THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER Book 1: Bleeding Kansas: A Novel Of The Zombie Apocalypse (13 page)

“Of course,” says Brandon, “there’s people him an’ his kind
ain’t got any use for.”

“You don’t know that, Brandon!”

Brandon blows a volley of smoke at the windshield. “You know how these flim-flam men’ll tell ya, give us your money now, get in on the ground floor or you’ll miss your chance? The way I see it with Evans and his people, you get
out
while there’s just a ground floor. The longer we stick around, the harder it’s gonna be to get away. Evans is gonna get’ more an’ more people to carry guns for him. He’s gonna build that little community of his. Basically one big work camp while he an’ his kids an’ his rich buddies live easy. He’s gonna have shit locked down so tight out here you got just as good a chance as bustin’ out of prison.”

“Pretty much the way it was before,” I say.

“Yeah, ‘cept there ain’t gonna be no welfare or disability for those who can’t or won’t cut it. You just won’t show up for dinner that night. Or maybe you’ll turn up missin’ come breakfast.”

“Now you don’t know that’s what happened to Marcus!” says Krystal. “He’d been
talkin’ about cuttin’ out ever since Evans got everyone together at the school!”

“Correction: ever since Evans put
 
people like us
 into the school. You know, for our own good and shit.” Brandon looks at me. “Marcus woulda come and got me. He an’ I were tight from way back. Krystal here’s too sweet to wanna wrap her head around it but those fuckers took Marcus’ poor white ass out!”

“I thought it wasn’t safe in town. With all the
deaders, that is.”

“Back when you were alive, you didn’t have
no business in a place, you didn’t go there. Just like that now that everyone’s dead. That’s the way it is in the rich people’s section. Reckon it didn’t take ‘em all mornin’ to clear the dead outta there. Shit, Krystal, I showed you this! They’re out there runnin’ their generators and sprinklers and everything like they don’t care! It’s a miracle all them stinkin’ mobs ain’t all come in to check ‘em out. I’m guessin’ it’s all those nice shade trees they got growin’ over the streets soakin’ up the sound. Hell, most of these former citizens see a tree they know they don’t belong there. Just graded-off dirt and heat stroke for the rest of us.”

“So we ring a louder dinner bell. Or just draw ‘
em in, like with bait.”

Brandon nods.
“Yeah. You could do that.”

Krystal looks from her boyfriend to me as if she’d just found herself among total strangers
. It’s all I can do not to crack up.

“Fuck!” says Brandon.

Krystal squeals and reaches out for the dashboard.

Brandon backs the truck up. Through his window I can see a man in overalls sitting outside the rows of corn, chomping away at a snake. The snake’s fishbone-thin rib bones are sticking in his teeth and the soft parts of his mouth and the man has to pause to pick out the slivers, sucking the meat off of them as he goes. By some reflex the snake begins slithering away, even with its midsection chewed out. The man’s large, pale hand falls upon its tail. He’s still picking the bones out of his mouth with one hand as the snake coils back and bites furiously at the other.

“That’s Mr. Sanderson, isn’t it?” says Krystal.

Brandon looks over at me. “Help me with this, will
ya?”

We both jump out of the truck. My heart
almost stops as Brandon turns his back to the man in the overalls to look through the items scattered in his flatbed. “Shit, there it is!” he says, pointing to my side of the truck. I pick up the demo bar and run around the front of the truck.

The former Mr. Sanderson is looking in our genera
l direction, sniffing the air. He lets the snake go and gets to his feet. The snake flops around in the dirt, bleeding out.

“Mr. Sanderson, oh man! I’m sorry, sir!
Mr. Grace, toss me that bar!”

Sanderson is already on his feet and moving towards Brandon. Once his back is to me I bring the curved end of the bar hard down on the back of his skull. It stuns him; he’s just about to turn around after me when I club him one, two, three more times. He falls to his knees and I step around to the front and club him three more times on that side. I get a crack going in the skull and hammer at that until his head opens up.

At last he is still.

Krystal has both hands to her mouth. I turn to Brandon, hold up the demo bar. “I’m sorry, you wanted this?”

Brandon looks at the dusty, bloodied form face down in the dirt. “He used to pull the hay wagon for us in the fall when we were little. I made extra money helping him bring in hay when I got older. He was one of the few—he was a decent man.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Brandon.
Except you’re going to need something better than this. I know I’m weak, but it shouldn’t have taken me more than a couple of strikes to crease his skull.”

Brandon looks at me like he might explode on me in rage or tears. “Brandon
,” I say, “I’m sorry you lost him. Everybody’s lost somebody, all right? Besides, this was not Mr. Sanderson. It’s some fucked-up thing eating a corn snake by the side of the road because nobody else was walking by out here. All right?”

Brandon
’s eyes are fixed angrily on the remains of the monster that was once Mr. Sanderson.

“So what do we do with the body?” I say. “Do we leave it out here or do you want to take him back for proper burial?”

“We’re supposed to burn ‘em,” Krystal says.

Brandon shrugs violently, like he’s trying to get something off his back. “Help me get ‘
im into the truck,” he says.

“He’s
gonna stink to high heaven in this heat!” Krystal says. “Don’tcha think we oughta leave him here and come back for ‘im later?”

I’ve made a point of grabbing for the armpits; let Brandon have the shit-stained legs. “Krystal, hush,” I say.

“What! I—!”

“
Quiet!
” I lay Mr. Sanderson’s shoulders and head on the gate of the flatbed and haul myself up. With Brandon pushing at the legs I’m able to drag Mr. Sanderson’s remains to lay on their back in a clear space among the tools, empty potato chip bags and beer cans.

Brandon slams the gate shut and I jump over the side. We climb back into the truck in silence. He puts it into gear and we scratch away down the road.

“Just so you know,” Krystal says, “I remember ridin’ on that hay wagon, too.”

“Woman,” says Brandon, “
shut up!
”

We ride along at a reasonable speed—hell, almost slow. I expected the exact opposite but now I realize this is Brandon’s way of showing deference to one of the few adults who was ever kind to him.
 

After a while Brandon turns on the radio. He runs through the stations—where they used to be, anyway.

“Yep, that one’s gone. Was up yesterday.” He comes across another repeating the Civil Defense script over and over. “I reckon that one’ll be up ‘til the end of time,” he says.

“It’s already on past Doomsday,” I say.

“Shit. When was that?”

“Friday, where I was.
I heard it came a little earlier here.”

“Things were going to shit all week long,” Brandon says.
 “There wasn’t no Doomsday. More like Doomsweek. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Shit man, where you been? I thought you been around!”

“It was different in Kansas City,” I say, knowing that’s not the whole truth. I was in an air conditioned bubble of leather upholstery and tailored suits and free passes to the most fashionable places in the Big City, where you sweat from working out, but never while working. Far from the concerns of people who dirty themselves handling oil pans, bed pans—of course, at least they had jobs, however shitty, and saw things going on around me.

I realize now I’d have been fatally clueless if I’d stayed home. If I’d just been there in my basement office, never encountering the sick cabbie, all the sick people at the airports and on the plane. Seen Giselle break down. Seen Angie transform. It would have been just me and Claire.

What would I have done there, with no frame of reference save the worry and helplessness of watching Claire
die? When I see the dead rise and it’s not strangers on a TV over a bar in a securely locked hotel, it’s my wife of 22 years and I’m not saving anyone because I’m the first one going down....

“Well, here we are.” Brandon pulls off the road towards one of the many drainage/irrigation canals that run between properties in rural Kansas. These are among the few places you find trees out here. He parks under a thick, gnarly looking specimen with crazy limbs and
thorned twigs. “Watch where you step,” says Brandon. “These fuckers’ll go right through those shoes of yours.”

I stand just inside the shade line while he goes down to the black, stagnant water at the lowest part of the ravine. Krystal looks at me. “
You feelin’ all right? Color’s gone out of your face!”

“Just
thinkin’ about things.”

“Your family?”

“Yeah.”

“Aw. Bless your heart!”

The rustle of leaves and debris shoved aside draws our attention downhill. “Hey, Mr. Grace,” Brandon calls up, “you hear anything before you crashed?”

“There was an explosion beneath us. I figure it was the tires on the landing gear. Either we were going too fast or we hit something, I don’t know.”

“You hit something, all right,” says Brandon. He pulls it from its hiding place.

I see the spike strip dangling from his hand and then I remember. The last thing I thought I saw before the bang and the nose going down.
A line across the asphalt.

“Brandon, you can’t be sure of that!”

“You saw me pull it out of the landing gear yourself!”

“You don’t know who put it there, though!”

“Who the hell else is out here, Krystal! Who?” Brandon looks at me. “I got three more in here that I pulled off the roads comin’ past town. I figure they musta pulled these out of the back of the cars at the sheriff’s substation close to here. After the crash me and Marcus went out lookin’ for ‘em. We took ‘em and hid ‘em. I try and get back to see if they’re puttin’ any more down. So far, they don’t seem to have to, at least as far as I-70 is concerned.”

“How do you figure?”

“They left your burned-out plane by the side of the road. It’s practically a goddamned tourist attraction now, with a burned-up body in the cockpit an’ everything!  They just kinda pop up out of nowhere when they see people they want, invite ‘em to dinner, give ‘em the tour. A lot of people are so damn happy to get a square meal on an actual plate they’ll give up their freedom for the promise of another helpin’ of mash-potato flakes outta the box.” Brandon smirks. “But it’s on a 
plate
, see, so it’s all good!”

“And the people they don’t like?”

“Well, if they look white enough, they’ll let ‘em go.  Niggers an’ beaners an’ other colored folk, not so much. They end up where Mr. Sanderson up there is gonna end up. In an ash pit, with hot tar poured on ‘em and set ablaze.”

“You hear
somethin’?” says Krystal.

It’s the unmistakable sound of an approaching engine.
Two of them. Brandon puts the spike strip back in its hiding place and strides up the embankment. “No sense trying to run,” he says. “Just stand here and be cool. We’ll tell ‘em we stopped to take a leak.”

“How do we explain being out here in the first place?”

“New guy wanted the tour. Just let me do the talkin’, all right?”

A shiny black
pickup the size of a small building breezes in front of Brandon’s truck and scrapes hard to a halt, blocking our way out. Pulling up behind us is a bright yellow beauty of a truck, tall off the ground, a beautiful chrome job.

Of course, it could only belong to Mr. Evans. “What are we doing out here?” he says grinning behind black aviator sunglasses. A tall bruiser of a man with a bandolier across his huge chest and a Smokey Beat hat comes out of the black truck to join him. I see a blonde kid in the big yellow truck looking like he wants to come out. I gather Dad doesn’t approve of the risk.

“Just givin’ him the tour, sir.”

“I’ll bet. Who’s that in your flatbed?”

“Mr. Sanderson, sir.” I wince to hear Brandon say 
sir
. He thinks this shows Good Upbringing, and it does—an upbringing as a disposable peasant.

“Where’d you find him?”

“Out on the east side of his field, sir.”

“What was he eating?”

“A corn snake, sir.”

“All right, then. You better get him up to the processing area. Mr.
Grace?”

I look at Evans.

“You all right?”

“I’m good.”

“I’d like you to take the rest of the tour with me.”

“That’s all right. Brandon and Krystal had it covered.”

“No, they don’t. They got work to do when they get back to the school. That right, Brandon?”