This Is Not The End: But I Can See It From Here (The Big Red Z Book 1) (16 page)

Chapter 45

The path the tank had left curled east, falling away to blackened, bald earth.

Gig’s burnt frame was not far off, maybe two miles.  Doc could see eternity in his smile—his hearty face broken against the rock that had killed him.  Beyond that, the sullen murk of the wide, grim marsh flattened, butting up against the forested hillside were they hid upon seeing it.

He again looked at old Uncle Gill, wincing this time at his flame-cracked skin.  From the small grove of trees past the marsh spilled the mournful wails of wild folk, rising and falling out of tune with the wind.  There was something happy and tiresome about it at the same time, something that let him know that the people singing it felt something of their pain.

Doc smiled, wishing Gig farewell. 

The wind blew the grass around his horse’s hooves as it whinnied, as if in mourning.

Then Doc once more smelled the unpleasant stink of burnt flesh on the wind, and Doc heard the bittersweet clamor of the Zombies’ wailing cease. 

With quick, thirsty carelessness, Doc went to chopping him up and burying him.  Then, without words, he nodded and turned to find that their packhorses had already been strung together.  A pair of thin gray figures stood outside the trees, staring at him.

It was the chief and the old river rat.

There was an odd stillness in their silence.  And there was something lonely and menacing in their frozen, small eyes, contrasted the eager horses behind them.  Doc shivered and thought to nod, but instead rode to them wordlessly, gathered their supplies, and left before they told him they were no longer welcome there.

It was a shock to see the fellows ready to travel on so soon.  Such hardiness could only have come with the hardships The Good Fight had blunted them to, or perhaps it was solely because this place reminded them of Gig.

In either case, Tyler spat. 

He pulled some silver pennies from his shirt.  Throwing them over his shoulder, he said, “For ye parties in Heaven, Uncle Gig!”

Chapter 46

So they rode out, making their way south as hurriedly as possible, often with an unexpected happiness in their conversations.  But not once, ever, did anyone discuss the fact that they had just encountered a
living
machine.

In his youth, it was oftentimes amazing to him what the Commando heart can endure.  Frankly, it was still a stunning thing to see in person: the way they laughed and cajoled when talking about Gig, it was as if he’d been dead for years, and someone had brought his name in conversation.  But there was a part of him all through the week-long trek across those grasslands and thinning forests that began to see the wisdom of this.  Poets and bards with often compare sorrow or grief to a heavy heart, and anyone who has been amidst unfriendly enemies knows the danger of this.

But just when Doc had come to expect a certain happy, subdued undercurrent to his fellows’ exuberance, a shocked silence rippled through their party as they once again met with rolling hills.

His uncle made a motion with his hand for them to stop.

It was unnerving.  Each man, stout as stone, sat atop their mounts at the last of the grasses, and looked without words into the vast and stony way before them. 

Mighty Kenzo harrumphed. 

“Fuuuck me,” Rocco said. 

They had reached Nashville.

But it wasn’t there. 

What remained of it was like a fairy land in an epic told by a gloomy poet; everything they had imagined about it was wrong.  The wind reeked of utter annihilation.  Blue and cold, barren as a sandbar, the wrinkled landscape was all but devoid of life.  It was sharp with loose and flaky shale, as is if pounded by some monstrous hammer of the gods.  The ground was blackish, but oddly reflective, and under a sky that grew gray by degrees, the land undulated away to the west like a glacier made of steel and rock. 

Ever widening, the glassy desolation was consumed by the dreamscape of the bleak night that fell on them.  Doc breathed.  The difference in the land was so stark, so utterly unreal, he felt like he was staring at a different planet. 

They were not far from Longmonger’s Lair, the hole in the center of Nashville.  Maybe three days...  There was just three days left to see if all the trek and trouble had been just to come and kill the woman and child again as shado, or to becomes zombies themselves.

“We know what we need to do, boys,” Rocco said glumly, at which he dismounted and unburdened his packhorse of its dwindling load. 

“Indeed, Mister Rocco,” said Uncle Jickie.  “Hooves won’t do.  The beasts will slip and prove the fucking death of us.”

Than at last, someone at least
hinted
at discussing the living machine.

“No guns,” Tyler said. 

No one argued, perhaps for fear of having to discuss what they had seen.

Tyler spared them the need, saying:  “Something’s here.  Something that’s turning our machines against us.”

On foot now, their backs laden with gear, food, and only their most weapons---axes they had gained from the Mexicans, riot shields, and swords.

They meandered cautiously downs into the stony hills before them.  Their movements in the dark were hunkered and slow as they labored down the first slope.  The blue-gray land was already a nightmare of knolls and pits, and here, strangely, the horizon seemed as though it closed in around them.  The blanket of clouds was thinning, and the night sky swept itself clean to offer a better view of the hellish terrain before them. 

They padded quickly together down through a long finger of burnt forest that reached up almost to the grassy slopes.  To travel the hillsides in these reaches, one would do better to have walked for days beforehand, for the plunging, loose stone was already taxing the strength in his legs.

Doc would confess, though, that after so much riding, he found walking oddly pleasurable.  It was always strange to him how much less tiring it is than riding.

But Doc was far from comfortable.  Fortunately, he was not alone. 

By morning, they had to stop.  Under the fabric of low clouds, they halted.  There was a thin grove of ruined cedar at the edge of a wild stream, which spilled from the earth near the pinnacle of two hilltops.  The water falling wildly past their feet, they edged alongside a cool, blue wall of rock and drank.

They were each exhausted, utterly, and as a vigorous rain began to fall, Doc heard snoring.

He turned to find every one of his fellows asleep, sitting up. 

As the morning passed away to a cold, dim afternoon, Doc let the boys sleep and cooked them a breakfast of their last smoked sausages, surprised to find that Tyler had woken up to help him.   

“I’m sorry, Doc.”

“What?..  Why?”

“I don’t….. everything,” he said, but that was not at all that seemed to be on his min.”

“Tyler... There’s nothing to apologize for.  An especially clever wise-ass once advised me that for everything there is cost.”

“Yes,” he conceded with a small grunt of a laugh.  “Words like that lip out easier under a pleasant sun.”

Doc looked eastward.  “I feel like I should be doing the apologizing, Tyler.  You know, this trip hasn’t been with its losses…”

He laughed again.  “Do you know that when ol’ Rocco, Jick, Gill, Kenzo and myself left out for Bowling Green, we were in a company of fifty.”

Doc cocked an eyebrow. 

“Twelve of us came home.”

Doc remembered.  Jick had led that expedition.  They had lost so many.  He looked at Tyler with a look that told him he wanted to know if he was being honest, and not just making an old friend feel more confident.

He looked at him and clasped his shoulder, a tear forming, then curving down his sweaty cheek .

“Dangerous business, adventuring.  Not in score of lifetimes could I thank you for all this.  You have no idea what you have done for an old man.”

“Perhaps, soon enough some wayward whore of woman will have me for good, and I will have an idea,” Doc said and clasped his shoulder back.  “The meat is done,” he added, seeing him smile.  It was a sturdier smile than Doc had seen him wear in some months now, as if it might stay there for more than a moment. 

It did not.

Doc asked him, “Won’t you wake those cantankerous old bastards up for me?”

The moon still hung low over a distant ripple of hills, shining vaguely through a new rain in the west.

They began to trek once again the slope of a long, low meadow of stone and oily grass.  The long, sloping field was lined with a single high brake of evergreens, shaking in the breeze and dotted at their feet with a dull blaze of young yellow flowers.  Beyond it, the hills were less grassy, and some were grassless altogether, just bald hilltops of blunt and rounded rock. 

A wounded horse was running, three-legged, across a low side of the hill.

His forehead throbbed as a swath of tracks appeared, the hooves of a dozen more horses that had meandered into the odd hills ahead of them.  They had been walked over by the unmistakable, broken tracks of shado.  Zombie footprints reminded one of the tracks of man-like creatures, not men, for they had a habit of chewing each other’s toes off.

But these were not normal shado track, either.  The strides between them were eight or ten feet.  Which meant that this band of them were particularly strong and fast.

The tiny hairs on the back of his neck rose.   He rubbed his neck.  He pinched the bridge of his nose, and they all knew not only that these were the prints of some evolved sort of shado, creatures so strong, fast, and vile that they could down the horses they chased without any weapon but the bony shards that were their teeth.  The fact that a horse was left alive meant it was likely left alive on purpose, as a trap—which smacked of an intelligence in the creatures they had not yet encountered.

And the beasts that had done it were somewhere out there, perhaps looking at them right now.

They doubtless already know that they were here.

“Kill them as you would a normal shado,” Rocco whispered to him. 

Uncle Jickie added, “Just make certain, boy, that you kill them twice as much!”

Chapter 47

As they descended further into the vast and stony way, it became more difficult to maintain any real sense of direction.  The high, rolling thunderclouds overhead let eerie squirts of sunlight through, and the moving shadows made the sheer piles seem to lean, an illusion of motion that was sometimes real, as towers of rock sent pebbles scrabbling down beside them while they picked their through gap after winding gap. 

They had traveled only some six hours more before Tyler paused.  He made a motion for them to halt. 

He pointed silently to a distant ridge, which was some three hundred yards to the south.  

There they witnessed a pair of goats, moving swiftly across the stones.

“Flushed from the north,” he whispered.

Noises like snaps and whistles could be heard echoing in the distance as they crept along, ever cautiously.  They all thought of the unseen voyeurs out there in the scree, perhaps waiting in ambush already, perhaps salivating at the sight of them.

But no one cared to think about what the noises sounded like… communication.

They moved more slowly, more silently after that.  They paused often, looking around. 

Now the vertical rolls of loose shale were less steep.  But it was as if they only offered a better view of things merely to show that they were in an endless sea of the glassy stones.  A hill that cast them all in shadow looked like a wave of it jagged trash, melted into the hillside. 

It felt like you could drown in this place.  More than once, Doc felt disoriented and dizzy.  They were was always leaning, always trying to avoid the deep and scattered cavities that may or may not have led straight to frozen depths of hell. 

Then the hillocks became steeper again, and more numerous.  They began to hear the distant, unmistakable yelp of the shado.  It was both wolfish and owl-like at once, and three times louder than either.

“Take care, boys!” His uncle whispered to them.  “We’re not long for a fight!”

Always, they took draw of their samurai blades at the sound of the crumble of stone.  And in time they were looking behind them as much as they were looking ahead. 

All day, they could never see far off, not until they crested a rise, and by then there would be no sound or movement, just the undulating ocean of stone.

And now there was a fog rising from the valleys and troughs.

Night came in a shroud of misty fog, and in this unpleasant habitat of hell-things, Doc could not always hold his panic at bay.  They stood back to back in a circle, forming a shield wedge.  They all gripped their swords, holding riot shields aloft.

Stillness underscored the moving fog.  Soon, again, they heard the distant yelping of zombies.

There was a nearby thump, then a crumble of stone.

“Ooh, thundering fuck…” Jickie whispered. 

He looked around.

Then Doc saw his eyes widen.

“Run!” he squalled.

Hairs rose on his arm, and before Doc could make out what he had seen, his feet were carrying him in mad darts across the stones.

Yelps were rising now here and there throughout the stony way.  Shado, gruesome and brutal, were emerging from everywhere, from every nook and pit, as if the earth was spitting them out.

Doc followed the fellows as they darted across the rocks.  All the while, forms scurried in the dark and in the fog, following them with a mad chorus of yelping.  The bleak landscape alive with motion, Doc ran, struggling to catch up with the fellows.  They allowed him the central position, and no sooner had Doc gained his spot than he finally saw some of them. 

Five of them, stared, unmoving.  Feral, covered with mangy hair even though they looked vaguely reptilian, their terrible heads were sullen with the deep gazes of predators.  But, deep inside him, Doc sensed something in them that he calculated as more than a predatory danger.  Doc could feel the ancient blackness of their hate.

Just as they had expected, these were not normal shado.

They were not even normal offspring.

These things were a whole new human-animal.  They were just standing there.  Then they squatted, readying themselves.  Each was strapped about the ankles and wrists with thongs of horse hide.  They were their equal in height, but they were lithe and sinewy.  They flashed terrible, growling mouths and brandished primitive clubs of bone and rock.

They ran toward them, crying out the crazed, human bellows of war.

Then fear hoisted the boys back a step in their shield wedge.  They trebled.   At the last possible moment, the commandos each leapt, crashing down on the zombie skulls and upheld arms with the mighty chops of their sword.  And no sooner had they cut through them than they swung back, splitting their jaws or ripping the gray leathery hide of their bellies.  

But even as they ran past them, the strange shado yet followed, hobbling like mad along the rocks, squalling.

With each step closer, they yelped and growled. 

The commandos dashed onto a massive, high stone that was encircled by a stream, tracing its edge. 

They halted, the zombies coming still.  Tyler fell behind them.  He pulled the bandana off and wrapped it around a large bite the back of his arm, wrapping, growling as the zombies scampered up the rock.

The first of them fell on broken legs, tripping the next two.  Then one leapt over them all.  Doc chopped sideways, bringing his blade across its scar-pocked chest. 

Tyler emerged and ripped him again, across the throat.

The body rocked back and forth, clutching crazily for a head that was no longer attached.  Then it collapsed and the others leapt, not for the fallen alpha, but for the commandos. 

Roaring, Doc rolled around on and came down hard enough on the first one to shave off its arms.  Back on its heels, the next bit at Mighty Kenzo, only to go flying away from them in two halves.  Uncle Jickie cut with surprising strength too, sending the other two without their hands, then rattled at them to run as he split one of their faces on the rocks with the pummel of his sword.

Quick as that, they ran again for higher ground. 

They were coming from everywhere now.  With help from Tyler, they scalped two, even as they ran together, zigging up the crumbling stones of a steep landslide.  One stabbed at him with a pointy shard of stone fixed to a horse’s thigh bone, and Doc landed his axe in the back of its neck.  Then he ripped the blade in a deep awkward gouge across the spine.  The zombie’s body seized and fell away.  It was jerking as it rolled downhill.

Still others came, rising toward them in leaps.

Before Tyler could turn, one leapt on him.  As he ducked, rolling with the beast, he planted his foot and grabbed it by the arm.  Then he flung it, even as he grabbed his sword and swiped across the creature’s ass as it flew.  The move was off and weak.  It bounded back in the next instant, and it came down on top of Rocco.  As he fell backwards, Rocco’s lips were curled in pain.  He had to chop toward his own body, which he did deftly enough to cleave the zombie without chopping himself too deeply.  He scrambled to stand, the shado’s blood smeared and dripping down Rocco’s camo.  The beast was still grabbing at him, and Tyler turned, hacking it nearly in half.  As it dropped, they ran again, chopping backwards, severing shado spines and heads before they turned at the summit to gut and behead more of them from their high vantage. 

One gripped Doc’s hair, sending him crashing down.  Dale was down too, holding his split cheek.  And they both saw an army of zombies approaching.  Doc roared as one clamped down on his foot and shook terribly, undulating as he grabbed his ankle and tried to snap it.  Dale growled as the body flopped around, and chopping down, sent the headless body fish-rolling down into the lower rocks.

Doc stood again, and winced with the viscous pain. 

A brute of a zombie bounded ahead of the others.  It was gigantic, a monster, crushing several of the other as it rushed up the hill.  The others halted and fell to their bellies, groveling before it as it passed.

It roared.

As did Doc.

It kept running. 

Fear gripped him, thrusting him into the insane action of running right at it.  Doc barreled sideways into it, his knees slamming its face before it tossed him some ten feet behind his fellows.   Dale hacked into its shins, only to find his sword kicked away.  But Doc saw Dale yet rise and leap towards it, only to fall short.  He chopped from the ground, and missed.

Uncle Jickie and Rocco slashed wildly, cleaving into is ribs and belly.  But it flung them aside like dolls before biting at Mighty Kenzo, who recoiled, but came up from a squat, splitting its jaw before he spun and chopped once more, lopping off the top of its skull, which fell to the ground like some gruesome cup.

The massive horde was still groveling, whimpering now like beaten dogs as they sunk into the black crags and scampered away.  The enormous beast seemed to heave a moment.  Then the great mass of it fell backward, landing on its back with a gravelly crunch.

The brain rolled out with a fleshy bounce.

All of them were panting, impossibly exhausted.

Kenzo clasped Rocco on the shoulder and sheathed his bloody sword. 

He shook his head, and wiped the blood from his glove on his shirt.  “I’ll be damned, Frobbie old boy!  That big one wanted me worse than Addly’s sister!”

Rocco made a disgusted noise, then the desolate hills exploded with their wild hoots of laughter.