This Is Not The End: But I Can See It From Here (The Big Red Z Book 1) (7 page)

Chapter 18

Early and I are back on more open seas in the little boat.  About an hour later, he growls at me a few times getting here.  Have to suppose it is because we didn’t go after that meat we smelled.  The truth, I suspect, might be stranger.

He is not just a dog, after all.

A new rain comes suddenly in sheets across the darkening water.  We do not have to halt. 

No need to let the ears and eyes adjust. 

In New York, it was easy to imagine the Earth overrun with the undead.  This is the nonsense of adolescent, anthropic thought processes.  Five billion undead, and growing every day, and most of the earth is, in fact, very much devoid of them. 

Consider the ocean.

In fact in getting to the Army base in Aculpoco there is only one other incident.  It is just a day south of the base.  We make camp.  We pull the boat on the black gravel of a little beach and hike to a high rocky place and look around a moment. 

There is another hill with a better view just beyond, but Early doesn’t want to go.

“I wish you could talk to me, son.”

The shepherd seems to wish it too.

“Okay.”

I slap my hip.  Then we freeze.

Just ahead of us, back toward the boat, a new hole forms. 

I tell Early to stay.

Chapter 19

Approaching the nest, I sense there may be nothing to this.  Just coincidence—which from time to time I still have to convince myself actually exist. 

If I can reach the hole without alerting them…

Something howls in the distance behind me—coyote. I approach the hole, which is about three feet wide, ever slowing, softening my footfalls at the edge of what turns out to be a nest.  With a breath, I lean over it.  I keep the gun trained, forcing myself to urinate at the mouth of nest.

It take three more breaths.

Damn it is impossible to not be shocked at the sight of them.  Fungal death masks, peeling away in rotten flakes, the mouth is agape, crying a demon’s song as it rockets upward through the rooty muck.  Teeth like shards of marrow.  One after the other they come.  Unafraid.  Unhuman.   Their craniums flowering open like meaty poinsettias under my M4.

My breathing quickens once it is over.  I do not have to call Early to my side when the firing stops.  He comes, and together we look at the hole, stuffed to the top with twitching flesh.

Flawless.

Lucky, but flawless. 

Early growls as I scrabble to pull one up out from the nest.  Disgusting mottled flesh like Jackson’s tongue, but more bloodbuckled and greasy.   Bits of exposed muscled and tendon.  It would stain your hands.  Stain your eyes.  The undead have a hold on the human psyche, no matter how often they are seen.  I examine the teeth and cannot decide if there are multiple rows.

What an enigma, these creatures.  Blood, with no beating heart.  Lungs, but no real breath, just oily red grease within the lung itself, tangled in rosy white muscle.  Then bone.  The open cranium has bizarre filaments, like threads.  I am loathe to imagine its thoughts, whether the thing dreamed.  The Shado feel.  Something.  They react, not to pain, but to each other.  The cold doesn’t harm them, and at times I have mused on what drives them into the earth.  Was it fear? The remnants of what they were.  The only semblance of culture is that females seem to decide where they will dig out their nest.  When they rip apart their victims, they often bring the meat back to the nest to eat. The rest of the carcass is left alone.  Left to the elements.

I’ve heard once that studying a thing is an act of pity.

I’ve heard lots of dumb shit.

So why here?  What about this spot, so near the sea?  So far from anything else. 

“Let’s go, son.”    

Chapter 20

  As Early and I get back on the water, it’s morning.  The sun is reddening all but the deepest pockets of forest to our right.  The nest of Shado, clogged with the rot of their once-again dead, fouls the air some nineteen miles south of us. 

We travel along the shore, ever northward, through drifting fog, fog pouring off the ground like smoke, through trees so thick and green they look black against the reddening day. 

We reach a spot where fire has come to the shore.  A fire, in this wet a gooey place is a difficult thing to imagine.  Had to be manmade.  We stop. Just ahead in the thinning fog is a set of foot prints in the tar and burnt clay ground. Sore-assed and bleary-eyed, we find a perfect perch on the shore and study them.

That’s when I see the Humvee coming.

One of ours.

Rescued, finally, and all I can think is we’ll be able to catch a little rest soon—real rest.  Which of course means I’ll be wide awake. 

Hell with that.  I’m ready to sit drink away the strange feeling in my head.  It just fucking clings. 

That, and I need some toilet paper.

I kiss Big Early’s head as they get out and ask if I’m okay.  Then I cry.  Lick them in the face with every tongue in hell if they didn’t understand that. 

Chapter 21

“So that’s it,” the army psychiatrist said.  “
That’s
how you got here?”

Tyler McCarthy stared at his boots a moment.  The doc was pretty, he thought, like magazine pretty.  “Yeah.”

“You do know about the dog then?”

“Ma’am.”

“You do?”

“Well I think.”

“What do you think,” she said.

“Please, not...  Just take care of him.”

“Okay.”

Chapter 22
 

PART TWO

DOC’S TALE

War would end if the dead could return

-Stanley Baldwin

While the cold air splashed up his back, Doc Ludeman took another step into the bar, then stepped aside, watching a pair of battered hunters leaving, limping, holding each other up.  The first brawl of the night was over.  For now.  Probably some nonsense about money.   But he knew they can always take it to a more basic level than that.  The victor, he seemed nice.  He stood bloodied and depleted at the bar.  A guy named Dale, up from Nashville.  His smile was the smile of the new ones.  It didn’t seemed forced.  He was half again as muscular as most hunters.  But so were half the old dogs in Outer Fort Campbell—which seemed to attract every manner of roughneck and scumbag that Kentucky had to offer.

Doc threw aside a toothpick, which he had exhausted down to a sliver, and strolled across to Tyler McCarthy’s uncle’s.   The McCarthys.  Gruff, displaced Old New Yorkers, every one.  Jickie, Rocco, Gig, and Kenzo.   All were retired, so to speak, but each had once been commandos once, fierce pavers of the great Human Way.  They were engaged in a heated discussion with some fellows that were Doc’s age.  They were from a nearby fortification called Bastard Hill and armored in tattered Kevlar.

“Has any heard anything about Tyler?” Doc asked, uninterested in their dispute.

“That’s the tenth time you’ve asked that question,” Tyler’s Uncle Jickie barked, looking up sharply.   “The tenth fucking time, Doc.  And you’ve got no more information than the first!”

The rest of the table hushed.  Jickie looked to him to for a humble nod of apology.  For bringing Tyler’s name up, Doc supposed.  Tyler had been a source of both income and pride to his eldest uncle. But that love was buried good, layered under the kind of grizzled face that could have been grafted from the ass end of a rhinoceros.  

Doc gave the boobs at the bar a peak, then gave in. 

“Sorry.”

“Hold on, Doc,” drawled Fat Addly.  He was a squat dude, strong as hell, but the kind of fellow you’d think would have been bred out, seeing as speed was everything.  He had friendly eyes and bulging, red cheeks.  “You don’t expect Tyler?”

“Here we go…”

“Even if it
was
his tracks the pararescuers found leaving the site, that fucker’s a pile of anaconda shit by now.”

Doc laughed.  Inwardly.   Well, what can you do?  A pile of Anaconda shit was a funny thing to think about.  However, he could tell Addly’s goal was more to get away from Tyler’s uncles’ arguments than to answer him.  And Doc couldn’t help himself.  He drew up a chair to the esteemed company of McCarthy patriarchs. 

“I beg your pardon, fellas,” he said. “What were you saying to Fat Ass?”

“Talk of conquest,” Uncle Jickie said.  

“Yeah?”

“Hell yeah, Doc.  We’ve have transformed these shado-filled hillsides into a damned playground.  Safe enough for fat fucks like this piece of shit.”  

“Ha!” Addly laughed.  He was, of course, was amused at Tyler’s uncle.  Old Jick had been a leading spirit in the Good Fight, and his enthusiasm still knew no bounds.   

“We have chopped a path from these outer walls as far south as Bastard Hill.”  

Addly paused with a supercilious smile, puffing grandly on his cigarette.  “By damn but I’ll give you old fuckers that much.” 

The old uncle grimaced, which Doc had to admit, puzzled him somewhat.  You could never seem to get a bead on how the old dogs were going to react.  Addly agreeing with him, for instance, wasn’t to his taste; it was certainly true that in rare pockets of the world, the Safe Zones were actually
spreading
, thanks enough to the savagery of ironclad old hunters like the McCarthys.  IN places like Fort Campbells it even allowed the lazier young fatasses of the hills to come in afterward, living relatively normal lives, so long as they camped near the outer walls.

“Old fuckers?  Pardon me, Mister Addly,” the uncle said, furrowing his brows thoughtfully.  “You forget that, technically, the blowjobs your mother gave us all ensured we didn’t have to do too much
fucking
, so to speak.”

Addly tsked, and his cheeks took on a deeper purplish shade.  But Doc had to say this of him, he returned the charge good-humoredly enough.

“Nonsense, old man,” he laughed.  “If mama gave such good head, why the frozen hell did so many of my brothers look like you ugly-ass McCarthys?”

Before the laughter subsided, “It was her heart!” interrupted Uncle Jickie.  “And I’d thank you not to talk about Miss Fay like that,” he added.

Doc shook his head, grinning, before he decided to leave and let the old men have their time.  

Then the uncles all rose as well, and he feared for a moment they were going to follow him out.   But it was only to get nearer the bar and sort some other argument out with beer, where Doc heard Tyler’s uncles flinging more verbal fists.  

“Now see here, Jick…”

Chapter 23

It was a windy night, and as cold as a corpse’ fraying nipples.  A foot of snow covered the ground while a few lonely clouds scooted atop the black pines trees.  There was a wolf’s eye moon rimming the naked, twisted girders of the old power plant on the horizon, and it smelled of even more snow, or perhaps sleet, despite the great splash of stars mid-heaven.

Doc looked up the side of Collie-dog Hill to the light of Uncle Jickie’s hall.  It was a grand old lodge, built like a cabin designed in the fevered dreams of a lunatic.  Spikes jutted from every conceivable angle, like a porcupine.  It was there that Doc met Tyler.  He had only just arrived, eleven years old and somehow still alive, still wiping tears from his sleeves.  Tyler, thirteen, must have noticed the look in his eyes, because he deigned to ask who he had lost.  And in less than a moment, Doc had learned that the same thing had happened to him.  Tyler had lost his father when he was just a boy, and that after his mom fell to them, too, Jickie had raised him like a son.  At that information, Doc’s heart gave a curious, jubilant thud.  It was hard to explain.  The circumstances were so alike, maybe.  He had no idea.  All he could feel was a warmth spreading across his chest.  Did he just need someone to relate to?  As he pondered why he felt so much better, so suddenly, Tyler’s uncle mentally measured him with that stern look he was so good at, interrupting his reverie.  

Seemingly undecided, he turned to Tyler.

Young Tyler gave a sort of reserved nod.

It was all the approval Uncle Jickie needed.  “You’ll have your smile back, Doc,” he said, calling him Doc for the first time, seeming to decide that the scrubs he was wearing were more doctor-like than nurse-like. 

Before that year had passed, Tyler and Doc they were as good companions as two fellows could be.  But Tyler had already had a big ripe, fair-haired girlfriend.  That did not mean, however, an end to their rides, to their hunting down the Red River, and their long evening talks.  Emily was almost as much fun as Tyler, with a laugh that could light up an old coal mine.  She made second place feel just fine.

So here Doc was, stepping outside Goback Pub, thinking about Tyler, about the time Emily had shot him a bird while he spied on here bathing, when something odd happened.  Peering from the porch, he was calculating how long a man could survive in the jungle he was surprised by the form of a horse beneath the lantern of the arched gateway; and his surprise increased on nearer inspection.  As Doc walked up, the creature gave a whinny.  Then he recognized it was Tyler’s red horse, lathered with sweat.  It was shivering, but he had given it no blanket.  The reins were slung over the hitching post, and he heard steps hurrying to the side door of the pub.

“Tyler?”

There was no answer.

Doc led the horse to the stable-man and hurried back to see if Tyler was inside. 

His eyes adjusting again, he blinked.  The sitting room was deserted, but Tyler’s figure was entering the dining room.  He must have seemed a curious figure to the questioning looks of old commandos, who were still arguing:  in one hand was his riding whip, in the other, his gloves.   He wore Kevlar and in the belt were two axes.   One sleeve was torn from wrist to elbow and his boots looked like something had clawed them.   His helm was still on, slouched down over his eyes.

“Frozen fuck, it’s Tyler!” Uncle Jickie said, crying as he ran to embrace his long lost nephew.

But he halted.

Not a word came from Tyler.

Doc rushed forward.   But Doc quickly checked himself.  Tyler turned slowly towards him, offering no greeting but a pair of eyes like frozen little ponds and parched, wordless lips.  Even Addly, insufferably honest ass that he was, hadn’t been jowls-deep in beer, would have noticed that there was something terrible written on Tyler’s face.

“Surprised his girlfriend let him out of that ass of hers long enough to come play.” he said, despite Doc’s raised hands and headshaking.

Barely were the words out when Tyler’s teeth clenched behind the newly-bearded lips, giving him a feral expression that was strange to his philosophical face.  He spun and took a quick stride towards the fatass. 

Then he whirled his whip in one cutting blow, landing it across Addly’s bloated red cheeks.