The Remnants (Book 2): Dead Wrong Page 2

  The gardener pulled itself towards the man with the gun, who was still looking down at the dead woman with one eye squinted and the other raised to a quizzical angle.

  He has gray eyebrows, Seth noted. Brown hair under that hat, but gray eyebrows.

  The man glanced at the crawling zombie with marked disinterest, though it was perhaps only ten feet away and closing. He strode around the dead woman at his feet, annoyance crossing his face, and looked off at the horizon. He shouted, “You missed!” and gestured angrily at the approaching dragger with his pistol.

  A moment later another CRACK rang out, and the gardener's head blew sideways. Its body shuddered and lay still.

  The man frowned, holstered his gun, and yelled out, “Oh, hardee-har-har!”

  He snorted once, horse-like, and put a finger to the big walrus mustache clinging beneath his nose. He took his hat off and a mane of sunburned hair tumbled out. He let his eyes wander over the yard, as though seeing it for the first time. They were pale blue, a color that made Seth think of public swimming pools. He thought the man could be forty or fifty or even sixty years old.

  The pale eyes had just settled on the shattered kitchen window when Melinda stuck her head out of the hayloft hatch. She looked curiously at the three bodies spread about on the ground and said, “You got them.”

  He shifted and glanced up at her. If he was surprised to see a living child, he didn't show it. “No ma'am. Sadie got two of them. I just shot the lady.”

  Seth dragged the rifle sights over the man.

  “Who's Sadie?”

  “Sadie's my wife. She's down at the end of your driveway. She never could cook worth a damn, but she's pretty good with that rifle.”

  “I can cook,” Melinda said.

  “Oh yeah? Can you make shepherd's pie?”

  “No, but I can make cereal, and I can cook a cow. We cooked our cow already though.”

  “Is that so,” he said. His eyes darted back over the dooryard. “What's your name, miss?”

  “Melinda Walker. I'm seven-and-a-half. How old are you?”

  “Walker? I saw that name on the mailbox.”

  While they spoke, Seth made his way across the kitchen to the front door. He came out of the house slowly, keeping the rifle on the stranger, who looked in his direction. A bemused smile rippled briefly over his face.

  Seth didn't like that one bit, and put his own face into a hard scowl as he drew near. In movies they always had hard scowls and clenched teeth.

  “Hello,” the man said.

  “Get out of here,” Seth said. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will.”

  The stranger shrugged. “Fair enough, son. No harm intended.” He turned and started down the driveway, stuffing the sunburned hair back under the black hat as he went. He stopped after a dozen paces and turned back to them. Seth's hands were sweaty, and he nearly fumbled the gun at the sudden movement, but if the stranger noticed, he didn't show it.

  “You should know,” he said, looking from Seth to Melinda and then to Seth again, “there's more of them around.”

  “More of who?”

  “You know.” He waved a hand at the dead woman in the yard. “Them. Rotters. We tracked this one for a day-and-a-half and we passed around a big group of them, just north of the city.”

  “How many?”

  The stranger scratched his mustache, seemed to consider the question. “Well… maybe a hunnerd, maybe two. Today was the first time she was almost alone — leastways, enough for us to take her.”

  “Her?” Seth looked at the dead woman on her back in the yard. Half her face was gone, because this man had shoved his pistol under her chin. She looked like any other dead he’d seen. Dangerous, kinda vacant, but no different from any other. “Why were you after her?”

  “She killed our dog,” the man said, with a simple shrug. “The other two I didn't care about particularly.”

  “You chased her a day-and-a-half over a dog?”

  “Sure. Max was a good dog.”

  “What kind?” Melinda asked. She had clambered down the hayloft ladder and was coming out the barn door. She had a particular interest in dogs.

  “Huh?”

  “What kind of dog was Max?”

  He waved a hand. “Oh, just a mutt. A real mongrel of no special worth to anyone.” He paused, and released a heavy, regretful sigh. “That doesn't mean I can let some dead bitch eat him and get away with it, If you'll pardon my frawn-says. That’s not really what I wanted to tell you about though, boy. I wanted to tell you about the rotters. They're starting to move, you know, to... to drift around, I guess, like birds. That's the plainest way to say it. They're drifting like flocks of wild turkeys. Spreading out from the cities, making big circles. You'll see more of em pretty soon out here.”

  Seth's eyes shifted around. He wanted to stay focused on the man, but the words stoked his paranoia, and he simultaneously wanted to see what was behind him and on either side. “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Four Corners, just west of the city. We mostly cleaned out all the dead in town, Sadie and Jake and me. But then, there wasn't that many to begin with.”

  “Is it far?”

  “About a half-a-day’s ride on horseback. We got two horses, Sadie and me. You kids want, you’re welcome to come. Plenty of room, and we could use the company. It’s just us and Jake.”

  He held out his hands palm-up. “Come on, boy. This here is no life for two kids. What do you say?”

  Seth looked at his sister, and at the dusty dooryard and the shattered kitchen window and the old farm truck and the graves. He thought about the Army, and the fat lady, and the Gorton's Fisherman with his duffel bag full of banknotes.

  Melinda looked right back at him.

  Seth lowered the barrel of his rifle. “Come out here, Mel,” he said to his sister.

  4

  It didn't take them ten minutes. They had packed travel bags the night before in preparation for their journey to New Mexico. Mostly bottled water and what was left of the canned food and the little pistol that wasn't so useful. Seth had dumped all the textbooks out of his school backpack to make room, and stared blankly at titles that seemed faintly ridiculous to him now, like UNDERSTANDING ALGEBRA and EARTH SCIENCE and RISE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

  Melinda had a pink Powerpuff Girls backpack that she had filled with a box of spaghetti noodles. Seth hadn't objected, but he'd made her add three water bottles.

  He hadn't argued with her too hard because he didn't really expect they'd make it all the way to New Mexico anyway. He hadn't even bothered to find a map, and for all he knew, the clunky website with its grandiose promises of salvation was a cruel joke, or an old-world relic of some dead nerd's post-apocalyptic roleplaying game. All it really had been was an excuse to get out and find something. Anything. What Seth knew was that they couldn't stay on the farm, just he and his sister, alone. Big Kev had been right; that way was death.

  “My name is Noone Tompkins,” the man said, leading them back toward the road. He paused in mid-step and gave them both a courtly little hat tip.

  “Noon, like high noon?” Seth asked.

  “Yes, but with an E at the end. My folks named me No One. First name No, middle name One. I just combined it to Noone when I grew up. That way people just think my parents musta been hippies, and not just cruel and thoughtless.”

  “Why did your parents name you that?”

  “You know,” he said, in tones of mild amazement, “I never asked.”

  5

  A big woman with jittery eyebrows – they bounced up and down on her brow regardless of her expression – was waiting for them at the foot of the driveway. Her hair was graying brown and tied in a severe bun, which gave her a matronly air, and she wore a paisley housecoat like a woman hanging laundry in the 1950s. She held a long, bolt-action rifle by the barrel at parade rest.

  “Well, hey there,” she said, as they drew near. She smiled at them both, but her eyes were flat, as tho
ugh thinking of something else.

  “Hey,” Melinda said. She was wearing the cowboy hat she'd claimed the day before, and she tipped it in a gentlemanly manner, as Noone had done to them.

  The woman smiled again, but it was a dim, misty smile. “Are you a cowgirl?” she asked.

  “Yes I am,” Melinda said. “I like to eat cows.”

  The woman didn't laugh, but lingered on the children for a moment before shifting to her husband. “All done up there?”

  “Yep,” Noone said. “Max is avenged, as any good dog should be, and we can go home. These two are gonna come along.” He glanced at Seth and Melinda, who introduced themselves.

  “I'm Sadie,” the woman said. “Can you ride horseback?”

  Seth said they could.

  “Why don't you come with me, Miss Walker?” Noone said to Melinda. “We tied them up behind that field. They get nervous when they smell the dead, so we couldn't bring them any closer.”

  “Okay,” Melinda said. She stepped forward and stuck out her hand. Noone smiled, a little embarrassed and a little pleased, and took it in his own. The two of them crossed the road and went into the field on the opposite side, leaving Sadie with Seth.

  Seth was uncomfortable. The woman just stared at him for a long while, a half-smile locked on her face and her eyes staring right through him. She looked like a mannequin in a big-and-tall store.

  Finally he said, “It's just the two of you?”

  She stared at him for a moment longer and then blinked once, slowly. “No,” she said. “We live with Jake. He's back at the house.”

  “Oh...”

  “You and your sister been here this whole time?”

  “Yes,” Seth said. He still wasn't sure what to make of the man with the mustache and the funny name, or this woman with the broken eyebrows that even now were dancing a jig atop her forehead, and wasn't inclined to reveal any more than he had to.

  “We've been in Four Corners the whole time, too. Noone and me and Jake. You'll meet Jake. I guess the little, out-of-the-way places were the best spots to be in, don't you think?”

  “Yes,” Seth said again, and meant it.

  Sadie shifted her weight and adjusted the rifle. She turned her head and gazed after Noone and Melinda, now halfway across the field. “He hated that dog, you know. It shit all over the rug and he beat it. The dog hated him, too.”

  Seth said nothing, and she looked back at him. “He cheats on me. Three times since we were married.” Her eyebrows abruptly stopped their frenetic dance and lay down flat on her forehead, which made her look cold and dreary.

  “I hope those whores are all dead now,” she continued, in a whisper. “I hope they’re good and dead right this minute.”

  Seth still didn't speak.

  6

  Noone and Melinda returned leading a pair of swayback mares that Noone called Bluebell and Circe. Seth, who knew a bit about horses, didn’t think they looked much like riding mounts – they looked like converted draft horses. Their saddles were only two old blankets folded over their backs.

  “Bluebell and Circe used to pull a buggy in the Harvest Parade,” Noone said, confirming Seth's suspicion. “That's all they did, one day of work a year. I found em in the stable behind the Historical Society, hungry and lonely. They're still not used to carrying people and they'll be doubly unhappy carrying two apiece, so I don't think they'll like you much.”

  “Don't you have a car?” Seth asked, not liking the look of the horses, one of which had sniffed at him once and then snorted disgustedly.

  “I got a pickup,” Noone said, “but the exhaust is shot and it's too damn loud to risk driving far in. You know, the dead can hear and sound carries far these days. Someday soon I'll take a trip into town and look for something quiet. Maybe one of those hybrids.”

  They managed to get on the horses with relative ease. Bluebell bucked a little when Seth got on behind Sadie, not liking his smell or his weight, but Sadie yanked hard on the reins and she settled into a quiet, sullen pout. Both horses seemed temperamental but obedient enough.

  “They know what's good for em,” Noone said, watching his wife. “If they don't behave, I'll give them both to the dead, and I think they know that.”

  “Horses can't understand you,” Melinda said, thinking of Prickly Pete.

  “You don't know much for a cowgirl,” Noone said. “Horses are smart as whips and can piece things together. They knew what was happening before any of us people did.”

  He lifted the reins and Circe soon fell into an easy lope. Bluebell followed without any prompting from Sadie.

  “When there was still TV they showed a video from some city back east somewhere,” Noone said. “Cops on horseback tried to charge a mob of the rotters like they were old-time cavalry soldiers, but their horses wouldn't have it. Threw the cops, stomped on em, ran off and left them for the dead.” He nodded to himself with approval. “Smart animals.”

  Seth said nothing. He was looking over his shoulder at the peaked roof of the farmhouse, trying to burn it into his memory before it faded from view. In minutes they had left it behind.

  A murder of crows soon roosted in the barn where Seth and Melinda had spent so many weeks. They multiplied quickly, and gorged themselves on wild corn that summer.

  With the kitchen window gone, it wasn't long before various critters moved in. A pack of dogs, turned feral by the absence of their masters, soon roamed the Walker property, hunting whatever small game they caught wind of. When they smelled any dead, the dogs retreated into the fields and waited for the air to smell safe again.

  Three years later, the farmhouse roof would collapse, sending hedgehogs, possums, and two raggedy coons scurrying, and making the crows in the barn take flight in sudden alarm.

  A scared young man on the run from the town of Salmon, Idaho – a place which had been plunged into a special madness of its own – stumbled across it months after that, and took up residence for a time. After a week of sleeping exposed under the caved-in roof, he tried to patch it with a scavenged plastic tarp, slipped off the top of a stepladder, and broke his neck on the hard wood of the front steps — the same front steps where years before a frightened ex-soldier named Riley had been stabbed to death.

  The remains of the house, its base rotten and overgrown with goldenrod and sumac, fell into a pile of timber and shingles within a decade.

  None of which especially mattered.

  7

  Noone Tompkins thought they'd been lucky.

  It was near nightfall and not a single rotter had noticed them. They'd quietly zigzagged their way around the perimeter of Bozeman, skirting the worst of the shambling masses, and now they were almost home – within the hour, if he pushed their pace.

  The house he and Sadie and Jake called home had previously belonged to one Charlie Ames, the well-to-do owner of a combination gas station and Subway sandwich franchise, and a real high-falootin’ bag of shit, if you asked Noone (no one ever did, but he’d have said so).

  Charlie’s house had been the finest in Four Corners, redbrick and two floors and three bathrooms and an attached garage. The garage made a fine stable for Circe and Bluebell, and Noone had been happy to appropriate it. Noone was likewise happy to appropriate the fuel from Charlie Ames' gas station whenever he needed any, and his Subway sandwich fixings too, before they'd gone bad.

  “High on the hog,” Noone's father would have called it, between pulls from his pewter flask. “High on the hog and livin' large.”

  His father had been a majestic old drunk, and “high on the hog” had meant beer money to him. Noone had liberated the pewter flask from his father while he lay in a cheap pine casket in a rented suit Noone would not be returning. He carried the flask today in his own chest pocket, and whenever he took a swig he thought: high on the hog and livin' large.

  Sadie drank from it more than he did. A nip in the morning to perk up, another at mid-morning to even out. Three at lunch and so on and so forth. She and Jake had
gone through half the shelves in the Indian Liquor Store behind Charlie Ames' gas station.

  They'd have to scavenge more from Bozeman pretty soon. That is, if they wanted to stay high on the hog.

  Four Corners was starting to smell pretty ripe, now that the temperature was going up. He and Jake and Sadie had cleared out all the dead in town during the first month, and had been quick to kill any that roamed in afterward, rather than hide and wait for it to pass through. That had been Jake's idea, who seemed to believe that the rotters gossiped among themselves – that if they killed every dead that came within a mile of Four Corners, word would eventually get around to keep away. But Jake was a midget and had pretty strange ideas in general.

  He and Jake had worked in a slaughterhouse before all this happened, and they handled the dead in the same way they'd once handled cattle. Rotters were stupid, and not all that dangerous, if you stepped lively and kept your wits about you. All you had to do was lead them, the same way you led cattle up the race and into the plant. Noone had even used a cattle-killing bolt gun on one or two, and found it worked just as well as his pistol.

  Leading them was everything. Coming one at a time through a bottleneck, a single man could kill dozens. Hundreds. Noone himself had put down at least that many; Sadie a little more, Jake a little less.

  All of them were accustomed to the smell of guts and blood, but the stench that hung over Four Corners of late was a different animal altogether. Sickly-sweet, a decay smell that lingered on your tongue and made you spit. They would have to do something about it soon if they were to stay put.

  Bozeman was far worse. They'd crossed some of the foothills on the edge of the city, and from atop one of them, he'd reined Circe to a trembling stop, and they'd looked down on the elevated expressways choked with automobile pile-ups, at the smoldering rubble from the fires that had roared through downtown, at the dead gathered in listless, shuffling masses. At whatever was left.