This Dark Earth (14 page)

I say, “I just had an idea. I need a piece of wood. Yea big.” I hold my arms out and make an imaginary square, four feet by four feet. “And some black paint and a paintbrush. You think you can find that for me?”

He’s quiet. I can see his brain is working. The boy is a little scary. He hasn’t cried; he hasn’t shown fear. Just acceptance and understanding of everything that’s come along. Zombies. Nuclear explosions. The change and brutal death of his father.

“And some more nails. And rope. Can you get all that?”

He nods again. He’s chubby but has a nice, long neck and big hands. Smart features. He’ll grow. Soon.

He turns and runs to the stairwell. Watching him move, I’m reminded he’s only ten.

“So, what happened? Did you get the rest of his story?”

“Yeah. Bob Milton, our next-door neighbor, wrecked his car. Spasms. Lesch-Nyhan. Fred—”

She stops. I reach out and take my cigarette back from her.

“Fred went to the wreck to help him. Milton bit him. Gus pulled Fred . . . pulled his father back inside. They locked the door and watched the TV until the electricity went out. By midnight, the street was crowded with revenants. They started trying to get in. Fred boarded the windows, and Gus
helped. But Fred started to have spasm problems. Cursing. Gus pulled him downstairs to the workroom. I guess it was there that Fred went into opisthotonus . . . a constriction of all the back and leg muscles. Horrible shit.”

Lucy looks at the cigarette again. It’s almost down to the filter. I take one last puff and hand it over.

“Gus is no dummy. He knew what was about to happen. And Fred did too. Gus convinced his father—who was already starting to spasm—to lock him in the safe. At least for a while, until they knew if Fred was going to—” She stopped there. Took a hard drag on the last of the smoke, looking out the window into the backyard. The rattling gate. Maybe it was the smoke that irritated her eyes. “So he dumped the Krugerrands on the floor and got inside the safe with a bottle of water.”

“Shit. Smart kid.”

She nods. “I can’t imagine how hard it must’ve been for him. Or for Fred to turn the combination.”

“Do you have everything you need?” She needs the change of subject and I’m happy to provide it. “I think you need to get all the medical supplies you can get. All the drugs, whatever you won’t be able to find on the road.”

“I lost my needle gun when we were running from the army. And it’s useless without a lab anyway.”

“Get what you can.”

“I’ll get Gus armored up too. I think there’s some work gloves in the laundry room.”

Gus comes into the kitchen carrying a two-foot-square board, a can of paint, and a brush.

“Here. Best I can do, Knock-Out.” He leaves the board on the table.

“Your neck, arms. Protect them.”

Gus follows Lucy out.

I hammer two nails at the top of the board, and once they’re in good, I bend them over, creating loops. I feed the rope through the nails and tie it off, making a larger loop.

Opening the paint, I dip the brush in and, using my best handwriting, begin to write on the sign.

When Gus and Lucy come back, Gus has ski goggles strapped to his forehead and a black bandana tied around his neck. He’s wearing a black motorcycle jacket, gloves tucked into his belt. A snub-nosed pistol in a holster. A hunting knife next to it, and a small Maglite. I have to remind myself he’s just ten.

“What school did you get your medical degree from, Lucy?”

She looks surprised. “Dartmouth Medical School. I was a resident at Johns Hopkins.”

I turn back and finish the sign. They watch me work.

It says, “Don’t
SHOOT
! I’m a
DOCTOR
. Dartmouth Medical School. Residency: Johns Hopkins.
WE CAN HELP
!”

Lucy opens her mouth, shuts it. Gus smiles.

“Where will we go?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere with very few people.”

“This is the first time I’m glad I chose to practice in Arkansas.”

Gus says, “We have to make for the Ozarks. There’s nobody up there. And there’s woods.”

“We’ll need to stay close enough to people that we can get food. Find other survivors. There’s not going to be a harvest this year, I don’t think.”

The shamblers are in the guest room now, banging on the door. It’s time to go back out into the world. We grab our bags, our boxes, and go back out to the back deck, down the steps to the fenced patio. The dead moan and rattle at the cypress gate. They can smell us. They can hear us. Everything we have is on our backs and in our hands. The rest is . . . abandoned.

I look at Gus, and his face is hard, mirroring Lucy’s. She’s got a look like an eagle’s, fierce and uncaring. She’s grinding her jaws, making the fine cords of her long neck stand out in relief.

I want to cry for them, this grim mother and somber child, since they can’t do it for themselves. They need someone to burden their grief. To show them it is okay to weep, to feel for them the horror that’s descended on us all.

Lucy looks at me and sees the tears streaming down my face. She comes over and stands by me. My burns are on fire. I want to scratch my ears, the back of my neck. She takes my hand and looks at me, her gray eyes luminous and questioning and large in the perfect clarity of her face. She kisses my cheek.

Then she looks back to the fence and the shamblers waiting there. It’s as if she’s thinking,
This is the reality of life. This is everything there is, and I can understand it, if I try. The end of the world. The undead. I can understand it. I can understand everything. I accept it
.

But that’s Lucy. I’ll never be able to understand her fully. I
never want to. There are some things beyond comprehension, and saying that the evil upon us is just a virus, or a bad decision from an army general that ended our world, will never excuse or forgive it.

But I am beginning to understand what Meemaw meant. Sometimes life is too big for one person to understand. And you need to use something, a phrase, a song, a snippet of ribbon, to encircle and contain it.

Everything is everything.

Tessa cared for the men. Their needs, all of them. They called themselves the G Unit. Twenty men under the command of Captain Hugh Mozark. Each man was young and scared and suddenly lost in the world.

The EMP wiped communications and the zeds ravaged the cities. The G Unit, like their forefathers before them, moved across the Great Plains, and if not for the automatic weapons and the armored Bradleys, they would have been as helpless as pioneers in the face of a wide, untamed wilderness.

At night, when
Tessa had satisfied the captain in his tent, she brought around water, MREs, jerky scavenged from gas stations and convenience stores. She’d walk the perimeter to each of the men on watch, each man staring out into the dark fields, waiting for the dead. They looked at her with little boy eyes, and she’d crush them to her big bosom and let them cry. She hated Captain Mozark with all her heart, but she couldn’t bring herself to hate these boys. These men.

Some men didn’t want mothering. Some would grip her, hands tight on her back or on her ass, tearless, and want to take her into the Bradley, or away from the others, and put
her on her back and spread her legs, even though she was old enough to be their mother. They were young, and the world was dead, but they still had needs.

Terrel, Keb Motiel, Blevens, and Jasper, they needed her that way. Terrel had a long salty dick and kissed sweet. Keb liked to smack her ass and rub it on her back door, and she avoided him as much as she could. Blevens was shy and came fast. Jasper liked dirty talk and to suck her breasts; he wanted her as a mother and a lover, and she tried to keep him satisfied, because he was bull-thick, heavily muscled, and could be dangerous if angered, or protective if sated. For one so young, he had a raw animal grace to him and knew how to move.

Lt. Quentin Wallis, second in command, didn’t want to cry or to fuck, but he wanted to make sure they lived, all of them. And even though she was twice his age, Tessa loved him. He looked like Cass’s daddy: tall, slim, and intelligent. Black as sin and noble as a king. Looking at him made her stomach flutter. She wished Cass was alive so she could have him. Cass was his match. But now she was dead.

And for that, Captain Hugh Mozark had to die.

They’d moved across the burning plains of Kansas, down into Oklahoma, toward the Ozarks. The cities still smoked a month after the end of everything, and their effluvium—vultures wheeling, smoke curling—drew crooked pillars up to heaven.

Tessa and Cass
hid for nearly a month in the convenience store. They’d found it empty of both the living and the dead. Drawing down the aluminum-mesh doors, they hid in the
back room, behind the register, eating cold food and drinking sodas and building a nest of wrappers. The dead rattled the mesh and moaned.

“Momma, why’d God leave us here like this?”

“God didn’t leave us, baby. This ain’t the work of God. It’s the work of man, that’s for sure.”

“But he let it happen.”

Tessa took up dipping tobacco in their convenient prison. Years before, she’d broken herself of smoking; six months of mood swings, shouting matches, and late-night ice cream. Cass, then a girl of ten, remembered that time with a mixture of fascination and wariness, like a biologist living in close quarters with a particularly vicious and intemperate big cat. But now she was back using. She preferred Skoal Apple Long Cut to the other brands, and her Skoal supplies were getting low. Taking a can from her pocket, she twisted off the top, dug thick brown and pink fingers into the dark tobacco, and stuck the pinch in her bottom lip. It tasted like apple orchards burning.

“Everything the Lord does, everything he lets happen, it’s for a reason. It ain’t our job to question him. It’s our job to work through it, baby. To keep our faith.”

Cass looked away from her mother, like she had when she was a girl, rolling her eyes. She put her disdain on display for Tessa.

“God don’t give a shit about us. Or if he does, he hates us, sending the dead to eat the living. It’s unnatural, Momma. And if God hates us so much to make something unnatural, I don’t love him no more.”

It was too easy for Tessa to slap, an old habit, a reflex. She never spared the rod and tolerated no insolence or back sass. Even now. Her hand came out, quick and open-palmed, and left behind nothing on Cass’s cheek except a tear in the corner of her eye.

Cass, wiping her face with her sleeve, stood from their nest of wrappers and said, “I can’t stay here no more, Momma. We gotta get out. Go to the mountains or something.”

“Baby, the streets are full of ’em, the dead folks. The army will come. The police.”

Cass laughed, a sound so lost and dejected Tessa couldn’t believe it came from her own daughter.

“Five-o?” She turned away from Tessa and looked at the front of the store. The undead had moved away from the gate days ago and hadn’t returned. But they’d seen them moving in the streets. “The police ain’t never helped us. You know that. They shot Boo.” The old bone of contention still had flesh. Cass’s boyfriend, Boo, Boo whom Tessa forbade Cass from seeing after she’d caught them in bed together. Breaking and entering, the officer called it when Boo was shot dead climbing from a house with a silent alarm. But it only left Boo’s body broken and ended Cass’s trust of authority.

“Take a deep breath, Momma. You smell that? It’s rotten meat. Rotten people. Piss and shit in the corner. Our piss. Our shit.” She pointed to the walk-in freezer. They stayed in the back room because the flies were angrier near the walk-in and thickened the air like black smoke.

Tessa breathed, but all she smelled was the scent of burning
apple orchards and tobacco. Her mouth, full of brown saliva, pursed. She spit.

“We will, baby, we’ll leave. It’s late now. Let’s have a drink and sleep here tonight. We’re still safe. There’s a thousand places in this city but tonight, right here—” She pointed at the floor, firmly. “Right here is still safe. We know we ain’t gonna go hungry. We know we’ll have something to drink. To eat. That we won’t be eaten.”

“That ain’t enough, Momma. Not for me.”

They carried rifles
and knapsacks full of clothing. They carried MREs and iodine pills. They wore full battle rattle and carried gas masks and vials full of Neumune pills to combat radiation sickness. They carried pictures of their loved ones and mementos of the homes that were forever gone.

In a pocket in her skirt, Tessa carried a tight, childproof bottle labeled Tylenol but full of gray-green cylinders of d-Con. She’d pilfered it from the convenience store. Warfarin, the d-Con box had read, was the primary ingredient. Deadly to rats. Call poison control if ingested.

In the day, as they moved across the plains, Tessa stayed in one of the two Bradleys, ordering and inventorying the rations, checking water, scanning the radio. The ammo, and whatever men could fit, rode in the other Bradley.

Mostly, Tessa simply sat still and swayed with the movement of the armored vehicle while the men flanked them on motorcycles and ATVs, ranging backward and forward, taking out any stray zeds. It was as if with the rising of the dead,
they’d gone back a hundred years or more, crossing the plains on machines instead of horses, with Bradley Fighting Vehicles instead of wagons.

Tessa rocked with the movement of the Bradley, listening to the static—the ever-present static—on the radio and the distant pops of rifles. Ammunition wasn’t a problem for the G Unit. Nor was food. It was the dead. It had been fifteen days since they’d heard from another living soul. She kept her hands in her skirt.

And she carried her hatred of Hugh Mozark.

He’d come into
the Bradley the day after they picked her up. The tall, beautiful officer stood behind him in the backlit door, looking in. Wallis.

Mozark turned, waved a hand, and said, “Lieutenant. You may go.” The beauty had stood straight and saluted.

Mozark filled the space. Hard faced and short spoken, he looked at her. She’d made herself smile, even though she’d come to kill him. She smoothed her dress. Tried to cover her breasts a little, even though she made sure she had showed enough to get the G Unit’s attention. Cass was born when Tessa was young, sixteen, and now she was thirty-five and she’d never been pregnant again and had heavy breasts and deep hips. She knew what men wanted.