that cause real problems. We have to move the bikes into the median or on the shoulder to get around them.

Another surprises Jasper from behind an SUV. Grabs his arm. Yanks it to his mouth and starts gnawing, but Jasper’s gear means the shambler is losing teeth rather than enjoying dinner.

If there weren’t, oh, maybe a thousand zombies tottering behind us, I’d find it funny, and the cocaine is wearing off. Jasper pulls the zombie close and smashes his fist into its face. It doesn’t let go. He pulls out his headknocker, a big stake hammer, and pops it a good one between the eyes. It falls away. Probably dead, but we don’t get off the bikes to check. There’s a damily working its way up the shoulder toward us, too close. A woman and two little boys. Another woman trailing behind.

We roll.

The moans are really loud now. I can hear them over the thunder of the bikes.

I have no memory of the layout of Little Rock from when I was a boy. Maybe I’ve been trying to forget. But the sun rises, and I can see we’re among buildings. Shamblers are everywhere, coming for us.

I hold up my hand to Jasper and Keb, and we stop for a moment but keep the bikes running. I turn to look behind us.

A wall. An ocean. A wave. Coming. Moaning.

Thousands. Maybe more.

We roll up a rise to an overpass and a zombie falls from above, a leaper, and lands in front of us, a sack of goo exploding into a hundred streamers across the pavement. I have a fleeting memory of stomping on ketchup packets when I was a kid.

The leaper zed tries to rise even after impact. Jasper runs over him with his bike and stops, keeping him pinned.

I stop, turn around, and check on Keb. He’s shaking his head, looking at the road behind us. From here we can see the extent of the mob. The horde.

This must be what rock stars felt like.

Keb, Jasper, and I look at each other and Keb flips up his visor. I follow suit.

“Holy fuck, Lil P.” He shakes his head. “It’s unbelievable.”

“Believe it.”

We sit there. Watch them slowly coming up the slope into the shadow of the overpass, the morning light washing over the wreckage of their faces to show every bit of decayed flesh in detail. Everything has this dreamlike, rosy glow, and I can hear the cicadas whirring in the trees beyond them, rising and falling like waves cresting and crashing on some far-off beach. I wonder what Mom would be thinking if she could see the real me. The me that chucks people off bridges and huffs cocaine like a vacuum.

I feel tired. I don’t know if it’s the cocaine wearing off or the realization that I’m such a shitty human being. Or both.

“Guys!” Jasper’s yell interrupts my thoughts. “This pus-bag is clawing at my boots. We gotta go.”

And we do. Ride the wave.

South.

On the far
side of Little Rock, we pull ahead, maybe four hundred yards, and do as much blow as we can in the time it takes the horde to catch up. By now, I feel like an old pro, snorting huge lines with a hundred-dollar bill.

I have no idea where the bill came from. Keb, I guess. “Tradition, baby. Tradition,” he says, and he winks at me, snatches the rolled-up bill, and huffs down a line.
It’s weird holding money
, is all I can think.

We remount, fire up the bikes, and lead the horde south.

Horde
is a poor word for what they are.
Horde
points to intelligence of some sort—or at least intent—I think, and these things have none now, I’m sure of it. Maybe the freshies, the ones with a brain still intact and not a piece of rotten meat sloshing around in a skull full of putrefying juices. I’ll grant they might still have something going on upstairs. But I doubt it counts as thought. No. They just have instincts, raw and ravenous.

They call a group of geese a gaggle. A school of fish. A flock of seagulls. A murder of crows. A team of horses. A pack of dogs. A pride of lions.

We went through all of this in school. Everything has a name.

But what do you call a group of undead? Never mind one
this large. A damily won’t cut it, as Knock-Out says. Maybe an extended fam-damily?

Next stop, I’ll see what Jasper and Keb think.

Still tweaking as
we roll up on the roadblock. No way to get the bikes across or around.

Someone guessed we’d be coming.
And
they devoted the resources to drag cars and trucks and SUVs across the highway all the way to the tree line. I can see where big treads hauled them over. A backhoe, maybe. Or even a Bradley. The woman said they took her to an army base; it could be a Bradley.

I dismount and take off my gear, preparing for the long hoof.

We’ll never make it. Never. Might be able to lose the horde, but we’ll never make it to the slavers’ territory without transport.

There’s fifteen thousand dead at our backs, moaning like, well, whatever it is you call a group this large.

“What the fuck you doin’, Lil P?”

I unsling my shotgun, check my headknockers.

“Getting ready to run.”

He pops the straps on his M-16, lifts it, chucks a grenade into the launcher.

“Why?”

It takes the
horde a long time to work itself through the breach. We blew three vehicles into parts, dragged the bigger
stuff aside, and rolled through, smelling burning rubber and gasoline.

“Bottleneck is gonna stretch out the group!” I yell to Keb and Jasper. “Gonna have to slow down even more, if we can.”

No one looks happy.

“Uh . . . well, let’s get far enough ahead for another bump,” Jasper suggests.

Sounds good to me.

Keb spots the
rider first and is off like a flash, revving the bike, making his front wheel pop off the pavement. The man had been sitting on an ATV, idling, surveying the road. A sentry. The moment he sees us, he drops his binoculars and wheels around and bolts south. Keb points at the retreating figure, looks to me, and I nod. The best rider among us, he disappears down the interstate, moving around burned cars and SUVs.

Jasper revs his bike, but I hold up my fist in the stop signal. He guns it down. Even through his visor I can tell he’s disappointed.

In an hour, Keb returns. He’s bleeding from a graze on his arm, but he’s got a man trussed and over the backseat of his bike. We pull ahead of the horde and stop but leave the bikes running.

Keb pops his helmet, shakes out his lengthening dreads, and says, “Check it, Lil P.” He walks over to the man and points at his pants, his jacket. “Army. A slaver, no doubt.”

The man mumbles through the gag that Keb has on him.

I point at it. “Let him speak, if he has anything to say.”

“Awright, yo highness. Awright.”

When he can speak, the man looks at me wide-eyed. “Slavers? We ain’t no slavers.”

Keb, Jasper, and I glance at each other. News to us. The woman could have been lying, but I seriously doubt Wendy would’ve faked the shackle. And Mom said that the other one, Jennifer . . . she’d been raped many times. The evidence was all over her body.

“That right? Not slavers? You mean you don’t have a bunker full of girls? Your own little whorehouse?” This from Jasper. I’d never heard him so bitter. Or intense.

And that makes me pause. I’ve always thought of Keb and Jasper as outlaws, wild men constrained by no law. Seeing how disgusted Jasper is with this man, it makes me reconsider him. And Keb. And Bridge City. People want order, order and stability and, if not righteousness, then at least individual respect where the strong can’t abuse the weak.

I think back to the night before last on the bridge. Frazier’s last sound as he fell.

The soldier is grimy, greasy-haired, and nearing starvation.

“Almost got away. Little four-wheeler. He tried to go off road, took a spill, and I snatched the little bitch up, easy as shit, Lil P.”

I look back toward the . . . horde. We need a word for them. Getting closer and closer. We’re gonna have to move in the next few moments.

A lone revenant—a girl, it looks like, at least through all the bloat and char—shambles up, out of the brush on the
shoulder. Keb runs over to her, kicks her down, and stomps on her head until she stops moving. He’s snarling as it happens, and I see the man watching him.

“So, you say you and your little group aren’t slavers, huh?” I try to keep my voice light.

“No! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Where are you located, then?”

He shuts his mouth and looks around. I nod at Keb and Jasper.

Jasper unslings the man and dumps him onto the concrete. We remount our bikes.

“Ain’t you gonna untie me? Hey! I told you I ain’t involved with that! Untie me!”

The moaning is so loud now, it’s hard to hear anything other than the slaver’s blubbering.

“You don’t seem to get it. You’ll tell me everything I want to know, or you’re zombie food. There’s no deals to be made. There’s no angle for you. It’s total honesty. Or death.”

He doesn’t take long to decide.

“You won’t leave me here?”

“No, we won’t.”

“Lil Prince, don’t go making promises you can’t keep.”

“Shut up, Keb.” I turn back to the slaver. “Spill it.”

He starts to talk, but Jasper interrupts, grabbing the man and slinging him over the back of his bike, facedown.

“Too late, fellas. We need to skedaddle. Our tagalongs are getting a mite close.”

We fire up the bikes, roll maybe a few hundred yards more down the interstate, as slow as thunder. On the bright side,
the horde is getting back into a tight cluster after straggling through the breach.

We have to do some spring cleaning before we can stop. There’s a little group of zeds coming toward us from our front sector, as the old members of the G Unit might say. We stop, fifteen feet shy, drop our visors, cinch our gorgets, and get our headknockers up. Once everyone is ready, we wade in. There’s a sketchy moment when two of them grab my swinging arm, but Jasper’s there, crunching skulls with his tent hammer. Keb’s a blur with the crowbar, jabbing with the forked end, clubbing with the curved.

When the last zed is down, we clean our bludgeons, store them, and once again dump the slaver onto the concrete, this time in the middle of the putrid remains of the cluster we’ve just wiped out.

Strange. When I was a kid I would dream about doing stuff like this—

The slaver blubbers again, but we ignore him. Keb turns up the mirror on his bike, and I can’t see any problem with doing some more blow. I’ve been up thirty-six hours now, and I can feel it. A line or two will hit the spot.

We do the lines, and I walk back to where the slaver lies on the asphalt. I’m thrumming all over, energized, and he looks at me with wide eyes as I rub the residue of cocaine over my gums like I’ve seen Keb and Jasper do. It numbs my teeth, which is bizarre, not as a feeling, but the fact that it feels good. I could use some water. My mouth is tacky.

“So, where were we?”

He’s crying now, for real, terrified. No more bravado, like
Wendy, no more posturing. He knows he’s a hairbreadth from shambling.

I squat. He’s facedown on the pavement, eye-level with the black pulp of the strangest fruit known to man: zombie noggin.

“Hey. Hey, man.” He quiets a little. He needs to hear what I have to say. “Listen. Tell us everything. The slaves. Your plans about us. Where you’re located. You spill it all, right now, I promise I will let you go unharmed.”

“Lil P, you can’t do that shit, man.”

“Goddamn it, Keb. I can do whatever the fuck I want.” I stand, walk over to where he’s watching me. “Don’t contradict me again. Why do you think they put me in charge of this mission?”

I’m angry, but Keb gives this half-amused, half-distracted shrug, as if he’s saying,
Hey, what’s it to me?

What he
does
say is, “It’s cool, Prince, it’s cool. I’m here to bring you back home in one piece, doctor’s orders. It’s your ass when you get there, though.”

I turn back to the slaver. My skin’s itching a little, and I scratch at my arm as I get in the slaver’s face.

He doesn’t need any more prodding.

He spills it all or, at least, everything he knows. A mean son of a bitch named Konstantin is in charge. It’s hard to get a clear picture of the man from the slaver. The slavers don’t have any heavy armaments except a couple of .50 cals mounted in the rear of Jeeps. Of the near fifty Bradleys they have—New Boston was a motor depot, after all—none of them will start, and there’s no one there with the wherewithal or tech savvy to make them run again.

They couldn’t figure out why the Bradley’s wouldn’t start. Thought it had something to do with the radiation that caused the zombies.

Idiots. And they don’t even know about the EMP.

Jesus.

They heard our ham radio broadcasts and have set up camp on the Fulton Bridge over the Red River a few miles out of Texarkana. They’ve got chain-link murderholes set up at the south end, and they just spear the zeds through the fencing and then go in and clear them out.

They plan on moving north, through Hot Springs, toward us, in winter, when there’ll be less growth and more visibility.

They don’t think we’ll give them any trouble. They don’t know about the G Unit or the Bradleys—a couple of things we didn’t mention, of course.

When he’s done, I pull a knife. Put it at his throat.

“The slaves.” I prick him hard enough to make him start to bleed. Actually, I stick him harder than I mean to, and the tip of the knife slips a half inch into the soft underside of his jaw. It’s too easy to slip. Too easy to go further than I want.