Well Fed - 05 (48 page)

Shovel looked toward Sick, which was enough for Slick Pick to raise his hands in surrender and take a quick step back from the three men.

“I got it, I got it,” he blurted.

Shovel glared at his mouthy henchman.

“Just
sayin’
…” Slick Pick finished in a much lower tone, inspecting the floor of the trailer to avoid Shovel’s stare, “was all.”

Drool threaded from one corner of Gus’s mouth, seeping into his patchy beard before descending to his neck. Gus’s feebly smiling face stared at the ceiling, stoned eyes as dreamy as fog on a lake, oblivious to the stormy debate.

Shovel shook his head again, knowing he was fidgeting on this one and hating himself for it. His brother, presumed long dead but not, had appeared during the largest take of living meat yet. What
would
Giovanni say to Gus’s appearance? Shovel knew that answer without squeezing his brain for juice. He despised it when Slick Pick could point out the obvious.

“How we doing for time here?” Shovel asked, changing the subject.

“Give us another couple of hours or so,” Slick Pick cleared his throat. “The boys are having the new recruits load up the other trailer right now. There’s a lot to be loaded. These Pine Holers had prepped for the winter: cured meats, salt fish, bottled jams, root cellars full of veggies, even fucking garlic.”

“Weapons?”

Slick scratched his ear. “Nothing special there. Sorry. But there was a portable generator there too. All ’round, this fuckin’ shithole turned out to be a plum.”

“How many new heads?”

“Forty-two.”

That number impressed Shovel. Pine Cove had given shelter to a sizeable number of people. Yet, as time and time again had demonstrated, when faced with life or death, the true survivors had no problem emerging from the captured populace. Some had to be executed straight out, bludgeoned to death just to prove their conquerors were serious. Shovel’s men had gunned down two runners who thought they might make the tree line. But after all that, it was down to business. Flaying the fat from the meat took an hour, and the fights were bloody, even by Shovel’s standards. In the end however, forty-two new men and women were added to the fold. An additional six kids also joined, all under ten years of age. Shovel loved finding them that young, young enough to fashion into the fighters he needed them to become.

He inhaled sharply. “Where’s the next crop?”

“Only one,” Slick Pick said. “A back road in Ontario.”

Shovel chastised himself. He had forgotten the plan with the arrival of his brother. He needed to get thinking straight again, to get back to the game at hand: strike east and scoop up the residents of Pine Cove first, then pluck the second lot on the way back to base, along with whatever supplies they could find. If they left them, road savages most definitely would not.

Gus
.

Who would’ve known he’d actually survive? Shovel expected he did know, way, way back in that part of his mind where he stored memories of more civilized times. He remembered how, if pushed into a corner, Gus would come out swinging. The apocalypse had been a
huge
corner, and there he was, as glazed and runny as jelly.

Shovel studied the stoned form on his couch.

He knew the same killer instinct flowed through Gus’s veins as did through Shovel’s. Accessing it correctly, however, was a mystery.

“All right,” he finally said. “Sick, you stay here with me. Fix up another shot in case we need it. You other guys get outta here. See that things go smooth. I’ll stay here and watch over this one.”

A glistening spit bubble appeared on Gus’s lips for all of a wet second…

Then burst.

“Gus.”

“Yeah?”

“About your place.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m… I’m sorry, okay. It’s just that I owed Johnathan first. He’d saved my ass from folks. I owed him. If we’d have met before him, I would have thrown in with you. Really.”

“I get it.”

“I mean
really
.”

“No, no, I understand. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m… I’m sorry about knocking your teeth out.”

Gus chuckled, and his whole body pulsed in fine humor. “That’s okay. It was a damn good shot. No idea you could fight like that.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. Really. I mean, hell, I shot you.”

“You did,” Roxanne said, not upset in the least. “
Twice
.”

They laughed, at complete ease with each other, glad to put the incident behind them. The surf rolled in over the sands and retreated with a growl, smoothing the grains and leaving a sheen of fine silk. The water slid in again and touched the bottoms of Gus’s bare feet, as warm as a bath.

“This place is paradise.”

“You understand why it’s illegal,” Roxanne giggled.

“No. Why?”

“Can’t have people doing this all day. They’d die eventually.”

“They would?”

“Sure would.”

“Oh.” Gus found it hard to believe.

The water rolled back, composed itself, and advanced once again, touching Roxanne’s feet this time and making her squeal softly. She pulled her feet away from the surf.

“I’m glad we had this talk,” she whispered in his ear, as flowering explosions in the sky pirouetted from starry white to pink.

Gus lay back and stared, unblinking, drinking in the pillowy hammering of pyrotechnic glory.

At times, his arm prickled. Tiny tick bites demanded his attention but then were quickly forgotten in a hot—but not uncomfortably so—rush of euphoric bliss that left him gasping. A blast of liquid gold surged along the blue highway of his cardiovascular system, ripping it up at warp speed, cracking the synapses of his nerve endings like fiery whips.

So good.

So
good
.

He wondered how or when these bites came along, if a pattern existed, undetected as of yet. As far as he could tell, no sand flies buzzed around, nor any other aggressive insect life. The bites just seemed to happen.

However…

Once, while enchanted by that ever-glowing glitter show above, Gus thought he heard gods speaking—gods who…
swore
an awful lot, which made Gus feel better about his overindulgence in expletives. The gods cussed and turned the air blue with flame, and while their amusing and ironic blasphemy thundered throughout the heavens, Gus believed… no, he was
positive
, that through the sheer veneer of reality, just beyond those celestial lights far above, shapes
moved
. A tracery moved just behind the sky, like a fingernail popping up and caressing the thinnest of sheets.

They were too indistinct to see clearly what they actually were, but… they were there, all the same.

Gus thought and thought about that revelation, wondering if a connection existed between the mysterious beings lurking in the sky and the bites on his arm.

He thought about that for weeks, it seemed, until he came to the conclusion that, yes, an association did exist.

The beach lurched then, one powerful jolt that left Gus staring at the receding surf and then at the balmy tree line some distance behind him. He’d been drifting, cozying up with Roxanne at—in?—his side, watching the scintillating twirls and pops painting the entire sky. The sudden shift ebbed away, and a sunny Gus smacked his lips and smiled, basking in the sand grilling his bare skin.

The smile diminished.

Roxanne was gone.

Brow furrowed, Gus looked around.

The beach stretched into infinity on either side of him. Endless. Empty. Unmoving except for the constant stroking of the surf. He shrugged. Nothing to worry about. She’d probably gone back to the fridge for a few beers. Gus smiled at the thought of cold beers on a hot beach. Jesus, was there anything better? He glanced left and right one last time, hoping maybe the beach had servers so he could put in an order for pizza too. Even chicken fingers… if they had them.

Someone slapped him. Hard.

Gus pushed himself back, shocked at the contact, and felt his bowels come close to letting go as the reality he’d been enjoying up to that point split apart with a clap. A storm god’s angry face pushed through the bright lights of the sky and stopped inches from Gus’s nose.

“
Wake up
!” it roared.

Another slap fell across his cheek, hard enough to bruise, and Gus moaned at the contact.

The lights bled into an off-white flatness draped in dusty webbing.

“
Jesus Christ, he’s truly out of it. I swear to fuck, Sick, ease
off
on that shit. I don’t want him comatose. Here, you try. Think I threw out my fuckin’ arm just then.
”

One of the gods pulled back, replaced by a demonic golem possessing a man’s head made of silver.
A man
, Gus realized—tall, mean, with a chin as square as a cinder block. He recognized the features.

Nolan grabbed Gus by the shoulders and shook him, just rattled him as if the big man were trying to extinguish a flaming piece of paper. Gus’s lower jaw clacked against the upper until he clenched it, senseless in this violent cement shaker intent on bursting something internal. Nolan released him and threw him back onto the beach––now a sofa.

Jerry stood off to the right while a militarized ninja lurked behind him.

Gus put his hands up and squeaked, “I’m all right. Don’t shake me. Don’t. I think my balls came off.”

That put a satisfied smirk on Nolan’s nonmetallic face.

“Morning, sunshine,” Jerry greeted in that deep, deep voice of his and moved in past the goon. “Feel all right?”

“Not sure. I think so.”

“We had to dope you up a bit. Make you more compliant to travel, but that’ll all end soon, I promise.”

“Dope me up?”

His brother smiled. “Yeah. Zombie dust 5.0. Or just zed5. Half a dozen other names for the shit. Fuck if I know ’em all. About two years ago, we came across a transport trailer coming up from the states loaded down with every fuckin’ illegal drug on the go. Heroin, cocaine, hard and soft o-balls, and plastic two-liter bottles filled with this zombie shit. Makes a person travel without going anywhere.”

“You gave me… drugs?” Gus asked weakly, grasping the true nature of the bites on his arm.

“Just a little,” Jerry admitted with a frown. “Had to. You were just about to open your trap about shit, and I just didn’t have the patience or the time to listen. You feel good now, right?”

“What day is it?”

Jerry barked a laugh. “That’s the dust talking. Had to bring you out of it, to check on you. A few of my guys became recreational users of zed5. Lost all track of time besides a couple of other effects I won’t get into. Can you stand up?”

Gus lay on the couch and stared at Jerry and the rest of the crew present.
Walk?
He considered it, drawing up his legs to stand. Jerry took that as a yes and hauled on Gus’s arms until he was on his feet, swaying with a moment’s vertigo. Hands steadied him until he didn’t need them.

“Not my thing,” Shovel said. “But no denying it’s useful at times. One time––”

“Jerry, where are we?”

Saying his name silenced Shovel as effectively as a slap. A coolness as sharp as a razor slashed the room, and Gus became very aware of the stillness that one question evoked. He’d said something forbidden, crossed a line, and saw it in the questioning frowns directed at his brother.

Jerry spoke slowly, clearly. “In the presence of the boys here, you call me Shovel. Remember that.”

The tone was not to be argued with, which Gus remembered from a long time back, back when they were teenagers.

“Where are we?”

Shovel exhaled and studied Gus with an air of deciding if he could be trusted. “We’re just over the Quebec border. Stopped for a day. Had another load to pick up.”

“Another load of what?”

“People,” Shovel said.

Gus’s mouth hung open. A greasy knot of nausea expanded inside of his guts as if a fist had pinched off the southward flow. “People?”

“I don’t stutter, man. You heard me.”

“You picked up a load of people.”

“Well,” Shovel scuffed at the floor. “We
had
another load. It didn’t go over as planned. Seems like this time, they were waiting for us.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I think we covered this. Me feeding the machine and all. If we
don’t
take them, someone else
will
. A better question might be ‘Why do they stay?’ That’s one I’ve given a lot of thought to. Because, frankly, as bad as we are, as you
perceive
us to be, after a while, a person realizes we’re all that’s left.”

Gus wasn’t sure what he was listening to, so he started for the door.

Smiling, Nolan blocked his way, looking down at him with a sympathetic expression.

“I need some air,” Gus said.

“Take a breath then,” Shovel told him.

“No, I mean I need
fresh
air. If I don’t, I’m gonna barf all over this place. And right now, if one pipe opens, I’m pretty sure they’ll
all
open.”

“Let him out,” Shovel said immediately.

Gus stomped toward the door and slap-pushed it open hard enough to make his palms sting. Sunlight blinded him, but the cold air of the afternoon steadied his rolling gullet. A chair was the only step down to the pavement—always pavement, it seemed—and Gus teetered in the doorway.

Faint streamers of black smoke, residual wisps of destruction, rose into the sky over a series of roof tops. The smoke seized his attention. Gus gawked at the billowing trails, took deep breaths, and when he’d seen enough, looked to the right. A second trailer was parked in the lot of a giant strip mall. Intimidating black-masked guards stood in the backs of pickups, automatic weapons held at port arms, eyeing a herd of people sitting on the asphalt.

They were too far to see exactly who they were, but he believed he knew.

“Hafta let them out,” Shovel announced from behind, making Gus jump. “Hafta. Let them stretch a bit. We lock them up in the trailer there until transported over. The victors of their individual combats. Whatever. It’s not uncomfortable. That trailer has sofas and chairs… even bunk beds. Maybe a little cramped, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be inside if someone cuts the cheese, but hey… They made it through part one. Part two is a little easier. A little longer.”