Zombies: The Recent Dead (62 page)

Three doors down I found the remains of a campfire on what had been somebody’s front lawn, a time ago. I found some old cans, emptied and licked clean. I found flat places in the grass where wild folk had laid out in the night.

I felt the ashes of the fire and they were still warm. I still had a chance, then. At least as long as the General Manager of the Home Depot didn’t mind receiving my cargo slightly used.

It’s not hard to find the villages of the wild folk on a calm day, even though they move from time to time, even though they are little more than tent towns and colorless and small. You look for smoke, is all, and it’s something my grandfather taught me. You get to a high place, say the top of an old commercial building or you climb on top of a bent old power pylon and you look across the land. If you don’t squint too hard you’ll see them, the columns of smoke. Thin gray pencil lines rising in the air.

I tracked them down through a low defile that ran parallel to an old state highway. I moved quietly but I didn’t waste time. I could hear them before long but I trailed behind, keeping my distance. I waited for them to camp and then I waited for the sun to sink over the hills. Only then did I move in.

There were maybe seventy of them, a fair-sized encampment and far more than I could take on with just my two arms. There were children with them, some as young as five. The wild folk have their babies in the woods and raise them where they can. Very few survive to puberty. It’s why they keep their women pregnant at all times, and why they’re constantly looking for new breeding stock.

I saw them like pinkish ghosts in the falling light, their undyed clothing and their pale skin moving between the trees like inverted shadows. I saw their fires and their animal-hide tents stretched over battered old aluminum poles. I saw their pet slack.

Every band of wild folk has one. A dead man, usually an ancestor, who they keep and feed. Some are simple totems, rallying points for the tribe. Some are valued because they can do tricks. I watched this one work his single gimmick over and over. The wild folk would bring him scraps of paper, bits and ends they had found in the old houses. The slack had a plastic pen wired to his hand. A girl of maybe ten years would fill it with ink from time to time as the slack signed his name, over and over. Who could say what dim chunk of his rotting brain, what curl of gray matter was left to him, that let him do that. He looked quite happy to sign and sign away, his fleshless face turned upward in a pure and innocent smile, his tattered body jiggling with the joy of it.

Every time he finished a signature the wild folk would laugh and cheer. It was something of the old world, something they might remember doing themselves. It was a thing of power, every name an incantation. I don’t suppose it matters why. It was a good trick, for a slack, and entertainment is what you make of it out on the road.

I gave them an hour of darkness—just long enough to have their dinner ready—and then I stepped out of the shadows and into the light. I made myself known with a loud, warbling screech and threw my lance down before me.

Every eye in the encampment turned my way. Every hand reached for a weapon. Yet my intentions could not be more clear. I had dealings with the wild folk before, many a time, whether or not I knew any of this band. Their lives are unlike the life of the Stores. They don’t hold to so many rules. But they still have a few, and I knew them, and how to make them work for me.

“I want some dinner, and I want some information,” I said. I held my arms outstretched the way a ghoul might. In this case I was showing them I was unarmed.

The leader of the band came to me then. He was nearly my age—ripe, for a wild man—and some kind of fungal infection lined his cheeks and forehead with angry ridges. Muscles crawled across his chest and shoulders like vines pulled taut. He wore drawstring pants and shoes of fine deer hide. The top of a human skull, sawed away just above the eye sockets, perched atop his unwashed hair.

“You come to join us, Roadie? You come to be a friend to the dead?” he asked. He didn’t look happy but he didn’t look like he wanted to kill me, either.

“Not hardly. I’ve come for dinner, like I said.”

He nodded. He’d be willing to feed me, in exchange for my leaving them alone.

I went on. “And I’ve come to be told where the girl is. The girl with hair like gold and eyes like old glass bottles. I’ll be taking her with me.”

His eyes narrowed. He moved sideways, scuttling around me, looking me over. He wanted to know if I had any real weapons on me. Say a pistol, or even a zip gun. Say a knife in a hidden sheath. He glanced at the spring-lance at my feet but it was well out of my reach.

“Finder’s, keepers,” he said, finally, when he was sure I was defenseless. He had a hatchet in his own hand, a steel thing at least half made of rust. It wouldn’t keep an edge any more but it would do just fine for bashing in my face. “She’s weak, but she can birth some babies for us. We won’t be giving her up.” He looked me up and down again but this time it was my breasts and my crotch he sized up. “Maybe you want to make a trade? Maybe you want to come be our babymaker?”

“Not hardly,” I said again.

His brothers, his cousins, his uncles came out of the tents then or stepped up from their campfires or ghosted in out of the woods. They had spears and knives in their hands. Some of them wore leather thongs around their throats, tight as chokers, with finger bones dangling from them. That marked them as killers, as those who had fought before. They came close, close enough to strike me, but not close enough that I could touch them. They knew this kind of entertainment all too well. There was no chance of me taking them. I was a tough thing, all muscle and sinew, and stronger by far than any wild folk, fed up better on Store food, trained by hard life on the road. Against their leader, maybe, or maybe even him and his best two champions, maybe. But there were just too many of them.

“Roadies are too smart for this kind of aggro,” the leader said. “Too smart to come in here and start something they can’t finish.” He was figuring out my game, and far too soon. “You playing at something, Roadie?”

I shrugged my shoulders elaborately. “You won’t give her back, then. All right.” I took my water bottle from my belt and showed it to him. He turned away and spat. He wouldn’t drink my water. It might be poisoned.

I shrugged again. I had to draw this out a little longer. Slowly, as if to assure them of my good intentions, I unscrewed the cap from my water bottle. Slowly I lifted the bottle, as if to drink.

Then the wind changed and a familiar smell lit up my nose and I smiled. I turned over the bottle and rabbit’s blood spilled out on the ground.

Behind me, come looming out of the shadows, the ghoul appeared, his broken mouth black and wide as a cave as if he would swallow the wild folk whole. I’d been teasing and taunting and coaxing him along all day and finally he had caught up. He smelled the blood and the hunger in him must have spiked. He came shambling for me—for the leader—for anything warm.

In the confusion I grabbed up my lance and slipped past their leader. I dodged around a cook fire and tore open the flap of the first tent I found. Inside a huddle of children looked up at me, terrified.

I’d brought death down on them, maybe. I didn’t waste time on guilt. The next three tents I found were empty. Behind me the leader and his extended family were whooping with fear and running every way, their weapons up, their hands raised. The ghoul would lunge at one of them, then another. They would dance away from him, yelping like dogs. He stumbled like a drunkard from one body to the next.

I tripped over the slack in the middle of the encampment. He looked up at me and raised his pen hand, perhaps wanting another piece of paper. Endless copies of his signature littered the ground about his feet. My skin rumpled, my stomach flipped at the nearness of him, this harmless dead man. Reflexively I raised the spring-lance. But no. If I took the girl and ran this band of wild folk might forget me, after a time of seeking revenge. If I did in their pet slack, however, they would chase me like furies. I pushed past him and headed for the next tent.

Winona stepped out of it before I even arrived. Her hair hung loose around her face, piled in careless hummocks like the yellow grass revealed by the melting snows of spring. Her eyes saw me and I saw in them a hurt that went beyond blame. A hurt that needed healing of a kind I could not offer. She was stark naked, her little body smeared with dirt and ash and paint. I knew what that meant.

They had tied her feet and hands together with leather cord. She could shuffle forward but not walk with any speed. I didn’t have the time to free her so I grabbed her up over my shoulder and I ran into the darkness, leaving the camp in chaos behind.

We hid in a tree, our exhausted bodies draped over the branches, and spent the night not sleeping, but listening for any sound, and smelling, our noses twitched, even as we dozed.

The next day I brought her back toward the Turnpike. We passed through the overgrown asphalt of an old school parking lot, climbing over places where the pavement had cracked like the top of a loaf of bread. The brick building loomed over us in silent decay, its windows broken, its doors standing open to let us look in on empty rooms full of dirt and dead leaves.

“They kept a dead man among them,” Winona said to me as we climbed an endless on-ramp to the Pike. “They kept him like a milking cow, like a treasure.”

It was the first thing she’d said to me since I left her in the abandoned house. I considered what to say long and hard. “They are the friends of the dead. It’s why you call them wild.”

“This much I knew, yes. That when one of them dies, they are left uncleansed. No relative will strike the sacred blow.”

Which is what they call it in the Stores. The Final Duty of Kinship. The Sacred Blow. Which amounts to taking a sledgehammer to the brains of your loved ones when they pass. It’s a necessary thing. I did for my grandfather, didn’t I? I’m no wild folk savage. Still. I never saw it like some holy thing, as Winona’s people did. I saw it as a sadness, a sharp sadness on the world.

“They have avowed never to strike a dead thing. They make a pact with their ancestors, you see. They will not harm the dead, which is sin, and in exchange, the dead will let them survive.”

“The dead know nothing of treaties and compacts,” Winona said, a little of her old uppity pride glowing behind her eyes. I guess maybe she was going to be all right. “Such foolishness. Such evil.”

Now a Roadie may never judge those she trades with. So I kept my peace.

The ghoul found us again the next evening, just as the sky started turning orange. Maybe he got a meal out of the wild folk. Maybe they outran him. It didn’t matter. He had my smell in his dead nose and he couldn’t not come for me. He was a thing of nature, as pure, if not as innocent, as the smile on the face of the paper-signing slack.

For days he tracked me. For days I tried to give him the slip. It was for naught. We were like two arrows launched in the air at the same target. At some point our paths would cross. Smart as I am, I decided I would choose when it might happen.

I smelled him and then I heard him. I readied myself for him. I put Winona in an old storm cellar and locked the door behind me. Then I walked out into the middle of a suburban street with my spring-lance loose in my hands. I spread my legs a little, kept my knees unlocked. I tried to sense where he was, what direction he might be coming from.

He surprised me, as they do. He came from behind and I barely had time to pivot on my left foot, my right foot high to kick out at him. I caught him in the stomach and knocked him backwards. It gave me a splinter of a moment to bring the lance around.

His hands came for me, his broken jaws, his whole body swimming through the air as time slowed to a near standstill. My eyes focused on his head until every little detail stood out. The dark veins beneath his cheek. The ragged hole in the side of his head where my spring-lance had caught him before, like a second, rotten ear.

His fingers caught at my belt, wove themselves through the cord to anchor himself to me. The next blow would tear my flesh open and make me bleed.

At least it might have, if I’d been a trace slower. I pressed the end of the coffee can against his forehead. It was a centered strike, a perfect placement. His own momentum pressed his face against my spring-loaded weapon. The coffee can slid backward and released the hidden latch. The spike jumped forward, its glinting point emerging from the back of his skull and catching the moonlight.

He fell on me, all spark of animation fleeing, and I might have been pinned by a collapsing chimney. His body sputtered out its last spastic movement and then stopped.

I rolled out from under him and lay looking up at purple clouds that stretched in thick bands across the whole of the sky. I waited a while, to catch my breath, before I stood again.

Atop three flagpoles in the Home Depot’s parking lot long Mylar banners snapped in the air, welcoming us to our destination. At the loading dock a party of warriors in orange smocks waited to receive us. They wore circlets carved of rosewood on their temples and had gold and silver chains wrapping their forearms like vambraces. The General Manager himself stood silhouetted in the doorway, a fire behind him throwing long shadows down toward us. He was a gray-haired old man with a white scar running across the full length of his chest. He wore nothing but a pair of tight-fitting elastic shorts, black and satiny with gold piping. Beads and bones and jewels were woven in his long hair. He smiled to see Winona, and he gestured to her to come into his arms, to come to his bed, perhaps.

“He doesn’t waste his time,” I said. We were still out of earshot. I’d planned on giving the girl a final lecture in what a beastly little hardship she’d been. Instead I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t turn around and get back on the road with her.

“It is a grand destiny, to make the heirs who will rid the world of the monsters,” Winona announced. She looked a bit scared, but not of the bulge in the General Manager’s underwear. Something else had her in its teeth.