Well Fed - 05 (41 page)

“Should I call them over?” Gus asked.

“No,” Collie answered. “Not right now. People don’t respond well to Ollie’s condition.”

Gus could believe it.

“How’s the shot?” she asked, changing the subject.

“Good.” Gus took a breath to settle his nerves, amazed the whiskey still went down like water. “It’s not Uncle Jack or Captain Morgan, but… it’ll do.”

“This is for special occasions,” Collie revealed. “It’s a Japanese brand. And once they’re gone, well, they’re gone. Unless I get my ass to Japan, which I doubt will happen.”

Wallace held his mug in both hands, studying the drink.

“You okay?” she asked him.

“Yeah,” he said as if coming out of a dream. “Just savoring it.”

“You looked like you were thinking.”

“I was. Thinking that someone will have to set up a still. All the alcohol in the world is now the only stuff left on the planet.”

Gus took another drink.

“You like it?” Collie asked him, leaving Wallace to his deep, sobering thoughts. Sobering thoughts weren’t scheduled that night. Gus could smell that fact as clearly as the whiskey in his mug.

“I do. It’s good.”

They finished the first round, not rushing things, and another was poured. Collie then gave a full recounting of what had happened inside the motel and the house on the other side of the river. She described the fight in the play pen and how the gang tossed a grenade through the slot, hoping to kill her.

“Where’d they get the grenade?” Gus’s body was laughing at the night’s cold as Collie got around to pouring the third round of the evening. He had to slow down, having already guzzled the second shot far too quickly. If the others noticed, they didn’t say anything.

“Anywhere,” Collie reported. “When the world went to hell, all sorts of illegal weaponry started appearing. The automatic and explosive kind. Maybe souvenirs. Maybe ordered online. Maybe even from a dead soldier. Sometimes trucks carrying munition supplies went missing. Any of them could have gone off the road and been found by scavengers. Same thing might have happened to any of the military bases. It’s interesting you haven’t come across anyone not having big guns.”

“It is,” Gus supposed, remembering the gang that had assaulted his mountain abode.

“Scary thing? There are probably caches of missing weapons and ammunition all over the place. Troop emplacements might have been overrun, personnel killed or turned. If the weapons got dropped, well, by now they’re useless. The ammunition is another matter. The challenge is finding it.”

“Yeah, you said that before.” Gus eyed the bottle. The rye was tasting far better than it should. “Play pen.”

“Sick, eh?” Collie asked.

“Sick.”

“But not the sickest.”

The conversation went into horror-story mode as Collie and Wallace took turns—Wallace’s turns were more like memory prompts for Collie—recalling the types of individuals who had survived the zombies but had crossed a line somewhere, going from survivalist to killer.

“To warlord,” Collie finished, draining her drink before reaching for the bottle. When she did, Gus motioned to be refilled.

“Holy shit, you finished that already?”

“No,” Gus said innocently before adding, “Maybe.”

For the first time, Wallace seemed to have a genuine smile on his face.

Collie poured Gus another. “Nurse this one, okay? Stop chugging the shit. There isn’t much of it left in the world.”

“You said. But god
damn,
you got plenty on the table here.”

“You did bring out two bottles,” Wallace pointed out.

“I didn’t know we were in the presence of an Olympic-level boozer,” Collie protested, chuckling, the sound pure.

“You don’t know half of it,” Gus said, debating whether to tell them of how he tried to kill himself with the bottle. He figured that would put too much of a damper on the evening, and he was smiling for the first time in a while. The search for Maggie and the kids would resume tomorrow, but right then, after all he’d seen and lived through, the frights he’d endured, he needed a few good shots of merriment.

“This stuff’s smooth.”

“The Japanese know how to make whiskey.”

They talked on, until the cloud cover split overhead, and the stars made a quiet but brilliant appearance. By then, the cold didn’t touch any of them, and they dared gravity by leaning back and taking in the grandeur above their heads. The candle in the beer bottles, already replaced twice during the drinking session, died and wasn’t relit. The bottle of Nikka ended, and a shitfaced Collie pleasantly gathered up the empty, saluted it, and grabbed the remaining full one.

“Where you goin’ with that?” Gus asked in drunken wonder.

“This one is for next time.”

“But you said you had another one for next time.”

“
That
one is for the time after next,” Collie said. “Yeesh. Slow down there, Gussy. Spare this child. Anyway, you sleepin’ with me tonight?”

The question stabbed a bolt of mortification through Gus, and he sat as if whacked with a bat.

“Excuse me?” he finally got out.

“The RV, you perv. You sleeping in my Winny or his?”

“Uh…”

“Yours,” Wallace said, not nearly as drunk as Gus would have thought, and despite the soldier smiling and such, it dawned on him that perhaps booze didn’t affect Wallace as it might, well, an ordinary person.

“I don’t want him pukin’ in my place. Smells bad enough because of my ass anyway.”

“You, then,” Gus said meekly.

“Later, buster.” Collie winked at him. “And stop scratching at your bird. Jesus Christ, let the little fella breathe.”

That slackened Gus’s face as if he’d been zapped with a defibrillator. His free hand, the one secretly courting his crotch for most of the evening, went into hiding.

“You heard me,” Collie warned and then told Wallace, “Later, bruiser.”

“Later, baby girl.”

That put a smile on her face, and she did something that saddened Gus even though he knew she was married to Wallace. She got up, leaned over, and kissed her man. Sick though he did appear, she planted the softest kiss on his pallid cheek.

Then she struck her chair as she turned toward her door but caught it before it could fall over. Collie moved like a phantom against the dreamy white hide of the motor home, and as Gus watched, she became two dimensional and slipped through the crack of the side entrance.

“Where’d you meet her?” Gus asked Wallace after she’d retired.

“Training camp.”

“Yeah. What kind?”

“The kind where they teach you to kill with your thumbs.”

Gus had nothing after that. He pulled his coat a little tighter.

“Thanks for going after her when you did,” Wallace finally said.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“No. But… you didn’t hesitate,” he pointed out. “I said go, and you went. That counts. With me, it counts. And don’t worry about the whiskey.”

Gus didn’t understand what he meant by that, and it showed on his face.

“Hold on.” Wallace got up, exceedingly stable for a man who’d just downed a third of a very tall bottle, and walked––amazingly steadily––to his RV.

The night shimmered. Gus sat at the table, listening. A door opened, but he heard little else as he marveled at how beautiful the sky had become. For a while, time ceased being a human measure. The tinkling of another bottle of Nikka being set down canceled the spell. A helmetless Wallace, skull-smiling, sat down with the barest of breezes blowing past his near-apparitional form.

“Jesus,” Gus blurted. “You can be goddamn frightening.”

Wallace didn’t respond.

“Nice night,” Gus said cautiously, feeling much more rode upon the wind. He inspected the short black ridge of hair covering the soldier’s scalp. It reminded him of an exceptionally thick paint roller.

Wallace sat with that dead smirk on his face, as if he’d just heard an amusing joke. His eyes didn’t appear the healthiest either, like the film forming over an opened can of eggshell white.

“Uh, you okay?”

“Don’t I look okay?”

“Look, man, this is the drunkest I’ve been in”—he glanced at his wrist for no particular reason—“in a while. And that’s coming from a dried-out drunk. Not that I see myself as a drunk. More like… okay, I’m a drunk.”

“I don’t care. Call yourself whatever you want.”

“Cool.”

Gus swallowed another shot of whiskey, feeling it light up his insides, but he eyed Wallace over the slender neck of the new bottle, thinking it not entirely wise to take his attention off the spooky special operator. Not that late at night.

Wallace reached for the bottle and poured himself a fresh one four fingers deep. It was a sizeable wallop that brought Gus almost back to the brink of sobriety. When he finished pouring the killer shot, Wallace carefully placed the bottle back on the table, picked the mug up, and saluted.

“
Za tvoyo zdorovie
.”

Gus hesitated with his drink. “What’cha say about my mom?”

The amusement on Wallace’s face dulled. “That’s a toast.”

“Next time, say something I understand then.”

“You’ve never heard
Za tvoyo zdorovie
before?”

“Nope.”

“You’re something else.”

“Might be something else, but I say what I mean. Most the time.”

They drank. Gus bared teeth at the gulp. Then he settled in and studied Wallace at length, ignoring the frown on the other’s face.

“What?” Wallace finally asked.

“Never seen you before with your helmet off. Or visor up, for that matter.”

“The helmet stays on to protect my head. The visor, well, the sun hurts my eyes. Used to hurt it, anyway. Not so sure if I’d feel anything at all now. Not after stabbing myself.”

“What was that all about, anyway?”

Wallace shrugged. “When you realize you’re not feeling anything, you test yourself. Though I might not have shown it, I was feeling just a pinch of anxiety at the time.”

“You fooled me.”

“Don’t think it would take much to fool you.”

Gus thought of long-dead Roxanne and decided to let that one go. “So you don’t feel any pain at all now.”

Wallace shook his head and listened to the night.

Gus did the same, ears buzzing in the total absence of sound. Collie had already crashed inside her motor home, and no one else in town seemed alive. That left only Gus and Wallace, who leaned forward in a subtle shifting of cloth, fingers tightening about his mug.

“Not a thing,” he whispered. “I could… I could stab myself right here—right this very instant—and not feel a goddamn thing.”

Anyone else might have spoken those words with at least a touch of fear, of desperation, but not Wallace. The admission nearly ruined Gus’s growing buzz.

“I’m telling you this because… I need to tell someone. Someone not Collie.”

Gus felt his stomach flutter at the sound of her name. “And that’s me.”

“Right now, that’s you.” Wallace watched him with those darkly luminous eyes. “If I told her, she’d worry. Maybe even freak out. I don’t need to see that, but I have to confide in someone. And you owe me.”

“I do?”

“For saving your ass. Back when you were hanging out like a slab of meat.”

Ah.
Wallace had him there. “Collie too, for that matter.”

“Just listen,” the soldier said to silence him. “I’m not sure how long I have. You understand? I’m not sure how long it’ll take before I go full-on zombie, okay? It’s going to happen. Almost happened the other day back in that house, just before the grenades came through the window. If Collie hadn’t have yelled at me, I think… no, I
know
I would’ve dropped down on my knees and started eating. She yanked me back from doing a very bad thing. And if I started… I wouldn’t have stopped. Pretty sure of that. She brought me back, and I managed to control that… that urge. But it’ll happen again. I feel it coming. In the not-too-distant future too. I’ll cross over. When I do, and if you’re there, save Collie the job of putting me down, okay? You finish me. The moment you hear a moan leave my lips, and I don’t respond to questions, you put a bullet in my head. I’d ask you to do it now, but…”

Wallace didn’t finish the sentence.

Gus prodded. “But what?”

Those dying eyes regarded him, and that cold smile thawed as if touched by warm flesh. “I don’t want to leave her just yet.”

Though Wallace might not feel any physical pain,
anyone
could detect the emotional hell twisting the soldier round and round inside.

“I can do that,” Gus said, not feeling good at all. “If I can, when the time comes. I’ll… finish it?”

That pleased Wallace, and he nodded. “She’s second to none,” he continued. “A professional through and through. A woman and… and a wife on top of all of that. You know how we were married? At Whitecap? No church service for us—I snuck into her quarters and got into the bed beside her, and you know what she said? ‘Would you marry me?’ I said, ‘Here?’ and she… she said, ‘Yeah, right here, right now.’ I said, ‘Don’t we need an official for that? To make it legal and binding?’ And she said every engagement we’d ever fought in, every life we’d ever rescued on a mission, every life we’d ever taken––and we took our goddamn share and then some––was legal and binding. For better or worse. So we made our vows right there. And we didn’t need anyone sanctioning it, didn’t need any blessing, and sure as hell didn’t need a ceremony. Then she went on about wolves and how they mate. So that was that. We married each other in her room. In the dark. On just a few simple words that, to this day, are as hard as tempered steel.”

The story definitely threatened to ruin Gus’s buzz.

And Wallace wasn’t finished.

“Listen,” he kept on. “I want you to do something else for me. I… I don’t know how this is going to end, but I’m betting it won’t be the way I want it. Never is. The final… transition will be a walking corpse, and if past behavior is any indication, I won’t realize it’s happening at all. My mind will already be gone. So, do me a favor. She’d kill me for saying this, but watch her back, okay? Take… take care of her, and she’ll… she’ll take care of you. She’s that kind of person. But she’s not invincible, so watch her back. Do that for me, okay? When I’m finally gone.”