Thirty-One

Reggie felt his eyes glazing over. His conversation with Stacy had gone well enough so far—about as well as anyone could expect, anyway, given the circumstances. Then he mentioned his daughter, and things took a turn. Hippie nonsense wasn’t new to him, and though he really wasn’t surprised to hear it rolling out of Stacy’s mouth, he was disappointed nonetheless. She’d gone from making sense to telling him that he could sense if his daughter was still alive, if he just believed enough, to regaling him with the details of her dead husband’s communications with her from the astral plane. From there she’d moved on to the nature of the soul, specifically as related to the ever expanding population of walking corpses bringing civilization to its knees.

The souls of the walking dead were earthbound, she’d assured him, and a blow to the head not only killed the flesh but freed the soul to move into the light. She knew it, she just knew it. More importantly, she felt it.

Throughout it all, he could not tell if she actually believed what she was saying or not, or if it was all just a nonsense security blanket. He was almost happy when the dog piped up and the first two shots rang out, bringing her spiel to an abrupt end.

“Oh, God,” she said, and they were both on their feet. She stood too quickly, and her chair tipped backward, striking an end-cap display of beef jerky. She looked at him, eyes wide, opened her mouth to say something.

“Shh.” He held up a silencing hand. “Behind me.”

Outside, the old man’s dog barked and barked, without pause. Face frozen in an almost comical expression of worry, Stacy listened, and they stood that way for a few interminable seconds, before the next three shots were fired, one immediately after the other. With the third shot, silence fell. Crate’s dog no longer barked.

Shotgun ready, he took one step toward the entrance. To his right, Cardo burst into the store through the door leading into the back. Reggie wheeled in his direction. His hands were tight around the gun—his right forefinger hovered above the trigger—but did not raise it.

“What’s happening?” Cardo said, his words slurring together. His hair was a mess and the look in his eyes was one that Reggie had seen many times in Vietnam, often in the mirror and in the tired and dirt-streaked faces of those on both sides of the battle.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Reggie said. He looked at Stacy. “Stay right here.”

“But we should probably get upst—”

“Stay right here. We may need to make a fast getaway, and you won’t be able to do that from upstairs.” He looked at Cardo. “Let’s go.”

Before they reached the door, Crate slipped into the store, reaching up and muting the bell with one cupped hand. He eased shut the door, locked it, and slapped off the light. The overhead fluorescents winked out, casting the interior of the store into twilight.

“Shhh,” Crate said, pressing the forefinger of his left hand to his lips. His beard plumed around his gnarled hand, threatened to consume it. His words came in a frenzied whisper. “Shut up. Don’t make a sound.”

“What is—” Reggie began, also whispering, but the panic on the old man’s face shut him up.

Misty emerged from the back, stumbling, a stupid look on her face, her eyes perfect cartoon circles in their wrinkled nests of flesh.

“Shut up, woman,” Crate said, before she even had a chance to open her mouth.

Reggie and Cardo exchanged a glance, and then they slowly closed the distance between themselves and the old man. Crate watched their advance with baleful eyes, and when he opened his mouth to hiss a warning, Reggie touched his index finger to his own lips.

“Shh,” he said, nudging past the old man and to the door. He cracked the blinds, leaned close. To his left, a few slats down, Cardo did the same.

The fire no longer raged, but it had not burned out. Flames danced, and smoke wafted into the air. Untouched by the fire, the fat man’s leg’s were intact from the knees down—they rested upon the gravel, turned inward, the tips of his shoes pointing at one another.

Four corpses, actual dead corpses, were sprawled like fallen dolls near the place where gravel met black asphalt. Five more corpses shuffled by, moving slowing, aimlessly in the dull evening light. One of them sank to its knees beside the body of Bilbo Baggins, prodded its stomach.

“Why’d you shoot your dog?” Reggie said, his voice a hair above a whisper.

“Be quiet, you stupid idiot,” the old man snapped.

“You shot Bilbo?” Misty said, and Reggie realized for the first time just how drunk the old gal was. The beer from the cooler hadn’t done the job, and she must’ve gone up top to hit the hard stuff.

“He wouldn’t shut up.” The old man’s voice cracked. “There are so many of them. I tried to get him to, but he wouldn’t. I had to. He wouldn’t…”

“So many?” Stacy said, and Reggie could tell that she was closer now.

“…he just wouldn’t shut up.”

“Oh, shit,” Cardo said. There were now eight walking corpses shuffling within one hundred feet of where they stood. While Reggie watched, another dead body—a topless woman whose breasts had been chewed away and now hung from her chest in ragged, deflated sacks—stumbled from behind his truck. Her wounds glistened in the flickering orange glow of the burn pile, and she raised an arm to shield her eyes.

“I recognize a few of them. That woman,” Cardo said. “That’s Marietta Stolf.”

“What do you mean,” Misty asked, trying to squeeze between Reggie and Cardo. Crate growled something incoherent and pulled her away.

“They’re from town.”

Reggie pulled his finger from between the blinds and turned around, looked at Cardo.

“You did this,” the old man said, glowering, and for a second Reggie wasn’t sure who he was talking to. Crate leveled a curled finger at Reggie’s chest. “You did this.”

“What?” Reggie asked, though he knew exactly what the old man was talking about. “How could I—”

“You led them right to us, you black son of a bitch.”

That answered that. And suddenly, Reggie was staring down the barrel of the old man’s rifle. Not missing a beat, Cardo raised his gun. It wavered before the old man’s face.

Reggie pressed the barrels of his shotgun to the old man’s chest.

“We don’t need to be doing this,” Reggie said, cocking both barrels.

“Stupid son of a bitch,” the old man said, spittle bursting from his mouth and clinging in shiny beads to his beard.

“Goddammit, Crate,” Misty said, placing a hand on Crate’s shoulder. He shrugged her off, jabbed the business end of his rifle to Reggie’s throat.

“He’s right,” Cardo said, leaning forward. His hand was steady now, the barrel of his gun less than an inch from Crate’s nose. “We really shouldn’t be doing this. Got to stick together if we’re going to make it out of this.”

“Stop this,” Stacy whispered. “And be quiet, all of you.”

“They don’t know we’re in here,” Cardo said, glancing at Reggie. “I’ve watched them, remember. I know how they work. Crate?”

The old man would not take his eyes from Reggie’s face, and as he stared into their frightened depths, Reggie was certain that Cardo was wrong. Somewhere not far beneath the surface, the old man was exactly like that.

“Crate?”

“What?” he whisper-screamed, his eyes darting toward Cardo and back to Reggie—back and forth, back and forth. The barrel of Crate’s gun pressed harder into Reggie’s throat.

“I’m sorry,” Cardo said. “We didn’t know they were going to follow us here, okay? How could we?”

After several seconds of loaded silence, Cardo repeated his question: “How the hell could we?”

“Okay,” Crate said, lowering his rifle, de-cocking it. Reggie and Cardo followed suit. “Now what the hell are we going to do?”

Reggie stared at the old man, running scenarios through his head. He could get to his truck, no problem. He could get to his truck, and he could be gone, fuck these hillbilly assholes. Cardo could even come along—they could be out the door and inside the truck before the dead fucks outside even knew what was happening, and that would be it. To hell with the old folks and the hippie chick…

Only thing, he felt a little bad—a little, not a lot—for leading the dead folks to the store, and he thought maybe there was some hope for the space-case. God help him, he kind of wanted to keep her around. She was dumb, but she didn’t deserve to be abandoned here, left to die.

“Listen,” he said, adopting the voice of authority, a shut-up-and-listen-to-me tone he’d used more than once when things in Vietnam had gone to shit and everyone around him was turning into Jello. “We can survive this. I’ve survived worse. Those dead motherfuckers out there don’t have guns and hand-grenades.”

He looked outside. From where he stood, he could see more than twenty walking corpses. The dead didn’t like the fire—that much was obvious. They kept their distance, and as such hadn’t come near the porch. Most of them wandered in the middle of the road. They’d worked over Bilbo’s carcass, but had since abandoned it. The dog now stood on all fours, head low, glistening legs quivering like those of a newborn calf, tattered innards hanging from the ruin of its stomach.

“About twenty,” Reggie said, looking back at the others.

“Bullshit,” Crate said. “After I shot the first two, I walked to the edge of the parking lot. I looked down the road. There were a hell of a lot more than twenty coming. It’s why I shot my damned dog. He just would have kept on barking, the dumb bastard.” The old man shrugged. He looked defeated. “Would have led them right to us.”

He stepped away from them, toward the tables, where he sat down and fished a lighter and the twisted remnant of a joint from his breast pocket. After a few sparking flicks of the lighter, the joint flared up. Smoke plumed around the old man’s head, churned in the dim glow of the coolers, and he looked to Reggie like some prophet who’d been to the mountain one time too many. He raised his eyebrows, stared Reggie into the ground.

“Well?” He said.

“They can’t all have followed us,” Reggie said, looking to Cardo for conformation.

“He’s right,” Cardo said, looking at Crate. “How many did you see down the road?”

“Hard to tell,” the old man said, drawing deep on his crooked joint. The tip flared. Crate held his breath and closed his eyes, opened them a few seconds later. “A lot.”

“There weren’t more than five hundred in the streets when we left town,” Cardo said. “They’re not smart. I doubt even half of them followed us.”

“And I’m sure some of them went south when they reached the intersection.”

“How many bullets you have?”

“For this,” Crate said, lifting his rifle. “A few hundred.”

“A few hundred,” Reggie said, the tone of his voice suggesting that he really didn’t need to say any more. “Not counting our guns.”

“Yeah,” Crate said.

“Then here’s what we’re doing…”