Dead Lands Pass the Ammunition Read online

~

  I made my bunk near the one wall the single men shared with the family room. The family room had a wholesome name but scarred heart. Lennie called it an orgy once, but I wouldn’t believe it. Lennie like to tell stories, and he always puffed them up.

  We stayed in the adjoining shack, one wall in common. Maybe we stayed there to remember or imagine. Maybe we stayed close so when we heard the grunting and moaning through the thin metal sheets, we’d grab our dick’s and spank them until the loneliness went away even though it never did. Entertainment, I guess. Self-abuse…

  I heard Mack and Sasha whispering the night after the big skirmish, and I don’t mean making the beast with two backs. They were talking. Their voices came like rats’ scratches at first, so quiet I almost wasn’t sure I heard what I heard.

  “You saw the way Lennie and Rex followed you,” Sasha said.

  “They just wanted to kill some flesh bags,” Mack replied. “Everybody just wants to kill some flesh bags. All this waiting around for them to come to us is nuts. I didn’t do anything special. I was just antsy. Ready to do something.”

  “You’re a leader. A natural. Half this camp would stand up and bark if you asked them to. God knows I’d bark if you asked me to.”

  “Sash… I’m no leader.”

  “Bullshit and you know it. Nobody else has the balls you do, baby.”

  Mack grunted. I imagined where Sasha’s hand must have been.

  “Big D knows it. He hasn’t done anything to move us forward. We just hang here, waiting. He knows you’re going to challenge him.”

  “What?”

  “He has to know,” Sasha said. “He has to suspect something.”

  A metallic squeak leaked through the thin wall. I scooted closer, listening, waiting for their voices again.

  “I don’t want to challenge Big D. Plenty of folk love him. He’s done right by us most of the time. He’s kept everyone safe. He was here in the beginning. What’s this all about, anyway? I never mentioned challenging Big D.”

  “But you could. You could take him,” she said. “But maybe not out in the open. You know the council would jump on you if Big D was out of the way. If this pest hole needed another leader, you’d be next in line.”

  “What about Donnie?” Mack asked. “Donnie lives in his back pocket.”

  “What about Donnie? He’s a snot-nosed weasel.”

  “Donnie’s a dangerous guy. He’s number two, and suspicious as hell. He’s got that lean and hungry look.”

  “He’s a head case. You’re a natural leader.”

  “No,” Mack said. “I can’t do what D’s done. What he keeps doing for this camp.”

  “He’s an egomaniac and weak, too. You should be in charge.”

  “No, Sash. Big D’s the man. He’s kept us safe here. Got us planting seeds and farming. We’ll start raising hogs in the next year—once we grab some of those wild razorbacks down in the bottoms. Big D’s the man.”

  “You think those were his ideas? You think any of that shit is going to win the war against the flesh bags? He doesn’t shit without thinking about which way the wind blows. Just think about it, baby. If you want something, sometimes you have to reach out and grab hold of it yourself. Sometimes you have to make it yours.”

  Mack grunted again, and then the squeaking came back followed by a few muffled moans. I rolled over and draped an arm across my ear, trying to blot out the sound.

  I’d imagined enough for one night.

  ~

  That conversation nibbled on me. It was still there in the morning, sticking in my side like a wood splinter under the skin. I tried to imagine Mack as leader of the compound, crown prince of thirty odd or so survivors all huddled together in our half-dozen shacks behind makeshift walls. I tried to picture Mack presiding over the gardens and the expeditions to gather food and cooking fuel and kerosene for our bombs. No matter how my brain worked it, I just couldn’t make it come out right. Mack as leader…

  Or Sasha as the queen, pulling his strings.

  But she already was, wasn’t she? She pulled hard enough for old Mack to tumble into a mess of trouble, filling his head with ideas of grandeur and delusions of a new order where he’d sit in the central hut on Big D’s old throne. Nothing but a stinking stained recliner pulled from a ditch, that throne, but that didn’t matter.

  I wanted to forget it, burn the whole stupid conversation from my head, but memories never worked like that—before or after the dead came back to life and everything we knew crumbled like a toothpick castle in a twister.

  I chewed on my thoughts along with bowls of bitter vegetables and tasteless potato soup.

  But then Mack and I were filling sandbags—we mostly used old plastic trash sacks filled will mud to shore up the outer walls—a few days after I overheard them. My thoughts foamed over into words.

  “Sasha’s got a big mouth.” I sank the shovel into the wet ground and twisted to face him.

  Mack heaved a bag onto the pile and then turned his square-jawed face my direction. “What the hell are you talking about?” He asked. Sweat trickled a zig-zag line down his reddened face. His eyes went cold like midnight.

  “Nothing.” I looked at my soil-stained hands. “Nothing…”

  He snorted. “Bullshit. Come out with it P. You drop some shit like that about Sash, you better be ready to back it up.” His fists curled at his side. A quick flash of those meaty paws skittered through my head. Nobody really wanted to be on the wrong side of Mack.

  I swallowed hard and turned back to the shovel. “Just what she was saying about Big D the other night. Stuff she was saying about you being in charge.”

  “You were listening?”

  I shrugged. “Thin walls. It’s not like I tried.”

  Mack scowled. “What of it?”

  I heard it in his voice, anger like a volcano ready to pop—anger like the powder of a cartridge right before the pin sets it off.

  “She’s going to get you killed is all. She’s going to talk you into doing something stupid.” I wrapped my fingers around the shovel handle and lifted it from the muck. The wrong words crawled over the edge of my tongue and spilled into the air. “She’s got her claws in you pretty deep.”

  “Say it again,” he said.

  “You heard me.”

  His fist hit the side of my skull like a stone. White light burst in my head. My body flopped to the side, limp and broken like a scarecrow knocked down with the wind. I slid a few feet in the mud.

  “Motherfucker,” Mack snarled. He stood above me, his back to the corrugated tin wall of the compound. A couple of guys on watch shouted something, too, but my ears couldn’t grab hold of it just then. Blood throbbed in my head. “Lay off Sash, you jealous prick.”

  I shook my head, asking for more abuse. “She’s—”

  His boot caught me in the gut, and I doubled over.

  “She’s… She’s everything. We’re nothing. We’re fucking disposable, you know that? We’ve got to have women like Sash, good tough woman who are going to make this work. It’s not just about fucking and having a good time. They’ve got to be mothers to our kids. Yeah, kids. It’s not something I imagined for my life, ever, but the reality of this,” he paused and waved his hand at the compound, “we’ve got to have good strong women who give a shit. I figure if we want to survive—”

  “I want you to survive,” I said. I’d been trying to cover for the guy for years—since high school on the football field and in the classroom. He used to sit next to me in Mr. Alstatt’s algebra class and copy answers during our tests. I’d been trying to keep Mack afloat for too long, and figured this was just another in a long line of bailing out his sorry butt. All that bullshit about the future—children—my God. Maybe Mack came around before I did. Maybe he did get it, but visions of Sasha’s swishing ass and her devil’s eyes kept me from believing him. Maybe I was jealous and jealousy blinded me. Mack might have had his shit together.

  Either way, I must have struck a dif
ferent kind of nerve because he didn’t kick me again. Maybe he heard some truth in those words. I don’t know. His big fists deflated, but his dark eyes still hammered against me like the twin barrels of Uncle Gary’s shotgun.

  “You need to get your God-damned nose out of my business, P. We’ve been like brothers since—”

  “Middle school,” I said.

  “Yeah. Since Mr. Grinich’s homeroom. You invited me to your table at lunch when the rest of the damned school looked like it wanted to fling shit at me, the new monkey in the cage. I suppose I owed you one for that. I’m sure I’ve paid up by now.” Mack shook his head. “Just lay off Sash. We’ve got dreams.”

  My stomach twisted, snake like. Dreams. She’d filled his head with delusions of grandeur.

  “Dreams,” I said. “Ambitions. Like maybe—”

  “Don’t start,” Mack growled. “This is over.”

  I nodded. Nothing was over. Nothing would be over for some time. Nothing except our friendship.

  Chapter 3

  Everyone in camp knew exactly how many shots they had left.

  I carried twenty-nine shells when I arrived at the Nebraska compound and hadn’t spent one since. The shells came from a Wal-mart in Concordia, Kansas. Mack and I had been traveling with an ex-GI who called himself Ghost, a skittish, thin fellow who claimed the rotters couldn’t function up north.

  Ghost played too many video games and had Mountain Dew for blood plasma. He claimed strength in numbers because, as he said, “a guy had to sleep sometime.” Ghost had a car and when law and order fell apart in Manhattan—I can’t even imagine the shit-storm in a bigger city—we piled into his Camry and headed west. We passed one town—Clay Center—in flames. The bridge west on U.S. 24 had collapsed into the river, so we swung south and hooked up with U.S. 81. Concordia’s Wal-mart sat just off the highway.

  I had the gun, my father’s old sixteen gauge, already. Damn hard to find ammunition for an odd gauge even in the best of times.

  “Right here fellas,” Ghost said, steering into the lot. The whole damn town appeared deserted. A big brick building like a castle sat on a hill, watching the whole mess. Ghost explained a bunch of nuns lived up there—it was a convent or school or something. I wondered how long they were able to hold off the dead in their cloistered halls.

  We loaded a couple carts with dry groceries before making our way to sporting. The place had seen some action—shelves and clothing and boxes strewn everywhere—but we held hope.

  And it paid off for me.

  We found a toppled display of shotgun shells, one of those hunting season specials, scattered across the floor.

  “Looks like somebody’s been here,” Mack said. “Took most of this stuff.”

  I knelt and started digging through the boxes. “Still some left… These are sixteen gauge.”

  “It’s your lucky fucking day,” Ghost muttered as he climbed over the counter. “Your lucky day. Mack and me might grab some of these.” He gestured toward the rifle display. “Free for the taking.”

  I’d shoved several fistfuls of ammo in my jacket pockets before we smelled them. They made noise, sure, a low, aching moan, but the smell really tipped us off.

  Ghost was behind a counter hammering at the locks on a whole row of rifles.

  “Let’s go,” Mack said. His eyes darted back and forth. We both scanned for the source of the stench.

  “Just a minute,” Ghost said.

  Hard to imagine a lumbering mob of undead ambushing us, but that’s as close to the truth as I can make it. They must have had a nest in there or something. Like some kind of hive. A big crash behind Mack grabbed my attention, and the bastards had us surrounded. Three snarling, grey-faced monsters lumbered toward Ghost down one aisle; behind and to my left, two more. Mack spun to face a sixth staggering on his right.

  “Fuck it,” Mack said. A rack of baseball bats had been strewn on the floor nearby, and he stooped for one, aluminum. “Let’s go.”

  The fleshbag closest Mack lunged, but Mack feinted left. He brought the bat up at an angle, landing a vicious uppercut on the thing’s jaw. The mandible snapped, crumbling with a wet pop. The body fell to the floor.

  Blood pounding in my head, I shoved one more fistful of shells in my pocket and scrambled away from the two behind me.

  Ghost grunted.

  I turned. The quickest of the three coming toward him had him pinned against the counter. Ghost had managed the lock and now held a gun in front of him—unloaded. The fleshbag’s rotten mouth snapped open and shut inches from Ghost’s face. The other two bastards started tearing at Ghost’s arms with their nasty-ass hands.

  The guy was dead meat. I knew it. I looked at Mack.

  Mack’s face went red.

  “Mother-fuckers,” he muttered. Swinging the bat, he came at the two nearest us. With one swift strike he sent the smaller of the two toppling sideways. It struck an empty shelf with a clatter and collapsed. The other sort of paused, almost like it was trying to understand what happened. Mack swung the bat with two fists, breaking the head of the second—a big, bullish meatwad with a beard—off at the neck. The skinny one started crawling toward us, but Mack hopped over it and headed for Ghost.

  My hand swooped low and snagged a bat. I swung in one swooping down stroke like a guy might with a sledgehammer. Skull fragments and rotten flesh squirted to the side like black jelly. Ooze hit the floor with wet plops.

  It was my first kill.

  The first time I’d killed something that wasn’t dead, wasn’t alive.

  I stared at the end of the bat, the black stain, my own hands…

  Ghost howled in pain.

  My attention snapped to the moment. Mack had managed two of the three baddies, but the last one, the one Ghost was fighting, latched his foul mouth on Ghost’s shoulder. Mack swung like a thresher, landing blow after blow on the rotten torso until the teeth came loose with a deep red spurt of Ghost’s blood.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…” Ghost groaned.

  “C’mon,” Mack said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I couldn’t move. My eyes flicked between the black mess in front of me and the slick flow of red on Ghost’s shoulder. Mack punched me in the arm.

  “Time to go, P. Unless you want to hang around and feed the animals.”

  We hurried through the store. Shotgun shells rattled in my pockets as we ran through the doors and across the lot. The earth rattled in my bones as my feet struck pavement. The sky, cold and grey and unsympathetic pressed down like a lid of iron. Once in the car, Mack fired it up and tore through Concordia. Ghost lay groaning in the back seat. I counted the shells in my pockets after the shaking went away.

  “Twenty-nine,” I said.

  Mack grunted. We zipped past a “Welcome to Nebraska” sign, a blue blur against the grey sky.

  “Twenty-nine shells,” I said again. I looked at my hands.

  The silver bat rolled on the floor at Mack’s feet. “Better than zero,” he said. “Damn lucky they had your size.”

  Lucky.

  Right.

  ~

  I hadn’t fired the gun since living in the compound. Most of the fighting came in short bursts after the flesh bags gained strength in numbers and hammered away at the metal walls. I supposed those walls might not hold for long if we let them pound away all night and all day. The cocktails took care of most of the bastards, and before Mack splatted the lot that day, we’d simply wait for the fire to swallow the rest.

  Besides, the damn things were too stupid to stop, drop, and roll. A dead body burns a hell of a lot faster with one still full of blood and piss and stomach juice to slow the flames down.

  Safety lay tucked away in the compound, but the future stared at us each day with the sunrise. We’d run out of glass bottles soon enough. What then, take pot-shots at the meatwads until our guns went dry? Our ammunition was limited, too, and seemed a hell of a lot more precious than bottles. Each man and woman carried what he or she o
wned, never letting a cartridge out of one’s sight for fear it could be the lost bullet which might save one’s life. All sorts of mythology sprang up around our guns, but they’d be no more use than a fence post without shells. Once the guns fell silent, we’d have nothing left but to fend off the meatwads with sticks and bats until their number swallowed us like a frothing red tide. And they would, too. If we couldn’t keep them off the walls, those walls would never hold.

  A dream of dying in a flood of grey flesh woke me at least twice a month. It was the only dream I ever remembered in color. Hell, I could have closed my eyes and almost smelled that dream.

  Part of surviving meant scavenging. We sent small bands down old U.S. 81 at least once a week. On occasion, they’d come back with a trophy head or two. Often they spent more ammunition then they ought. They always spent more ammunition than they brought back, but sometimes they’d return with more than a trophy head. Sometimes, they’d come back with little snatches of the old world: a comic book, titty magazine, some canned fruit cocktail or even rock-hard Twinkies. We used to imagine Twinkies would survive right past the end of the world. We were wrong. If you gave them a few years, they’d petrify.

  Before Big D and Mack went on their hunt, we’d only lost one other member of the compound. He was a weasely guy with slick hair greased back into what Dad used to call a duck tail. I don’t know where the guy—name was Fischer—found the hair gel. I don’t know that it was hair gel. He stood tall enough to duck through any of the entrances to the shacks inside the compound. His gut used to poke out like Mom looked after about five months with my baby sister in her belly. The rest of him was toothpick thin. He never said much. His eyes always searched the edges of the trees like he was waiting on something which would flap into the air and fly away.

  Fischer went out in a group of six; five came back three hours later, sweating and talking in quick, excited tones about the flesh bags gathering together for another attack. None of them noticed Fischer missing until they were safe inside.

  Small bands went out into the wild at least two or three times a week, but Big D only made the trip on rare occasions, and he always waited until after we killed a few dozen in an attack. Being a smart guy, I suppose Big D figured after a raid was just about the safest time to venture into the woods. It would take a week or more for those bastards to form up enough strength to come at us. Big D’s trips were called hunting parties because he’d come back with at least one trophy which we’d mount on a pole on the high tower.