Double Dead (28 page)

Cecelia knelt down in front of her. Desperate for something, all of a sudden.

“The word
whore
, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. Way back when, the Romans or Greeks or whoever, they didn’t mean that word in a bad way like we do now. It meant something different. Whore meant to desire, or be desired. There’s nothing wrong with that. Is there?”

Kayla paled. “You used to be a damn hooker, didn’t you?”

“What?” Cecelia said, suddenly incredulous. But she couldn’t keep it up. “We preferred to be called escorts.”

“Oh, god, Cecelia!” Kayla said, suddenly grossed-out. She stood up from the bed and started pacing by the window, squinting in the bright daylight. “That is nasty. And you and my Dad? That’s gross. Was he paying you? Is that how you saw this whole thing? As a business transaction? Just… ew.”

“It’s not gross,” Cecelia said. “It’s the way men and women are. Men do nice things for women so they can sleep with them. It’s just biology. Being an escort just cuts out the middle-man. A guy doesn’t need to buy me drinks or a meal. He just… has to buy me.”

“That is cynical as… well, that’s cynical as
hell
, Cecelia.” Kayla wasn’t used to using curse words like that, but it felt right.

“That’s why Danny is being nice to you.”

Kayla’s jaw dropped. What was worse was that Cecelia wasn’t saying it out of malice—when she was being mean, her face twisted up like a fox who just caught a whiff of some possum shit or something. This wasn’t malice. She was being sincere.

“You shut up about Danny,” Kayla said. “Danny’s just a nice boy, is all. He doesn’t have that kind of poison in his head. We haven’t even kissed yet! And I don’t know if we’re gonna. I don’t know if it’s like that. He probably doesn’t even feel that way. I don’t know if
I
feel that way. I just know…” Her words drifted off. “I just know that I hope he’s okay.”

“I hope Gil’s okay.”

Kayla plopped back down on the bed. “I’m tired. I need a cigarette.”

“Me too.”

Locusts sang.

Somewhere above, two crows circled, complaining to one another.

A rattler crawled across the hot broken macadam, accompanied by serpents made of dust, creeping along as the wind blew.

And then, the locusts quieted. The crows shut up and took wing away. The rattler hurried off, found somewhere else to be.

Loco had left the I-40 gate last night in the Humvee, taking Dope Fiend and Jester with him. That left Big Money Jigalo—AKA Pete Sorvin—as the one guard at this gate, which wasn’t that big of a deal. They didn’t see humans all that often, and mostly the zombies stayed away because there wasn’t much out here for them. Thuglow’s crew had cleared out Erick and all the surrounding towns.

Still. Pete—er, ‘Big Money’—liked having his rifle handy. A Ruger Mini-14 with a long-looking Leupold scope on it and chambered for .223 Remington. Any zombies thought of hiking it up the highway, they’d find their skulls evacuated by a bumblebee made of hot lead.

Killing zombies was one of the only things that gave Pete much happiness anymore. Everything else was gone. His wife. His boy. Swept away by the zombie horde. Turned into… well, God didn’t even know. Only the Devil had a clue.

Pete didn’t much like the other survivors here. Bunch of lunatics, they were. Taking their dopey names. Dressing like clowns and like the jokers in a deck of cards. All because of, what? Some white rap group the King liked? They gave everybody dumb names—‘Skull Hustla.’ ‘Pimp Killa Z.’ And him, ‘Big Money Jigalo.’ He didn’t have any money. He damn sure wasn’t a jigalo. The name didn’t make any sense. It was like they picked it out of a hat.

In this way, the apocalypse was a lot crazier than Pete imagined it would be.

But that was okay. He had his rifle.

He leaned up against the top of the fence, laying atop an old beater Oldsmobile, and pressed his eye against the scope.

Heat vapors rose up off the highway like the sizzle off a hot pan. Way those vapors worked was, they distorted things a good bit, and sometimes in there you’d think you saw a zombie when really it wasn’t anything at all.

So when he saw the four dark shapes come up at the horizon’s edge, heading down the highway, at first he thought,
this can’t be real
. They didn’t look right. Taller than they should’ve been, maybe. Longer arms, too. And necks he could see. He caught a flash of pink fabric.

But they kept coming. They weren’t a mirage.

And behind them, Hell’s own army followed.

They rose up from the horizon’s edge like the first dark wave of a coming tide, a black tide, a
dead
tide—zombies. And not just a handful of them, either, but dozens. Maybe hundreds. They just kept coming, following behind the four like an ineluctable force. Pete felt his hands shaking. Remembered seeing his Mary—with their son Owen in her arms—swept beneath a crowd of zombies a fraction of this size. He lined up a shot. Cranked the magnification.

The four in the front weren’t like the others at all.

Their mouths, bigger. Filled with tiny teeth. Hands curled with claws. He let one of their wretched faces fill the scope.

Thumbed off the safety.

Took a deep breath.

Steady
.

Just before he pulled the trigger, he was sure the thing looked right at him. The monster hit the ground just in time for the bullet to sail over its head, clipping one of the zombies in the back in the neck. A jet of black blood arced up and that zombie dropped.

“Shit!” he said, moving the rifle to rediscover his target in the scope. The monster was nowhere to be found. Neither were the other three.

He pulled his gaze away from the rifle, and with his bare gaze he could see them: they were loping like animals, like wolves launched straight out of Satan’s womb, and they were headed toward the fence.

It all happened so fast.

The one draped in scraps of pink launched herself up over the fence like it wasn’t but a knee-high hurdle. Pete stood, staggered backward, tried to get off a shot—but this wasn’t a shotgun and that wasn’t a clay pigeon.

She struck him in the chest. It felt like he was hit by a bull. Launched him off the Oldsmobile and down to the ground, to the dust.

He tried to get his rifle between them, either to shoot her or to shoot himself, but she tossed it away. Then she buried her face in the crook of his neck and began to chew. Everything felt wet, hot, cold, electric.

The other three hit the gate like sharks headbutting a diver cage.

As Pete’s life drained away, he saw the front fence denting, bowing, crashing inwards. The cars behind it jumped the tracks as the hunters struck them again and again, pushing them back with the groan of metal.

The way was open.

Hell’s army was here. The 66 States were breached.

Pete saw blood in darkness.

Gil stood in the motel room bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror. He looked about as good as a shovel full of road-kill. His left eye was shut behind two swollen lumps competing for attention. Half his face looked like a roadmap of broken capillaries. In his palm he held two bloody teeth.

He upended them into the sink with a clatter.

He hadn’t felt more alive in a long time.

Seemed strange, really. Even he couldn’t quite justify it. All things considered, they were pretty well screwed. Held captive by a kingdom full of mad-men in greasepaint. His daughter on the path to prostitution. His other friends—they were that, he reminded himself—held against the wall for their own strange fates. He
had
been resigned to the motor pool, which sounded fairly benign, but apparently attacking that dope-smoking dickweed who called himself ‘King’ was frowned upon, and about an hour ago they’d come in to tell him that his sentence was set: they’d drag him out into the firing range, stick a grenade in his mouth, and a bunch of stoned clown-faced fuck-wits would take shots at him until one of them managed to blow him to pieces like a scarecrow with dynamite up its ass.

So, no, things weren’t looking so hot.

And yet: he felt good.

Maybe it was the beating. Pain had a way of clarifying things. Probably a brain-thing. Adrenalin. Dopamine. Endorphins. Something. He’d been in a fight before. Hell, he’d been in dozens of fights. As a younger man—and, frankly, sometimes as an older one—he had quite a temper. Anybody said something to him he didn’t like, he’d make sure to give them a good whipping. Sometimes he took the whipping instead, but way he figured it, he’d won more than he lost.

Really, though, it came back to something Leelee said to him. As they were being dragged into the Friendship Motel, as Kayla and Cecelia were thrown into their room and Leelee was being moved into hers, she bent over and said something to him, something that stuck with him.

“Your daughter is special,” she said. “She is protected. Fight for her and she will be free.”

Fight for her and she will be free
.

“Okay,” Gil said now, to his busted jack-o-lantern face in the mirror.

He knew he couldn’t go out the window: they’d been smart enough to bolt wrought iron bars (really, old garden gates) against the frames.

They weren’t
that
smart, though. They’d left the trappings of the motel in place. Like, say, the bedside lamp. It didn’t work—the motel didn’t have power, not like Thuglow’s hangar did. But the lamp didn’t need to work.

He grabbed it. Pulled the cord taut.

He cleared his throat, sauntered over to the motel room door, then pounded on it and yelled out in his best tortured voice:

“Oh shit.
Oh shit
. I think something’s broken inside me! I’m hemorrhaging. Help!
Help
.”

He stood to the side of the door. Out there, he knew, stood two guards: his favorite buddies, Dope Fiend and Jester.

The older fellow, Jester, was first through the door. He caught the lamp right under his chin and he went down like a stack of teacups. Dope Fiend—the human wall—was close behind but slow to react. Probably, Gil figured, because he was dumb as a wrench.

With the cord pulled taut, Gil stepped in behind the muscle-bound freak and pulled against his throat.

It didn’t go as planned.

Dope Fiend started whirling around, carrying Gil with him—suddenly Kayla’s father felt like he was stuck on the back of a mechanical bull, smashed into the door, into a closet, into a bedside table.

Gil couldn’t hold on. He hit the ground hard on his butt. He reached for Jester’s fallen rifle, but Dope Fiend was already firing his own—the bullets stitched across the floor and juggled the other machine gun out of Gil’s reach.

He saw no choice: as the room filled with machine-gun fire, Gil bolted out of the room, catching a face full of splinters as bullets chewed through the doorframe.

They tried to play nice.

They sent an emissary to talk diplomacy, trade, to make a
deal
. That emissary—Tom Fichter—came back after having been beaten with phonebooks. They branded a symbol in the meat of his ass: a three-pointed crown.

Fucking animals. Or clowns.

It was time to do something about it. Benjamin Brickert stared out at one of the northern gates of Thuglow’s territory. The Route 54 entrance, coming down out of Goodwell, Oklahoma, with the gate preceding Texhoma. It was the easiest way in—come down out of their own territory in Kansas and hit them from the top. No need to come in from the side. Here, he figured Thuglow would’ve been better protected, figuring that Brickert and his people would stage an attack one day—but, nope, not really. Not much defense at all, and easy enough to remove. Thuglow wasn’t any kind of strategist. Just an idiot king idling time.

His ears were ringing from the shot. He snapped his fingers, told Shonda to hand him the glasses. Benjamin pressed the binoculars to his face, saw in the distance the dead man hanging half-out of a repurposed lifeguard station. Something red dripped from his skull. A crow had already alighted on his chin, was starting to pick at the meat.

Brickert gave the thumbs-up to his sharpshooter: Carlos Gonzalez. Carlos twiddled a toothpick with his tongue and winked. Then he hopped off the top of the moving truck, the Remington 700 slung over his shoulder.

“Chain her up,” Brickert whooped, turning his finger in a circle, telling everyone to
move, move, move
. At his back waited a small invasion force: pick-up trucks with DIY-mounted armament, armor-plated Cadillacs, a few moving trucks (to reap any loose bounty), and a shitload of the Sons of Man. Capable men. Men who knew what it was to shoot straight, take a life, and thank God for the privilege of being alive.

These were hard times. But they were good times, too.

The men moved heavy gauge chains, looped them around the gate leading into Thuglow’s bullshit kingdom. Shonda—Brickert’s own second-in-command, a tough woman built like a mailbox filled with bricks—went over and supervised. Chains were connected to the back of one of the pick-ups: the diesel (all the vehicles were diesel, as they had to be) gunned it, kicking up a dragon’s plume of dust.