Undead (22 page)

In the first light of dawn, the generator continued to run, its lawn mower sound filling the surrounding woods.

Dave, Carl and the baby were asleep, the baby cradled against Dave’s inert body. They were protected within the circle of generator wires strung through the branches of trees.

A few yards from the circle of wire lay the charred unmoving corpse of a vanquished ghoul, wisps of smoke still rising from its blackened remains. On the grassy hill, sprawled where they had fallen, were the charred remains of two more of the vanquished humanoids.

The generator motor sputtered.

Carl moaned feverishly in his sleep.

The motor continued to run smoothly again, as if a bubble in the fuel line had caused it to miss a beat.

The baby stirred slightly, still cuddled against Dave’s body. The revolver remained weakly clutched in Dave’s right hand. Carl had dropped his cleaver onto the dewy grass.

The morning air was damp with a faint mist that had not yet been burned off by the rising sun.

The generator sputtered again, and stopped. The chirping of birds and the quieter sounds of the woods stood out in the shocking silence of the stopped engine.

The two men and the baby continued to sleep. In their sleep they were now defenseless, and were being approached by soft footsteps moving cautiously through the tall grass of the hill and entering the clump of trees. Whoever was approaching had been lured by the sound of the generator, now silent.

Dave slumbered, tiredness and anxiety etched on his face as he slept the deep sleep of exhaustion, his mind wracked with dreams of his wife and child. He was not a handsome man, but his face possessed strength and character; his short sandy hair was rumpled and matted, there was a bruise on his forehead and a smudge of dirt on his cheek. He was dressed in the jeans and flannel shirt which had formerly belonged to John Carter, while Carl was wearing similar clothes once belonging to Wade Connely.

Carl was deeply asleep, but was not sleeping well. He moaned and stirred frequently in the throes of fever brought on by his wound. Though the morning was damp and cool, Carl’s brow ran with perspiration, his dark, wavy hair hanging down and plastered against his forehead. His complexion, normally ruddy, was pale. His wound radiated a soreness and stiffness that had spread through the muscles of his side, so that he was aware of it even in sleep though it did not rouse him to consciousness. The tiredness of his body helped numb the pain.

The approaching footsteps continued to move as softly as possible, picking their way carefully amidst foliage and dead branches in the clump of trees.

Quietly, a hand parted a low-hanging branch, revealing the face of a boy peering between the leaves. The boy’s face was dirty and tanned, his eyes alert, the eyes of one who is used to living in the woods. The boy’s eyes surveyed the dead generator and the circle of wires, and the two men and the baby sleeping within the circle. Then the boy took a quiet and decisive step forward, his arm raised in a gesture of silence. He was carrying a bow and a quiver of arrows, a hunting knife tucked under his belt.

Other boys stepped forward, all of them armed. Some carried bows and arrows, others had knives and guns. They moved silently out of the woods, surrounding Dave and Carl and the baby.

The first boy, the leader, ducked under the useless cable from the dead generator, advanced quickly and quietly and stepped on Dave’s wrist, preventing him from using the revolver. Other boys moved forward, pointing their weapons.

Startled, Carl jerked awake and tried to raise himself up, but his bewilderment and the pain in his side caused him to fall back to the ground. The stiffness of his muscles had gotten worse during the night, and he sat there staring at the newcomers and realizing at the same time that he had a fever and that his wound was probably infected.

“Who are you?” Dave demanded of the leader, after he came to his senses and realized that they were surrounded. He was not sure of the exact nature of the predicament they were in, and he retained some hope that it would turn out for the better somehow, if he played his cards right. The hope came from the fact that they were, after all, surrounded by
boys
, their ages seeming to range from about thirteen up to perhaps eighteen. There were about a dozen boys in the pack.

One of the boys reached down and gingerly picked up Dave’s revolver and fondled it in his hand, pleased with the acquisition. The boy flipped out the cylinder and noted that the revolver was loaded.

“That’s
my
gun,” Dave said, “and we need it to protect ourselves and the baby. Put it down on the ground.”

“Shut up,” the leader said with soft-spoken authority and power.

“I’d like to get some more ammunition for this,” the boy with the revolver said, gloating.

“Frisk them,” the leader ordered to the troops behind him.

Carl stood up painfully, not wanting to be rolled around on the ground. Obligingly, he raised his hands over his head and stood with his legs apart. The boys frisked him, quickly and professionally, taking from him one long knife and the heavy cleaver, which had been next to him on the ground. He did not have any wallet, watch or money; anything of value had already been taken the previous day by John Carter’s gang.

Dave laid the baby on the ground gently, and rose to his feet also. He raised his hands over his head and allowed his pockets to be turned inside out. From him the boys got only the flashlight and the revolver, and the ammunition for the revolver which was inside his jacket pockets. Dave stooped and picked up the baby, and the baby woke up and started crying.

The tribe of boys began grumbling, disappointed not to have found any money.

“We don’t have anything,” Carl said, speaking with effort. “We’ve already been plucked clean.” He debated the advisability of telling the boys they were State Troopers, finally deciding the revelation would not improve their chances. He was certain it would most probably have the reverse effect if the boys had committed any crimes during these lawless days.

The baby continued to cry. Dave held it tightly and rocked it and looked to the boys’ leader hoping the gang’s hostility was based on fear and that there might be a chance to get out of this together, helping each other. “The baby’s hungry,” Dave said at last, seeing nothing but hatred in the boy’s eyes.

“Shut up,” the leader said again, as though it was his response to everything.

“We’ve got to get this baby to a doctor,” Dave said. “His mother is dead. And my partner is wounded.”

“We’re State Troopers,” Carl said, taking.a chance.

“Yeah. I’m the mayor,” the boy with the revolver said. He seemed to be the second in command.

“Where did you come from?” the leader asked.

“The Miller farmhouse up the road,” Dave said, pointing down the hill, then patted the baby and tried to comfort it while it continued to cry terribly. “Everybody else was killed. The baby’s mother died. Why don’t you go down there and see?”

One of the boys snickered. “Sure…and get torn apart by all those monsters down there.”

Dave had decided the boys weren’t going to give him and Carl any help, so it was best to channel their energy somewhere before they got more dangerous. Maybe he and Carl and the baby would be lucky enough to escape with their weapons. His mind formulated an argument. “You can see we don’t have any money or anything valuable. Why don’t you just give us back our gun so we can protect ourselves and try to find some food for this baby?” He looked to the leader for an answer.

“Good try,” the leader said. “But we’re keeping the gun. We need it, too. It’s dog eat dog now—you should know that.” He laughed cruelly. “Now
get moving
.” He raised his bow, an arrow pointed at Dave’s chest.

Dave and Carl hesitated. The other boys also pointed their weapons. The boy with the revolver squeezed the trigger, so that the hammer moved back; a further squeeze and a round would fire. “I said
move
!” the leader shouted. The force behind his voice made the threatening arrow quiver slightly.

Reluctantly, Dave and Carl began to walk down the grassy hill toward the dirt road, the baby still crying.

The leader called after them, using his right arm—the arm that still held the bow—to point up the road, away from the Miller house. “There’s another farm about three miles up that way! You might be able to get some help there!”

“To hell with them, let them fend for themselves,” the second in command said, fondling the revolver. “Specially if they’re State Troopers. They could put in a call and get someone on our ass.”

“Phone lines are dead,” the leader said. “Besides, we’ll be long gone before they can do us any damage. What say we try that farmhouse, like they said? If they’re all dead, it should be easy pickins.”

The leader gave the command to move forward and, whooping and yelling, the tribe of boys began to run down the hill, toward the scene of desolation and death.

It took Dave and Carl the better part of an hour to cover the three miles to the next farm. During the trek, which was exceedingly painful for Carl, the baby cried itself to exhaustion and fell asleep, weak from hunger. Dave continued to carry the baby, keeping a lookout for possible attack. The two men had to move slowly, keeping to the cover of foliage at the side of the road wherever possible. The surrounding terrain, above and below the road, was so hilly and thick with undergrowth that it would have been impossible to travel through it, especially for Carl in his condition.

Carl’s fever was much worse. His shirt, soaked with perspiration, his body becoming weaker with each step. For the last mile or so, he moved in a dogged half-stumble, refusing to give up, fighting a lapse into delirium or unconsciousness. They were terrified to stop, but they did anyway, a couple of times, to give Carl a chance to rest. The rest periods did not seem to help; he seemed to do better when he could keep moving, and for the last half mile Dave tried to support his partner and help carry him along. If they could get to the farmhouse, he reasoned, there was a good chance they could obtain some kind of help. If there
was
a farmhouse. If the boys had not lied.

They rounded a bend in the road and spotted a small shed through the trees. At the same time they came upon a dead chicken in the road. They kept moving, not commenting, and when they had advanced a few more yards, past the clump of trees which obscured the chicken shed, they saw a white frame farmhouse about forty yards back from the road. Instinctively, both men stepped behind the protection of a huge tree. They peeked out, looking toward the house across its yards of tree-dotted lawn. There were dead, inert forms on the lawn—the remains of dead animals and some humanoid forms, ghouls which had obviously been conquered. The windows of the house had been boarded up; the place had evidently withstood an assault.

Looking at each other and making a wordless decision, Carl and Dave stepped from behind their tree.

A shot rang out and Carl was blasted back and fell dead.

For an instant Dave did not move, seeing the frozen expression on Carl’s face and the blood soaking through the front of his shirt. Then a flurry of shots rang out and Dave dived and rolled for cover, ending up in a gully behind some low shrubs. In his rolling he had tried to protect the baby with his body and had apparently succeeded—the infant was badly shaken up, but un-hurt. He was crying violently, the tiny body wracked with sobs that seemed too terrible for it to sustain. Dave was afraid the baby was going to die. Keeping as flat as he could in the gully, he peeked over the edge, back at Carl’s body near the tree. He saw what he had not seen earlier; in addition to the chest wound, the top of Carl’s head had been blown off, probably struck by a second bullet in the flurry which had followed the first lone shot. Guilty relief swept over Dave as he realized that at least Carl would not get up again. He would not become one of
them
. Then he shuddered at the deeper realization of the sorrow he felt at his partner’s death. All these feelings were mixed with the knowledge that he and the baby were trapped and had to find a way to survive. The people in the farmhouse had mistaken Carl and Dave for attacking humanoids, and had fired without asking any questions.

The baby continued to cry loudly, so loudly that Dave felt sure it could be heard from the house. “Help me! Please! I have a baby! Help me, please!” he shouted across the lawn.

Another shot rang out, disturbing leaves. Then came a moment of silence. Dave tried again, cupping his hand around his mouth. “I’ve got a newborn infant with me who’s starving.
Please
! You don’t need to help
me
—but take the baby!”

He waited. There was only silence. He waited for a long time. A voice came, muffled behind the barricades of the boarded-up house. “You, out there! Show yourself!”

Dave hesitated. The voice came again. “Show yourself, by God! We’ve got to be sure you’re not one of those things! “

Anger grew inside Dave. He wanted to inform whoever it was that they had already killed his partner because of their itchy trigger fingers, but he figured he had better keep quiet about that for the moment. If they knew they had killed a man, they might decide not to leave any witnesses. Dave cupped his hand and yelled as loud as he could, “I’m going to get to my feet! Don’t shoot, for God’s sake! I’m a
man
—and I have a
baby
!”

Unaccountably, the baby suddenly stopped crying. Dave looked at it, ascertaining that it was still alive and realizing that even if it were not he would still use it to gain admittance to the farmhouse. He got up, holding the baby in plain view above his head, then he scrambled awkwardly up out of the gully and stepped from the shelter of an overhanging tree so that anybody in the house could clearly see what he was. Walking slowly, holding the baby carefully, he approached the house. He saw the glint of gun barrels in the boarded-up windows and he tried to be ready to dive for cover in case a shot rang out.

A dead goat lay in the yard close to the house, some of its bones picked as clean as if buzzards had feasted on it. Dave saw that the goat had been shot almost exactly in the right eye; the socket of that eye was caked with blood, while the partially visible pupil stared out.

Twenty feet from the front porch of the farmhouse, Dave stopped, still holding the baby above his head. He spoke in the direction of a window with a cracked glass and protruding rifle barrel. “This baby was born last night. The mother died. Her name was Karen Miller. She was your neighbor, up the road. The baby hasn’t had anything to eat. Would you be kind enough to give it a little milk?”

Dave lowered the baby, hugged it to his chest, feeling its weak breathing against his ribs. He figured if the people inside didn’t know he was human by now and needed help, they would never figure it out.

A man’s voice came from behind the cracked pane. “We have no milk. Our goat is dead. Can’t you see?”

Before Dave could reply, the man’s voice boomed again. “How do we know you ain’t one of the looters or rapists that have been loose around here? We knew Karen—knew her whole family. They came to our daughter’s funeral. Maybe you robbed them and did them in.”

“My name is Dave Benton and I’m a State Trooper,” Dave said. He jiggled the baby and it began to cry as if on cue, and Dave hoped it would win him some sympathy.

It did. A woman’s voice came from behind the cracked pane of glass, “Henry! The
baby
. For goodness sakes,
let the man in
!”

The protruding rifle barrel withdrew through the broken place in the window and shortly after it was gone, Dave heard the sounds of the door being undone; he listened as three bolts were unlatched. The door opened and Dave stared apprehensively, the baby continuing to cry. Two middle-aged people stood in the doorway, a man and a woman. The man continued to point his rifle at Dave and to look him over very suspiciously. The woman seemed more kindly; she had gray hair done up in a bun and wore a faded print dress. The man wore overalls and a flannel shirt, his face creased and hard, his complexion sunburned and his head bald. The couple were Mr. and Mrs. Dorsey, parents of the dead child to whose funeral Bert Miller had come with his three daughters. Mrs. Dorsey brightened when she saw the baby, eyed her husband and pushed the barrel of his rifle aside so it was not pointing at Dave or the baby any longer. “Well, hurry up inside now,” she said, noticing Dave’s hesitancy and stepping back to allow him to enter.

Dave followed the retreating farm couple inside and watched while Henry Dorsey secured the door. Mrs. Dorsey took the baby and held it up, looking at it with love and concern. “We’ve got to get milk or the baby will starve to death,” Dave said. “He hasn’t eaten since he was born.”

Mr. Dorsey spun from the door. “Can’t help ya there, I told you. Our goat’s dead.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of a big hulking young man, whom Dave had not noticed, sitting in a rocking chair in a dark corner of the room. “My son shot the goat. Thought it was one of them dead things. When it comes to brains, my boy didn’t quite get his share. He don’t take after his old man noways. Trouble is—” He caught himself. “You say you’re a State Trooper?”

“That’s right. My partner and I were captured by a gang of looters. They took our uniforms. Now he’s dead.”

When Dave stopped talking, the only sound in the room was the pat-pat of Mrs. Dorsey’s hand as she patted the baby, hugging it to her. Nobody knew what to say. The baby had stopped crying. Mr. Dorsey gave a long stare in the direction of his feeble-minded son, who let his head hang and cringed in his chair as it stopped rocking. Dave got the idea that it was the son whose thoughtless bullet had killed Carl, with the old man joining in the shooting spree afterward.

“We’ll see to it he has a decent burial, if we can,” Mrs. Dorsey said. “It’s not much, but it’s the best we can do.” Her words hung in the air and did not comfort anybody.

The idiot son wrung his hands and sulked in a scared sort of way, and began rocking back and forth involuntarily, the chair squeaking.

“Don’t you have some powdered milk? Canned evaporated milk?” Dave asked.

Mrs. Dorsey shook her head. “We been livin’ off canned stuff I put up last fall,” she explained, her eyes downcast, “but if we stay holed up here much longer it’s gonna run out.”

“Is there anywhere else around here where we can find milk?” Dave looked from husband to wife and back again.

Mr. Dorsey spoke, his voice harsh and grating without his meaning it to be. “Ain’t no other homes around for miles except the Kingsley estate. And the Miller farm.”

“Kingsley?” Dave brightened at the recognition of the name.

“Kingsley Country Club’s five miles north on the highway, over the hill. Least that’s where the golf course begins. Three miles further’s the club and then the mansion’s a mile or so beyond that. Kingsley owns practically the whole area. But I’d say yer best bet’d be the gas station.”

“Gas station?”

“Log Cabin Gas Station, seven miles south down to the main road. They sell bread and milk—least they used to.”

Dave mulled the information over in his mind. If he could get some form of transportation and a rifle, he could try to make it to the gas station for milk and food. Then he could set out after John Carter and his gang, and the captive Miller girls.

Mr. Dorsey watched Dave thinking, and read his mind. “I got two trucks and a car. I kin let ya take the car if ya wanna chance it. I’ll even give ya a rifle to take with ya. We’ll keep the baby here—for collateral.”

“If you’ll do what you say, I’ll take the chance,” Dave said, looking Mr. Dorsey in the eyes. “We can’t let the baby die from hunger—not after all he’s been through. With your help, maybe he’ll make it.”

“I’ll do the best I can while you’re gone,” Mrs. Dorsey said. “I’ll make some weak tea and feed him that, for a stimulant. Doctor told me to do that for my first born, when he was allergic to milk and couldn’t eat much else. I won’t give him much tea, just enough to see if it helps.”

Dave did not say anything. He found it impossible to thank the couple, considering either the man or his son had killed Carl. But they were trying to be kind now, perhaps as an atonement. Dave was not unappreciative. But nothing could bring Carl back.

The feeble-minded son kept rocking back and forth, back and forth, in his squeaking chair.