This Is Not The End: But I Can See It From Here (The Big Red Z Book 1) (9 page)

Chapter 27

Doc and Jickie stood in the melting snow an hour later, above the zombie nest where he and Tyler had found his dog tags.  Tyler was below, still crawling around, hunting for some passage that led under the house.

Doc was relating his experience with the Mute, recounting how even he was certain it was longmongers.  But, being highly successful in all his own dealings, Jickie seemed all but irritated by the fact that it would boil down to a best guess.  He could not tolerate guesswork.  And yet two days of vigilant searching had yielded not the slightest inkling of Emily, or even how the longmongers had gotten her, so maybe the aggravation of it ignited all fury of the uncle’s fiery temperament. 

“We’ll find who did this.  I won’t stop till I’ve chopped his head off and cleaved him in two, Doc!” he continued.  “Make it a point to knock the balls off anything that stands in your way—”

“Dangerous business, dealing with the longmongers.  We’ll be venturing as far off as Nashville, right into their neck of the woods.”

“Danger is my business, Doc!  I’m Jickie Fucking McCarthy!”

“But you don’t suppose …” 

“Suppose!” he roared.  “I make it a point never to suppose anything.  I act on facts.  And the fact is I’m not sitting around here.  I’m waiting for more of those bastards to pick us off one by one.  What the hell are they doing that for anyhow!”

“Who knows…”

“I know you better hack the balls off anything that opposed you.”

“You’ve said that several times already, Mr. Jickie,” Doc put in, having a touch of his own peppery temper from his mother’s side.

The uncle looked at Tyler emerging from the ground, then said with uncharacteristic softness, “Call me uncle.   Now go.  Get the boys together.”

Meanwhile, Tyler rested neither night nor day.  In the morning, he would outline the plan for the day with a few hurried words.  At night, he rode back to the lodge, or emerged from the zombie nest, with eager questions in his eyes, and Doc knew he had nothing better to report to him than he did to him. 

After a silent, meager meal, he would ride through the dark forest on a fresh mount.  How he passed those sleepless nights, Doc did not know. 

Chapter 28

Not even someone who had lived in the Old World, the world of air conditioning and the McRib, would have trouble imagining what the eyes around this table had seen.  No one who had seen a documentary about chimpanzees would have any difficulty understanding the cost of fighting something that was five times their equal in strength, but thirty times as aggressive.  Certainly no pampered history professor would doubt that medieval lords and earls ever waged more ruthless war on each other than the zombies and commandos during those years.  The savagery and sorrow seen by the eyes around the table would not be eclipsed for centuries. 

But it did not damage the hearts of these old bucks. 

Uncles Jickie, Rocco, Gig, and Kenzo were the sort of men who were still pulled by the life of the cutter.  They still wanted to rise up and salute their destiny with a growl.  They were still ravenous for danger and barbarity.  They still felt the stirrings of youth, the places where they had faced down and laughed at death, and roared out the inexpressible depths of defeat’s anguish.  But since they had taken their seat at a table behind Gig’s Hall, they sat silently across from Tyler and Doc, just looking. 

They were positioned in a mossy and rock-strewn clearing, along the long wall of Fort Campbell, which was casting them in the moon’s dim shadows.  They sat for long minutes, perfectly still, all of them, still just staring in the lone candle before them.  Beside it was a mason jar of goat’s blood, to be drunk should any oaths be sworn this night.

Gig harrumphed quietly at the head of the table.  He cocked an eye at Kenzo, a dour old man whose hair had not yet flecked with the slightest bit of gray.  “Well?.... What the fuck are we waiting for?”

All of them, silent and rapt, turned to Tyler.  He made a strange wincing expression and seemed to study the sky.

“Boys, I can’t ask this of you… of
any
of you.”

“Fuck that!  Here, Here!” Uncle Jickie thundered.  “Once more, boys!  Once more to the filthy fucking joys of war!”

“Here, here!” they all cried.

And each of them, in turn, drank from the jar of goat’s blood.
 

Chapter 29

In making his oath, they had decreed Doc their leader, and Doc took up the role with an enthusiasm that prompted more than a few eager nods from the leathery band of adventures.  Indeed, a horny young fellow, on his first escape into the night with a young woman, could not have been half as exhilarated as Doc was to have so venturesome a quest before him.  With Tyler’s bar of gold, he provisioned them with every worthless trinket and flashy trifle that could tempt the local hillbillies and rednecks into aiding them with supplies or the secrets of the forest.  And if these things should fail, Doc added a dozen fine as new hunting knives, which everyone knew could corrupt the soul of even the most hardened backwoods bruiser.  Doc also equipped them with a box of wicked-looking samurai swords.  He placed these things in square cases that were slow to open, which would surely add to their aweing power. 

As to their needs, Doc secured a twenty foot rubber raiding craft from Addly, who happened to be the son of an old Navy Seal.  The compact vessel had a somewhat flat canvas bottom, specially designed for the river.  It was lovely thing with a hull about five feet wide, a small 25 horse outboard at the stern, and a triangular gun mount made of titanium, on which a pair of M4s were mounted, supported by two rope crutches that it ran like a rafter from a sailing vessel down the center of the craft

And for all their posturing, preparation, and searching the week prior, it seemed like no time before the at all before the unlucky number of six of them were loading the craft with every manner of supply:  Tents, blankets, bows, arrows, flints, pipes, marijuana, shotgun shells, flour, deer jerky. 

The Feisty-Uncle was a genuine military ship, worth more than the bar of gold, so despite the handsome cost, Doc had to suppose that Addly harbored no grudge against his good friend—for he obviously looked on it with love and memories of his father, and Doc believed that he even reinforced the sides with some Kevlar plating for them right before they bought it.  From a distance, the vessel looked lean, and somewhat knifelike, but when you were aboard you could see how it flared outward so that she sat on the water like a shallow bowl rather than cut through it like a blade.  Even with her belly laden with several stout men, their weapons, food, and supplies, she needed very little depth.

Testing it, the commandos went out rowing with the full load of men and supplies. They chanted an old song Doc did not know about how it was time to Ramble On as they rowed, before pounding out the tale of some place called Hotel California.  It was a good tale and its rhythms took them down the river in spirit not unlike teenagers itching for a brawl. 

They were going northwest, against the current, still testing things out.  The ride was placid, and the sun was warm, despite the river’s margins being thick with ice.  Once in a while her motor would scrape on gravel, but by keeping to the outside of the river’s sweeping bends they were able to stay in sufficient water.  The mast had been replaced with a long aluminum river pole, so that, on the outside of the river’s curves, they could slide under the overhanging trees without becoming entangled.

A few of the guards from Goback rode horses, keeping pace with them on the eastern bank.  They had gone so far north as the Clinton Dam, where they let themselves rest.

A lone hunter stood on the rise before them, and for a moment they just watched him work.  His name was Dale, a fellow who had come to Fort Campbell for reasons that were his own.

It made Doc think.  Here in the hilly, relatively safe part of the state where they lived, zombies had taken to living in caves and keeping mostly to nests that were deep in the woods and marshes, but away from the base’s heart, the world was overrun still by the steady stream of Shado, still
filled
with the beasts in some places—and it occurred to Doc that while he had brought every manner of thing to trade with the hillbillies, they didn’t have enough people to take on a full onslaught from a large pack of Shado.

“We need a seventh member,” Doc said to no uncle in particular. 

The old man knew at once knew what Doc was hinting at.  He looked up at Dale.  He had seen the new guy beat two commandos to an inch of their lives.  He was hovering over a hole in the ground now, like a polar bear hunting seals, waiting for the zombies within to emerge.  He was wearing some sort of coyote skin hat.  Or it might have been a dog.

Jickie “puhed” loudly.

“Puh?  Puh doesn’t feed the hound, Mister Jick.  Someone has to man the river pole.  That leaves us five guns.  And we need someone who’s been south.”

“I said call me uncle.”

“He’s from Nashville,” Gig agreed behind him.  “Came on this very river.  Seems he’d make a damn fine guide if you ask me.  Knows how to keep that mouth shut too!”

At that, Big Kenzo grunted, followed by several others, though it was hard for Doc to tell if they agreed or not.

Suddenly, just ahead, Dale filled the air with the thunder of his guns.   Sparrows, just out of their winter sleep, swooped across his large frame.  When the echoes settled, he turned away from the smoking nest, approached the bank, then stepped beneath the naked branches of a brake of willows. and yelled, “Fine vessel, boys!  I hear that that motherfucker could float on a puddle!”

Then he came wading out to greet them, crunching through the thinner ice until he waist deep in the frigid water.

“Now what the fuck’s all this!” Uncle Jickie said.

“I’ll tell you boys what all this is.  This is a deathtrap.  Going to Nashville in this, you better be right with God.  Sometimes you’ll pass a riverside settlement of barbwire and timber, and you’ll think it’s a trading post.   But the folks inside…  I tell you, a lot of them, they’ve become like them.  Hungry for flesh of any kind.  Some are more like wolves than men at all.”

“Says the man in the wolfskin hat!” thundered Jickie.

Doc suddenly had the feeling he’d been very foolish, or else very wise, wanting to talk to this guy.

“Trust me on at least this much, Mister Jickie.  I know them like… well, as good as any man does.  If you won’t make me rich as your guide, then make me satisfied knowing you will not travel by day.  Hide the boat, boys.  Hide it by day and glide it by night.”

“Shit, son.  We are commandos!”

“They have commandos, too,” Doc said.

Big Kenzo laughed. “I think only one man in three is a real commando, and sometimes not even that many, but in our company, young Mister Dale, every man is a commando.”

“Well, maybe.  You know, they say that in the first years, if you didn’t want to kill, you stayed home. You tilled the soil, cooked burgers, drove the tow motor, but you did not take to unfamiliar land and become a commando.  But now, boys?  Come on.  I shouldn’t even have to say, every man is forced to the fight.”

“Hell yeah!” Kenzo growled.  “But what you have to realize it is that one in three or maybe only one in four has the belly for it.  The rest are farmers or fry cooks at heart.  They just run when they see a Shado.  We’ll be like rabid hounds.”

One or two of the oars dipped and the Feisty-Uncle glided backwards.

“Yep, hounds.  Growling and yelping, fighting bears.”

The vessel slowed.

“I saw zombies try to take a band of longmongers down.”

For once, Doc’s kinsman fell silent.

“These were smart beasts too, boys.  Two bands of them had joined.”

“What!”

“Oh.  Yeah, boys.  That’s not all.  They had blocked the river with felled trees.  There were about a hundred of the fuckers.  And the longmongers just had about a dozen riflemen, and some jackass with a sword.  But then I see a pair of spear-throwers.  Sons of bitches trotted right up on the blockage, skewering them.”

“Oh Come on.  Fucking lies.”

“Believe me or don’t.  But that was something else I learned about the blackwaters.  First of all they call them longmongers in Tennessee.  A man’d like to think it’s all about money.  But they’re Shado cutters too.”

“Nope.”

“Yep.  For some it’s just the joy.  I’ve seen go out after the undead.  And I’ve seen the utter geniuses they are at it.  I saw men whooping with joy, I mean real fucking joy, as they leaned down to stab the beasts, only to have Shado teeth rip off their faces while the others laughed.  Laughed…. And some, I shit you not, they’re like fucking ninjas.  I’ve seen them disappear with people they kidnap without so much as—”

Doc watched in amazement as Tyler hefted Dale over the Feisty-Uncle’s prow.

“If you fight half as well as you talk shit…” he offered, at which the others had a much-needed laugh.

They had their seventh member.