Snareville (10 page)

I felt kind of responsible for her, so once she was out of quarantine, I invited her to stay at our house. The three upstairs bedrooms were full. All our girls were pregnant. A lot of women around town were knocked up these days. We had one small bedroom downstairs that was still empty, and Bitch was welcome to it.

A couple of weeks after Bitch moved in, I walked around the corner of the house to find four women, one of whom I didn’t recognize.

“
Danny!” Jenny shouted. “Come here!”

I came up as she was speaking Spanish to the girl, and they both turned to me. I still couldn't quite recognize the girl, but I knew who it had to be.

“
Bitch?”

“
Bitch is gone,” Jenny said with a smile. “This is Pepper. She volunteered to go on a run with you to the store and get the rest of the maternity clothes we need. The girls will put in their orders this morning, and you can go tomorrow.”

“
Pepper?”

She was wearing a gray sweatshirt and faded jeans, both of which looked good on her. She must have found my beard trimmer; she'd shaved her head. The heavy, black paint was gone from her eyes. She still wore the rings in her nose and lip, but overall, she didn't make a bad picture.

“
Yes, Pepper," Jenny said, grinning now. "Girl’s got a habit of eatin' jalapeños off the bush.”

“
Okay, that fits.” I glanced at the fire we had burning to distill our water. I could just see the studded collar as it went up in smoke. “What’s this about a store run in the morning? My crew has other things going on.”

“
Just you and her. She knows what to get. You can take your bike.”

I smelled a trap. “Just two of us? We’ll need more guns than that.”

“
I can cover for us,” Pepper said. “That bike in your garage is faster than the trucks. We buzz in, get what we need, and buzz out. That simple. And I need undies, too. Only thing I’ve got is what I’m wearing, and Jen loaned me the bra.”

“
Yeah, but…”

“
Danny, we got very few supplies on that last run. Barely any maternity stuff.” Jenny tried to stand on her own, and Pepper pulled her up by the hand. "We’ll make a full run next week, but I need the right kind of bra now. My boobs hurt. My clothes don’t fit right. We need enough stuff to get us through the week.”

“
Kenny doesn’t like us to go out alone.”

“
I’ll talk to Kenny, and you won’t be alone. You’ll have Pepper.”

I looked at the girl. She smiled at me. Yeah, it was a trap.

“
Fine. Get together with the other girls and make me a list.”

The next morning, I rolled the Harley out of the garage. I'd fired it up a few times over the summer, and I'd puttered around town on it a time or two, but I hadn’t taken it out past the barricades since all this began. The tank was still full as I rolled the motor over. The big, black Softail rumbled under the morning sun.

Tony’s riot gun hung over my shoulder. Two pistols rode my hips, and a half dozen mags shared my pockets.

Pepper hopped off the front steps to the house and swung aboard the Harley behind me. She wore her MP5s in a harness across her shoulders. She wore a different sweatshirt, and she'd put on a pair of hiking boots borrowed from Jenny. She tucked a number of canvas shopping sacks into the saddle bags of my bike. It’d be a different story getting them back home once they were full of supplies.

“
Ready?” I asked.

“
Si
. Ready as I’m gonna get.”

I looked up at Jenny on the porch. She smiled and blew me a kiss. I waved back, let out the clutch, and rolled from the driveway. I had one foot in a bear trap, all right.

I eased through the last checkpoint over the canal on the main road out of town, then I gave the bike some gas and powered up the hill like it wasn’t there.

“
What’s the fastest way to get to Wal-Mart?” Pepper shouted over the wind.

“
It’s straight through town, in theory,” I yelled over my shoulder.

“
Why in theory?”

“
Full of deaders and stalled cars."

“
We got a bike. Take the sidewalk.”

“
You got a death wish?”

She laughed in my ear. “Trust me. I got your back.”

“
Great.”

I bypassed the last section road to go around town. Snareville is south of Princeton, where Wal-Mart is on the north end. Through town, the jaunt was nearly four miles. I hadn’t taken that route since May. We always go around. Always go in the trucks. Always go in with at least two squads. Now here I was, riding into town on my Harley with a crazy lady piggybacking me. Just the two of us, and Jenny at home.

I stopped at the edge of Princeton. The Pentecostal church stood behind me. Our town radio station, off the air for months now, lay to my right.

“
Sure you want to do this?”

Her breath brushed my left ear, heavy over the rumble of the bike.

“
Yes,” she whispered. I felt her reach around with her right hand to pull one of the MP5s from its holster. “Any time.”

I eased into town. Nothing sounds like a Harley—nothing. Mine wasn’t all that loud, but I didn’t want to put out the dinner call until I had a better lay of the land.

We rolled down the first few blocks with no problems. It was spooky quiet. At the town square, the road started to bog down. I saw vehicles backed up four blocks to the first stoplight. I trundled onto the sidewalk and gave the bike a little throttle. Not a lot of room to dodge if I needed to.

The exhaust report bounced off the silent brick walls downtown. I popped into second gear, getting nervous about this whole thing. I could see the intersection of Main Street and Route Six coming up ahead. It always was a busy stop, and now it was jammed with cars from both directions. Here, none had crashed, but they were backed up out of sight. Apparently, folks had just given up and tried to hoof it.

I started to wonder how many of these ex-motorists made it out of town, then I saw the first small cluster of deaders. They shambled down Route Six as I navigated the jam. When the Zeds saw us picking our way through, they moaned and shuffled faster. Pepper opened up on them as they approached, and they dropped like wet concrete.

The next few blocks of Main were clear, and I made good time. On the sidewalks, Zeds strolled along in a horrible parody of everyday life. I don’t know if they talked or not; if they did, I couldn’t hear them over the bike.

Pepper started to raise her weapon a couple of times, but she didn't need to. For the most part, these deaders ignored us. Only a few even turned our way. Maybe they figured they couldn’t catch us. Maybe they'd just eaten. No telling.

Down near the ice cream stand, I saw something I’ll never forget. A young Zed stumbled along. She must have been in her early twenties when she died. Long blonde hair, eyes gone dead white like all the rest.

She pushed a stroller in front of her.

From what I could tell, it was empty, but it was coated with blood. Cushion, sides, wheels, everything stained dark. The girl wore a light blue maternity dress, bloody from the chest down and billowed around her like an obscene flag in the breeze.

I heard a choked sob behind me, then the safety clicked off the MP5. Pepper's bullets tore into the girl, and the impact sprayed black blood all over the sidewalk. The corpse twitched and jerked under the impact. One round broke her hip, and she went down. Pepper shifted her aim, and the deader’s skull came apart. The gun clicked dry.

We rode the rest of the way in silence. I saw no Zeds in the parking lot at Wally World, so I rolled around back. Pepper jumped off the bike and opened the door so I could pull in. She kept quiet as we gathered up the shopping bags.

“
You okay?”

“
I’m fine.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She turned, walked past the grease pit, and pulled open the door to go inside the main store.

We flipped on our flashlights. No electricity ran here, and only the skylights let in any sun. We couldn’t see very far into the store, but lucky for us, all Wal-Marts tend to be set up the same. Pepper led me into the women’s section first, and we stopped at the racks full of underwear.

Dropping her bags on the floor, Pepper shuffled through the first few items. She pulled a dark red set of panties from their hanger, held them in one hand, and found a bra to match. I started to say something as she stripped right there.

“
I don’t think anyone’s watching,” she retorted.

I shut up. She peeled off her borrowed jeans. The panties she had on were full of holes. The white cotton was stained with blood on the left side, where she’d been wounded at some point. She shucked those off and flung them into the gloom. I looked away as she pulled on the new set. The waistband snapped into place before she slid out of her sweatshirt. Shifting from foot to foot, I couldn't help but notice she wasn’t wearing a bra. That went on next. Then she stood there for a moment, trembling in her grubby socks and new undies.

I tried to keep my eyes to myself.

“
Don’t turn away, Danny,” she whispered. “Look at me. Look at me with my bald head, my furry cooch, and no makeup. Tell me I’m okay. I could be someone’s lover again someday.”

I saw her scars for the first time. A spider's web of pink slashes ran across her dark skin, from shoulder to breast down her left side. In her right thigh, she sported a deep pockmark from a past bullet. Like most of the women of Snareville, she hadn’t used a razor in a while. Her bush thrust out all around her new red panties.

“
Tell me I’m okay,” she said again.

The tears ran free from her eyes as she struggled for control. One splashed onto her scarred breast. That’s never fair to a guy, but I had to tell her the truth anyway.

“
You’re beautiful, Pepper. Don’t ever let anyone tell you different.”

She gave in to the crying then. Great, heaving sobs wracked her body as I gathered her up in my arms. I felt the soft skin of her back under my beat-up fingers, and I wished my hands weren’t so rough. I cried a little, too. I hadn’t let myself do that before. I'd been too busy pushing everything back, so I could concentrate on getting through each day one by one.

“
C’mon,” she finally said, pulling away.

I yanked a handkerchief from my back pocket. She wiped her face first, then handed the cloth back to me. I followed suit.

“
We can’t let folks see Pepper go cryin' like a girl like this.”

“
Think Danny Death wants anyone to know?”

Pepper managed a smile.

“
No.” She pulled on her pants and slid the sweatshirt back over her head. “Let’s go find your woman some decent clothes.”

We found our way into the maternity section. The Wal-Mart in Princeton completed a remodel just a few weeks before all this started. For a short time, its selection had improved.

“
You folks are nuts,” Pepper remarked as we browsed. “You’re just breeding food for the Zeds.”

“
I imagine a lot of people would think that,” I said. “It’s not really something we meant to set out to do.”

Pepper thumbed through the bras until she found the right sizes, then stuffed them in a shopping bag. She did the same for panties.

“
Noticed Heather spent the night last night with Bill and Cathy.” She didn’t look up. “You guys do that a lot?”

I chuckled. “A few folks do.”

“
You don’t?”

“
I love Jen.”

“
You don’t want to disrespect her?”

I looked away. Not like it hadn't crossed my mind. Most of the younger guys with a spouse or girlfriend had doubled up.

“
It’s not like there’s a lot of opportunity, and it’s not like I’m out looking.”

Pepper peeked up at me with a little smile. “So you’d know the chance when you saw it?”

I shrugged.
Both
my feet were caught in that bear trap now. “If Jennifer agreed.”

Pepper just kept smiling and held up a shirt. “What do you think?”

“
Too big for you.”

“
Not for me. Jenny.”

“
It’s pretty. I think she’d like it.”

The shirt went into the bag.

“
Let me ask you something," I said. "Have you come across any other towns like ours? We’ve had contact with some other places on the Net, but they’re scattered around pretty far.”

She stilled in the act of putting a pair of pants in her bag.

“
I’ll tell you the truth,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “I
have
come across other towns like yours. Little towns that are making it. Usually out in the sticks. A few places around Milwaukee. Only saw a couple of preggers, but they were already that way…. before. I haven’t seen any other towns as well armed.”

“
We were lucky. We got our stash early.”

“
You’re also very good.” She frowned at the floor. “Most of those places were easy hits. Seems people have no problem shooting Zeds, but they've got a real problem shooting other people. Even people who're stealing from them. You, though… you dropped Worm a hundred yards out, while he was on the move.”