This Is Not The End: But I Can See It From Here (The Big Red Z Book 1) (17 page)

Chapter 48

The morning found them sore, and soaked with so much sweat and blood that they glistened.  Tyler and Dale, badly bitten, went immediately about washing their wounds.  And Doc had no idea how they even did that much.  He struggled to keep upright, so utterly spent that he worried Doc might pass out.  It was almost fortunate, he mused, that he had been bitten on the ankle, for it meant that he could sit to clean the wound.

The light also revealed that they had run through several camps of the beasts.  But calling them “camps” was being generous.  Doc sat, tenderly scrubbing his wound, looking about:  They were just nests of stone and hide, really, with bones and dung scattered everywhere.  Every nook and cleft and cranny was filled with them.  

Though the hillsides were abandoned, the wind was still stinking with the smell of the creatures themselves, a musky, sulfuric scent.  Rains were gathering and starting to dampen them, adding to the odor as they once again walked. 

It was a light rain, but noisy weather for all the flat rocks and the echoes of the hillside.  It felt good on their grimy faces.

In time the rains picked up, and they trotted a tree line tree escape the cold downpour.  There were several small pits with stinking, empty nest at the bottom.  They all stood wet and motionless, their adrenaline still pumping through their veins.

Some of the fellows sat, and as a few of them settled in for a smoke or a nap, Dale and Doc crested a nearby hill as lookouts. 

First, they had to sink slowly deeper into a hollow before the ravine rose again, bringing them up the opposite slop.  Crooked, shrubby pine jutted across their path.  The needles were black with some moldy disease.  They pulled themselves along a fallen tree, sitting, holding their axes close. 

There were a dozen or fourteen young zombies staring at them from a distant hill.  They were more halted than the others, and much smaller.  They looked around often.

Through the better part of the morning, Dale and Doc waited there, watching them, breathless and dripping from the intermittent fall of rain.  The day was a long affair, being so stiff, so very well exhausted, and cold.  Nearing afternoon, the young zombies began to sit or leave.  Some just kept staring.  Others pulled their supplies in brown fiber packs beside them and slept.

Dale and Doc took turns sleeping, watching with great care, but under the bleak and rainy skies, he had to admit, he dozed off a few times on his watch. 

Once, when he woke, the young zombies had disappeared 

Panicking, he looked around for them and saw nothing.  Doc turned to see the older fellows, snoring away blissfully under the tree line.  But there was no sign of the young zombies. 

They might have just slinked off to build new nests.  But Doc had a peculiar feeling.

Then movement exploded from behind him like a nightmare.  Everything blurred.  His heart raced.  He could only vaguely sense being surrounded, and no sooner had Doc realized it than arms, fists, and steel were whirling in every direction.  Swords flashed in impossible sweeps; it was impossible to distinguish the bite of one from the sting of another.  Dale bore his teeth, lunging into the confusing mayhem before he was even awake.   The fearsome thwacks and pings were chorusing his own grunts now as Doc recognized his foe—they were humans.  Females.  The barmaids from Beergarden roared with animalistic wailing. 

As Dale went tearing his way through the tumult, chopping, his sword was pulled from his hands, and the strength gushed out of his legs as one thwacked him atop the skull.

Then, with the abruptness of a startled animal, Doc regained consciousness—just in time to see one of them telling the others to hold.

Being bound, then dragged along the gravels like a carcass, Doc looked up at the backside of a woman with long black hair and legs as powerful as a mule.  She had a muscular ass and was growling rubbish about how much Doc weighed.

His fellows, readying their bows, halted when the saw the barmaids’ prizes, namely Dale and Doc, hog-tied by their wrists and ankles.

“Merry Commandos, Shadohunters, hear us!” the one carrying him called.

“Thundering fuck!”  Uncle Jickie roared.  “Now what’s all this!”

“In Beergarden, your own Mister Gig decreed that if any among us were stout or clever enough to down anyone of you, then we would be allowed to accompany you on your mission!”

“The one you speak of, the man who uttered that decree, is buried in the black grasses of the wild folk.”

“As one of your warparty, are you not bound by honor to keep his word?”

“Pah!  And who the fuck are you to question the bounds of honor?”

“The ones who took not one, but two of your best men!”

“Best!” Mighty Kenzo thundered.  “You’ve done nothing, you stupid bitches, but unburden us of our horniest fools!”

At which all the fellows had a hard-earned and much-needed round of laughs.

The woman looked down and eyed him suspiciously.

Doc looked up at her, shrugged, then winked.

She growled.  “Stubborn old fucks!” she roared back them.  “Do you have anything resembling a plan?”

“Quite so!”  Uncle Jickie called, waving them in.  “Why, my dears, already we’ve caught you girls with our bait, now haven’t we?”

Chapter 49

Doc was stunned to see the old boys welcome the barmaids so readily.  Indeed, as they went crookedly up the sandy rocks, the rain a full-blown storm now, a volley of howdies and hellos greeted the barmaids like long-lost friends. 

No hearty greetings escaped the barmaids’ lips, however.  Twenty of them, the full score of them, lofted a zombie head each upon the ground to send the snarling, lifeless faces crashing down the stony hillsides.

“I am Ollief,” the one that drug him said.  “And these, his honorable fellows, are the Barmaids of Beergarden.  Each of has lost a child to the longmongers.  They are at your service, old men!”

“Rocco McCarthy, at your service!”

“Jickie McCarthy, at your service!”

“Tyler McCarthy, at your service!”

“Kenzo McCarthy, at your service!”

“I am Dale Stonebreaker, at your service!”

“And I am Doc Ludeman, at your service, and feet!”

“Hello,” she said, and rolled her eyes down toward him.

The one that drug him motioned another to her side, and she told her to unbind Dale and him. 

In the next instant, a thousand voices seemed to call out, but it was only the maids as they gave such a high-pitched, lilting war cry that made Doc jump with a start.

“Craaaazy bitches!”  Mighty Kenzo thundered, then squalled laughing. 

As laughs poured like beer from the rest of the old, boys, the barmaids did something that surprised him.  Doc got a little dizzy as Doc stood, watching a dozen of them break off into pairs, and each pair picked out a man and approached.

Ollief nodded.

“We know where there’re some sturdy ruins.  Not far from here.  They’re on the shore of Percy Priest Lake.  Let’s go.  Let us groom you merry old boys for battle.”

Chapter 50

Doc could hardly imagine a stranger circumstance than cresting only three more hills and seeing what remained of a building.  Perched atop a lonely chunk of rock, the waves of the vast lake beyond it were pounding away at its base.

Doc had not ever seen anything so desperate and desolate, yet so sturdy and welcoming.  Strange, how hard it was for him to believe what he was seeing, but he had no trouble imagining the restless spirits that no doubt still prowled the halls.  It was the only thing standing as far as the eye could see, save one volcanic-looking structure, further down the shore.

For strangely long time, they all stood on that knoll of treeless land and watched the broad-shored waters, pewter and black, recede and crash again at the base of ruins. 

In time, though,  the barmaids accompanied them along a road, of sorts, which rose up to meet them, forking into several, crumbling dead ends to either side into deep and brackish pools.  They strode swiftly forward, and while Doc would have given all he possessed for the welcome of a roaring fire, they plunged waist-deep into frigid water for some hundred yards of low road, only to arrive at a somber, dark stone place.  It was nearly April, but the wind that raced off the water, howling through the broken building, seemed as cold as autumn’s last frost.  There was a smell that was hard to describe.  Again, it was like autumn, but sour, tinged with the hectic flush of coming death.

It was only then that Doc noticed that their motley party had a half a dozen goats, for some reason, and even the beasts seemed leery to go any nearer.

Bik and Andi, two noisome redheaded barmaids that had adopted him, drew closer.  Apart from a pat on the hands, Doc responded coldly to these warm overtures.  But Bik pulled him closer still.  She pointed to a gray monolith, a lone mountain, of sorts, to the north.

“The lair of the Black Ones,” she said in a kind of whisper.  “The abode of the helicopter.”

Doc winced at the thought of the flying machine.  Then he felt the unyielding agony that welled in Tyler’s eyes.  There, with any luck whatsoever, was his beautiful Emily, somewhere in the bowels of that mountainous hill, enduring unknown hells.

There were not three miles away.  The mountain in which they had been tucked away was like a scarred, bleak, and lonely cone with half of it sheared off.  It was half a mountain, really.  The part that should have jutted out into the ocean looked as though they had been chiseled away by some enormous, mystical hammer—perhaps the same one that had pounded the rest of Nashville into black ruins.  There were no foothills or peaks rimming it, just the lone monolith, bizarre, black and angular, rising from the water’s edge as if it had been dropped there from the heavens.

Doc strained his eyes for any sign of the helicopter against the black slopes or the sheer, dark cliffs, and Doc thought for a moment he saw figures against the horizon. 

Sometimes his eyes did that. 

They made camp just inside, with a pathetic excuse for a fire and not so much as a pile of hay to sit on.  There was a solitary window-slit, or crack, facing the mountain, and while the tiny fire burned pitifully in the enormous, towering hearth, Dale kept watch.  He said nothing of it, but Doc realized he had lost a great deal of trust with him, letting the barmaids catch them off their guard.

Doc could smell lake’s brine, blending with the thin smell of the fire’s scrubby odor.  Everything felt too still, and everything was strangely quiet as Bik and Andi pulled him aside.  Others were taken aside two, Doc noticed, before they brought him upstairs, producing picks and combs from the folds of their thick mid-dresses.

Doc looked out through a broken section of wall, breathing deeply.  He stared out at the black mountain.  It was disappearing into the gathering night, but it was no less impressive.

Doc thought of Dolly.

Andi knelt before him.  She was freckled and pretty, with eyes that let you know she had known melancholies that no woman should ever have to endure.  She pulled the twine from the braids of his beard.  Bik approached too.  She was mannish and tough, but somehow the more fragile-looking and prettier of the two.  She scooted behind him, then pulled off his commando’s helmet.  With her fingernails, she scruffed up his hair and unbound his ponytail.  She would gradually loom into view, head first, combing and pawing at the front part of his hair before she began snipping at it here and there with small scissors.  Then she would disappear behind him. Under his chin, Andi spread a bit of clothe over his lap, proceeding to even out lengths of his fire-singed beard.  She told him to hold his chin high.  Then, with a sharp razor, she sawed at the tangles under his jaw.  Doc had never received, nor even seen, such care and attention, not to his beard at least.

“They say the helicopter cannot resist the cry of a child.  It is like the cry of a rabbit to a fox,” said Andi.

“Yuh,” Doc whispered, unable to nod with the razor beneath his chin.

“That is why we brought the goats.”

Doc raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“Have you ever heard a goat being bled from the throat?”

“Yeah.  I see,” Doc mumbled.  “You plan to lure it out with them.”

Bik whispered into his ear from behind, “Smart.  As intelligent as you are easy on the eyes, Mister Doc.”

“And twice as generous,” Doc said puckishly.  “Though I’m afraid you’ve arrived at the auction too late, my dears.  The one called Dolly has stolen away with your prize bull.”

At once, they both giggled, but then stopped themselves too soon.

“What?” Doc whispered, Andi trimming again on his beard.

“Nothing, Mister Doc.”

“Don’t call me intelligent then play me the fucking fool!  You obviously know her!  What is it?”

“A small matter, sir.  It’s just that Dolly, she’s…”

“She’s what?”

“Barren, sir.  Poor Dolly cannot conceive.”

Doc grunted, softly.

In his mind, he had no doubt that this was as villainous a trait to these barmaids as arson, or even murder.  And that Doc would fail no matter how hardily, and cleverly, they might try to have a little one of their own, should embitter him unspeakably.

But it was not so.

Instead, his heart gathered around the thought of her more tenderly than ever, endearing her to him more fully

“We understand, sir,” Bik said, changing the subject, seeming to mistake his silence for rage, “that your company of commandos does not mean to kill the longmongers, only to steal away with the wife of the one called Tyler?”

“True,” Doc said, though he was not entirely certain that was the plan.

Then the absurdity of that hit him--thundering fuck!  Somehow, they had drug themselves across the state, and they hadn’t even discussed what they were going to do once they got here!

“Very good, sir.  Then luring it out of your path will serve both of our warparties well!”