Twenty-Six

Two miles out of Beistle, Reggie passed the first walking corpse he’d seen since shooting the blood-covered woman. He rolled by, and the dead man didn’t bother to watch his passage, merely shuffled along, head hung low, its bare purple feet scraping across the blacktop. Shortly after, he drove past a group of three corpses—two men and a child. One of the men was naked, the other was dressed in the oil-stained uniform of a mechanic. The child wore a sleeveless Scooby Doo shirt and nothing else.

It wasn’t until he’d passed the next cluster of walking corpses—eight of them, for God’s sake, walking along like drunks bumping into one another—that Reggie realized what was wrong, aside from the obvious: only two of them had borne any wounds at all. The rest were, quite simply, unmarked. Yes, several had worn little to no clothing, their thighs dark with voided waste, but none of them appeared to have shed a drop of blood. There was not a bite wound to be seen, let alone any sign of traumatic death.

“God,” he said, though prayer never really was an option—not when he was a child cowering in the night nor when his body was pressed to the ground and bullets chewed through the air above him. God, real or imagined, was not his concern. He’d either face God when he died or he wouldn’t. There was no point in wasting time worrying about it now.

Ahead, a throng of walking corpses encircled a car, weakly pushing and shoving at one another. All of the car’s windows had been smashed, and the dead seemed to be searching it. Several of these dead bodies were slick with blood, though not from any visible wounds. Those corpses not interested in the car fought over a scattered skeleton. One of them brandished a long pink leg bone like a club.

A sprawl of low buildings spread before a horizon of trees, Beistle sat in a mostly flat valley between two large hill ranges. A single double lane road bisected the town, the road that would lead Reggie to the Interstate and, he hoped, to his daughter, and it was alive with the walking dead.

“God,” he said again, slowing down. He tried a quick head count and stopped at forty-three. They were everywhere, and like the ones he’d met on the outskirts of town, they were mostly unscathed. No doubt, with the order of things fallen into ruin, there were hundreds, possibly thousands of people across the country dropping dead from heart attacks, but a whole damned town?

He took it slow, allowing the truck to coast along at just around fifteen miles per hour. To his right, several dead bodies—real ones, not the walking variety—had been laid out and covered in sheets and towels. Handmade signs lay upon or beside some of the corpses. This remnant of an ordered response to the situation told the story of folks who’d had their shit together, not all that long ago. Now they were dead, all of them, dead and walking.

Was it like this everywhere? Could whatever was causing the dead to come back now be causing the living to simply drop over? Fear surged through him, and a new thought, persuasive and reasonable: suicide.

“No,” he said, turning on the radio. Two men debated something Nixon had said earlier that day, something having to do with Soviet troops massing near—

He turned off the radio. Whatever had happened here had been isolated, probably accidental. Possibly intentional. Someone had gassed the town of Beistle, California.

As he rolled along, another detail emerged: several bodies lay here and there, scattered—in the street, on the sidewalk, between abandoned cars in parking lots. Each of the bodies seemed to have been shot through the head and lay in a ragdoll sprawl, arms and legs bent this way and that. Someone hadn’t gone out without a fight.

“No way, man,” Reggie said, bringing the truck to a halt before BEISTLE TV AND APPLIANCE. “No fucking way.”

A crowd of twenty or so corpses had gathered before the large window in which several color televisions, as well as a few small black and white models, were displayed. The window had been smashed, and one of the televisions lay on its side in the road, but the power was still on and each of the television screens depicted the same thing: the grim face of Walter Cronkite, who was droning on about something dire.

The gathered dead swayed, but with their backs to Reggie they could almost have passed for living men and women. He rolled down his window and listened.

“…ports that the phenomenon is not taking place in Australia and New Zealand are, in fact, no true,” Cronkite said, continuing to speak over footage that depicted walking corpses on the streets of Sydney.

“Hey,” Reggie yelled to them. He cupped a hand behind his ear. “Can you turn up the volume?”

Some of the tv-watchers drifted over to him, joined the others surrounding the truck, arms raised, hands clutching. Hands splayed toward him in a mosaic of decay—gray, or bluish and purple and bruised, or livid and bloated, or stained with blood. Some were missing fingers. Wedding rings tinked against the windshield. The faces of the dead were rigid and waxy. Reggie tried to ignore them.

It was harder to ignore the smell, meat just starting to turn. And gas. The dead were quiet, very quiet in a bad way, but the sounds of escaping gas were all over. Reggie was surrounded by belching and farting corpses who wanted to eat him. If it wasn’t so fucking horrible, it would be funny.

Cronkite was talking about the Middle East. All order was gone. Tel Aviv had gone black less than two hours ago, and there were several unconfirmed reports of a massive explosion of some sort and of a mushroom cloud rising above the Gaza Strip.

“Dammit,” he said.

One of the corpses jostled the passenger door handle, and the truck rocked. It was time to move on. Reggie gave Cronkite and his audience one last look and began to roll up his window.

“Hey,” someone yelled. “Hey!”

Reggie rolled down the window and leaned out, looking around. Gray hands clutched the air beneath his face, just out of reach. Flies buzzed. A few of the dead people had makeshift weapons—sticks and bottles and rocks—which they hammered against the truck. A nearby corpse ripped a long wet fart. They were really pressing in now. Even the television generation was catching on—only five of them remained glued to the tubes.

“You in the truck,” the voice said, and Reggie saw the form of a man several buildings back standing upon a roof, arms in the air, his hands moving in blurred arcs above his head. “Hey!”

“Hey yourself,” Reggie yelled.

“I need help, God,” the man yelled. He sounded frantic. “Don’t leave.”

“Dammit,” Reggie said, looking forward, past the gathering sea of corpses and down the road, his road. The guy on the roof was behind him, and he was moving forward.

“Come on, please. I’m gonna die up here,” the man yelled. “I don’t want to die up here!”

Reggie rolled up the window and threw he truck into gear, inching it forward through the crowd. The man on the roof screamed and cursed. Reggie turned up the radio.

He wanted to step on the gas, to plow right through the dead—just get the hell out of here as quickly as possible—but he couldn’t. Running one or two bodies down at full speed might not be a problem, but plowing through scores of them? It could be dangerous. He’d lose control of the vehicle or wind up with one of them in his lap.

The dead were not entirely stupid. They seemed to get the idea. This large thing was moving toward them, and getting out of the way was probably the best course of action. They parted, slowly, and he allowed his foot to grow a little heavier on the gas.

The guy on the roof had sounded just like Taylor Lincoln. Not his voice, but the desperation in his voice—Reggie had heard it before.

Lincoln was an ox of a black man that Reggie had known in ‘Nam. They hadn’t been friends, not really, but Reggie had liked him well enough. Lincoln was meaner than he needed to be, and he enjoyed combat more than any man ever should, and he had died screaming and crying like a little girl. Reggie hadn’t seen it happen, but he had heard it. Crouched behind a tree and waiting for a Viet Cong bullet to drill through his thoughts, Reggie had listened as Lincoln cried out—I been shot, God, I been shot.

A spray of gunfire had turned his thick right thigh into pulp, and he’d sat alone against the side of a jeep for probably forty minutes. Bullets zipped by, and no one could get to him.

“I’m dying,” he’d screamed. “God, I’m dying. I don’t want to fucking die.”

“Shit,” Reggie said, and brought the truck to a halt, threw it into reverse. The path he’d opened had begun to close. Bodies fell. The truck rocked. Meat and bone scraped across the undercarriage. He pulled his eyes away from the side-view mirror and looked through the windshield in time to see the first of the fallen bodies come into view. Some of them lay motionless, skulls crushed. Others writhed, their mouths and eyes wide, their fingers clutching the air, guts spreading between their broken legs.

He cut an uneven and bloody path two blocks long, stopping when the building on which the man stood was to his left. The sign over the tattered green awning read: AUBREY’S FURNITURE. Reggie rolled down the window and looked up at the man, who stood slump-shouldered and slack-jawed. He looked dead.

“How do you want to do this?” Reggie said. A fat dead man carrying a length of pipe shuffled toward the truck. Reggie pulled his Colt and blew away the right half of the thing’s head. The pipe clattered to the ground, and the fat man fell, knocking down three stumbling corpses in the process.

“Jesus, man,” said the guy on the roof. “I thought you were leaving. I thought—”

“How you wanna do this, man?”

“Yeah,” the man said, looking left and right, his hands on his knees. “If you can pull close enough, I can jump down onto the top of the truck.”

“If you fall off and break your leg, I’m not getting out to help you. I’ll shoot you between the eyes and leave.”

“I understand.”

“Okay.”

Reggie rolled up the window, threw the truck into reverse once more, and backed up another twenty or so feet before moving forward and driving onto the sidewalk. Moving slowly, he took out two parking meters and crushed the pipe framework supporting the green awning, which crashed to the ground. To Reggie’s left, seen through the large windows fronting the store, dead bodies moved within the dim interior of Aubrey’s Furniture. One of them stood before a dresser and pawed at its reflection in a large, oval mirror. A dead child sat before a ceramic statue of a leopard, tracing its fingers along the indented spots. A naked woman drifted between plush chairs and couches, its discolored hands modestly covering its breasts.

“Okay,” the man shouted. Reggie stepped on the brakes. A second later, the man landed atop Reggie’s truck, buckling the ceiling above his head with a hollow metallic thump.

Reggie leaned over and rolled down the passenger side window. Two scuffed dress-shoe-clad feet fell into view, and the man on the roof, a skinny white man with a thin face and close-cropped blond hair, snaked through the window and into the passenger seat, panting. He wore a sleeveless white shirt, black slacks, and a policeman’s belt, its holster empty. Reggie reached into the back, grabbed a can of Coke, and handed it to the man, who took it from Reggie and stared at it as if it were some strange thing he’d never seen until now.

“You’re supposed to drink it,” Reggie said.

The man looked up, dazed. He shook his head. “Thanks. Thank you. I thought I was going to die up there.”

“You probably were,” Reggie said. Several dead hands came into view, just behind the man. “You wanna roll up the window?”

“Huh?” The man asked, following Reggie’s line of sight. “Oh, shit.” He rolled up the window, looked at Reggie, then opened his Coke and downed it in a series of noisy gulps. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he let loose a thunderous belch.

“You sound like our friends out there,” Reggie said.

“Haha, well,” he cleared his throat. “I excuse myself.”

“Good enough,” Reggie said, easing his foot off the brake and inching the truck back onto the road. By now, the path he’d cut had healed, and the dead stood shoulder to shoulder twenty deep around the truck.

“We going?” The man asked, nervous.

“Yeah,” Reggie said, strangling the steering wheel, “Trying to figure this shit. The last thing we need is to break down out here.”

“Yeah,” the man said, looking at the empty Coke can in his hand. He rolled the window down, just enough to accommodate the can, which he crushed and tossed out.

“There’s food in the back,” Reggie said, taking his time. As before, the dead seemed to figure out what was happening. Their reaction time was slow, not non-existent.

“Okay, thanks, maybe in a bit,” the man said, leaning forward, watching the dead faces inch by.

“You from here?”

“Yeah,” the man said.

“So you know them?”

“Not by name, not all of them, but yeah. That one there,” the man tapped the glass, and Reggie couldn’t tell which of the corpses he was indicating. “That’s Hank Prescott. Over there, the one in red, that’s Maria Jameson. God, she was a nice lady. I shot as many of them as I could, the ones I could recognize.”

“I saw that,” Reggie said.

“I got down to one bullet, and I sat up there with the gun to my head, playing with the trigger. Then I saw a kid, I can’t even remember his name, but he’s this damned cute kid I see around town sometimes, walking with his mom. I saw him down there, looking lost. Both of his arms were gone. I missed.” He sat back, closed his eyes.

Reggie grabbed the bottle of Jack and placed it on the man’s lap. “You got a name?”

“Cardo,” the man said, laughing. “Short for Ricardo.”

“You don’t look like a Ricardo,” Reggie said.

“I know,” Cardo said. “It’s stupid. My name is Scott Ardo, but the kids at school used to call me Cardo Ricardo, like there was anything funny about it. So I became Ricardo for a little while, and then just Cardo. You know how it is.”

“I guess so,” Reggie said. “What did you do here?”

“Cop,” Cardo said, opening the Jack and going bottoms up. “Whoo. Thanks.”

“No problem,” he said, stepping on the gas a little harder. A dead man carrying what appeared to be a chair leg had no interest in getting out of the way, so Reggie gunned it, slowing down only once the dead man had vanished beneath the truck. “Oh, come on—get the fuck out of the way.”

Suddenly impatient and needing to be as far away as possible from this dead town, Reggie pulled on the horn, long and hard. Eyes wide, heads jerking left and right, hands swatting at the air, the dead peeled away from the truck.

“That’s not a good idea,” Cardo said.

“It’s working,” Reggie said, yanking out another long, deep bray.

“Sure it is,” Cardo said, pointing past the corpses backing away from the truck. “See?”

Along the street, as far as Reggie could see, dead bodies streamed out of doorways and from within alleys.

“Aw, shit,” Reggie said, stepping on the gas, getting it up to ten miles per hour, fifteen, and now twenty. The truck rocked and bounced, and the dead vanished beneath it. His foot grew heavier on the gas, and soon the dead were slamming into his grille.

They broke free of the thickest cluster and Reggie moved the wheel to the left and the right, weaving between smaller groups. It wasn’t easy, and he drove right over several of them, but Beistle and its teeming population of dead people fell behind them. Looking in his side-view mirror, Reggie gave his horn one final, long pull.

 

 

 

The road outside of Beistle was deserted. No corpses. No survivors. No sign that anything was going on anywhere, save the occasional abandoned car. Cardo crawled into the back and made himself a sandwich with the last of an opened can of SPAM.

“You want half?” he asked, returning to his seat.

“It’s yours,” Reggie said. “Needs to be eaten up anyway.”

Cardo froze in mid bite, drew the sandwich away from his mouth. “How old is it?”

“I don’t know,” Reggie said. “It’s SPAM. It’ll keep.”

“It smells fine.”

“Ha!” Reggie said, slowing down as they passed another abandoned car, looking for any signs of supplies left behind. There was nothing. He looked at Cardo evenly. “Don’t worry. If you get food poisoning, I’ll shoot you. Won’t have to worry about walking around afterward.”

“Oh,” Cardo said. “Great.” He smelled the sandwich again and took a bite. “Mm.”

“Reggie Turner,” Reggie said, extending his right hand toward Cardo, who wiped his hand on his pants before shaking Reggie’s.

“Pleased to meet you, Reggie,” Cardo said. “You—I can’t thank you enough.”

“Stop with the shit,” Reggie said. “What else was I supposed to do, leave you up there?”

“You wouldn’t have been the only one.”

“Huh.”

“I was asleep, too,” Cardo said, taking another bite of his sandwich. When he’d swallowed most of it, he continued. “The sound of the engine woke me, and when I looked up, I heard you yelling at them to turn up the volume. Thought I was dreaming. Damn, man.”

“I don’t wanna hear any more, okay?” Reggie said. “Or I’m gonna throw your ass out of this truck right now.”

Cardo smiled and took another bite of his sandwich.

 

 

 

“What happened back there?” Reggie asked, inspecting the exterior of his vehicle. Bloody little bits of meat were speckled like bugs across the front of the truck, and the grille looked as if someone had taken to it with a mallet. Both of the headlights were smashed. “How’d everyone die?”

“A gas of some kind,” Cardo said, walking along behind Reggie. “Things were crazy. There was a riot at the grocery store. I barely got out of there, but other than that things were pretty much under control.”

“I saw the bodies, lined up under sheets.” Reggie said, dropping to his knees and inspecting the undercarriage. There were bits of meat caked atop dirt and black oil but no damage he could see.

“Yeah,” Cardo said, helping Reggie to his feet. “The people were doing it, man. They were pulling together and making it happen. After the riot, I went home and passed out in front of the television. The sound of the helicopter woke me.”

“Good thing you’re a light sleeper,” Reggie said, circling his truck. It would need diesel soon, and driving at night would be a problem until he could fix the headlights, but it was fine. “What kind of helicopter?”

“I don’t know,” Cardo said. “Army, maybe.”

“What color was it?”

“I couldn’t tell. It was dark, and as soon as I saw the gas cloud, I ran.”

“Let’s go,” Reggie said, nodding toward the dead man emerging from the forest behind the truck.

He climbed into his truck and closed the door. The passenger door opened and Cardo got in. He shut the door, frowning into the side-view mirror. The truck jerked forward, and they were off.

“You familiar with this route?” Reggie asked.

“Yeah,” Cardo said. “Harlow is this way, about twenty-five miles.”

“Big town?”

“Barely a town,” Cardo said. “I’ll bet they’re doing just fine there.”

“Huh,” Reggie said. “Anyway. You were saying?”

“Yeah,” Cardo said, nodding. “I ran. People were running and screaming, getting into their cars and barrel-assing out of town. My car was wrecked in the riot, so I just had my feet. I tried to flag down a few cars, but they just kept going. A lot of people came out of their houses and just watched the shit drift down.” He shook his head.

They rounded a sharp curve and passed the site of a collision between a pick-up truck and a large sedan. Three dead people shuffled along the road. Reggie weaved to the right, but the shoulder was too narrow, and he only managed to miss two of them. The third slammed into the grille and seemed for a time to be stuck there. Black blood and strands of brain fanned out across the windshields.

“Son of a—” Reggie said, and the dead thing dislodged, rattled beneath the truck, and was gone.

“Can’t take too much more of that,” Cardo said.

“No,” Reggie said, grabbed the Jack from Cardo’s lap. He took a swig and passed it back to Cardo. “Keep going.”

“I had an idea what I was seeing,” he said. “So I ran for the department store. The windows and doors had already been smashed out. They sell these thick yellow haz-mat suits, you know those?”

“Yeah,” Reggie said.

“I put one of those on, got a fancy respirator, the kind with replaceable filters, and put some swimming goggles on. By then the cloud was already in the street, but the wind was tearing it up pretty good. I found the back office, turned off the AC, and hunkered down all night.

“I have no idea if the mask and all the other shit protected me or not, or if the wind just carried away all of the gas, but I made it,” Cardo said, knocking back a little more whisky. They were going to run out, at this rate. That was probably a good thing.

“I walked out of the store a few hours later, just before dawn, and they were everywhere. I ran,” Cardo said, shrugging. “What else could I do? I ran into an alley, not really thinking. I saw the ladder and crawled up, and, well, that’s it.”

“How long ago?”

“Day before yesterday. You care if I put on the radio?”

“No.”

“Thanks,” Cardo said.

The news was bad. At least three sources had confirmed that a nuclear warhead had been detonated in the air above Israel, and someone pointed out that the view outside of the window behind Nixon in his most recent Oval Office address to the nation looked suspiciously artificial. Reggie weathered a wave of dizziness, and Cardo grew pale. His hands shaking, he lowered the volume.

“It’s over,” he said, shaking his head and taking a long pull from the bottle.

“Looks like it,” Reggie said. “Ease up on that, okay?”

“Okay, sorry.” Cardo said, capping the bottle and tossing it into the back.

“Nothing to be sorry about. Where we going?”

“That way,” Cardo said, pointing forward.

They drove in silence. Their road, for now, was empty.