Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 50

She died, and he lifted the baby, turning toward the dead. It let out a keening sound, and as one, the dead stiffened, as if in prayer.

"It's a girl." They were his very last words.

G.o.d save the Queen.

27/ Cody Goodfellow We Will.

Rebuild.

ON THE FIRST MONTHLY ANNIVERSARY of V-D Day, some residents of Ocotillo still came out to wave or put Old Glory up on their porches as Deputies Snopes and Bas...o...b..rolled up the nameless main drag in their armored cruiser, siren blaring to lift the curfew.

"Happy Death Day, suckers," Bas...o...b..hollered.

"Leave 'em alone," Snopes said. "Everybody loves a parade."

Bas...o...b..made V-D Day medals out of X-mas ribbon and teeth for the occasion, but only Bas...o...b..wore his, along with his Army purple heart and the special citation for the Battle of the Calexico Wal-Mart, two weeks ago. A Wal-Mart greeter's nametag hung from the ribbon; Hi' My Name is Sole Survivor.

Verna Schepsi swept the sidewalk in front of the feed store, but it was a fool's errand. The particles of ash that still rained down out of the sulfurous yellow sunrise were like downy snowflakes, merging into gray dust devils battling in the empty street.

Chubby Beckwith lumbered out of the Circle K and waved at them when he got to the end of his chain. Chubby was a good kid, always kept a fresh pot of coffee on until they ran out of it, but he got grabby when they stopped to top off the cruiser once, so they had to chop off his hands. It was all legal, the papers on file with the judge.

"Wanna go out to the ca.n.a.l and look for deadbeats?" Bas...o...b..was crocked early and itchy today, because his wife got into it with Taffy, their doberman pinscher. Reluctant to put either of them down, he was d.a.m.ned if he wasn't going to shoot something today.

"Waste of ammo," Snopes replied. "Besides, we got to go out and change the sign."

The sign marking the Interstate 8 off-ramp used to read Ocotillo; Elev. 47; Ft. Pop. 220; Gas Food Lodging. As soon as the dust settled after V-D Day, they revised the list of amenities with big stenciled red No's, and shortwave and CB frequencies to call those inside.

Snopes had the idea to borrow the Scoreboard numbers from the little league field. He displayed the number of the alive with the black numbers for the home team, and the number of the dead in the red for the visitors. The score was not encouraging: 32 to 67. Gabe Gonzalez got bit by his daughter last night, and after they woke the judge up to sign the order, she was put down. Everyone pretty much knew what he was trying to do when he got bit, so no one was overly exercised about it.

Still and all, a pretty normal day...

Bas...o...b..wanted to tack a I in front of the black number. "If any more gangs come looking for s.h.i.+t, we got to look tough."

"When the Army comes, we got to look meek, so they don't just bomb us. You heard on the radio what the Marines did to them rich d.i.c.ks in Palm Springs."

Snopes went up the road with his binoculars to check the perimeter. Oco-tillo straddled the I-8/S.R.46 junction, snug between the Anza-Borrego mountains, studded with fractured granite boulders and the dusty, drained lakebed of the Imperial Valley.

Nothing alive or dead had come up the 8 or down from the hills in over a week. Gangs and deadbeat stragglers from the conflagration that destroyed El Centro and Calexico still dribbled in from the east, but dead-beats couldn't cross the ca.n.a.l; burnt up with hunger and half-mummified by the desert sun, most of them dissolved like soda crackers in the swift current. Everything on wheels stopped where the deputies had blown the 1-8 overpa.s.s at the ca.n.a.l, and either turned north on the 46 or abandoned their vehicles.

After that doctor from La Jolla, n.o.body had successfully pled for asylum in Ocotillo. When they let him in with his wife and three daughters, they thought they'd turned a corner; but three days later, the s.h.i.+tbird ga.s.sed himself and his whole family with their propane tank. The house blew up and burned down both its neighbors.

People from the cities couldn't handle desert life, before or after Day Zero. Nothing out here had changed. There had always been laws on the books for dealing with aliens. If they were from outside the town's jurisdiction and had nothing to offer, they had to be treated accordingly.

A couple deadbeats had wandered into the minefield along the highway a while back, and parts of them still tried to crawl through the tumbleweed snarls of razor wire that flanked the interstate and encircled the town. The fields were clearly marked for living and dead alike, cardboard signs and rotting, chattering heads on pikes, but n.o.body took time to read anymore.

Vultures and crows feuded over the last sc.r.a.ps on the skeletons of the latest live invaders-a small herd of runaway horses that had blundered into the claymores set up between the outbuildings of the abandoned Pernicano ranch. The yard sale scatter of long, elegant bones and stringy flesh looked like the ruins of something built to fly. Sometime ago, he might have seen something sad or beautiful in it, but now the waste of meat just made his mouth water.

In the crisp heat haze of the quickening day, everything seemed to squirm with a tortured thirst for blood and sweat. Snopes went back to the cruiser. With sheet metal and chainlink fence for windows, it was already a sweat lodge inside. Bas...o...b..was in the driver's seat, hooting at the radio like football was back. "h.e.l.l yeah!"

Snopes pushed him over and got in, turned back down the off-ramp. Bas...o...b..loaded sh.e.l.ls into the shotgun and stuffed the rest of them in his pockets. "Dead wetbacks!"

They pa.s.sed Chubby again, who waved a stump at them as he chewed on the other, and a couple of boarded-up houses. Mrs. Chesebro wandered her dusty yard in her housecoat, looking for her cats. Next door, Chet Bamberger strained at the end of his leash to get his month-old morning paper. He wore only a wifebeater tanktop-second-skinned to him by yellow seepage, and drizzling maggots out the armpits. His muzzle was splashed with bright red blood, which, since his own was black and clotted in his feet and a.s.s, clearly solved the mystery of the missing cats.

Bamberger was unemployed, and lost his license for a third DUI coming back from the Golden Acorn casino, so he and the deputies knew each other pretty well. He liked to tune up his wife, but she never pressed charges. He beat up Connie in Pal Joey's Bar on V-D Day, and got locked up with some deadbeat tweaker from San Diego who'd crashed a stolen car on the off-ramp. The tweaker bit Chet, who died but got up and ate two of his cellmates.

Chet was one of the first locals to stir, and Snopes put four bullets into his torso that night. He sorely regretted that he didn't know, back then, that you have to shoot them in the head. Order was restored, Connie took him home, and he hadn't attacked anyone since. How they stayed together under one roof with no AC was a mystery to Snopes, but their problems were none of his business, until someone complained.

At the stoplight, Ocotillo showed that somebody really believed it would be a proper town, once. A shabby little bandstand and a pocket park once sat in the middle of the road, but now, the town square was a field of black, greasy ash. A sun-bleached and smoke-blackened banner hung "over the street, reminding him to catch the Ocotillo Settlers' Days festival that should have started last weekend.

The town hall was a st.u.r.dy whitewashed brick monument to itself, with a sheriff's station, courtroom, mayor's office, bas.e.m.e.nt holding cells, and a broom closet that doubled as a library and civil defense shelter.

V-D Day was mostly peaceful in Ocotillo, until the panicked ma.s.s exodus from San Diego swept through, with the dead in its wake. Half the town bugged out for the hills, while the rest hunkered down in attics and cellars, or the town hall building.

Ocotillo was overrun and picked clean. Sheriff Lorber and the deputies holed up on the town hall roof when the remaining civilians fled or went down in the shelter. The dead converged on the town hall, wading into the ankle -deep gasoline pool Sheriff Lorber had drained into the square, and gawking up at them as they tossed road flares.

When the fire died down, the wave had crested and fallen, and the remaining deadbeats were easy to put down or contain.

Judge Dooling came down from his ranch that morning, and since the Mayor was dead, he took over and restored order. Painting the town hall white again had been the first order of business.

The people in the shelter weren't so lucky. When the power failed and the water pressure dropped, rats boiled out of the toilets and bit them in the dark. All the rats had feasted on the bodies in the streets, and were rife with the bug that made them walk and eat.

Whatever still knocked around inside was too dumb to work the hatch, but the Judge ordered them to open it. Three deputies had family in the shelter, and at first, they were just happy to have them back. Benedetto got careless, and was bit by his son. He looked happy, when he and his family lurched out of their trailer for the chow wagon. Espinoza ate his gun that night, after executing his deadbeat wife and his mother. Bas...o...b..and his hogb.i.t.c.h wife fought almost every night, so for them, nothing much had changed at all.

In all, they identified seventy-nine walking dead residents, and sixty-three living. Getting the deadbeat locals to go home was easy; once chained down in their houses or at their jobs, most just did more or less what they always had, knocking around aimlessly until chow time, or until live meat got too close. Putting the muzzles on, though, was a king-h.e.l.l b.i.t.c.h.

Deputy Mark Snopes had no family in town. He came over from the San Diego Police Department two years before, and was d.a.m.ned lucky to have a job. The cop mentality-us versus them, with any civilian more or less one of them-ground on his nerves. He tasered an enormous lady shoplifter when she got aggressive with him. She turned out to be five months pregnant, and miscarried.

In a burg like Ocotillo, it was the same problems, but smaller and simpler. Half the town out of its head on drink or drugs or G.o.d, and beating on the other half; s.h.i.+theads and deadbeats pa.s.sing through, littering, and shooting up the signs; and wetbacks, creeping over the border and eating all the livestock. But it was better than the city. The desert took care of those who couldn't take care of themselves. You knew who the good people were, and the right and the wrong of a situation was writ plain. Now, more than ever...

Snopes swung the cruiser into the town hall lot and jumped out. Bas...o...b..called after him, "f.u.c.k you, then, I'm driving!"

Betty Olson saw him coming, and unlocked the door, then locked and bolted it when he barged through the saloon doors that led to the courtroom. "I wouldn't" she whispered, "The generator's out, so he's in a mood."

Snopes didn't knock. The courtroom was darker than the other rooms, with no slits cut into the boards over the windows, and no lamplight. The dark was all violet fireworks until his eyes adjusted to the pinp.r.i.c.k spiderwebs of daylight seeping into the courtroom.

In the stifling heat and silence, Snopes believed he could feel something scratching, like claws, on the concrete underneath his feet. Somewhere in the room, the dispatch radio crackled.

"Your Honor, even if there was something out there, we got bigger s.h.i.+t-beg pardon, sir-issues, to contend with, and I'm worried about Bas...o...b.."

"He's worried about you, Deputy."

"I can't see you, Your Honor."

A match flashed and kissed the mantle of a Coleman lamp on the judge's desk. "The dark makes it feel cooler." Only the gavel, drinking gla.s.s, revolver, and pale, liver-spotted hands came into view. "If we had gas to spare for the generators... but never mind. You wanted to resign, then?"

"You know I don't. I take this job seriously, and since Sheriff Lorber got bit, me and Doug are pretty much the only law left. But this patrol duty isn't going to solve anything. We're just wasting gas."

"Deputy, the migrant illegal traffic through this area is more of a scourge now than ever. You saw, yourself, what they did in Seeley and Calexico. You'd like to see them gather at the wire, I suppose, and overrun us again?"

Snopes couldn't lose his temper with the judge, but the way he tied you up with his questions made his head hurt. "I'd like to clean up the mess inside the wire."

"What mess is there? What haven't you been reporting to me?"

Snopes came closer to the light. The outline of Dooling's head floated in the dark above the perfect black of his robe. Hairless, blank as the moon. "Your Honor hasn't been outside in a while, so far as I know, but I have, and I file reports on everything. Five of our people got killed this month in, uh, domestic disputes-"

"Nine died this month, don't you mean, Deputy Snopes?"

"No sir, the other four were already-"

"They were citizens of this town, each and everyone, never forget that. We take care of our own."

"Sir, we have a responsibility to the living to protect them from the dead... don't we?"

Judge Dooling looked Snopes up and down, his bifocals and his dentures winking in the yellow light. "Deputy, do you know why the dead got up last month?"

Snopes felt as if the courtroom at his back was packed with laughing ghosts, laughing at him. "No sir, I don't."

The judge clucked his tongue, a dry baby rattler sound. "Then how can you say you know what will happen tomorrow?"

Snopes headed for the door. "I don't get it, Your Honor."

Dooling's chair creaked. "You are the arm of the law, young man, not its brain. The police have ever had the thankless duty of standing between the citizenry and their own worst impulses."

"Your Honor might take a different view of the law if he ever got off his fossilized a.s.s and tried enforcing it." That was what Snopes wished he'd said. Instead, he said, "Yes, Your Honor."

Dooling's voice got higher and louder as Snopes walked away. When Snopes stopped at the door, it went down low, but the superb acoustics of the courtroom delivered it to his ear. "This could be divine retribution, and it could be a disease, Deputy. But tomorrow, if it is a disease, there may be a cure; and if it is the judgment of G.o.d, then we will go to our greater reward with our sins against the innocent and ill weighing heaviest in our hearts."

Snopes tried hard not to shout. "Your Honor, Bas...o...b..and I are more than ready to take care of business with a clean conscience-"

"Have him start with his wife, then, would you, Deputy? You haven't lost anyone, so you can't relate. The state can't presume to write the law, but should act to preserve order and normality, until the rest of the world does likewise."

"Right, everything's normal."

"Yes, if we say so, and we do. We have restored order, and we will rebuild our town. Now there's a mob of dead illegal aliens ma.s.sed somewhere around the fence. See to it."

Snopes left, stopped in the library to get a tripod-mounted M-60 and two extra belts. Judge Dooling was also a retired Brigadier General in the National Guard, and had the keys to the armory in Seeley. All the heavy stuff went out to blockade the 8 to the east, to stop the deadbeat armies marching out of Mexico. Nothing came back.

Snopes got blindsided by the daylight when he went outside. He slipped on his shades. Bas...o...b..hung out the window with his arms thrown wide for the machinegun. "OK, you can drive."

They drove south, down the perimeter to where it swerved east to parallel the interstate. "All clear, s.h.i.+t!" Bas...o...b..growled, and cracked open a blood-hot beer.

Most of the ash came from El Centro, Calexico, and Mexicali, which the Marines torched with fuel-air bombs a week after V-D Day. They boiled over like anthills doused in gas, never-ending waves of deadbeats, scorched black and ravenous. The Marines got eaten or bugged out, and that was the last they saw of any order outside their own fence.

Snopes went up the ca.n.a.l to where the fence picked up at the trailer park at the north end of town. He cut across the back end of Bas...o...b..s yard on the cul-de-sac. Bas...o...b..waved to his wife, who drooled and banged on the bars of their bedroom window.

They followed the fence along the ca.n.a.l and turned north, and were almost back to the main drag when Bas...o...b..called, "Wetbacks!"

Snopes braked on the s.h.i.+ngled dirt road beside the abandoned Milbank ranch, which stood half in and half out of the perimeter. Donnie Milbank was a small-time TV minister, and when the Rapture found him still on earth, he packed up the family in the Winnebago and hauled a.s.s for some born-again survivalist enclave in Texas.

Where the fence circled behind Milbank's stables, he saw twenty or thirty ragged scarecrows loping across the dead brown lawn. They shambled jerkily through a gap in the razor wire, where it was trampled flat.

Snopes jerked to a stop. The nearest wetback was inside the fence, not ten feet away, flannel and denim rags caked with mud and dust and blood, greedy claws outstretched, slack jaws snapping in dumb, bottomless hunger. Bas...o...b..jumped out, laid the M-60 across the hood and opened up.

Bas...o...b..hosed them down like leaves off a driveway, walking the spray of lead across their midsections to slash them in half and pile them up against the wire.

Snopes stayed behind the wheel, but opened fire with the shotgun. He saw big scoops of meat lifted out of heads and chests and knew he was connecting; at this range, how could he miss?

It was hard to hear with the atomic-typewriter clatter of the machinegun, but when Bas...o...b..finally stopped to reload, Snopes could see how a few survivors tried to run for the open desert. He could hear how they screamed and cried and prayed.

His stomach filled with nightcrawlers and battery acid. "Stop! Bas...o...b.. Doug, Jesus Christ, stop! They're not dead!" He hit the siren and jumped out, ran around the cruiser to knock Bas...o...b..down, because his partner just laughed and kept shooting.

Snopes tore down the gun and shut off the siren. If any got away, he didn't see them moving.

Bas...o...b..got up and dusted off, punched Snopes in the shoulder. "f.u.c.k you thinking, f.u.c.ker? You wanna die?"

"Didn't you hear that? They were f.u.c.king screaming!"

"They were screaming in Spanis.h.!.+ They're f.u.c.king wetbacks, dude, and they look pretty f.u.c.king dead now. Come on, let's clean up."

Bas...o...b..covered while Snopes checked for survivors. There were none, and nothing got up. The bodies lay in mounds like wet laundry in the gap, which they'd made by throwing plywood from Millbank's stables over the wire. There were nineteen of them, as near as he could tell, what with their being blown open and running into each other like a ca.s.serole.

He saw two women with babies in slings, and another who might've been pregnant.

"Give me a hand, a.s.shole," Snopes said. He turned and vomited into the dust, wrapped a bandana over his face. They rolled out some tarp and got them ready for the chow wagon.

The bodies were pitifully light, skeletal, blistered skin flaking away, but they had walked out of Mexico alive. "We gotta get this s.h.i.+t in the chipper before lunchtime," Bas...o...b..said. "Stiffs'll think it's Thanksgiving."

"Your wife'll be so happy," Snopes said, "she might even let you get some."

"f.u.c.k you, Mark. Least I got something to come home to..."

They lifted one by the hands and feet, and were trying to sling it over on the tarp without spilling its innards, when Chet Bamberger came limping across the yard, with his chain and a chunk of drywall dragging behind him.

"Oh f.u.c.k," Snopes cried, and let go of the corpse's feet.

Bas...o...b..let go a hair too late, and blundered into the piles of razor wire. He shrieked, "Eeeeyagh!" and jerked up, but the curling steel teeth snagged his uniform and flabby back and dragged him back into the thickest of it.

Like all Ocotillo's registered dead citizens, Chet wore a chain and a leather muzzle with a bike lock on the back, and only a tiny hole for eating. They were fed slurry and carrion from the chow wagon, but said supply had petered out as even the dead stopped coming down the road.

Chet wasn't wearing his muzzle.

Snopes's left hand went out to pull Bas...o...b..free, while his right tried to draw his gun. Neither effort met with much success.