Well Fed - 05 (2 page)

Gus cringed. The toothless ones bothered him the most. They reminded him of feeble grandparents wanting a kiss.

Gus was thankful the crawler wore clothing: ragged jeans with frayed threads; a filthy film of a T-shirt, chewed through by kilometers of abrasion. The skin of its chest had shredded down to a gray rib cage. Knees missed their protective caps and lay opened to crusty black joints and stretched sinews.

A slug of a tongue stirred inside its mouth.

“Whattaya waitin’ for, man?” Talbert said from behind him. “Pop that thing.”

Gus sighed.

“Christ,” Talbert blurted in exasperation. He stepped around Gus and put his boot through the nose of the trapped gimp, crushing the egg-thin nasal bone. Talbert hooked the skull with his toes, attempting to turn the thing over in the ditch, tearing the head from the shoulders in a fragrant spatter of clumpy ink.

“Shit,” he swore before withdrawing his boot and stomping, squishing the head in a burst of bone and brain matter.

“That’s how you do it,” Talbert declared, freeing his foot from the mess. “The fuck got into you, Gussy? Your tampon in too tight or something? Maybe you should stay back here and guard the farm.”

They faced off, and, after several long seconds, Gus broke the stare and sheathed his bat in the leather scabbard draped across his back––yet another gift from Adam. Once that was done, he produced a pair of gardening gloves and pulled them on.

Talbert threw up one hand. “Well, I’m wasting daylight here. I thought you’d be badass for a trip off the farm––badder than
this
anyway––but you ain’t. You keep the peace here, and I’ll bring you back a teddy bear, okay?”

With that, Talbert turned and walked away, kicking up gravel as he went.

Gus focused on the dead thing cluttering his ditch. One gimp at a time was more his speed these days, keeping the folks on the farm secure. Going the length of the valley to rummage for expired medicine or whatever didn’t interest him. Nor did meeting more survivors and puzzling over their true intentions. His lot in life now was keeping the fields clear, protecting the farm, and disposing of the dead.

Little else interested him.

Taking a breath, he grasped the deadhead’s arms and grimaced as he pulled the body out of the ditch. A hip bone caught on the edge. Gus tugged, and the torso came free in a dry popping of flesh and bones while the lower part sagged back, leaving him looking dismayed.

“You piece of
shit
…”

A hole had been dug nearby for such a catch, and Gus dragged the upper half of the corpse toward the open grave, intending to bury it before lunch.

Talbert walked over to three men waiting near a burgundy minivan. He shook his head to give them advanced notice.

“No?” a surprised Sheldon Smith asked, his sandy hair pulled back in a surfer’s beach braid at the nape of his skull. He was the tallest of the four, broad in the shoulders and wearing a set of John Lennon wire-frame glasses.

“No.” Talbert flapped a hand. “His balls are milked, dude. If he still
has
balls, that is. Mount up. We’re outta here. If traffic’s not too heavy, we should be there just over an hour.”

He watched the three men climb aboard the van, all eager to break into a mansion and take a look around. Following Sheldon, Matt “Machete” Miller had his namesake strapped to one hip in a leather sheath. Talbert had once witnessed Miller decapitate a pair of zombies with one swing of that wicked blade, something that shocked the shit out of him. Benny Shaw had a hammer hanging off a stripped-down carpenter’s tool belt. He wielded that flathead with a speed and power that made Talbert wonder if the man was bionic. All of them were in their physical prime, much younger than the forty-four, forty-five years Gus was hauling.

Gus
. Luring that scorched prick wasn’t the easiest thing to do, even for a snake charmer like Talbert, and that failure burned in his craw.

Truthfully, exploring and looting was a young man’s game.

Talbert wanted Gus along only so he could kill the bastard.

Until the arrival of the old man, he’d been gleefully enjoying the fall of civilization purely for the sheer freedom it allowed. A guy could do whatever the hell he
wanted
in the new world, go anywhere he wanted, with nary a law official around to stop him. Houses, banks, stores, and army bases––all the forbidden places were wide open for business. Talbert’s group had already explored the battle-wrecked airbase in Greenwood, having a blast with playing at the controls of the remaining military aircraft, but ultimately disappointed in failing to locate any additional stores of munitions for automatic weapons. The magazines they’d pulled off dead soldiers or found on base had been depleted long before, when the zombies had been more active in their wandering. Recently, any zombie fighting needing to be done was resolved hand-to-hand, unless a house yielded a box or two of regular shotgun shells.

Maggie and Adam made most of the decisions on the farm. Maggie had been designated as the de facto leader since she was a doctor back in the day, possessing invaluable skills that secured her position in the little community. Adam actually owned the property, and Talbert wondered if the old codger wasn’t sticking it to Maggie in the wee afterhours. He’d been living at the farm for almost two and a half years, and he still didn’t know. Not that he cared. Talbert preferred the younger stuff, but unfortunately, the apocalypse hadn’t produced too many young, nubile, ready-to-fuck model types aching to latch onto strong alpha males like himself. The movies screwed up that part. The handful of birds who’d managed to make it to the farm were either married or well past their prime. The distinct lack of fuckable T and A on the farm pissed Talbert off—made him and his boys edgy, restless.

Made them think the farm needed new leadership.

When Adam first hauled Gus’s torched ass out of his car way back when, Talbert didn’t think anything of it. Adam had even identified Gus as the same guy who’d once fired upon him while he was in town. Maggie got to work and brought the nearly dead man back to health. By that time, people were in more than just a little awe of the burned survivor. Gus possessed a celebrity’s aura, which befuddled the hell out of Talbert. When discussing matters important to the farm, all twenty-three of them would gather in the living room of the main house to listen to proposals, and almost
always
, folks waited until Gus mulled an idea over and offered his opinion.

It amazed Talbert how they blindly looked to Gus for guidance for no reason whatsoever, something that Talbert failed to do the entire time he’d lived on the farm. All Gus did was show up, and the toothless cocksmoker became an instant celebrity. Only thing the balding prick didn’t have was an entourage.

That kind of confidence, that kind of
weight
, irritated Talbert. If Maggie and Adam came to a violent end, the little colony would gravitate to Gus in an instant.

Gus had to be removed.

The discovered mansion had been an opportunity to rid themselves of the man in a very convenient manner.
There were zombies. Gus was overwhelmed. We got away.
End of story and perhaps a week of long faces.

Except old Gussy didn’t
want
to go on safari.

That pissed Talbert off. Leave it to that marinated ass sore to shit the bed. Talbert had to think of another way to kill the man. Perhaps more extreme methods had to be considered. Cracking a few
living
skulls didn’t bother Talbert. In retrospect, the last couple of years seemed to be preparing him for that very eventuality.

Gus had to be made gone. Had to be rotor-rooted. Jettisoned.

Another day
, Talbert fumed.
After
they checked out the mansion.

His little gang waiting aboard the van, Talbert made a quick inspection. Body armor stripped from the dead soldiers at CFB Greenwood filled the rear compartment, as did a small collection of bats and knives. Tools of the trade.

Talbert took one last look at the main farmhouse, smelling freshly baked bread on the air. Saw the faces of the kids––Becky and Chad––peeking out from an upstairs window. Talbert forced a smile and waved, but the children ducked out of sight.
Goddamn little noisemakers
. He shrugged and turned his attention to the nearby barn. The building had been converted into a small but roomy barracks redolent of dried hay—simple shelter if one wasn’t picky.

Perched on a hill and surrounded by apple groves and perhaps more, the mansion appeared to be a leap into luxury. Talbert had a very good feeling about the place, the
potential
of the property.

He yanked open the passenger door of the van and slapped the side. “All right, let’s go. Things don’t get done on their own.”

They drove past Gus, shoveling dirt onto an unseen deadhead. He had his visor up and stopped in midtoss as the van rolled by.

Smiling, Talbert gave him the finger.

With the legs of his wooden chair planted firmly into the lookout mound’s dirt, Gus leaned back. Visor up, he eyed the outer limits of the farm while taking deep, contemplative breaths. The temperatures felt more seasonal. To the northeast, however, a nearly black bank of clouds spilled toward the valley, closing on the sun. Near the barn, a few people chopped and stacked wood. The background noise of falling axes and low conversation put Gus at ease.

He leaned back a little farther, two wooden legs off the ground, and planted the head of his bat into the dirt. The fields lay empty, but he remained vigilant. The morning before, the zombie, the same piece of trash Talbert had stomped on two days previous, had a visitor—one that both disturbed Gus and lifted his hopes.

A rat.

A dead rat with its dusty snout half buried in the recent gimp’s grave. The little rodent wasn’t only dead. It was reanimated.

But barely moving.

Gus had nudged the thing with his boot, hard enough to flip the sun-toasted horror over onto its back.

That had been an eyeful.

The rat’s underbelly had worn away to nothing, a dried-up shell of madness. It had reminded Gus of a narrow strip of grimy scalp, complete with legs worn down to nubs of bone that twitched. The eyes, resembling tiny raisins, had shriveled up deep inside its skull. He’d nudged the rat a second time, and the snout opened weakly, ready for action.

Little fuck
.

Gus had squashed its skull under his boot heel, disliking the eggshell crunch. Burying the abomination had taken only a few minutes, but the memory and significance remained with him. The zombies were burning—no—
wearing
themselves out, their biological bilge finally decomposing to a point at which they almost ceased to be a threat. The same appeared true for the rats. Since their bodies were built low to the ground, the erosion would be much faster than in the regular deadheads.

According to Maggie and Adam, the infected rats never reached the farm—perhaps because they’d never had a putrid trail of bread crumbs to follow, as had the swarm that assaulted Gus’s mountain hideaway. In any case, time allied with the living. Soon, very soon, it appeared as if the undead would become immobile. If so, Gus doubted the undead could stand another summer sun. One more hot season would be enough to melt them into foul stains.

And the world could come out of hiding.

There was just one problem…

“Gus!”

A rush of déjà vu overcame him. He lowered his chair, turned, and saw Adam approaching, recognizing his short-cropped silver hair, the bulbous nose from a decade of heavy drinking, and the faded gray eyes of a person who’d seen things he’d spend the rest of his days trying to forget. The older man was a little slimmer around the waist but still retained plenty of spring in his coils.

“Howya doing out here?” he asked in his Hants County drawl, stopping beside the chair and studying the lay of the land. “Feel a distinct chill in the air today. Enough to send my boys to high ground.”

“If they get too high, you’ll have to get Maggie to take a look at them.”

“Ah,” Adam said dismissively, “she’s seen ’em enough, I think. Still. Better to have your boys cupped than not at all. Shit. See any more of them rats out here?”

Adam and Maggie had been the only people he’d shared his discovery with. Gus realized his social skills were still a little wonky from the two years of being isolated on the mountain. Some days, he felt more forthcoming with the others, especially the kids, but some days he kept to the mound and just watched.

“Nah.”

Adam squinted at the sun and made note of the clouds. One of the youngsters called out—little Becky Norris—and Adam waved in her direction.

“Chad chasing her again?” Gus asked.

“Yep.”

“Nice to see.”

“It is. It really is. But… who knows. Shit. Right now, I figure those two are pretty much the only children left in the valley. Hard to imagine.”

“Yep.”

“Unless we find more children out there. Hopefully with their parents alive.”

Gus agreed. It was a shitty time to be orphaned.

“They like you, though.” A smile accompanied Adam’s words.

“Yeah.” Gus liked them too. Besides Adam and Maggie, they were the only ones on the farm whom he didn’t mind visiting the mound.

“Like they adopted you or something.”

“Kinda busy here, Adam.”

“Shit, yeah. I see that.”

Gus didn’t know whether he was being genuine or cleverly disguising a sarcastic dig.

“Anyway, gotta talk to you about something.”

Gus sighed, having a fair idea of what
something
was.

“Talbert and the boys haven’t come back yet,” the older man stated.

“Knew this place smelled better. Quieter too.”

Adam rubbed at his head and scuffed his shoe into the dirt. “Yeah, well, I suppose I knew you’d feel that way. Regardless, they went down to Digby and haven’t come back. Been a couple of nights now. Maggie’s worried. Frankly, I’m worried.”

“Don’t know why you’re worried about Talbert.”

“I know you don’t care for the guy… but he’s part of this community. Sheldon, Mike, and Benny are part of this community. And it’s four of them. There’s only twenty-three of us here, Gus. Twenty-three. I’m sure there are others out there somewhere, but until we make contact, we’re it. And missing four from that number hurts, even if they are assholes.”