Zombie Pulp (33 page)

Six months later…the world was gone.

Biocom was the great eraser that washed the blackboard clean. A world that had been a struggling, unruly child lost its innocence almost over night and became a deranged adult that shit and pissed itself hourly, its mind lost in a sucking black whirlpool vortex of dementia, madness, and resurrection.

The plague filled the cemeteries and emptied them again and that’s the way it was. Many contracted the plague, but survived it. But even survival left a little parting gift: sterility. No man or woman over the age of thirty came away able to reproduce. The young and virile became something to protect and covet. Without them, there was no children and with no children, no future.

And that had been five years ago. Five long, hard, cruel years.

This was the reality that Cabot and the others in Hullville lived with day in and day out. It was a bitter pill to swallow. Some people just couldn’t keep it down. They lost their minds, they raged, they pulled into themselves, they became sightless breathing shells. And more than a few slit their wrists or ate the gun.

But for all those, many more did not roll up like frightened pillbugs. They survived. They accepted. They adapted and overcame. Not just in Hullville, but in towns like Moxton and Pick’s Valley, Slow Creek and Nipiwana Falls. They accepted the reality that the new world was not the world they or their parents had known. The new world offered the survivors nothing; everything from food to shelter to a bucket to piss in had to be fought for, had to be wrenched free from the hard earth or taken from those that held it.

Survival.

A simple concept and one the human race was very adept at.

Graveyards and ghost towns.

A few struggling pockets of humanity trapped in-between. In Hullville, things were run by the Council. They made all the decisions. Guys like Cabot didn’t like the idea of driving the sick, the weak, the old and diseased out to the Deadlands and ghost towns, but there was no other choice. If the Wormboys weren’t given meat, they’d come for it.

So Cabot, like so many others, did what he was told.

For in the end, it was always better to be in the front of the truck than in the back.

*

The ghost town came up out of the fog like a clustering of tombs blown with fingers of white vapor. The headlights speared through the mist, but neither man looked too closely at what they might reveal in the deserted lots and leaf-blown streets. A pall of age and shivering malevolence hung over the town, just as thick and palpable as the fog itself.

“This is it, kid,” Cabot said, his voice dry and rasping. “This is where we dump our load.”

Blaine said nothing.

He hadn’t said a word in some time now. He was just as still and silent as the mist-shrouded streets spreading out around them. Cabot had been keeping an eye on him and, mile by mile, he had gotten more tense, every muscle drawn taut, his jaws clamped tight, sweat beading his face.

Cabot pushed the truck further into the ghost town.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught shapes pulling back into the fog, thought he saw eyes once that reflected red in the headlights. He’d done this so many times but it never got any easier. He fumbled another cigarette into his mouth with a shaking hand, his fingers trembling so badly he could barely fire it.

The Freightliner’s lights revealed the town inch by diseased inch: the dusty windows of empty shops, the spiderwebbed windshields of abandoned cars rusting at curbs, rotting houses leaning precariously on lawns gone wild with weeds. Everywhere, desertion and desolation, the American dream gone to rot and ruin.

In the back of the truck, the cargo was thumping and bumping around in the darkness, trying to shake off a drugged stupor.

Cabot pulled off his cigarette, pretending he could not hear them back there. Pretending he could not feel the flat, evil atmosphere of the town invading him and turning him cold and white inside.

“Another block,” he said. “We’ll be in the village center. That’s where we’ll get rid of our load.”

Blaine muttered something under his breath.

“What’s that, kid?”

He swallowed, then sighed. “I said it hasn’t changed much. Just older. Decaying.”

Cabot looked over at him. “You been
here
before?”

Blaine nodded. “This is Mattawan. This is where I came from. This is where we were running from that night our van puked out.”

“Why didn’t you ever say so?”

“Nobody ever asked me.” He shook his head. “Whenever I started talking about it, people shut me up. In Hullville, they all shut me up. You’re here now, they’d say. Where you came from don’t matter. We all came from somewhere.”

Cabot didn’t like this. He was getting a real bad feeling stirring in his guts.

“We hid out in a basement for three years,” Blaine said. “We foraged by day. The dead were in the streets then, too, but not as bad as at night. Ever notice how they’re so sluggish and stupid during the day? But then at night—”

“Kid, you should’ve told someone.”

“Nobody’d listen. Now I’m back. I’m home.”

Cabot was wiping sweat from his own face now. “Sure, kid. But this ain’t home. Not anymore. It’s a graveyard.”

And then Blaine reached over and quickly popped the lock on his door, threw it open and leaped out. Cabot cried out, caught the kid’s elbow, but he pulled free and was gone.

“Shit!”

Cabot hit the brakes and brought the truck to a stop. It rocked back and forth on its leaf springs. He shut the kid’s door, smelling the vile and polluted stink of the mist out there.

Then he jumped out himself, looking around in every direction.

“KID!” he called out. “GET THE HELL BACK HERE! DO YOU HEAR ME? GET THE HELL BACK HERE!”

His voice echoed off into the misty darkness, but there was no reply. Fog filled the headlight beams and brakelights, swirling and steaming. Shadows clustered in warped doorways, the air damp, heavy, and moldering.

Cabot wiped a dew of sweat from his face, his breath coming fast.

Maybe Blaine was naïve and just plain stupid, but
he
was not. He knew this was not just some empty dead town.
They
were out there and they were out there in numbers. Even now he could feel their malefic eyes crawling over him, sizing him up.

They wanted what was in the back of the truck.

But they would take whatever meat they could get.

Cabot started first this way, then that, stopping each time, daring to go further. There was a park across the way. He could make out the shapes of slides, swingsets, an upended teeter-totter rising up in the fog like a derrick. This more than anything said all that needed saying about the wasteland the town now was, the extinction of the people who’d once lived there.

A little house bordered the park and Cabot wondered if maybe the kid had gone in there, wondered if it could be that simple.

He stepped over the curb into the long yellow grass that climbed up above his calves. His breath would barely come. He could hear the truck idling, a stray breeze in the trees overhead. Shadows were crawling everywhere and death waited in each one. The house was sagging, weathered and gray. A lone monolith wreathed in darkness.

He moved further into the yard, the crackling of dry leaves under his step making something pull up tight inside him. He saw a birdbath in the yard. It was sprouting withered creepers. The front door of the house was hanging from its hinges, the darkness beyond sinister and pooling.

That’s when Cabot saw he was not alone.

From one dusty window above, a white face was staring down at him. Its eyes were black and glistening. He almost fell over backing away. The figure up there began slapping its hands against the window violently.

“Shit,” Cabot said and ran back to the truck.

He got inside and threw the locks, started breathing again.

He was shaking worse than the kid himself now, everything inside him gone loose and watery. He knew how things worked. He knew exactly how they worked. The kid was valuable to Hullville. They needed the young and the strong because they could still bring babies into the world and Hullville needed babies. They needed a next generation or they were done. He would be sixty himself come next birthday and his procreating days were long over. He was just as sterile as the rest. Not as valuable as the kid. He wasn’t old, but it was coming and when you no longer had a use in Hullville you went in the back of the truck.

That’s why the patrols went out.

They needed bodies. They found anyone they could and brought them in. Then the Council decided whether they were useful or not. Lots of them were. People with trades, doctors, carpenters, bricklayers, engineers. But others…alcoholics, drug users, the old, the lazy, criminals, the sick…they were culled off, went into the back of the truck for the trip to the ghost town. That kept the Wormboys happy.

And now Cabot had fucked up.

He had lost the kid.

The Council wouldn’t like that. He thought about calling it in, but he was afraid to. He could hear Chum now:
You lost the kid? Well, that’s a real pisser, Cab. He was set to marry up with Leslie Rule next month. They’d a had some beautiful babies, I’ll bet. Oh well. Shit happens. Dump your load and head in. Council will want to talk to you.

Shit.

Council will want to talk to you.

“Like hell,” Cabot said under his breath.

He pulled a pump shotgun from the rack and filled his pockets with extra shells.

He was going out there.

Out into the graveyard of Mattawan.

He was going to find the kid.

*

Night and fog.

Cabot moved through the mist, having no idea where he was going. It was a fool’s errand and he knew it, but to go back empty-handed…well, that just wouldn’t do. He eased by picket fences spotted with black mold, crossed overgrown yards where children’s plastic toys bleached colorless by the grim roll of years were tangled in weeds. He slipped by rows of rotting houses with broken windows and rooflines fringed with mold.

So far, so good.

He scanned the darkness with a flashlight, the beam reflecting back off the rolling fog. Sometimes he saw shapes out there. Sometimes they were just trees or bushes and sometimes they were something else. He used the flashlight sparingly, turning it on and then clicking it off just as quick. The Wormboys were out there. Mattawan was dark, lit only by the mist and the pale moonlight filtering through it. Light of any sort would draw them right away like moths to a streetlamp. They didn’t like light much, but they knew it meant prey when they saw it.

Cabot tried to focus his mind, tried to come up with some sort of plan.

Where would the kid have gone? He had lived somewhere in this gutter, only he was never particular as to where that had been. And what had happened in the truck? Had he been planning this all along or had the sight of the place just unhinged him?

He couldn’t have known we were going to Mattawan. Nobody calls it that anymore. Ever since it died it’s just been the ghost town.

But there was no time for that.

Cabot decided right then and there that all he could do was sweep around the general area, be quiet about it, then make for the truck before he became lunch. If he couldn’t find the kid—and he was starting to feel pretty sure he wouldn’t—then he’d make up some story, anything to throw him in a good light and shade the kid in a bad one.

Sound thinking.

Cabot moved down a street that was crowded with rusting cars and trucks. Some were smashed up against trees, others had popped the curb and died on lawns. Many had bird-picked skeletons behind the wheels. The town was wild, hedges and bushes consuming lots, ivies engulfing garages, yards lost beneath uprisings of weeds and straw-yellow devil grass. Tree limbs had fallen everywhere.

He kept moving, keeping a wary eye out for anything alive…at least, anything
moving.
The mist distorted everything. Turned trees into stalking figures, shaped fire hydrants into crouching forms.

He stopped.

Behind him there were footsteps…slow, measured.

He whirled around, tucking the flashlight into his pocket, both hands on the shotgun now. He waited behind a hedgerow, ready, ready. A warm stench like spoiled pork wafted through the air and sweat ran down his face. He caught a momentary glimpse of a hobbling stick-like shadow melting into the fog.

The footsteps faded into the distance.

Cabot waited another few minutes, then he was moving again. Stealthy, alert, his muscles drawn taut like piano wires, his blood pulsing hot in his veins. He moved over grassy lawns, frost-heaved sidewalks yellow with rain-plastered leaves. The mist was damp and chill about him, moving, swirling, encompassing. His heart was pounding in his throat, his temples.

Off to the left, a branch snapped.

He froze, unsure whether to go forward or go back.