The Dead Series (Book 3): Dead Weight (24 page)

Sh
e shook her head sadly as she replied, “As far as I know. The rest of them just sit around and complain about how badly they’re treated and what they’re going to do when they get to the aid station. They see this as a perfect opportunity to set America on the right path. They’ve got these wild ass ideas about taking over since now they’re the most powerful political bloc in the nation. They want to use the military to disarm the public, so no one will be able to challenge them, and they’re always talking about healthcare and other unrealistic shit like its created from air.”

“It’s not unrealistic,” Sean mumbled. “The people need the government to take care of them since they can’t take care of themselves. They need more rules and regulations so they know what to do and how to think and feel.”

Linda looked at him with complete contempt and said, “Well, you
are
the government and you sure can’t take care of yourself!”

Smiling at this, Steve
called Heather over from where she was talking to Connie and said loudly, “This is Linda, and she wants to learn how to shoot.”

***

After unloading the supplies and removing any trace they had been on the road by pushing the truck off into the ditch at its side, they made a cold camp that night. After they had eaten, Heather worked with Linda, teaching her how to aim, disassemble, clean and assemble a .380 pistol they had taken from the highwaymen’s camp. Once the woman felt comfortable with the weapon, she let her dry fire it a few times. They couldn’t risk the noise of a gunshot attracting anything living or dead, so she would have to wait until they were moving again to fire it for real. Linda hit it off right away with Cindy, so when she tried to return to the others and was shunned, she spent the night in her sleeping bag next to the ten year old. Pep wandered around the small grove of trees for a few minutes, sniffing and marking her territory before lying down between them.

Tick-Tock was standing guard at daybreak when he saw something coming down the road from the direction of Jasper. It was some type of vehicle
, but it was moving too slowly to be a car or a truck. Raising his binoculars, he saw what it was in the early morning light and started to laugh. Brain was already up, so he called him over and handed him the binoculars saying, “Check this out, Pork Chop.”

Brain scanned the area for a minute before focusing in on the road. Doing a double take, he
asked, “What the fuck is that?”

“That’s what I thought when I first saw it,” Tick-Tock told him. “Go get Steve and
we’ll check it out.”

The three men stood
at the side of the road as the vehicle slowly approached. They kept their weapons ready but not pointed at the strange sight coming towards them. The sun was well up, so every detail of it was visible, and they were amazed at the ingenuity of it. Pulled by a team of two dozen of the dead strapped into harnesses, it was a farm wagon with a cart in tow, both filled with gas cans and boxes. Two people were visible, one walking in front of the Z’s so they would follow him and pull, while the other sat in the driver’s seat holding the reins.

This would have been an awesome enough sight, but to add to it, both of
them wore long black cloaks with the hoods pulled over their heads, and the driver had a scythe propped up next to her. Its blade glinted in the sun as Tick-Tock started singing ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ by Blue Oyster Cult.

He quit singing when the
wagon was fifty feet away and the one in front suddenly cut to his left and headed quickly back to the wagon. Without any food in sight, the dead stopped and whined as they looked around. Seeing Steve and his crew, they started to head in their direction but were halted when the person in the driver’s seat pulled up on the brake and stood.

Her face hidden by the cowl of her robe, she said in a clear voice, “Welcome to the underworld,
I’m Delightfully Grimm.”

“I’ll bet you are,” Tick-Tock said quietly.

Steve poked him in the ribs with his elbow and asked her, “Are you coming from Jasper?”

With a slight tilt of her head, Delightfully Grimm said
disdainfully, “But I have introduced myself, now it’s your turn. And to make it easier, you may simply call me Grimm.”

S
teve was stunned by her formality and it took him a second before he said, “Good morning, Grimm, I’m Steve and this is Brain and Tick-Tock.”

“Now that we know each other
,” Grimm said with a slight nod, “we can commence with the pleasantries. In answer to your question, I would just as soon go into Jasper, as you would want to drag your balls over a mile of chipped glass. It is full of my children that I haven’t been able reap, so I avoid it like the plague.”

“This chick is crazier than a shithouse rat,” Brain said below his breath.

“I’ve dealt with this before, Steve,” Tick-Tock said. “Let me handle it.”

Ignoring him, Steve asked, “Is
there a way through though?”

Waving her hand
at the empty fields on both sides of the road in a majestic gesture, Grimm replied, “Do you see anything around you that’s still living? There are over a million of my children massed to the east and they have gone through this area like the proverbial plague of locust. They have eaten everything living and left me with the pickings of all that is dead.”

Catching on to what she was saying, Steve said, “So you’ve been
travelling up and down the highway checking for gas and food in all the cars.”

“And trucks,” Grimm added with a
light laugh. “Our generator takes diesel fuel, so that’s mainly what I’m wandering this onerous road in search of.”

“Have you run into anyone else
?” Tick-Tock asked. Trying to be more formal to match Grimm’s speech, he added, “In your travels and wanderings about the countryside?”

“You make it sound like I’m a Hobbit in search of
Mordor,” Grimm said with another laugh. “I am simply a fragile young woman with a great big blade and a bunch of guns, trying to survive.” Pointing to the back of the wagon, they watched as the person who had been leading the dead down the highway flipped a tarp off an M60 machine gun that had been hidden in the cart and put the stock to his shoulder.

Grimm said,
“He cocked it long before we reached you pilgrims, so it’s ready to -,” at this, she paused and gave a chilling laugh before continuing, “- rock and roll.” In a stern voice, she said, “If you mean us harm, it would be best if you just stepped aside and let us pass. We don’t want any trouble, but we’re more than able to handle anything that comes our way.”

Steve paused for a second
as he studied the man behind the machine gun. From what he could see of his face and eyes shadowed by the cowl, he looked more than ready to mow them down in a hail of .30 caliber bullets.

Clearing his throat, he was about to
tell her they were just passing through when Tick-Tock interrupted him by saying, “Hey Grimm, we introduced ourselves like civilized people and you introduced yourself, so what’s up with your buddy. Doesn’t he have a name?”

Grimm considered this before smiling and saying in a friendly voice, “That is Igor.
He doesn’t speak, so I am his voice. And if you make any move to try and harm us, he will cut you in half.”

“All we’re trying to do is make it to an aid station or a military base,” Brain spoke up.

Tick-Tock made a motion with his hand telling him to shut up as Grimm said in a thoughtful voice, “You don’t look like brigands, but one never knows. Maybe we should just kill you. I have run into many people on the road who are not what they appear to be.”

Tick-Tock
quietly said to Steve and Brain, “I’ve got this,” then raised his voice and spoke to Grimm, “But why would one try to be something they’re not?”

Grimm laughed and replied, “Now you sound like a line from the movie Untouchables with Kevin Costner
, but you didn’t get it quite right. If you want to convince me that you mean us no harm, I want you to do the Hokey-Pokey.”

Now it was Tick-Tock’s turn to laugh. “You mean
, like…you put your right foot in, you put your right foot out?”

Grimm nodded.

“Then I’d rather die,” Tick-Tock said in a flat voice. With a raised eyebrow, he added, “If you want to play a real game, we need to play Duck, Duck, Goose.”

At this, Grimm laughed
so hard she almost fell back onto the bench seat of the wagon. When she recovered, she said, “How about we dance to ‘Go You Chicken Fat, Go Away’? Do you remember that one?”

After studying Tick-Tock for a second, she said, “I think I’m going to trust you for now, but if you make any strange moves
, I’ll kill you where you stand.”

“Agreed,” Tick-
Tock said. “And that goes both ways.”

“And
since you’re three men alone, if you try to screw me, Igor will kill you,” Grimm said. Turning slightly, she called out, “Igor, you can leave the 60 but keep your other items of reaping handy.”

Wondering what else Igor was carrying, Steve
told her, “There are more than three of us.” He decided to leave out the part about Cindy being immune, but added, “There are twenty-four of us total. We’re heading for Fort Polk. We thought it would be safe there.”

Grimm nodded and said, “
Three or twenty-four, I don’t care. I’ve met people on the road who’ve told me that Polk is open but you’ll need wings to get there. Between here and there are about a million of my children waiting to eat you.”

Coming to the conclusion that at the very least Grimm was unstable, Steve decided to level with her
anyway. Moving forward a few steps, he said, “We have to get to Polk. We have someone who’s immune to the virus. We found her in Clearwater and we think she might hold the cure to the disease. We’ve brought her all this way trying to find some kind of military base. Do you know if there’s another way around Jasper?”

Igor
said something that sounded like, “The chosen one,” before Grimm’s voice drowned him out by saying, “There isn’t another way to get there that I know of, but you’re welcome to come back to my place. It might be on the dark side, but we have cake.”

“And cookies?” Tick-Tock asked.

Steve gave him an odd look, so he waved him off and said quietly, “I’ve got this.”

“And Kool-Aid,” Grimm told him with a laugh.

Steve said quietly, “What are you doing? I don’t think we can trust her.”

“We need a place to hole up
until we figure out what to do next,” Tick-Tock replied. Raising his voice, he said to Grimm, “We would very much like to come to the dark side and have cake and cookies but we need some kind of assurance that we’ll be safe.”

Grimm flipped
back the cowl of her robe before shaking out her long, raven black hair. Now that she had revealed her true self, they could see she was in her early twenties with perfectly formed features and pure white skin.

With a deep throaty laugh, she
picked up her scythe while asking, “And what could be safer than an insane asylum?”

***

Tick-Tock rode on the bench seat next to Delightfully Grimm as the wagon rolled west on Highway 190. She had obviously survived on the road for months, so he wanted to pick her brain. Anything he could find out about this dead world he found himself in might save his life. Although they were now heading away from Fort Polk, he’d convinced everyone that this was the best course of action. Steve had been hesitant at first to follow a crazy lady who thought she was the Grim Reaper and her sidekick named Igor, but in the end he realized they had no choice.

The wagon led the way with Denise following in the Dodge Ram. Strung out behind them were two minivans and
two trucks they’d managed to find to carry their supplies and the others.

Tick-Tock pointed
to a line of abandoned cars at the side of the road with their doors standing open, “Did you find anything good in these?”

“Water, a few guns and some food,” Grimm answered.
“The main thing I seek is diesel fuel. We have a generator but we can only run it a few hours each day due to our lack of gas.”

“How many people are at the asylum?” Tick-Tock asked.

“There are only five of us left,” Grimm answered. “Some ran away after the dead came back to life and a few were bitten. I reap all those who get bitten.” Pointing to Igor, she said, “He is my third assistant. The last one got too close to my oxen and was eaten.”

“What about a radio
?” Tick-Tock asked, “Do you have a CB or a ham radio or anything? We’ve been using a CB but haven’t heard anything.”

“I ha
ve a ham radio,” Grimm told him.

At this, Tick-Tock perked up until she said, “It gets AM and FM
, and has a cassette player. I feed it bacon and it plays my music. Before my children started to die and come back, I listened to it often. Now I only get one station out of some military base in Texas. They play no music and are only on once a week, so I only use it when I listen to my tapes. We do have a CB, but we can’t pick up anything except some distant voices. You can’t make out anything they say, but it’s nice to know there are people out there.”