This Is Not The End: But I Can See It From Here (The Big Red Z Book 1) (11 page)

Chapter 32

“Handsome!” she whispered, interrupting his sleep at some point in the night.  “Let’s do it again.”

With a strange hope in his heart, Doc crawled cautiously down through the silent shadows of his dreams in the waking world.

But she had not uttered the words. 

Doc smiled anyway.  She was curled up next to him, nearly naked on the cold roof, also smiling.  Doc pulled her closer.  He just stared into the vast wastes of stars, completely content with his place in the wet gray muck of it all.  The wind moved through empty solitudes of the forest around them.  It brought a warm, aching sigh of unutterable satisfaction.  The curves and gentles noises of breath that came from the woman beside him were too flawless for the limitation of speech.  Every faint rustling from the gauzy, wavering bodies of heaven brought him peace, a peace as vast and noiseless as the wheeling of planets through the star-speckled black; and any attempts to describe it seemed sacrilege.  Perhaps it was. 

And that was purpose enough for his life.  For now. 

Reflecting on his experiences in life, on Tyler’s maddening heartache, Doc was starting to think of life as a senseless jumble with no purpose but to get through it.  Now, something in the calm of the forest around them, or the certainty of their unerring moment together, quieted his unrest; so let anyone who would hear a fool mutter absurdities, hear this—just like a mother quiets a fretful child, that rowdy woman, so free with her love, calmed and lulled his tumultuous thoughts.  And Doc loved her for that alone.  He did.  He loved her.

“How much for the blowjob?” he asked.

She smiled, stirring with the creeping morning light.  “On the house.” 

“If you’ll wear this bandana, or maybe put it away somewhere safe, perhaps you’ll remember the stray that came through your compound on the eve of Martin Luther King Day.”

She yawned, then smiled sleepily. 

“If you’ll keep one end for yourself, handsome, I’ll take the other.”

“Brilliant,” he whispered, tightening his clasp around her fingers.  He gave her a couple of his old Marlboros.  “You are just… Shit.  I don’t have the words.”

She laughed a low, mellow laugh that set his heart beating.  As she lit her cigarette, he felt another great intoxication of strength, and probably could have conquered a good chunk of known world.

“Doc!” someone shouted in the distance.

“Oh, no.”

“Doc?” she asked.

“Doc—I mean, yes,” he said, and he gulped down his embarrassment.

From the river came, “Doc, where the devil are you, boy!”

“Damn it.”

“Son of a bitch, that’s it, motherfucker!  We’re leaving without you!”

Struggling to get dressed, Doc was shocked that she was in no rush to do the same.  She lie there, naked as the day she came into the world, smiling at him.

Doc sat to put on his boots and kissed her. 

As he stood, Doc looked down with a questioning look, and he did ask why she did not cover herself.  He did not have to.  She was allowing him to digest what he was walking away from.   No, she was not full of conceit.  She was just comfortable, and confident.

What other absurd things Doc might have said, he cannot tell.  But they were at the end of their time together, and he had to go. 

Stooping, Doc picked a bunch of dandelion greens that had taken root in the roof’s gutter.  He felt foolish as he gave them to her.

“Doc, you idiot,” came a call from the distance, but it might as well have been her words.  “We’ll see you when we get back!”

Then she blew him a kiss, and it made a dull thud echo through his stomach—it was the most erotic and heart-melting thing he’d ever known.

“Go on, then. You’ve already slayed your woman… now go rescue your dragons.”

The purple hills were a frost-etched mirror to the morning’s new sunlight.  Between their shadows and the forested banks, Doc found the old boys in a circle, their backs to each other, guns up.  He could hear the shouts now, shouts of defiance and shouts to give a fellow courage, and then archers, of all things, rose on the city walls loosed their bows.  He saw the glitter of the feathers as the arrows slashed down toward his fellows.

A moment later, another round came arching over the high wall to fall on all around Dale and the McCarthys.   Amazingly, at least to him, it seemed that none of their men was struck, though several line of hedgehog spines feathered the dock as the old boys advanced toward the ship. 

And Doc noticed that it was prostitutes that were attacking. 

All of them, nametagged whores.

Three parties of prostitutes advanced, and now his boys were pointing their guns, none shooting at them. 

“Damnation, boys, we can’t wait!  We’ve gotta hurry along now!” his uncle cried nervously.

Doc saw the closely touching guns vanish along the docks.  Then he saw the gun-wedge emerge from a far ditch, and, like a monstrous beast, crawl out closer to the vessel.  Doc could see nothing now except the flash of samurai blades rising and falling, and as the maids charged,  Doc, for a moment, could only hear that sound, the real music of battle, the chop of steel on gunmetal, steel on steel, yet when he again caught sight of them the gun-wedge was still moving.  Like a boar’s razor-sharp tusk, the blades began the swing and lunge until the wedge had pierced the women’s’ formidable ranks along the docks, knocking several of them into the water.  Soon after, the Feisty-Uncle heaved upstream by dint of a Mighty Rocco, rowing with two oars, and though the barmaids plunged into the water and tried to wrap around the vessel, his merry boys pressed forward, more of them rowing now, across a small sandbar and into the deep green waters beyond it. 

The boys they suddenly cheered and surged beyond sight.

“What the devil have they done?” Doc muttered under his breath, realizing the surreal situation they had left him in—in one moment he was quite asleep, and very much naked with a rare beauty, and now they had vanished into the curves of the river.

The panic and relief mixing in his sternum, Doc charged into town, careful to remain unseen.

Almost immediately, he spotted a lone woman, walking her horse, leading it by the bridle.  He snuck up behind her, swiftly, silently before he grabbed the bottom of her dress by the hem and yanked upward.  As she spun around, struggling in vain to cover her buttcks, he tied the hem over her head.  He then tied the hem to a tree and leapt atop the horse.

In the next instant, she was running behind him, nude, crying, “Thief! Rapist devil!”

Doc was on the large black horse, scrambling through the compound’s streets and alleyway’s ramparts, then down the bank’s farther side through the ramparts beyond.  The way led through a side entrance in the city walls.  Before he knew it, Doc was cutting through a dense thicket of pines with ferns half the height of a man.  Only dim light penetrated the maze of foliage, and the trail led the horse and him at least a mile from the river.  Little Fellow, as Doc called the enormous steed, was trotting hard but with controlled glee, and they both glided through the brake without disturbing a fern branch, while Doc—after the manner of the McCarthys—seemed to catch every twig in the forest with his beard.  But the horse seemed to know what Doc wanted, as only the finest steeds can do.  Twice Doc felt Little Fellow pull up abruptly and look warily through the cedars on one side.  Once, the beast even stooped down and peered among the fern stems.  Then he silently whinnied back toward the river, galloping through the undergrowth again without explanation.  At first Doc could see nothing, and regretted being led so far into the woods.  He was about to reign him back onto the trail, when Little Fellow, pricked his ears forward and halted, as if he feared to move.

For the fourth time, the remarkably smart creature came to a dead stand.  Now, Doc, too, heard a rustle, and saw a vague sinuous movement distinctly running abreast of them among the ferns.  For a moment, when they stopped, it ceased.  Then it wiggled forward like a beast, or serpent in the underbrush.

It was a lone zombie.  He could just make out the stone-colored skin of its back before it leapt like a cat at the horse’s neck.  And those dagger-pointed teeth, sharper than a pruning hook, flashed as it licked the air. 

Doc leapt, swinging downward with his samurai sword.  The beast called out with a howl, but cut short as its head and right arm fell free from its body.

He winced, looking down at it.  Zombies have a sort of… ionized odor about them, something of a cross between a corpse and a leaky battery.  Dead, their stench amplifies in an instant, like squishing a stink bug. 

“Well, shit, Little Fellow.  I wish you were mine, dammit!  I’ve never seen a horse a smart as you!” 

He kissed the horse between the eyes.

Little Fellow eased back, and they stood noiseless until by the utter noiselessness of the green, until it was clear that the zombie had been alone.

Then at last, Doc saw them.

His merry warband.

Chapter 33

Just before the river narrowed to rapids, Doc called out with a series of three bird whistles

Uncle Jickie, whose cunning eyes seemed to gleam with the malice of a serpent, silently twisted in the vessel and turned to the bank.  The swish of waters rushing past, Doc gave the horse a drink and set him on a course back the way they came. 

Then, wrapping his half bandana around his head, Doc propped his ass on the gunwale and slid into his place among his fellow commandos.  Not a word was uttered.  They just drifted, guns up, and silent. 

When they were in mid-stream again, half dazed by the wonder of his night and half shocked still by the unexpected, unexplained fight his boys had with the prostitutes, Doc just breathed the clear air, and began rowing.   All he had seen and heard during the night still floated in his mind like a sigh of wind through the forest.  He was only half-conscious that cedars, oaks and cliffs were engaged in a mad race past the sides of the raiding raft—which was more less when his uncle cuffed him across the ear, to an uproar of laughs from the old boys.

“Bloody taint!” Jick screamed.

“What?  What the fuck was that!”

“The fuck was that indeed!” Tyler roared, silencing all onboard.  “How dare you?”

Doc turned to look up at him.

Tyler shook his head. 

“Little brother, you make off with that big apple-shaped ass, and you don’t even share the details?”

At which Rocco, Kenzo, Gig, Dale, and Jickie laughed with such an uproar that Doc’s cramped limbs ached to catch himself before he fell back-asswards from the rocking vessel.

A dozen times, Doc could have dozed off, but every time his eyelids became heavy, his uncle Jickie turned his grimace into that snake-like gaze and looked at him with a warning in his eyes:  fun may indeed be had along the way, sir, but it will certainly not slow the war party.

Now wide awake, a question fell on Doc’s head like a hammer.  He turned toward Dale. 

“What the thundering fuck was the deal with the prostitutes?”

Not a muscle of the big commando’s face changed, nor did any of the attitudes alter in the least.  In fact they all seemed in a sort of stoic oblivion of his existence.  Gig’s head was thrown back a little too far though, and the steely, unflinching eyes were fixed on the morning’s growing storm clouds.

“Gill?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” the old man said.

“What did you do?”

“Do?!  Henceforth, Mister Doc, I’ll thank you to know that a man of my age doesn’t often find himself telling a dozen women ‘no’.”

“What?”

“They asked to come,” Dale put in.

“Come?”

“With us.  And Gig here tells them, ‘You?  Ha!  You bitches couldn’t put an arrow in a hungover old man, much less a charging Shado.” 

At which the others lost their stoic cool, rollicking again like boys.  And Doc asked no more of it. 

Laughing, Doc told him sharply he needed to be more careful with his tongue.

He gave an evil leer, and muttered, “Pah!  Likewise, Mister Doc!”

“Trust me, Mister Gig, I was.”

Which set the vessel rocking once more.

Chapter 34

Without any more reminiscing, they pushed forward.  And they pushed hard.  The river’s pace was merciless. 

Logic says that going downstream is easier.  Logic, Jick would have you know, is a lying sack of shit.  At places, it seemed damned near impossible.  It flowed through the remnants of some unknown city, the intact foundations channeling the waters to only five feet across at places.  They had to pause to rest, mooring themselves on a stout metal sign post of something called a Cracker Barrel, which Doc assumed once sold Saltines.  And it was always in such places the Shado attacked. 

Pulling backwards, just trying not to rush downstream took the strength of three men, and a fourth to steady them.  Always, Tyler was left “at gun”.  If old Batt, the Chinese guide, had any equal on this Earth in his special sense for the presence of the undead, it was Tyler.  The most legendary of the McCarthys, his reputation was not unfounded.  Standing in the unsteady raft, sixty yard shots were as natural and easy to him as ten yard shots were to a normal man on level land.  Even in the heralded Z Company, where the best of the best had taken the Good Fight across the globe, Tyler had been a legend.  Surviving the plane crash in Ecuador, then making his way home to Kentucky, he had quickly turned into something beyond a legend, almost a living myth.  Truly, it was a pleasure to see him at work. 

When they finally gathered their strength, it felt that they had struggled for ten hours, and yet, always, Tyler sat, grounded and calm.

It was as if he had been shooting clay targets.

A mere thirteen miles out from Beergarden, severe weather threatened, and the impossibility of going any further loomed more heavily than ever. The old boys were for proceeding at any risk, of course, but as the thunderclouds grew blacker and dropped in funnels here and theret, Dale, the head steersman, lost his temper and grounded their vessel on a sandbar. 

Springing ashore, he flung down his river pole and refused to go on.

“By fuck!” Uncle Jickie grumbled, “Now listen, you insolent young shit,” but as lightening flashed, he could not sanely add anything more than that. 

Indeed, any of them would be foolhardy to argue.  A blast of wind, snapping the great oaks like a commando snaps necks, enforced Dale’s stance.  They only boarded again to beach themselves more securely, fastening battens down over the bales of provisions.  A few of them struggled to hoist a tent, but gusts of wind tossed the canvas above their heads.  And before the pegs were driven a great wall of rain drenched everyone to the skin.  By afternoon, the river had turned brown and violent.  Plainly, they were there for the day—which meant they were there for the night, too.  Navigating a swollen river is too dangerous a spot for even the most adventuresome man. 

So, with ample patience, they settled in.  And they at last managed to pitch their tents.  Then they kindled the soaked underbrush and finally got a pile of logs roaring in the woods and gathered round the fire.  They spent the afternoon hunkered down, which was fortunate for Doc as it allowed him time to draw his bandana down over his eyes and manage some sleep.

Doc could not have slept long, but he had the strangest, most vivid dream of his life.  He dreamt of being old, and of Death, riding atop that large black steed he had called Little Fellow.  He comes bursting up through the roof he had slept on the night before, like a screaming ghost, still atop his horse, and swinging his long scythe at him.  Doc can see the bony zombie face under that hood, wiping blood from his pearl-handled scythe on the sleeve of his cloak.  But it’s not blood.  It’s afterbirth.  Death hands him a baby.  Then Emily, beside him, lurches and yelps, like she’s in some kind of birthing.  And now Death is laughing. 

Emily is talking to him in a language that sounds like kittens or birds.   Death rides away but as Doc lay there, she slithers around him and starts telling him that what they did brought a life into the world...

But it would take seven lives out of the world too.

It was dark when Doc woke, and someone had added logs to the fire.  Tyler and Kenzo were on guard.

He looked at Tyler, his best friend.

Tyler looked back at him.

He knew, Doc sensed.

Somehow, the living myth just knew…

The fire’s glare in the sky attracted a small, wild party of river rats, the wet-dread-locked water men—violent hippies, degenerates who had lost all taste for civilization and lived completely on the water with women but never any wives or children.  Hillside lore had all manner of crazy shit to say about them.  That they can read minds, place curses, see the future, et cetera.  But Doc knew they were just a motley throng, just passing through; he had seen them before once twice, where the Red River wrapped his beloved Fort Campbell.  

When Doc saw them, he gave a low signal, the low whippet of a loon.  It was the signal to relax.  Everyone among them loosened their grips on their M4’s, some even doing without opening their eyes.

At this, the wet men approached slowly, making a friendly show of things, waving and nodding before they drew off to a fire by themselves.  They had either begged or stolen some beer in glass bottle, which they offered to them, only to receive icy stares from Tyler, Kenzo, and Doc.  Then they just shrugged as if it didn’t matter to them.  Doc watched the grotesque, oily figures leaping and dancing between the firelight and the dusky woods like forest demons.  With the wind and rain rustling overhead, and the river’s shores sloshing heavily on the pebbles, and the washed piney air stimulating his blood like caffeine, Doc began wondering how many years of life on a boat it would take to wear through civilization’s veneer and leave one content in the lodges of river wilds.  To dance among unseen spirits, beckoning them for protection from the Shado.  Gradually, Doc became aware of Dale’s presence on the other side of the campfire.  Doc watched as he rose, then went to about halfway between the two camps, and halted.  He made an outwardly gesture, seemingly for want of joining them, but he sat on his feet, Indian style, gazing intently at their flames as if spellbound by some fire spirit.

“What’s wrong with that Dale fellow, anyhow?” Kenzo grunted, who was taking the last pulls at a smoked-out pipe.

“Sick—home-sick,” Tyler said. 

“They say he came here with some of them… ratmen.  You’d think he was near enough the river here to feel at home!”

“It’s not his old tribe he wants,” Tyler explained.

“What then?” Kenzo inquired.

“His woman, he’s mad after her,” Tyler said, and he took his own pipe to his teeth to mask his grimace.

“Faugh!” Kenzo grumbled.  “Dale?  He’s too young for that sort of shit.  I’ve seen him bang half of Goback since he’s been with us.  The idea of a young buck like that all sentimental and lovesick for some fat lump of a wet-woman!  Come on!  Am I supposed to believe that?”

“Doesn’t matter whether you do or don’t,” Tyler returned.  “It’s a fact.  He told me.  His woman was a river rat.  He tamed her…. he thought.  Turns out, the water called her back.  He’s been loony for her ever since.”

“Loony?  The boy’s nary spoken a word about a woman!”

“It’s in his stillness, Uncle Kenzo… In his stillness.”

Kenzo looked at Tyler and muttered another unintelligible jumble of curses. 

Doc turned his gaze from them to the fantastic figures.  They were carousing around the other campfire now.  One form, in particular, stood out more than the others.  He was gathering the other rats in line for some sort of dance, a lunging, hypnotic jig that had an easy grace to it, one that was different from the motions of the other wet men.  With a sudden turn, his profile was thrown against the fire, and Doc saw that he wore a long, braided goatee.  He was otherwise clean shaven.

Then came one of those strange, reasonless intuitions that pop into one’s head but are never asked aloud:  Was it true they can see the future?  Was such a thing even possible?

Doc had hardly spelled out his own suspicions when the measured beatings of a drum rang out.  There was a low, tuneless chant, like the voices of the forest.  The rats began to tread a mazy, winding pace, which in a strange, unreasonable way brought up memories of his best friend’s wife, naked.  The drums beat faster.  The suppressed voices were breaking in shrill, exultant strains, and the measured tread had quickened.  The boisterous antics of these children of the river suddenly fascinated him.  They were swaying now, dancing in a way that could only be likened liken to the wiggling of a green thing under leafy cover.  The coiling and circling, the winding and lunging, it all became bewildering, and in the center, laughing, shouting, tossing up his arms and gesticulating like a maniac, was the fellow with the pointed goatee.  Then the performers broke from their places and gave themselves with utter abandon to the wild impulses of nature.  And there was a scene of uncurbed, animal hilarity as Doc never dreamed possible.  Savage, furious, almost animal-like, it seemed like at any time they could fall upon ground and start eating each other like zombies.

Even Uncle Jickie, who watched from the flaps of his tent, was unsure what to make of it.

Filled with a curiosity that he knew lures many to their undoing, Doc rose and went across to the thronging, shouting, shadowy figures.  But suddenly a man darted out of the woods full tilt against him. It was the fellow with the braided beard.  As quick as a the flashes of lightening overhead, Doc thrust out his foot and kicked his knee, and in the next instant dropped him with a punch.  His comrades only watched as Doc put a foot in his chest and looked down. 

The moonlight, only just visible through a break in the clouds, fell on his upturned face.  He snarled out something angrily.

“What the fuck is the matter with you, rat boy?”  Doc said, letting him up.

The wet man gathered himself in a sitting posture.  Then he seemed shocked at the sight of him.  “With me!” he muttered beneath his breath, momentarily silenced with astonishment.  “Is it not you who seeks the Black Ones?”

“Who the hell have you been talking to!”

“Pardon a little insolence, mister, but I took you and your company for commandos, not fools!”

“Well mind your fucking insolence and there’ll be no deed to pardon it,” Doc said, pretending not to notice that he had not answered him.  He was determined to follow his uncle’s advice and play a con at his own game. 

But suddenly, despite himself, Doc was curious—they say these men can also see into another’s soul. 

“Help you up?” Doc asked.

Extending his hand to give him a lift, Doc felt that his palm was deathly cold. 

“Cold!” he muttered, throwing aside the hand Doc offered down to him. answered his thoughts.  He stood, looking at him, but it was as though he was looking through him, or in him.  “Cold as seven old tombstones!” With an absurdly elaborate bow, he reeled back among the dancers.  “Frigid as a catfish’s asshole!   Frosty as the death’s-head of your dreams!  Farewell, grave skull!”

Doc froze, cocking an eye.

The wet man in oily clothing then went skipping madly back to his companions, drinking and dancing.

“Get up, Dale,” Doc urged, rushing back to where he still sat on his knees.  “Get up.  You know these people.  He’s a fucking oracle or some shit!  Talk to him.  Find out what you can!”

“I speak fucking English,” he yelled back, “You don’t need translator.”

“Well is it true?  Are you some kind of shaman?”

“Hold on!” Dale said, jerking him up back.  What makes you think this guy’s a seer?”

“I don’t know, really know,” Doc began, clumsily conscious that he had no proof for his suspicions, “but he hinted at my dreams.   If I’m wrong, what would will it cost them to find out?”

“Beer.  Lots of it” 

“That’s it?” Doc asked.

“He’s a hard one to read.”

“But he’s got the sight, you think?”

“Oh!  When he’s drunk out of his regular sight, I imagine,” laughed Dale. 

They walked together to the vessel.

“We haven’t got beer,” Doc said, and he began rummaging through bales of stuff with a noise of all manner of things knocking together.

His uncle and the rest of their company still watched wordlessly. 

“What’s your plan?” Dale asked with a vague tone that suggested Doc had some shady purpose in mind.

Doc found a fine dirk in a walnut box.  “Here.”

“A box?  You’ll need more than that, Mister Doc.”

“There’s an excellent dirk inside.  He could trade it for a barrel of beer, maybe two.”

“I could indeed,” the man said, suddenly behind them.  “Come down to the sand between the forest and the beach in about an hour and I’ll have all manner of answers for you.”

The man then brushed past him with a look on his face that was hard to read in the half-light.