THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER Book 1: Bleeding Kansas: A Novel Of The Zombie Apocalypse (20 page)

Evans drives quickly. Given all the shadows I’m
seeing assert themselves as we pass that’s a good thing. I see wet trails along the sidewalks, pale pink globs to septic black stains on the concrete: zombie scat in varying stages of decay.

Evans veers right at a fork and charges
up one of the many ridges in this Kansas Smoky Hills country most people mistake for “flat.” You can see the Interstate from here; in turn this Wal-Mart Supercenter is well within sight of the travelers there. I see all of two of them, both walking in the westbound lane. They don’t respond to the sound of our engines.

There have to be others closer by, however.
So far, it’s just us chickens up here in the corner of the empty parking lot. Brandon’s brown rustbucket comes up, then a white pickup, then a blue. The red Caddy shows up. Another pickup, lavender with dark purple flames decaled on the side and pimped out low to the asphalt appears. I’m surprised I didn’t hear it bottom out at the foot of the slope.

“Aren’t we supposed to be spread out doing our thing? What’s up with the convention here?”

Evans doesn’t answer.
Fine. As long as he’s got the motor running and the air conditioning on full. Other vehicles pull in, but the answer to my question drives up soon enough. Kerch’s black Luxury Tank, foreign made and worth three times the one I drove to death in Kansas City, pulls to the center.

Rebecca steps out to open the door for the boss. Kerch
comes out and motions for everyone else to do the same. As we do so Kerch walks over to where we are. “Let’s get up there in the flatbed, all right?” he says, clapping us on either shoulder.

Evans drops the tailgate and help
s Kerch and me up. I see Brick walking among the vehicles, pointing at the ones with their engines still running to support the air conditioning. The motors shut off one by one. Only Kerch’s Luxury Tank is allowed to remain running:

“We don’t have a lot of time, so I’ll make this quick. Last night, this crew—all of you here—killed 986 total confirmed walkers. Nine hundred eighty-six. If we can pull that number every day for forty-nine more
days straight we can own this city free and clear! We can move some people into the power plant and look at getting it running again. You could be in your own houses before it starts getting cold. Would you like that?”

“Oh hell yeah!” someone hollers, and the crowd laughs.

“Every former citizen you take out is one closer to comfort and freedom.  Some of you saw what they did last night. Every bit as ugly as it was tragic! You know Mr. Evans’ boy Daniel got swarmed.”

A low murmuring animates the crowd. I look at Evans. By this point I imagine he’s too tired and drained to show any emotion. I have to give him credit for not waving his bloody shirt at me, so to speak.

“I’m taking Mr. Evans home where he’s gonna take some time, get some sleep.”

“Sir,” Evans begins. “I don’t—”

“No, no,” says Kerch. “I need you to take it easy for a spell, get some rest. It’s time for Mr. Derek Grace to step up to the plate.” Kerch claps me on the shoulder. “You’re looking fresh, Mr. Grace. You ready to get dirty?”

“Not if I can help it,” I say. The crowd laughs. I pat the handles of m
y panga and my hammer. “These, on the other hand….”

“They’ll get a workout, I’m sure! You’re all going to get a workout! But we know how to cull their herd, now, don’t we?
Three hundred to the fields where we cut them down one by one, and six hundred here on the outside of town. In the woods, and in the dark! We lost Daniel Evans, Tyler McCracken and Jared Ledbetter. Three good men. Let’s honor their memory, see to it they didn’t die for nothing.

“I want you to all mind Mr.
Grace here and hit our target areas. Let’s get the stuff on our shopping lists—nothing more!—so we can get the hell out, restock our community supplies, and scrub another thousand biters from our city. All right?”

“Yeah!”

“All right, then. The quicker we can get this over with, the quicker we can get to that barbecue at the high school. Good luck!”

Everyone turns to go to their vehicles while the group leaders appear at the back of the Big Yellow Truck to ask the obvious question, as voiced by a Latino man whose natural expression appears to be one of perpetual worried urgency: “How do we coordinate with this Mr. Grace?”

I take out my phone and
find my number in the menu. I kneel down by the side to get level with the man’s face and show him the number. “Pass it on,” I say. “If I can get your number I’d like to put your name with it so I’ll know who’s calling right away.”

I hear Evans and Kerch walk to the tailgate and jump down. I hand my phone to the gentleman I now know as “Gitmo” (short for “Gutiérrez”). He’ll put the others numbers in for me—I would rather have introduced myself briefly to each of the squad leaders by way of ge
tting their numbers but I need to know what the fuck I’m doing here even worse.

“Gentlemen!”
I say loudly, jumping from the truck.

Kerch doesn’t indicate he
’s heard me. Rebecca is already out and holding the door for him. Evans turns. He’s holding a set of keys up for me. As I take them, he says: “To give you an idea of how easy your job is I expect this truck back with no blood or damage on it.  While your crew is loading up here you’ll wait for calls from the other squad leaders to inform you when they’re done.

“
Now, they won’t need your permission to drive to the estate when they’re done. All they need to do is check in. If you don’t hear from the others in a reasonable time frame you call the other squad leaders and I’ll leave it to your discretion whether you’ll organize a rescue and who you’ll take with you to do it. If you decide to do it, that is. Were you ever military?”

“
Nope. But I get the principle of bringing everyone I can home. By ‘estate,’ you mean Mr. Kerch’s house, right?”

“Right.
You’ll be here at the Wal-Mart. Gitmo’s taking on the liquor store, Brick is raiding the sporting goods place in the mall, Jake and Brandon are coordinating the supermarket. The people you really need to be concerned about, though, are the herders.”

“Herders?”

“You’re all working in a relatively small area. Billy, Russ, and Darnell will be drawing the citizens away while you work. Of course, three minutes is just a guideline. If you think you can clear out everything in those freezers and get away, do it. Those are the priority for you and the supermarket crew. Mr. Kerch has a walk-in freezer at the estate. If we can get—”

A horn honks. It’s the SUV.

“I’ve got to go,” says Evans. “Text me if you have any questions.”

“Sure,” I say, but he’s already walking away.

I stand looking around at the people buzzing about in the parking lot. Some are grouping for a few quick words before driving off. I hear the roar and chuff of engines turning over. Some
are already pulling away.

It took years and this one very long week but it looks like I’m back in management again.
I’ve even got the Big Yellow Truck. I think of what Evans said about fattening hogs.

What the hell
. I’ve got shopping to do.

19

Gitmo brings me my phone. “I’ll need a little more time. The liquor store is a few blocks over and they’ve got it barred up seven ways to Sunday. Give me a call if you don’t hear from me in 45 minutes. Everyone else should be done in about half an hour. You might want to take longer here, yourself.”

“
Yeah, we probably do,” I say, and so much for that in and out in a minute bullshit. I figured as much, especially when it comes to all this frozen meat. Unless there are herds of deer and other wildlife roaming these Kansas fields that I don’t know about, meat will be hard to come by for a while. It’s this or canned food from here on out.

Gitmo and his crew are the last to pull away. It’
s just me and Big Yellow, a white pickup truck, and the lavender lowrider truck with the purple flames on the side. My crew includes the tall, scowly-faced Goth kid from dinner last night with the katana at his back. A shorter, compact young man with long, stringy blonde hair squeezed beneath a trilby hat carries a crossbow at his back. I almost miss the little girl between them—actually a very small young woman with her breasts mashed together beneath her too-tight black blouse in case you mistake her age; she’s got a machete on her belt. The closest I’ve got to a normal looking kid wears a Kansas City Chiefs jersey and matching Snapback hat.

“That’s expensive gear to be wearing on what’s eventually turning into a bug hunt,” I tell him.

“These are all the clothes I got, man!”

“I’ve got to pick up some threads of my own. You
wanna come with?”

“Shit, man!”

“What?”

“No offense, man,
” he says grinning, “but I would 
never 
shop here!”

“Suit yourself.”

“A humble leader who walks with the peasants!” smirks the Goth kid, waving his sword about his head in short loops. “He can take on
three
citizens at once!”

“So let’s hear your mighty saga, then.
”

The kid hisses and
turns away from me. The stringy-haired man in the trilby shrugs. “He was actually pretty good last night. Just so you know, Mr. Kerch’s comment about seeing you take on three at once sounded pretty silly to the professionals.”

“The professionals?”

“Hey, man,
it’s serious business! You heard what the man said about last night! We were taking on a lot more than three at once to rack up that score!”

“All right, then, so what are we doing here?”

“We gotta get all the frozen stuff out of the freezers before it’s all thawed out. So we back up the trucks, I reckon.”

“Out front?
That makes no sense. We need to be closer to where the freezers actually are.”

“You the
bossman,” he says.

“Is this your first time doing this?”

“Individual runs. Not coordidnated-like.”

“Great
. Let’s get these trucks over to the loading dock on the grocery side. You’ve got gear to break locks with, right?”

“Well, duh!”

“Let’s get going, then!”

Trilby hat gets into the white truck with the guy in the Chiefs hat
, who drives the white truck over. The lavender lowrider belongs to Russ, one of the herders. “Shit, I don’t even know why they want us out here,” he says. “We cleaned ‘em out of here real good last night.”

“You heard the man. He wants another thousand gone today, another thousand tomorrow, and another thousand
the day after that. We gotta clear ‘em all out, no way around it.”

“I saw what happened to Evans
’ boy yesterday. They pulled him through the busted window. He was squirtin’ blood all over where he was cut up and those things had their mouths open like they were catchin’ rain. Goddamn, I can’t believe these were people once!”

“I
dunno. They make perfect sense to me.”

“
Shit, you may be right,” he says, starting his little truck. “Like my boy Marcus used to say, ‘Humanity two-point-motherfuckin’-
Oh!
’ People minus the polite civilized bullshit. They just step right up and bite your fucking face off.” Russ puts his truck in gear. “Take care, man.” He drives off.

I c
limb into the Big Yellow Truck. “Hi,” says Krystal from the passenger seat.

“
What? Jesus! I take it you rode over with Brandon?”

“You knew we were going to be here! I didn’t expect them to put you in charge so early, though. So sad what happened to Mr. Evans’ boy!

“Yeah. Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but what are you doing here?”

“Someone’s
gotta look out for you! You don’t know these people!”

“
I’m getting an idea.”

“Besides, they didn’t leave you nearly enough people to clean out that freezer. I’m pretty strong, you know!
”

“All right, then. Welcome aboard.”

We drive to the back. I’m almost relieved to see the two deaders coming in the other side of the parking lot. I know we’re not completely alone out here. It’s just a matter of waiting for the party to realize the food trucks (so to speak) have pulled up.

The man
walks unsteadily, as if drunk. He sways from side to side, his weight on one leg, then the other. He toddles laboriously behind the thin, intense-looking woman who is hobbled only by the broken stiletto heel on one shoe. She makes a loping, up-down motion as she staggers along, not as awkward as the man following her, but with grim, I-will-have-this purpose. The gore is dried thick and stiff down her power-suit ensemble, with a glistening fresh sheen adding another layer to the man-sized scab accessorizing her white blouse and navy-blue skirt. Her sloppy seconds cake the pastel yellow button-down shirt of her wobbly companion.