Echoes of Darkness (3 page)

“Well
 . . . 
what do you want me to shoot?”

“How’s about me?”

The boy stared.

“C’mon, boy. You’ve probably thought of doing it already. Now’s your chance.” He spread his arms wide, making a target of himself. “Go on. Plug me.”

All those slaps and cuffs from the old man ran through the boy’s head. The indignity of being strip-searched. His near suffocation. The gun came up. Rather than pointing toward the old man, however, the barrel aimed just off to the side.

“I’m over here, boy.”

“I know.”

“Then where the hell you pointing that thing?”

The boy was silent a moment. “My father taught me to never point a gun at a person.”

“In case it goes off accidental-like?”

The boy nodded.

“I take it you ain’t going to shoot me, then.”

The gun lowered.

“Fine. I’m actually pretty good with that. How about that, then?” He waved a hand toward a tree, stepping aside to be far from the line of fire. “Think you can hit that?”

The boy gazed at the tree, a cottonwood only ten feet away.
“Sure.”

“Show me.”

The boy adopted the shooting stance his father had taught him, sighted down the barrel, thumbed the hammer back, sighted again, breathed, and pulled the trigger.

Click.

The gun wasn’t loaded.

“Jeee
zus
! You took
that
long to pull the trigger at a damn
tree
? What if that tree was coming at you, looking to chow down on some dumb kid? What if it wasn’t alone? Jeee
zus
!”

The old man waved a hand, disgusted, then tossed the spare’s gun belt and holster to the ground at the boy’s feet.

“Put that on and let’s get going.”

The belt buckled on easily enough, though the gun felt odd and heavy on the boy’s hip.

“Do I get any bullets?”

“Bullets?
Pfft
.”

The lipless mouth emitted a dry, sarcastic sound, then twisted into something approaching a smile. “When I think it might not be a waste of time, then, maybe, you’ll load that thing. Now pack up and let’s get to walking.”

In the days that followed they practiced as they walked. The old man would hiss “Now!” from a few yards away, then move toward the boy with a measured pace. The latter would try to stop whatever woolgathering he’d been doing and get that gun out to dry-fire at the leathery scarecrow. It took half a day, and more than two dozen tries, before the gun even cleared the holster ahead of the old man’s stinging slap.

“You’re dead,” he’d whisper into the boy’s reddened face, then turn and continue on his way as if nothing had happened.

The first time the boy managed to get the revolver up and fire, he felt a second’s elation before the hard palm cracked across his cheek anyway, joy becoming frustration that made him want to scream.

“I got you,” he said to the old man’s retreating back, “before you
got me—
you had no call to hit me! That wasn’t fair.”

The old man turned, tapping his stomach.

“You shot me
here
. That won’t stop a zombie—hell, that won’t even slow him down.”

He walked toward the boy, one finger touching the brim of his hat.

“The body don’t matter to these things, boy. It’s the brain. Destroy the brain, destroy the—”

He stopped as the gun snapped up, nearly touching the end of his nose, steady in the boy’s hand. His mouth twitched.

“That’s good, but—”

He whipped up a hand to slap the boy’s red, swollen cheek, but checked the swing at the sharp click of the revolver dry-firing in his face. His mouth twitched again.

“Good. I—”

Click-click-click—

The boy stared into his dark eyes, pulling the trigger again and again, making sure the old man heard the hammer fall every time. He stopped when he realized he’d fired eight imaginary shots from a six-shooter, and lowered the gun.

They stood, silence spinning out between them for what felt like a long time. Then that hard slash of a mouth quirked at the corners.

“Don’t spray lead like that unless you can pull fresh ammo out of your ass. I know I can’t. We only have what we carry.”

He spun on his heel.

“Let’s move.”

On the fourth morning, the boy realized they were traveling in a curve. Each day they walked in a more or less straight line, following the occasional road crossing their path awhile if it was going in the right direction, but striking out cross-country again as soon as it turned the wrong way. In the morning, though, they set out in a different direction than they’d traveled the previous day: they’d been moving east, then turned northeast, then north, and were now heading almost due west. When he asked about it, all the old man would say was “Got somethin’ to do,” and would speak no more on the subject.

The only sign of man they saw in those four days, other than the roads, was a single car sitting alone in the middle of an eight-lane highway. The old man said he’d seen it before, but allowed the boy to make his own quick search while he swallowed a pill or two. The search turned up a Colorado Rockies cap the boy showed off triumphantly before putting it on to hopefully ameliorate the truly epic sunburn he was developing.

The house came into view in the middle of the sixth day.

They had passed another house on the fifth day, but it had been a blackened, burned-out shell. The boy had wondered about it aloud, but the old man refused to say a word. There was an extra tightness about his eyes and mouth, however, suggesting there was a story there he wasn’t telling.

The house on the sixth day, though, was a
house
. White-painted walls pushing a whole-looking roof toward the unending sky; a dirt road running past the front door. They took turns gazing through the sight on the old man’s rifle when the structure was more than a mile away.

“That’s great!” said the boy, after one long look. “Let’s go!”

He handed back the rifle as he started forward, but the old man reached past the gun to grip his forearm.

“Hold up. Ain’t that easy.”

He tore up a fistful of grass, letting the dry blades trickle from his fingers, watching them drift on the breeze. Without a word he set off on a diagonal to the house. The boy followed, mystified. The old man did the trick with the grass twice more, keeping an eye on the house as he moved in a wide arc. They crept along, staying low, until the house was barely a half mile away. Then the old man leaned right in to the boy’s ear.

“I went through there ’bout a month ago, and t’wern’t nobody there.”

The raspy whisper was barely audible, despite his terrible breath tickling the boy’s skin.

“Place was clean as a whistle. Looked like the folks might’a packed up and gotten out when things started to go bad, right after the rising. Probably went to the city, poor bastards. Point is, place was empty thirty days or so ago.”

The boy shrugged.

“So?”

“Sniff. Sniff deep.”

The boy inhaled through his nose, pulling the air down into his lungs. For the most part everything was clean and crisp. The wind gusted however, a slight breeze blowing toward them from the house, and the clean air was suddenly tinged with something that made the boy wince, flashes of a barrel and his parents’ screams running through his mind.

Rot.

Decomposition.

Them.

“Last month, that place was clean. Now there’s something dead in there. It may be lying-down-forever dead, but we don’t know. You go running in there, all excited to sleep in a real bed or sit in a chair or something, and there’s the wrong
kind
of dead in there, you just might be joining ’em. This ain’t the world I was born into, boy. You neither. In
this
world you don’t go running into
any
unknown situation. Not unless you’re bound and determined to give up that whole living and breathing part of walking around. Y’unnerstand?”

The boy nodded, gulping, hot saliva filling his mouth at the thought of what he might have just walked into.

“We go about this careful-like. On guard, so to speak. And the good thing is, if there
are
zombies in there, the breeze carries our noise away from them just as hard as it blows their stink toward us.”

He slipped the boy’s revolver from its holster, quietly loading it with cartridges. He handed it back, gestured for it to be re-holstered, then handed over his machete.

“Only use the gun if you have to. Too much noise and not enough bullets.”

Later on the boy was fuzzy on the details of the attack. He remembered the stink of the place, the fetid taste of rot hanging in the air. He remembered the blank eyes and shuffling gaits. The reaching hands. He clearly recalled hearing his parents, screaming amidst the shuffling feet and chattering teeth as more of the terrible, shambling
people
stumbled out of the house into the yard. His parents screamed from somewhere for him to run away. Or maybe to come to them. Or maybe find a barrel and hide in a small dark place and he’d be okay.

He remembered that: standing frozen with indecision, trying to decipher his parents’ wishes, their advice, telling him what to do to make things all right. All he had to do was figure out what his parents were telling him, and everything would be all right.

He remembered that.

He remembered, too, another face, different from the others, with their blank, staring eyes, if they even
had
eyes. This face held sharp eyes. Eyes that darted about. Eyes that
saw
. And the face itself wasn’t a blank, expressionless mask with a yawning, tooth-filled hole in the middle like the others. No, this face was filled with emotion, with anger, and the mouth opened and closed in a torrent of sound the boy vaguely recognized as words, though he had no time to hear them, so busy was he with puzzling out what Mom and Dad were trying to tell him as the grasping hands drew near.

A blade swung. A head rolled. Blood and other stuff, some black, some yellow, oozed from the neck-stump as the body dropped. The angry figure flitted through the slower-moving crowd like quicksilver, still spouting angry words, and where he went things fell. Arms. Legs. Heads. Bodies. Things the boy recognized, though he could not think of the names of them. Inside things, long and ropy. The angry man hurt the people,
killed
the people, and the boy began to cry.

The stink of the house grew as the people fell. Stronger. Thicker. He
felt
the smell on his skin, like he was moving through thick fog as he finally fell forward. He dropped into the darkness that swam up and around from all sides, closing him in like the curved slats of the barrel. He fell into the safety of the darkness and knew no more.