Dead Lands Pass the Ammunition (5 page)

“It’s Big D,” Lennie shouted. He waved his rifle over the wall, pointing it like a spear toward something on the other side. “Open the gates—It’s Big D!”

Two guys grabbed the blocks on either side of the gate and began pulling. I fingered the trigger guard on my gun. We all had them—anyone who owned a gun, that is. Without looking, I worked three shells into the chamber. Some of my twenty-nine shells had been worked with my fingers so much the metal wore a high polish around the rim. The metal and wood groaned as they pulled back the doors. My heart throbbed until I felt my ribs rattle. My gaze swept over the crowd again, brushing past face after filthy, dirt-stained face, searching for Mack. More camp members filed in behind the crowd.

Where was he?

Sunlight spilled across our faces as the gate split. Voices murmured.

The tree line made a near-black ridge behind a single, staggering figure.

Big D.

He’d been turned. He was one of them, the undead. I pushed toward the front of the crowd. Most folks backed away, stunned I suppose. Most of us had seen a loved-one turned before. It was the way of things in a dead world. Not that seeing a loved one with the blank eyes and snarling, undead grimace could ever be easy—something about Big D being a zombie was worse. He’d been our hope. Our leader. This staggering thing which stole his skin, his bones, terrified me like nothing had yet. He became a harbinger of our fates, a sign of the end to come for the rest of us.

Nobody raised a gun. My grip tightened on my rifle stock.

“Shoot him,” somebody yelled. I didn’t recognize the voice; maybe it belonged to me, my own voice.

I lifted the gun. It grew as part of my arm, an extension of my own flesh and bone. My eyes walked the length of the barrel and found range. Thirty yards. Maybe less. Still moving toward me.

Knock, knock, knock, my heart hammered my ribs.

Why didn’t the others shoot? Rex… Lennie… We all had guns—all of us.

Fifteen yards.

His teeth had yellowed and wore a dark stain. Blood?

Ten yards.

The side of Big D’s face had been torn open. I blinked sweat from my eyes.

Five yards.

Why didn’t anyone else shoot?

Guilt belonged to a different time.

It belonged to a place where people hurt each other out of malice, need for vengeance, or selfishness. Human beings wrought unmentionable cruelty upon one another long before the dead rose and the world went to shit. We hurt each other and then, later, in the comfort of our beds, our homes, our churches, we prostrated ourselves and begged for forgiveness. Some never knew guilt. Some reveled in the shit storm we’d made. Some thrived on adventure and risk and lawlessness.

I was not one of them.

~

The thing which had been Big D jerked as my shot tore through its lower jaw and neck. Even from five yards—especially with my shaking hands—I hadn’t made a clean hit. The body lurched and stumbled, collapsing on the packed earth at the camp’s threshold. It hit with a solid sound, the whump of something big and heavy and wet. One arm curled and uncurled in swift, involuntary spasm. A thick, black goo oozed from the remnants of its neck. Two cataract covered eyes spun lazy orbits.

Was it looking at the crowd gathered, searching for old friends’ faces?

“Jesus, Peter.” A man put a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t recognize his voice. Less than thirty live bodies in camp, and I didn’t recognize the voice. “You blew that bastard to hell.”

The crowd shuffled and shifted behind me. A couple of folks whistled.

My mouth dried like a slug under a shake of salt. My tongue wouldn’t move.

The guys who had worked the gate open hurriedly started to shut it. Several members of the camp lifted Big D’s corpse from the entry and carried it inside. The tide swept me as well. Moments later, with the gate shut, they dropped him and we stood in a ring around the body. My tongue became stone.

“Mack was right,” someone on my left said. “They got him.”

“Damn straight he was. Look what the rotten sons-of-bitches did to Big D. Poor bastard.”

Several voices muttered agreement. Whispers skittered around the fringe of the crowd. The acrid burn of gunpowder still hung in my nostrils. I took a step forward, toward the thing.

Big D’s jacket—the green Army surplus coat he always wore on a hunt—had a funny tear in the back, a hole no bigger than a thumb. My gaze flicked to the near-black barrel of my gun and back to the back of the corpse. I moved forward, knelt next to the body, and lay my gun on the ground. The eyes of the crowd leaned on my shoulders; their hot breath tickled my neck. Their stares cut like razors.  

“What is it?” a woman asked in a whisper.

My tongue thawed.

“Looks like something happened to his coat,” I said. My hand worked without conscious thought. It found the folding buck knife in my pocket and flipped open the blade. The sun crested the eastern wall, and its light glinted on the metal as I worked the knife back and forth, sawing through the jacket.

Beneath, in the grey-putty undead flesh, I found a bullet wound, a tiny hole in the flesh puckered around the edges. Not a big one, just enough for my index finger. Somebody had shot Big D in the back. Shot him with a small caliber gun. Somebody shot Big D in the back long before I ripped open the side of his face. The words caught in my dry, sticky mouth.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” I lied. “Looks like he tore it or something.” The other thing I noticed—the other inscrutable fact which didn’t leave my lips—was that Big D’s ammo was missing. Mack hadn’t brought any of the weapons or ammo when he’d run for his life. Somebody—not Mack—must have stripped them from his body.

My eyes lifted from the corpse.

Who would shoot Big D in the back?

A man shifted away in the crowd.

Mack.

After shooting Big D in face, I had twenty-eight shells left.

~

The undead had to eat. It’s about all they had to do.

Even those of us resigned to a life of waiting to die had to eat, too.

To stay as part of the compound, you worked as part of the compound. On off mornings, on those days I didn’t watch from the south tower, I played farm. I mucked chicken coops and the yard while others collected eggs. I then spent part of the morning on my knees plucking weeds from our garden. Flat-bladed water-grass sprouted between our peas, beans, and carrots each time it rained, and spring unloaded a holy deluge on us. None of us were farmers—we did the best we could with our meager abilities, stumbling along with trial and error and hoping more success came with experience. Canned goods collected from nearby towns and farmhouses wouldn’t take us to the crack of doom.

The choice held us in its cold grip: become self-sufficient or die.

I was rooting around on my hands and knees, plucking weeds from a row of beets when something blotted the sun. My head lifted from the work, and I found Ellen. She made a dark, angular shadow at mid-morning.

“Praying, Peter?”

Mud covered my hands. I wiped them on my tattered jeans. “Just that I don’t have to eat these beets.”

“Better than starving.” Ellen’s eyes wouldn’t meet mine. Her head shifted from one side to the other. “I’d like to talk again.”

I lurched to my feet. The muddy knees and thighs of my pants sagged under the weight. “Talk.”

Her head shook. “Not here. Not now.”

I squinted, focusing on her face. Damn me, but I wanted to kiss her—I wanted to smash her lips with mine just to feel something other than the bitter rot in my gut.

“Tomorrow morning, I’m on duty,” I said. “South tower.”

She nodded. “Before dawn. Be safe.”

I watched her walk away, her baggy shirt shifting over her lean shoulders. I watched until she disappeared behind the buildings on the opposite edge of the fields.  

~

I held my guard vigil alone after Big D’s less-than-triumphant return. From around three in the morning until well after dawn every other day, I sat on the south tower and waited for something to happen. I hoped for something. I would have prayed if believing in God was still an option.

Mack had become Donnie’s right hand. He was the one with an arm shoved up the head man’s ass. Some part of me felt surprised Mack didn’t take the rule of the place straight away. I figured it made sense, what with Donnie being the slick second in command bastard he’d always been.

Sitting on my platform, I puzzled through that hole in Big D’s back more times than I can recount.

Mack acted as guilty as anyone.

Mack never carried anything small caliber. He had his old man’s thirty-ought-six and a snub nosed .38 nobody but me and I’m sure Sasha knew about. The pistol was half worthless because he only had three rounds. Damn fool kept it tucked in his pants under his shirt as much as possible. The hunting rifle hung on his back like a newborn in a papoose. He jumped into the gang of meatwads that one fateful morning with the gun on his back. He probably fucked Sasha with the gun hanging back there. Whoever plugged Big D had used something smaller—a .22 maybe.

The thought made my stomach turn over. A .22 to the back, at least where it struck Big D, wasn’t going to kill a man. Not a guy as beefy as Big D. No, the bullet would have wounded him. A flesh bag must have finished him off, and judging by the lack of wounds, I’d say it had only been one of those monsters.

Their hunger might not go away, but their stomachs could only hold so much.

These thoughts echoed in my head while I sat with my shotgun and twenty-eight shells, waiting for the sun or grey death, whichever found me first.

These thoughts played an endless loop until Ellen climbed up.

The platform shook, announcing somebody’s presence. I tensed, sure the meatwads couldn’t be climbing to my perch, but wary of any one who might.

“Don’t shoot me,” she said. A moment later, her brown hair appeared. “That wouldn’t be friendly.”

I smiled. A breeze drifted over the platform.

“Damn it’s cold up here,” she said, patting her arms. She wore the same baggy clothing, a shirt which looked like it must have belonged to her brother and a pair of rolled-up jeans. “But look at the view.”

“It’s best without worrying about any unwelcome visitors.”

“I can go,” she said. “I just couldn’t sleep.” Her big eyes hung like a whipped puppy.

I didn’t buy the look for long. Ellen was too tough. Too savvy. She’d already shown me that hand. I leaned back on one hand.

“Couldn’t sleep? But yesterday you said—”

“Yesterday. Yes.” She shook her head, settled on her backside, and pulled her knees to her chest. Moonlight glowed in a strip of naked flesh at her ankle above a pair of ill-fitting black boots. “Thinking too much. It’s too damn easy to think too much in this damn world.”

I grunted.

She locked onto me with her eyes. “Thinking about you.”

I pressed my lips together. I hadn’t heard a woman say something nearly as nice since Amanda Gant at junior prom. Even if I was misreading her, it still felt like a heavy compliment.

We passed a long minute, both of us pale and blue under the moon.

“Another premonition.”

She shook her head. “I hope not.”

Her words didn’t comfort. I glanced toward the tree line. “How’d you know about Big D?”

She shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep that night, either.”

I rubbed a thumb against the polished stock of my shotgun. “Sometimes, I’m worried that… Fuck.”

“Fuck what?” She scooted closer. “You’re worried?”

“I’m not this guy. This gun. This watch shift. Even that bit with Big D when he came back to us. I peed myself a little when I shot him.”

She didn’t move. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t say anything.

“I’d never really shot anyone before, alive or dead. I just carried on with Mack.”

“Never really?”

“I never did. I never shot this gun except when Dad and I would tag cans of cheap cola for the hell of it. He’d buy a case for a couple of bucks and we’d drive out to the river… Oh, fuck it.”

Ellen turned away.

“What?”

“Mack. Sasha. The whole dirty thing.”

The conversation I’d overheard a week before floated to the surface. I could make out its edges. I played their words in a loop, trying to remember the juiciest bits, the parts which had rankled me the most. “What about it?”

“Sasha’s different. I’ve known her for a long time. A long time. She’s always been a bit of a slut, so I don’t think that’s it. Not that a girl’s going to stop sleeping around because it’s the end of the world or anything. Fucking Armageddon.” Ellen shook her head. “She’s just different now that she’s got her claws sunk into your buddy.”