This Is Not The End: But I Can See It From Here (The Big Red Z Book 1) (12 page)

Chapter 35

There on the banks of those brown, raging waters began not his first compromise with conscience.  Doc knew very well that his “uncles”, such that they were, would not approve.  Indeed, they would not even emerge from their tents for fear of incurring the wrath of God for invoking the spirits that were about to be called upon.  But Doc also knew that the rough-and-ready commandos sang epic poems about standing upon one’s own wits and cunning. 

His only fear was a vague sense that he would arouse bad luck with calling on the powers of the unknown, but again, they were facing powers not fully known.  For in as much as it was deemed “retro-fungal”, there been no lack of theories, and that the “rapture” had taken souls, rather than the entire body was one he’d heard tossed about McCarthy conversations more than once.

Suffice it to say, when Doc went down to the shore, the shaman was sitting in the midst of a new fire, swaying, and Dale was beside him on his knees.  Dale motioned him to keep behind the shaman.

They must have sat there an hour, maybe more, before finally Doc heard his drunken lips mumbling his own name in a voice that sounded like a whispering fiend from old.  Doc could not make out the nonsensical words, but something happened, something that is not easy to explain.  For a strange moment, the darkness overcame him.  It felt neither alive nor dead, but an indwelling for things from some ethereal world in between.  Doc looked from the fellow out into the dark trees, half-expecting fairy watchers out there in the dark.

Then suddenly, coherent words emerged from his jumbled hissing.

“Devil’s wife—serve him we-eel this night.   Tyler’s—friend too—his wife of the soul, taken.  Taken before she was taken, long dead but still alive.  Weelll enough, but still crying in horror.  Babbles inside, the dark within the dark.”

“Ask him where she is,” Doc whispered over his head.

“Where’s the woman?” demanded Dale, shoving more liquor over to the shaman.

“Emily—thrown into the earth for later.  As the squirrels do.  The Black Ones put them away, puts them into the inescapable lair.  The nest.  The hole.  Lets the apes eat them later.  Eats them later.”

“Where—”

Dale shushed him.

“Dark,” the shaman went on.  “That wax-face woman—hungry—a stranger at the teat.  Doc—stuck in the devil’s mouth to his neck—broken nerves, the fear of hell for seeking it.  Courage cut short, cut with the venom, with the bile, with the black smoke of his own thoughts.”

“What? What venom?”

Again, Dale shushed him.

“Small-fire pours from the mouth to make the Doctor-man bellow, bellow like a calf.  Go—run home—go back, says the mind—run away, away, to live, says the heart,” the shaman said.  And he stopped to look off at the stars, his eyes rolling back into his head.

“Ask him where she is,” Doc whispered.  “Quick!  He’s going to sleep.”

Dale wiped his beard on his sleeve and said, “Come back to now.  Leave the dark, go outside.  Where are you now?”

“Ah but you already knoooo…. Emily—hot in the halls of the dying,” drawled the shaman.  “Emily—hot under the water that rises but does not fall. Nashville not far enough, ye fools. Take off your Human head!  Put on the Zombie’s head!  Don’t wear helms.  No armor!   Bare feet—softer,” and he rolled over in a sodden pose, as if asleep.  “Nashville, it says.  But it fails.  All will matter not.  Death settles the matter.  In the end, it slithers around all, and Doc will burn and know why the Zombies fear not the cooling blue pain.”

Doc felt a shudder, looking at this silent, uncompromising pose.  He seemed frozen in the stance of a crab, an impossible angle for a man to assume for longer than a moment.

And yet he did not move.

Then the earth rumbled, or else it was his bones.

And the shaman fell.

“Why do they come,” Doc whispered.

“They yet seek The One… The Black Ones search out the one, the one who cannot be turned.  The one that remains as himself in death.  They hear rumors, whispers, of the one who remains a man …. Inside her ooooo, but mistaken… misguided, they are.  Trust, adventurers, the source is not fully of this world or the next, but a thing stuck between… Pray it does not seek to creep into your bones and flesh.”

And suddenly, the shaman snored.

Chapter 36

As Doc and Dale gathered themselves up from that encounter, the campfires were dead, or dying.  There was a gray light on the water with an elusive stirring of birds through the foliage overhead.  

But not a sound came from the fellows. 

The shaman lay with his bared chest not a hand’s length from the dirk they had given him. 

Dale and Doc looked at each other with the same unspeakable things in their hearts:  Did he see the future?  Did his mind take flight from his soul to go to Atlanta, lair of the Blackwaters known as longmongers?  Or was this all just an evil dream from a black moment of desperation?

In the end, it mattered little.  And it made little sense.  They only knew that Emily, and the legendary one that loved here, were suffering.  Doc had no doubt of it.  Doc looked over at Tyler.  He was feigning sleep. The poor soul had not managed any real rest.  Doc knew then he had to do what he could to help him get them back.  He had to use every means at his disposal, even if every soul in what remained of mankind thought it folly—which is exactly what Dale seemed to think.  Having spent time with the wetmen, he put more stock in words of the shaman, who had all but said they were doomed.

He and Doc stood silent above the sleeping shaman.  Neither of them was moving, and neither was uttering a word.  But Doc could see he was unnerved.

“Thundering fuckl,” Dale whispered.  He shook his head, knelt down and picked up the dirk, placing it back in the fine walnut box for him.  “It serves us right, the weight in our guts.” He was speaking in a low voice Doc had never heard him use.  “We should have asked nothing of it!  It serves us fucking right.”

He looked out at the water.  Then he looked at the small trail back northeastward.

His eyes followed his slow, deliberate gaze. 

“This is madness,” he whispered.  “The madness of the self-murderer. ”

Guilt robbed Doc of the power to answer.  He felt his blood freeze with the fear that he might be leading his fellows to their death. 

Then there was the faintest fluttering of leaves.  They both glanced fearfully into the gloom of the forest like two assassins that had been caught in the act of something horrible.  Doc was trying to knock the fear off his own brow, when among the shadows of the pines an open space suddenly revealed itself to be a face.  It looked out upon them gleaming eyes, like those of a crouching panther.

“Squeamish fools!” muttered his uncle.

They both leaped back from the thicket.

Then, at imminent risk to their own lives, they stood erect, defiant against his glare. 

“We had to make sure where she was!” Doc said, too loudly.

“Yes, Mister, and bind yourself as fear’s prisoner all the way!” Jickie added.

“Pah!  Fear?  Fear!  What is this shit you call ‘fear’?” Dale asked, which made Doc’s heart lift once again with hope.

Doc was learning, he supposed, that there are things that are better left unspoken.

“Indeed!   I wash my hands of even learning what it means!” Doc said in indignation, and he strode off to his tent.

At which he heard his uncle laugh.

“Good, boys!” he thundered.  “Very good!”

Doc had known for some time that the worst of cowards easily justify their acts at the time they commit them; but afterwards—afterwards is a different matter, for the thing left undone haunts a mind the worst.  But the uncomfortable reflections of the night kept trooping throughout his mind.  How near they had been to regarding it all as hopeless.  Indeed, Doc felt a certain creepiness that set all his flesh quaking.  It was those maddening words about venom and fire. 

He heard Dale snorting out some sort of inarticulate disgust as he tumbled into his tent next to his.  He tossed to his other side and stared to the last embers of the camp fire, trying to gather himself.  The courage one gets from the comforts of civilization was rubbing off at an alarming rate. 

Looking out of the tent flaps, Doc saw his morose friend Tyler on the other side of the fire, leaning so close to a tree that he was barely visible in the shadows.  Thinking himself unseen by him, he wore such an annoyed, sad expression that it made his heart sink.  Before he realized that he just needed some time to himself, Doc had bounded over the fire and sat with him.

“Mister Doc,” he said, the formality of it confirming that he did not wish to be disturbed.

“The shaman saw that she is still alive,” Doc said.

He might as well have struck him with all his strength full in the face.  Instead of nodding at him as the old boy normally would, he broke into muffled, but wolfish crying. 

That sound, brought on by hope and sadness, was as sad a noise as Doc had ever heard.  It would ring forever in his ears; and he would have heard nothing of it had he been in his right mind.

“Hulloo! What’s wrong out there?” bawled Mighty Kenzo’s voice from the tent.

“Nothing—false alarm!” Doc called. 

“Keep a stiffer hand on your alarms then, boy!  Or I’ll step all over your head.”

At that, Doc clapped Tyler’s shoulder and retired for the night. 

Rising with the first streaks of dawn, Doc was surprised that his thoughts were cleaner and clearer.  The wetmen were gone.  The river was down to a minor roar.  And as their vessel was reloaded, he was anxious to get going.

Strange, what a good night’s sleep can do. 

But scarcely had Doc thought this than Dale leaped into the air like a wounded rabbit.  A claw whizzed past his face and glanced within a hair’s-breadth of Gig’s head.  Both fellows were dumb with amazement as Tyler head-shot a pair of Shado.  Such was almost considered treachery outside the regular military, as taking a man’s kill would have not been surprising among the barbarous tribes known as the Army, Navy, of Marines.  But there were no “regulars” within a hundred miles of them.  Uncle Jickie would have dragged him pell-mell back to the beach, but Doc needed no persuasion.  Rocco tore ahead of all of them, getting to a riot shield he had brought. 

Dale kept by Doc’s side as they set off at a hard run behind the rest of their warparty.  As he ran, Doc peered out in the undergrowth.  He saw only the foliage as it bent and rose.

More were coming.

Then Doc tripped, crunching his toes into a fallen log.

That fall saved his life.  A flat set of teeth hissed through the air above his head and stuck fast in the bark of an elm tree.  Scrambling up, he gathered his knife the rip the beast under the chin before annihilating his skull with a single shot from his 40. 

Then all fell silent again.

Had the others backed off?

They scrutinized the underbrush, but there was no sign of anyone, except the cedars that absorbed some retreating forms.  Doc wrenched the knife free from the zombie’s neck.  The beast was young.  The skin on it was curiously ornamented with such a multitude of intricate carvings that he could not help but wonder if they more than just scars.  Then Doc discovered that the medley of lines were wrinkles. 

“What are these wrinkles, Dale?” Doc asked.

He fingered them closely.  “Dehydration.”

“Not enough water?”

“Blood.”

Blood… the word called a picture to his mind of an enormous gap between the malicious eyes of a zombie he had seen.  Even “alive”, there had been a sort of ooze, but nothing you would call blood.

“Damn offspring!” Gig shouted, not suppressing his anger.  “To the frozen depths of hell but these fuckers are uglier than the first generation!”

Of course then Doc knew that by uglier he meant more human-looking.  He almost smiled;
blood-sucking zombies
.  It was cheesy enough for a movie in the Old World.

Chapter 37

Rowing swiftly, beyond the reach of a band of watchful
offspring
, which Tyler felled from 300 yards, the fascinations of the wild once again beckoned like a siren.  Vast woodlands, where a dozen Walmarts could be dropped without any hope of finding them, seemed to sweep on forever to the very ends of the earth.  With the purple recesses of the hills on one side and the oceanic expanse of the forest on the other, all the charms of clean, fresh freedom were quickening his blood with a strange and fevered delight.

The river, with its brownish waters, flowed placidly beneath their vessels.  For two days they went without so much as a hint of another soul existing on Earth. 

This was about as far south as Doc had ever traveled.  He had been north to Bowling Green, Kentucky, once, following a rumor that inoculations were being produced and dispensed at the University there.  The trip had proven fruitless, save a bar of gold Tyler managed to wrest without incident from what was surely a trap of some sort—in fact, the whole rumor had probably been part of the same setup.

He tsked, shuddering to think of the risks that had taken and the resources they had wasted on that journey.

They hugged close to the numerous rocky shores to their left, which stood guard like a wall between them and the heavy winds of a quickly approaching spring. 

When at last they passed a north-bound vessel, with men clad in Kevlar, Doc judged they were once again near the habitation of a town.  They arrived at a compound called Foxwash at sundown.  A banner with a large penis was flying above the courtyard.

“Is that in our honor?” Doc joked up to Kenzo, who had asked to be at the lead of their party for a while.

“Not much is,” he laughed.  “We commandos aren’t oppressed with the weight of honors!  In truth, I think it welcomes the prostitutes.  Or it used to.  Like the boobie statue back in Beergarden, which Gig thought was thirsty for his cock!”

“She didn’t say no,” Gig grumbled.

Doc shook his head.  Speaking of thirst, though, he could go for a bucket or two of beer, and maybe something hot on his stomach.

“Is this the weekend by any chance?”

Doc suddenly realized as far as they were concerned the past week had been entirely composed of weekdays.

“Out of your reckoning already, sir?” Uncle Jickie asked.  “By fuck, boy.  Wonder how you’d feel if you’d had ten years of it!”

Everyone looked at each other, some with a few shrugs.

Situated on the riverbank of Foxwash was a typical stronghold.  Wooden palisades twenty feet high ran around the whole town and the inner court enclosed at least two acres.  Heavily built blockhouses with spears and lances poking through arrow slits gave a comforting to the place, but in truth, such defenses would probably only enable a pack of shado to scamper up the walls more quickly.  The blockhouses were apparently to repel attack from the rear, while the face of the fort commanded the river. 

Fatigued from the trip, Doc took little notice of the enthusiastic interchange of news and greetings as guards docked the Feisty-Uncle.  They were led by yet other stout guard into the gate.  

Stores, halls, warehouses and living apartments for an army of clerks, were banked against the inside walls, and the main building with its spacious assembly room stood conspicuous in the center of the enclosure.  As they entered the courtyard, one of the chief traders was a young man, perched on a mortar in the gate.  The little magnate condescended a thin smile of welcome until Mighty Kenzo came up. 

“I say,” blurted out the young clerk.  “Now here’s a man of renown!  Mister Kenzo!”

“Oh!  Deck the halls with buffalo balls if it’s not the young shithead that thought his neighbor’s cat wanted to play with my rabbits!” 

The bearded youth flushed at the sally of laughter.

“Shit.  Don’t listen to the growls and farts of that gruff old mastiff.  He got himself a pretty daughter and a perfectly fat wife out of that affair.”

“Hold it at that, Mister Tilli!  We don’t put treasures on display in the store front like you shortmongers!”

All the fellows, even his fellow sellers, laughed.

“No,” broke in the Tilli, “but there is no law against looking at a pretty bit of memory when it comes calling out in this wilderness.”

To which, every fellow of the crowd said a hearty, “Here!  Here!”

Doc laughed a bit then shook wrists with Tilli before he walked off to stretch himself full length on a bench.  The men began to disperse to back to their vending stalls.  The early twilight, the sort unique to evenings at the back end of winter, was gathering in the courtyard, and as the night wind sighed past, Doc felt the caress of warm air on his face and his mind was sent, not any particular memory, but to the innocent, yet terrifying, boyhood days in Philadelphia.   How far away those days seemed.  Yet it was not so long ago.  Surely it is experience, not time, that ages a body. 

The sky was dark and overcast.  Doc gazed high above the sloping roofs for some sign of moon or star. 

Without lowering his eyes, he stood. 

Then he reached out beside him to keep his balance, fearing he might faint.  His breath was gone.  What he saw framed in a window of stars, dropping from high in the sky straight towards them, was a small, but nightmarish machine.  It was a mechanized devil, a device favored by compounds who had run out of supplies and would raid another. 

“Drone,” Doc whispered airlessly.

The flying machine was painted black, and of course, being inanimate was inherently innocent; but the
intent
of it gave it a menace that was hard to put words to—t he four heads like a venomous cottonmouth snake, and atop the head was a suggestion of sorcery—the devil’s sorcery, arrow-like spikes that writhed with magic blades atop them, fanning downward a shivering blue-veined wind that could spell hell. 

“Drone!” Doc roared

Embarrassment, like a bloom of living fire, erupted in his cheeks as he watched activity exploded all around him.

People knew what to do:  Hide the goods, and hide yourself, for an enemy will rarely attack an enemy that cannot count.  And whatever you do, don’t try to shoot it down, because not shooting was far, far better than shooting and missing.

Yet he hadn’t so much as moved.

“Hells depths, Doc!” bellowed a deep voice in his ear.  “Hide!”

When Doc looked around, he had no idea who had said it—all he saw was the enormous mass of people, disappearing into whatever shelter was closest.  Doc launched himself, diving behind a stack of mead buckets

“Agh!  Fuck!” he screamed.

“Stay down!” bellowed several voices.

Then the machine suddenly drew up into the black night and a small pair of wings fluttered out from the sides and its entire heft rose. 

Doc rose from behind the buckets, shaking, as it sailed higher and higher into the far southern sky.  The tremendous silence around him ceased, and a small army of men came rushing, half-dressed, towards him shouting questions.  For a moment, Doc still stared into the sky, shaking.

It was only then that he noticed someone had put a sack in his hands, with a few blue seeds spilling out of a tear.  He picked up one of the seeds, surprised to find writing on it.  Pfizer was etched into each and every one, so finely that for a brief flash Doc thought he was imagining things.  He was so winded and confused it took him another moment to realize they were pills of some sort.

In the next instant Doc was surrounded by shaggy, ragged-looking rabble, commandos from the mountains, commandos with long white hair, commandos, like him, with beards like avalanches of hair, commandos half-dressed or dressed in ancient Kevlar, or some with gorgeous, sturdy longshirts of armor like the longmongers wore—in all, there wasn’t one manner of man known to him that didn’t surround him at that instant.

“By fuck!  I’ve never seen a soul spot one so quick!”

“I saw eyeballing it nearly before I even heard it!”

“Frozen hell, son!  I ain’t seen eyes like that on a hawk!”

Doc had no idea how to stop the torrent of false compliments, and he justified the silence on his lips by telling himself that even the stoutest of human hearts need something to celebrate every now and again.

“What an eye!  What a fucking eye!  What is your name, mister?”

“Doc,” Doc told the onlookers.

“How old are you?”

Uncle Jickie and the rest of his party were gathered nearby now.

“How old? …  I was thirty three when I got here.  But by fuck I just got scared straight to fifty!”

Every one of looked at each other, silent as snow in the cedars.  Then a raucous wildfire of laughter erupted, spreading among the spectators so rapidly that even his Uncle Jickie put his hands on his knees and had a good chuckle.

Doc smiled as a pair of old men examined the blue “seeds”, debating on what might grow from so curious a start.  Spectators were lining each side of the path of the banquet that was to be held in his honor.  There was a sad side to the clamorous welcomes and handshakes and surprised recognitions, of course.  The first part was Tyler, seeing him force a smile.  The other thing was a question:  Hadn’t these stupid bastards seen him shaking, nearly pissing himself from heart-freezing fear? 

Now, with hard-working men offering up belongings to help in their quest and, worse, their stores of food for this banquet, Doc had a harder time dealing with his lies by omission.  Now and then, strong men would fall in his arms, and they would embrace like women, and they would tell him with covered emotion of someone they had lost to a raiding compound, neighbors they thought were friends.

All night, the confusion of false compliments continued.  The dull tread of booted feet echoed in his guilt headas river rats and men carried pack after pack of beer and supplies to riverbank for them to choose from on their adventure. 

Meanwhile, in the main hall, the compound’s Governor, an old man named Boris, made a motion with his hand.  Everywhere, men lowered their voices, and as his party passed along that room to Boris, Doc knew that his fiery uncle was pleased, his determined look begging him now not to spoil the revelry of the night. 

“Are ye the one called Doc?”Boris asked, as beer was poured.

Doc looked at his uncle, and his uncle nodded.

“That is my name, Mister Boris.”

“Then unbuckle ye belly, ye’ll see the thick of a woman pregnant with twins for you leave my compound!” said the old man, followed by a hearty wail from the crowd.

Faster than the cooks could sort the meats, great bundles were heaped on the table.  By midnight, bellies were crammed from basement to attic.  Smoked salmon, opossum, pork, chicken, squirrel, venison, goat, beef—these and other rare meats, which were the testimony to the luxury of the kingly meals availed to commandos of the wilderness.

Doc turned to face a tall, dark man with the swarthy complexion and Kenzo’s intensely black eyes.  It was his nephew Tilli, who joined his uncle at the lng table. 

Doc looked at them, vaguely envious.  He had become accustomed to the soft-spoken, melodious speech that betrays wilderness living; if Doc were to encounter a descendant of a cutter anywhere in America, Doc could recognize the wilderness in his blood by that rhythmic trick of the tongue.

Grand were the tales around the long dining hall that night.  Explorers, warriors, and commandos from all over the wilds of Tennessee and Kentucky were assembled four hundred strong.  It seemed each had a tale larger than the other, buoyant and unrestrained, enthusiastically given to hilarious fellowship.  Their manner and clothing were rough, men who have passed a lifetime exploring southern wilds have much to say, and it is all worth hearing.  So the feast was prolonged.  And indeed, before the gathering broke up, plastic gallon buckets of beer, as well as candles, had to be renewed.  Lanterns swung from the black rafters of the ceiling, and piles of half-eaten foods stood in flippant rows down the center of each table, showing that men, not good barmaids, had prepared the banquet.  Stuck in iron brackets against the walls were the pine torches.  They had been dipped in some resinous mixture and now flamed brightly with the smell of incense.  Tables lined the four walls of the hall and ran in the form of a cross at the middle of the room.  Backless benches were on both sides of every table.  As his uncle finished one of his tales to a hearty round of, “Here, here,” he leaned back and whispered, “Ah, nephew!  Isn’t this fine?   Is this not worth living for!”

Doc nodded, drifting into slumber, his drunken face dropping atop pile of smoky mashed potatos.