Necrophobia #3 Page 7

“Boy, I sure talk a lot, don’t I?” she finally said.

  “That’s okay. I like to listen. It’s nice to talk to somebody finally.”

  “Yeah…well, if I ramble on, just tell me to shut the hell up. That’s what my mom used to do.”

  I didn’t comment on that…how could I? How could I reach out to her without being invasive or nosey? I respected her need for space. I kept my distance. When she wanted me closer, she’d let me know.

  “I like you, Steve. You’re different,” she said.

  I laughed. “Yeah, I’m different, all right.”

  “No, really, I’m a good judge of character. I know you’re not a shit.” She reached over and slugged me in the arm. Hard. “Still don’t mean I’ll spread my legs for you, though.”

  “Last thing on my mind.”

  The punch was hard. Either she was strong (she was) or I was in rough shape from weeks of abuse (I was). I wanted desperately to reassure her that I was old enough to be her father and that I didn’t have sex with teenagers, that she had nothing to worry about from me in that department, but it would have sounded hollow. I had the feeling that the age disparity hadn’t meant much to some of the other men that went after her.

  She was staring at the bandage on my wrist. “What happened?”

  “Cut myself.”

  I had a funny feeling she didn’t entirely believe me. She wasn’t naïve. She was a street kid and she knew bullshit when she smelled it. I had a feeling she had just caught of a whiff of something.

  “Where do you live?” I asked her, changing the subject.

  “Different places. I have a room in the house out in front and a few other safe houses. In case I get into trouble, I always have a hiding spot.” She shrugged and lit another cigarette. “It works for now. Sooner or later, I’m leaving, though.”

  “Don’t go back to Bensonhurst,” I cautioned her.

  “Bad?”

  I nodded. “Millions of zombies. ARM is there in force. Militias, survivalists, crazies everywhere.”

  “These friends of yours,” she said. “Are you sure they’re still out at that farm? You sure they’re even alive?”

  “They’ve got to be.”

  She nodded. “It’s gonna be dark soon. We’ll have to wait until morning. Then we’ll see about that farm.”

  She said she had a place for us to crash, but she wasn’t letting me go there until I did something about the nasty death smell clinging to me. There was a creek out back. She gave me a bar of soap and some clothes that had belonged to whoever had lived in the house before, a neon green tracksuit that made me look like some rapper down on his luck. While she waited by the garage, keeping an eye out, I tore off my grubby fatigues and waded into the creek. It was only about three feet deep and cold, but it felt good. I soaped my hair and body about three times before I felt human again. I dried off with a towel Robin supplied, then climbed into the tracksuit. Accessorized with combat books, I looked perfectly ridiculous.

  “You got a lot of bruises and cuts on you,” she said when I walked over to the garage. “Look like you really been through it.”

  “You were watching me?”

  “Yeah, why not? I like to look. What’s wrong with that?”

  I tried to think of a reason, but things had changed so much I couldn’t come up with one. But by then the sun was starting to go down so she led me away to our quarters for the night.

  SAFE HOUSE

  Well, realistically, it was a safe room. Robin said she saw no point in securing an entire house. Too much work and it advertised to outsiders where she was. The house was pretty much in shambles. The kitchen floor was littered with broken dishes and glasses, the furniture was broken, windows shattered. There were bulletholes in the walls. A battle had waged there some time ago. Upon entering and seeing it all, you would never have thought it was anything but a derelict house. Which was exactly the effect Robin was going for. One room that she used upstairs had a stout oak door. She unlocked it and we went in.

  It had been a bedroom once, but the bed frame was gone. There was a queen-sized mattress on the floor with some blankets and pillows. Cases of bottled water and canned food. A few handguns and ammo. The door had two locks on it and a deadbolt. The window was boarded over.

  “Lay down, get some sleep,” she said.

  “What about you?”

  She dropped into a rocking chair and put her feet up. “I’m fine.” She lit a candle that threw slight illumination. “You’re exhausted. You look like shit. Zone out for a while.”

  I suppose I could have argued with her. This was her place and her bed, and here I was kicking her out of it. The thing was, she didn’t seem to mind. I stretched out on the bed and closed my eyes. She was watching me in the darkness. I knew that much. I could feel her eyes on me. I think she was intrigued by me. I was a man and yet, I wasn’t trying to get her to spread her legs, as she liked to say, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it. She trusted her instincts that I wasn’t a drooling pervert, I figured, or I would never have been invited into her safe room. Yet, for all that, she wasn’t sure what my thing was.

  I was so tired that I dropped off right away, thinking about how I had been bitten and wondering when the infection would start kicking my ass. There was nothing so far, so I was hopeful. Also guilty, because I hadn’t told Robin about being bitten.

  I slept long and hard, without dreams. When I opened my eyes again, it seemed like scarce minutes later, but it was around dawn. The candle had burned down and dim light was filtering into the room through the cracks in the boards.

  Robin was still watching me. She lit another candle and the room brightened. She had a gun in her hand.

  “What’s that for?” I said.

  She just kept staring at me. “You were talking in your sleep.”

  “I do that sometimes.”

  “You were saying things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  She looked at me hard. Her blue eyes were like ice. “When did you get bit?”

  In a weird way, I felt relief. I wanted her to trust me and I wanted us to be friends. Keeping something like that from her didn’t sit on me real well and now, well, it was out.

  “How’d you know?”

  “You said it in your sleep. You were talking about the bite.” She shrugged. “I suspected it anyway. I mean, shit, you’ve got cuts all over you, but the only one you wrapped up was the one on your wrist. How long’s it been?”

  “Almost twenty-four hours.”

  “You feel anything?”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes you don’t at first.”

  “You want me to leave?”

  “No, I’ll keep an eye on you. Maybe you’ll be all right. It happens sometimes. When everyone at the orphanage got it, I was the only one that didn’t. Funny, though. I had the symptoms for a day or two, then they passed.”

  “I haven’t gotten anything yet.”

  We sat there in clumsy silence for a time and I felt bad because I had betrayed her. But, on the other hand, what did I really have to feel bad about? I hardly knew her and this wasn’t the sort of thing a survivor wanted to admit to. It was the kind of thing that bought you a bullet in the head.

  “You should be feeling something by now,” she said. She lit a cigarette and set the gun on the nightstand. “Too bad, though. I like you. You’re okay. You seem nice. You don’t seem like a shit. I was thinking I could go for someone like you. I was thinking, things work out, hey, maybe we could get it on or something.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You don’t like me?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I’m not good enough for you?”

  “You’re good enough for anyone. Don’t sell yourself short.”

  “Well, what is it? You gotta a kid out there somewhere, right? You had a wife…you must like girls.”

  I sighed. “Robin, I like girls fine. I like them very much. The problem is I’m in my thirties an
d you’re fifteen years old. You don’t think that’s a little weird?”

  “Who fucking cares, Steve? None of that exists anymore. All those taboos are gone. Nobody around to piss about it and no laws. So who cares?”

  “I care.”

  “You’re just a nice guy,” she said.

  “I try to be.”

  “Nice guys finish last.”

  “There’s nothing nice about me,” I told her, needing her to see the truth of things. I had left a few things out when I told her about how it was I came to be in the Catskills, so I rectified that. I gave her all the dirty, smarmy details. I told her how I had killed that guy to get his truck. I told her how I ate human meat. Maybe I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I still ate it. In fact, as much as I hated to admit it, it had been damn good—it was only a matter of selecting the proper cuts, applying the proper seasoning, curing, and salting, as Hillbilly Henry said—and the memory of it made my mouth water as much as it turned my stomach. Six months ago, I knew that if I had eaten something like that, I would probably have needed six months of therapy. Now, things were different. I had no desire to go around eating people, but what would have offended me to my core once upon a time was easily dispensed with now. There were too many other problems. Anyway, I laid it all out for her. I made sure she knew about the people I had killed in the war and the people I had killed since The Awakening.

  A nice guy? I thought to myself when I finished. Maybe you were once, but now you’re desperate and dangerous and that’s the truth of the matter. And, for all you know, a week from now you’ll be something worse.

  “Wow,” Robin said. “Talk about a fucking encounter session. When you spill, Steve, you really spill. I never knew a cannibal before.”

  “I’m not a cannibal.”

  “Well…you’re kind of an accidental cannibal.” She laughed. “That would be a good name for a cookbook: The Accidental Cannibal. You think?”

  I sighed. This girl could switch gears so fast she left me reeling. First, she had a gun on me because I might be infected with Zombpox, then she wanted to sleep with me, then she made jokes about me being a cannibal.

  “All I’m saying,” I told her, “is that I’m hardly untainted. I’ve done things I don’t like to think about and I have a feeling I’ll do worse if I have to.”

  “It’s kind of a turn-on.”

  “What?”

  “That you’ve actually eaten human. Call me a freak, but it kind of gets my blood pumping.”

  “I’m too old for you, Robin.”

  “Oh, lighten up, Steve. You’re like the rest of your generation: buttoned-up so fucking tight that you can’t breathe. Relax, just relax. I wouldn’t slap skin with a guy who was infected anyway.”

  It was the first realistic thing she’d said.

  She tossed me a water bottle and then a can of Spam. “Breakfast of champions. Eat.”

  It tasted good. Really good. Spam was one of those things back in the real world that I could take or leave. Now and then, I’d mix some up with scrambled eggs. It would never have made my top twenty convenience foods. Now, however, it was absolutely delicious. Even that weird jelly was tasty. I ate it all and used my finger to get the last few drops of salty jelly out of the can. Sodium-fortified for the day, I had one of Robin’s cigarettes and examined her guns. She had a little .25 Targa that was so small you could nearly fit it in the palm of your hand. The other handgun was .38 Colt Diamondback like the one Steve McQueen carried in Bullitt. I took the Colt.

  Robin was watching me. She looked very grim. “You still feeling okay?”

  “Yeah. But if something happens…”

  “I’ll do the right thing,” she promised, swallowing.

  .38 Colt Diamondback

  Type: .38 Special Revolver

  Kill Range: 15 yards

  Magazine: 6-round Cylinder

  RUINS

  Pretty much all we saw was devastation as we got out into the country and started seeing the farms. Several had burned flat; others were shattered as if they’d been hit by heavy artillery. I saw collapsed silos and one that was split neatly in half as if it had been chopped with an axe. Several farmhouses had fallen into themselves, but that looked like it had happened many years past. Others, though, definitely had been the site of some serious warfare. I wasn’t exactly encouraged by any of it.

  “ARM have been mixing it up with the locals for the past month,” Robin said as I drove. “Not much action in the last week, but for awhile there, it was going on day and night.”

  I took the road slow, weaving around wrecked cars and abandoned trucks. After a time, that played out and there was just that lonesome, dusty road and a lot of desertion and destruction, but definitely no signs of habitation. I was getting that tight, weak feeling in my belly. I was anxious, fearful, nervous…too many things. If ARM had come up here with serious ordinance, there was no way, I knew, that Tuck and the others could’ve held out against them. We had a few Stryker vehicles, but that was minor in comparison with what ARM had. Just looking across the burnt and blasted farmyards, I felt sick. I saw bomb craters, cars and trucks that had been reduced to mangled, blackened husks of metal. I imagined they were hit with RPGs and anti-tank weapons.

  The only thing that had kept me going was the idea of my son and the farm and being with my friends again. I had envisioned us setting up a self-sustaining little community. But the more I saw, the more dread chewed away at me. I was forced to consider the possibility that they might all be dead. The very idea opened up a hollow in me I could not fill.

  “You all right, Big Steve?” Robin asked.

  “Yeah. I’m okay.” But I wasn’t okay and she knew it. Was it my hands shaking on the wheel of the Toyota? My chain-smoking her cigarettes? The sweat that rolled down my face? I swallowed a couple times until I got it all under control. “You know, I can understand ARM raising hell in the City, but why out here in the sticks?”

  “They need bodies.”

  “Bodies?”

  She nodded. “Sure, bodies. They need them to fill out their ranks and to keep their zombies fed.”

  “You think they control them to that extent?”

  “Probably not. But, let’s face it, ARM needs new recruits. They need workers and slaves and camp girls for fucking. Maybe even camp boys. It’s like a hornet hive, Steve. Their numbers are going to keep swelling and they’re going to keep spreading out, taking more and more and more.” She stared out her window. “There’s other reasons, too.”

  “Such as?”

  She shook her head, waving me away. Then she sat forward. “Look.”

  I was looking and what I saw made everything shrink inside of me. I saw the wrecked hulk of a vehicle on the drive leading to a farm tucked away in the trees. It was nearly torn in half. My throat went dry. My palms got sweaty. I knew what it was because I had driven one in Iraq: a Stryker. We had three Strykers that we had liberated from a police garage in the Bronx, and here was the wrecked hulk of one. I pulled the Toyota up alongside it.

  Robin just watched me. She didn’t say a thing.

  The Colt in my hand, I went out there and examined the wreckage. It wasn’t new wreckage. Whatever had gotten the Stryker had been many weeks ago. It looked like she’d been hit by armor-piercing rounds. It was a tangle of metal, but the back ramp was buckled enough so that I could see inside the blackened interior. I saw no skeletons or stray bones. But it was really hard to tell. And there was no way to know for sure whether it was one of ours or not.

  I got back inside the Toyota.

  “Is this…is this where your friends were?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t be sure. Let’s go poke around.”

  I followed the winding drive until I could see the farmhouse and barn. The silo had been knocked right over. The face of the barn was peppered with bullet holes. The farmhouse itself had taken a lot of rounds, too, and from some heavier ordinance: there was a hole in one wall you could have driven a car throu
gh. Around back, there was a pickup truck perforated by heavy fire. I had never seen it before. There was a crow-picked skeleton behind the wheel. I didn’t recognize the ragged clothing it wore. I strained at the passenger door until it opened. I dug through the glove compartment, the cab stinking like old death. I found some insurance papers for a guy named Lester Samson. He had not been part of our group, unless he hooked up with them after I was gone.

  Robin stood there with a cigarette hanging from her lips, the Targa .25 in her hand. She looked tense and ready for action.

  If you find remains, if you find what’s left of Tuck and the others…and Paul, I told myself, you have to be strong. You have to accept it. You cannot fold up and feel sorry for yourself. If that happens, get Robin out of here. Get somewhere safe. Don’t loose it here.

  “C’mon,” I said, leading her over to the farmhouse.

  A crow on the roof was cawing. The air was sweet with the smell of alfalfa and timothy. Swallows winged about the eaves. Robin following at a discreet and wary distance, I stepped through the grass to the gaping hole in the side of the farmhouse. It seemed to be the easiest point of entry, as the front door was buried beneath scrap wood that had once been the second story overhang. My guts trying to crawl up the back of my throat and beads of sweat popping on my brow, I stepped in through the hole. The silence was heavy in there. I saw wreckage. A wall had collapsed into a heap of lathing and plaster debris. It gave me a clear view of the small functional kitchen beyond. As I got over near the staircase, I saw stains on the wall. The sort that would probably make a CSI tech very suspicious. The stair rail balusters were threaded with cobwebs.

  “Nobody’s been here for awhile,” Robin said.

  She was right and I knew it. If my people had been here, then they had abandoned it some time ago. My mind kept spinning around, showing me the worst possibly scenarios, of course. ARM had killed everyone and the zombies had dragged off their remains. If I dared look in the long, tangled, yellow grasses out back, I would find their well-picked bones shining in the hazy morning sunlight. If I sorted through them, I’d find a set of small bones from a boy, his skull grinning up at me and telling me how my world would never be the same again.