The Zed Files Trilogy (Book 1): The Hanging Tree (3 page)

Chapter 3:  Calvary

“One little, two little, three little Indians.” I mouth the words almost silently to myself from under my poncho. I’ve spent the morning slowly working through the honeysuckle and multiflora rose bushes to get behind the hanging tree.  There are only three Zeds still kicking.  The others have gone pretty rotten pretty quick.  Their bodies have bloated and they swing from the tree like bizarre alien Christmas ornaments.  Some show strange honeycomb growths hanging out of their wounds.  A couple of the ropes are empty.  I’m guessing they went full Pez and their heads came off, but I can’t see any bodies lying under the tree. 

The three remaining contestants are on low branches and easily reached.
  The center one hangs slightly higher than the two on the sides.  His arms hang outstretched, caught in the wild grapevine.  Tiny twigs from the collapsed branches are intertwined in his matted hair.  I know he’s not dead because of the twitching movements of his fingers.  The one on his left has a restless leg.  The one on the right makes a high pitch whistle when it breathes. 

I need to be quiet about it today.  I pull out the cleaver and approach them from behind.  “Smooth and fast,” I whisper to myself, “flow from the first one to the last, then pick up the middle.”  If I take too long, they’ll start moaning and howling their heads off.  If anyone else is around today, I’ll probably get the air let out of me.

I grip the cleaver tightly and step behind the first one.
  I swing through, just below the ear, with a back-handed delivery.  I jump away as I do to avoid getting zombie spray all over my new clothes.  Reloading as I pass the middle, I deliver a decapitating blow to the one on the other side.  The two bodies and two heads hit the ground about two seconds apart. 

My foot tangles in the undergrowth
, and I go pitching off forward, trying to regain my balance.  I’m taking too long.  I spin around and lunge at the middle one ready to carve his noggin like a jack-o-lantern but he isn’t making much noise.  He groans and rolls his head skyward.  A broken branch has pierced his throat, robbing it of any use.  His rope goes up to a broken branch that is caught above.  Another broken branch has pierced his rib cage.  He must have taken a tumble from his previous perch.  I walk around in front of him.  You don’t get a chance to look at them close up and still alive-ish very often. 

As I step in front of him for a closer look, his teeth snap together and his hands jerk forward.
  But he remains fastened where he is.  His eyes are all one color; the same matte gray, lifeless-dead, nobody-home gaze as the rest of them.  But something is alive in there.  Maybe not the former tenant but certainly some kind of mutation or parasitic life form.  I look closer at the hole in his throat.  A golden, porous, spongy type of growth has sealed around the branch preventing the loss of liquids.  “You like all of this rain and damp, don’t ya, buddy?” I ask the hanging Zed.  “You thrive in this environment with all of the rain cuz you can’t run without juice, am I right?” 

I push against the flesh of his cheek with the dull side of the cleaver.  It is squishy and strange. 
Like human flesh but not.  A gray tongue covered in a white film pokes out from the Zed’s mouth and tastes the air in front of him.  Air escapes from the hole in his neck as he struggles against the branches to get closer.

There’s something odd about the dress of this one though and I can’t quite make it out.
   His clothes are so mangled and dirty I can’t quite… ah, I see the collar now.  The rain is letting up so I slide the top of my poncho hood back and smile broadly at the right Reverend.   “Morning, Padre,” I tell him.  I can’t help but giggle a little.  “I don’t remember any mention of this in the book of Revelations, there Reverend,” I tell him.  “Is this one of God’s ‘mysterious ways’?  Huh?  I bet you prayed your ass off along with the rest of the congregation here and now look at cha.  Just a buncha cans on a string, howling at everything that walks by.  Can’t sneak up on nobody with you here.”  I take the end of the cleaver and tilt his head up as far is it will go.  “How’s bout I deliver you from evil and you go find out if any of that bullshit was real?  How’s that sound?”  I lean in and look more closely at his eyes.  “Or maybe you’re already there.”

I pull a branch down with my left hand and pull back with the cleaver in my right.
  “For the Lord is my shepherd… that I do not want.”  The cleaver swings mostly through his neck before sticking in the limb behind him.  The spinal cord is cut and he looks even more dead now.  The flap of skin and muscle still attached to his noggin acts as a hinge and his head flops over to one side.  “No time to be stingy, I guess.” The cleaver swings again and I lop the rest of his head off.  It bounces down through the branches and lands at my feet.  I boot it out of my way and make a cross motion with the cleaver.  “Ashes to ashes Padre, mush to mush.”

About
thirty yards away, behind the wall of thorns, bushes and undergrowth, I hear a loud snap.  My heart stops and a flood of adrenaline hits the top of my chest.  I drop into a crouch and breathlessly listen.  My eyes scan the brush for any sign of movement.  My mind empties every thought outside of the scene in front of me.  Time slows and the old expression, ‘you never hear the shot that kills you’ darts through my mind. 

After a few seconds, my mind starts to process.
  I guess it could be a deer.  Not a lot of those left these days.  Could be some rogue farm animal. More than likely though, it’s a two legged problem.

I continue to listen and breathe as shallow as possible.
  I’m somewhat protected by the dangling remains of Reverend Zed.  Minutes pass without another sound.  If it was an animal, it would have probably moved again by now.  I lay the cleaver down flat beside me on the ground and begin the task of slowly sliding the Ruger off my shoulder.  Twenty five yards away, the top of a sapling wiggles slightly.  Instead of bringing the little rifle down slowly, I opt for one fluid movement.  The shape of a person begins to emerge from the brush.

My legs are killing me.
  I can’t sit like this for much longer. The ground beneath me is wet and muddy and silent.  I have only a moment to move if I’m going to.  The trunk of the big oak is close and will provide protection even if I am spotted.  I spring up and over without making a sound and stop behind the trunk of the big tree.  The Reverend Zed’s head lies just a foot away, the teeth still moving slowly up and down.  I pick him up by the hair and turn his teeth away from me.

The figure coming out of the brush inspects my handy work on the three previously undead hangers.
  His finger remains on the trigger of the pump shotgun held across his chest.  He’s short, maybe 5’7”, but I can’t size up his build through the clothing.  And I can’t see his face for the balaclava and scarf wound round his head under his hood.  He is close.  His head snaps to a stop and freezes, looking straight ahead.  He is looking where I had been crouched previously.  My cleaver is still lying there.  Shit.

He creeps towards it, checking left and right.
  The shotgun swings with his eyes.  As he looks left, I am blocked by the headless preacher’s body.  The stranger looks right to see if I am in the brush and then forward at the cleaver once again.  His hood all but eliminates his peripheral vision and I know he can’t hear much all covered up like that.  With one arm, I train the rifle on the intruder.  With the other, I loft the reverend’s head high and wide behind the guy with the shotgun.  It lands with a healthy thud on the ground. 

The intruder spins and pulls a bead on the head with the shotgun.
  I move in a leap and land behind him with my rifle barrel pressed into his neck.  He freezes. 

“Lose the
shotty,” I tell him.  His shoulders and elbows never move a millimeter as he releases the shotgun.  “Hands behind your head, fingers interlaced.” 

He does.
  I kick the back of his straight leg and drop him to his knees.  “Normally, your ass would be D-E-A-fucking-double-D dead.  But it is your lucky day my friend.”

I move around to the side and slide his hood back.
  The scarf comes off in one pull, snapping his head around.  I need to see his face.  I need the true language of human beings, the nonverbal, the twitch, the blink, the tell.  “Yup, you’re a lucky, lucky bastard,” I say in a high British falsetto voice. 

I push the rifle barrel into the
V of his throat where the collarbones come together.  His eyes glare up at me with a deep seething hatred.  “Let’s have a look at ya,” I tell my captive.  “Take that bag off’n yer head, buddy.”  I smile at him as wide as I can, then cross my eyes and make a bubble popping sound.  Even in a world full of zombies and cannibals, there’s still nothing scarier than a happy crazy person.

As the balaclava slides
off, a long blonde ponytail uncoils out the back.  The face in front of it has smooth skin and high cheekbones.  The soft pink lips are pursed together in a grimace of determination.  Her eyes continue to bore a hole straight through me.  A single tear falls from her left eye and I watch it slowly trail down the side of her reddening cheek.

The word, “Huh” is all I manage before I notice her hand is digging into her coat pocket.
  I stab the barrel a little harder into her throat and the hand stops.  “My thoughts at the moment are that maybe you wanna bring your hands back up to where they were.  Real slow and empty like, please and thank you.  I don’t want to have to give you a supersonic tracheotomy.”

She doesn’t move.
  Her eyes flatten even more.  I raise my eyebrows and shake my head at her.  Her hand comes out slowly and empty.  I see defeat in her eyes as her hands re-clasp behind her head.  “Well done,” I tell her.  “Well done.  Smart move, really.  I already killed a good friend of mine this morning.  Beat him to death with a flat board.  Don’t’ think I won’t cap ya cuz you’re good look’n.  Hell, if I had an ounce of sense, I’d a shot ya already because you ARE good look’n.  But I’m kind a stupid and old fashioned that way.”

“You got the stupid part right, anyway,” she spits.
  The fire is back in her eyes.  “First chance I get I’m gonna cut your throat and… “

I stomp her hard on the shoulder and plant her backwards in the mud.
  The rifle barrel pushes into her windpipe shutting her air down.  “Ma’am,” I tell her still smiling, “if you wanna live to see the next shitty miracle of a fuckin day, I suggest you adopt a more congenial tone to your discourse.  Lest I have to aerate you and let the vermin of the world feast on your hide.” 

I take the rifle barrel and push her chin to the side.
  The right dead reverend’s head lies on its side looking at her, jaws still moving.  “Why lookie there.  There’s a hungry vermin now.  You don’t cool it, I’m gonna turn you over to Reverend Snappy’s dismembered coconut and let him work you like an ear of corn.  Praise be and hallelujah.”

The site of Reverend
Snappy’s gaping maw seems to suck the fight out of her.  With eyes closed and gritted teeth, comes the question, “What do you want then?”

Easing up on the weight of my foot on her shoulder, I pull the rifle back a few inches.
  “Well, let’s see.  Hmmm.  A million dollars ain’t worth much anymore.  I’m guessing a hug is out of the question.  Caramel popcorn’s out.  How’s about a little intel?  Some information on this here hang’n tree.  And what’s back behind it.  Hell… we can have a little chit chat.  I’ll leave your pump gun where you can get to it.  We can go our separate ways.  Nobody has to die.”

I can see the wheels in her head turning; the lie machine kicking into high gear.
  What to tell me.  What’s plausible?  What would a poor dumb son-of-a-bitch like me believe?

“I’ll even throw in a can of lima beans
, if you want.  I can’t stand the nasty things.  I’d just as soon eat the ears off of Reverend Snappy’s head as eat those goddamned awful beans.  Whatduhyasay?”

Her head nods yes.
  I remove my foot.  The game begins.

Chapter 4: 
A Friend for Dinner

“So whadya’ll got back there?” I ask her.  I swish the cleaver around in a mud puddle to get the goo off.  The small .25 caliber pistol that was in her pocket sits on a fallen tree next to me.  Her shotgun leans against it.  She is busy working a P-38 can opener on the lima beans.

“People,” she says.
 

“How many?”

“
Five.” She works the small awkward can opener fast and shaky.  She is starving.  Or scared maybe.  I consider loaning her my full-sized can opener.  But I ought to know better than anyone that no good deed goes unpunished.

“Five
,” I repeat.  “That’s a lot of mouths to feed.  You know, I haven’t talked to a lot of people recently but I’ve heard a couple of stories.  Stories about hungry people.  Six hungry people go to bed, five full people wake up.  That sort of thing.  Ya’ll ain’t uh… partakers of the flesh, are ya?”

The can is only half open
, but she bends the top over and chugs down a mouthful of beans.  Relief covers her face as she swallows.  I study the back of the cleaver, running my finger along the spine of the big blade.  “No.  We are not cannibals,” she tells me as she wipes her chin. 

She takes a spoon out of her front jacket pocket and digs into the can.
  She stops as I wipe the cleaver on some weeds.  Her eyes meet mine.  I see fear for the first time.  I smile back at her.  “I wouldn’t feed ya before I et ya.  Especially lima beans.  They’re bad enough like they are.  Twice chewed be enough to choke a buzzard off a gut wagon.”

Her spoon resumes its work and I can smell the beans from here.
  A warm and moist pumpkin fart builds up in me, but I hold it.  I doubt she would care but I don’t think I could stomach the combined aromas. 

I check the .25 caliber
pistol.  The magazine has only three rounds and there’s one up the pipe.  I empty it and toss the gun back to her.  “You can put that back in your pocket.  I’m sure glad you didn’t shoot me with it.  Woulda made me mad as hell.”

She quickly slides the pistol back into her pocket.
  The beans are disappearing fast.  I need to know more.  “Five, huh? I guess if you’re out on patrol that means you’re an ‘equal opportunity employer’ kind of outfit, right?”

She
shakes her head no.  Her spoon scrapes the sides of the can to get as much bean residue as possible.  “I thought I heard…” she lets it slide off into a shrug and shakes her head.

“Heard what?” I press.

“I thought I heard a plane or a car or something.   I thought maybe it was a way out.”

“Out,” I repeat.  I look off into the trees that surround us.  “Out to where?”
I wave the cleaver in the direction she came from before returning it to its sheath.  “I’ve heard about people making a go of it in the desert.  Zed dries up there like a kitchen sponge left on a hot burner.  Hear he don’t fair too well in the snow either.  Round here though…” I look around at all the vegetation and gray skies, “here it seems just right for those rotten bastards.”

She lets the empty can fall to the ground and takes a long drag from her canteen.
  She looks like she just got laid.  Her eyes close as she speaks.  “We were heading out as a group.  Heading for someplace out west maybe.  I dunno.  Just running away from the city.  But we ran out of fuel.  Highways weren’t safe.  Everybody was freaking out.  The zombies were everywhere…”

“Yeah, been there, done that.”
  I tell her.  “How many did you start with?”

“About 20. We lost a couple of families on the way out.  The Dawsons got picked off on the highway by raiders.  They fell behind on a hill and by the time we turned around for them, it was too late.  The Alvarez family… we heard their car start up in the middle of the night and run for a while.  We thought maybe they were cold.  Next morning, you could see the hose duct taped to the exhaust.”

She sighs heavily.
  “The rest of us found a school not far from here.  It had a chain link fence around it.  All of the stores had been cleared out, but for some reason, the school hadn’t been touched.  We blocked off the open parts of the fence, boarded up the windows, started raiding empty houses in the little town.  We made it a few days.  Thought maybe we’d be able to make a stand there.”

“
School got out early, I take it.”

“The
five of us were out looking for food.  Everyone else had taken a turn so the rest of us pretty much had to.  We walked for a long way but there aren’t many houses all that close together.  We took this dirt road down here and we found this… compound I guess you’d call it… back in the woods.  Looks like some sort of religious compound.  Lots of weird shit everywhere.  But it was empty.  It looked like it had been abandoned.  But we thought it might be more defensible.  Pretty solid log walls around the perimeter, metal gate.”  She stops and looks up at the hanging tree.  “I’ve got no idea what the hell this is all about.  But this is where I heard the noises coming from last night.  This direction anyway.”

“No bodies or
noth’n in the compound?” I ask. 

“
Somebody had been staying there.  But they weren’t there when we stopped by.”

“Ah.
  Well… I guess if they didn’t leave anybody behind to mind the store then they must not be coming back.”

She sighs heavily.
  “Yeah.  I dunno.  We headed back to the school to tell the others.  When we went got back there…”

Her voice trails off into nothing.
  No tears.  No grief.  Just a blank stare as the memory takes her vision.  “The front gate was open…I thought maybe they were ex-military since they had a Jeep kind of thing with a big gun on it.  When we got to where we could see with binoculars… they had all of them on their knees out front.”

The memory that had taken her vision t
akes her words now.  The gears inside spin without touching each other but refuse to stop spinning.   Her hands clench at the second knuckle as if to hold all of the broken parts in.  “I could see a man walking along in front of them all with a pistol, just shooting each one in the head.  They were loading the bodies into a panel truck.”

She is beautiful in her emotionless despair, gorgeous in her shattered state.
  My hand moves to the holster under my poncho.  My breath quickens and my teeth clench as my thumb lovingly caresses the fine notches cut into the spur hammer of my .45.   

I imagine running my hand across the smooth skin of this woman’s face.
  Our empty eyes meeting as she finds solace in the knowledge that she is not alone.  I think of kissing her gently and staring through the broken windows of her soul.  Her mouth falling open in ecstasy and surprise as the hammer falls and the round ignites.

A howl erupts from behind me, shattering our separate daydreams.
  A thrashing in the bushes is closing fast.  I spin and toss the shotgun to her as she springs up.  I bring the Ruger to my shoulder and quickly dial the scope down to its lowest power.  I see a blurry flash through the eyepiece.  It’s too close.  I look over the scope and fire point blank as the first Zed jumps.  The bullet enters his open mouth, driving up through the palate.  A small spray of bone and black blood erupts from the center of his skull.  He crumples in a pile in front of me.  He looks to be about fifteen maybe. 

I hear more coming.
  A girl of about the same age as the first Zed bursts into the thicket on a dead run at the woman.  The woman doesn’t fire.  I look out of the corner of my eye, but remain watching forward.  The Zed teenager is almost to the woman.  I start to turn and shoot but I’m going to be too late.  The woman waits until the Zed is only about three feet away before unloading in her face.  The girl’s body continues forward while the top of her head lifts slightly and falls behind her. 

Two more charge from in front of me.
  I sidestep away from the woman to where the brush isn’t as tall.  I swing the little rifle and pull a bead on the first one’s head as he runs by. 
Keep the barrel swinging,
I tell myself and pull the trigger.  The tiny bullet enters just forward of the ear into the temple.  His head snaps and he does a face plant in front of me.  The second one is almost to the woman but I can’t get him in time.   The woman racks the slide on the pump gun and lets him have it in the side of the head.  His skull seems to expand slightly from the shock wave and he falls to the ground on top of the lidless Zed girl.

I grab my pack and push ahead a few yards to the tree line.
  I need to be able to see them coming from further away; this underbrush doesn’t provide enough warning.  There may only be a few, there may be a hundred.  There may be a never-ending wave of them.  I scan between the trees for signs of movement and step forward again.  Everything looks quiet.  As I move out into the open spaces below the trees, something hits me hard from behind, knocking me down.  I can hear the remnants of the shotgun’s boom rolling off through the woods. 

I roll to my side and bring the rifle up.
  I can see the woman standing about 25 yards behind me, shotgun raised, a small cloud of smoke rising above her.  My arm hurts like I’ve been stung a thousand times but I raise the rifle and fire at her.   The shot is wild.  She doesn’t duck or flinch.  She stares at me a moment before turning slowly and walking away. I grit my teeth and listen.  I think I hear footsteps leading away but leave the rifle pointing in her general direction. 

I kick my head back and squeeze my eyes shut against the pain. I look at my arm and see tiny red spots coming through my jacket.  My pack has taken the brunt of the blast.  I see the white plastic shotgun wad lying a few feet from me.  I run my fingers over my wounded shoulder.  Tiny lead pellets stick to my bloody fingers.  “Fucking birdshot,” is all I can say. 

I get up off the ground and insp
ect my pack.  The pellets have torn a small hole in the canvas.  If I hadn’t moved forward when I did, she probably would have been close enough to smoke me.  I smile as I think about her scurrying back to her friends.  I pick up my rifle and make sure I have everything important.  I put her pistol bullets in my pocket.

Looking back towards her direction, I yell off into the forest, “Missed me,
missed me, now ya gotta kiss me.”

I grimace quietly and look at my arm again.
  “Fucking Christ.  My mother always warned me about talking to strange women with shotguns.”  I need to find a place to hole up, clean up.  Infection will kill me as quick as anything. 

I look around me.
  If I had any sense, I’d trek straight north of here and then west.  Maybe make for the Rocky Mountains and leave Goldilocks to play with her friends at the fort until the three or more bears come home and eat their stupid asses. 

“But if I had any sense at all, I’d of shot her on sight and kept going.   You know better,” I tell myself as I pick myself up off the ground.  “It’s like Grandma used to say, ‘Don’t be stupid all your life.’”

The compound can’t be far from here.  I put my pack on my good shoulder.  I check the chamber of the rifle and begin picking my way through the underbrush.  She wasn’t a pointy-eared green Neptunian woman, but she wasn’t half bad either.