Badlands Trilogy (Book 2): Beyond the Badlands (21 page)

Suddenly a scream pierced the silence like a cannon blast. Ed turned. He watched Jasper fall down, tackled by a snarling and biting carrier that had been hiding behind a nearby car. The gas can fell from his hands, their treated fuel leaking onto the concrete.

The carrier writhed on top of Jasper, its mouth open wide as it tried to tear flesh. Jasper fended off the attack, gripping the carrier by the neck, pushing it away. Feral stink filled the air.

Ed ran toward the carrier, hauled back and kicked. His boot met the carrier’s mouth, snapping its jaws violently shut, severing its tongue between its front teeth.

With the carrier dazed, Jasper pushed, rolling it off and to the side before scrambling to his feet.
 

It rose to its hands and knees, its bloody, severed tongue flicking wildly inside its mouth as it wailed. Ed smashed another boot in the thing’s face, knocking it to the pavement. He pistoned his boot down, splitting the thing’s head open. Pain ripped through his injured ribs as carrier blood and brains oozed.

“Get that bike started!” he yelled.

Jasper stood, transfixed. He raised a finger and pointed behind Ed.

Following Jasper’s finger, Ed saw them.

Scores of carriers, trudging toward them along the street. The moans hung in the air.

“Start that goddamn bike!”

More screams, now directly behind them. Only yards away, a half-dozen more infected approached, mouths wide.

“Run!” Ed yelled.

“What about the bike?”

“Leave it. Just go!”

They ran. Screams echoed from behind them as Ed searched frantically for a place to hide from their pursuers. Only burned-out storefronts and disintegrating cars remained, all open and exposed.

He glanced behind. More carriers followed, creating a horrific cacophony of moans and screeches as they pulled themselves along.

Three runners appeared, breaking from the pack and closing the distance quickly.

“Faster!” Ed shouted.

“This is as fast as I can go!”

Ed spied an adjoining street. No visibility to what might lie around the corner. They’d have to take their chances. He pointed it out and Jasper followed.

They rounded the corner and kept running. Suddenly a truck carrying a deer carcass appeared from the cross street before them. It slowed to a stop. The animal’s body hung from a makeshift boom attached to the bed of the truck, wrapped in a length of chain link fencing. Metal bars protected the truck’s windows.

The truck’s passenger door opened and a man leaned toward them.

“Get in if you want to live,” he said.

Ed shoved Jasper inside the cab of the truck, leaping in after him. His ribs screamed. He pulled the door shut as a gnarled, filthy hand slammed against the metal bars lining the door’s window. It snarled, teeth bared as more carriers piled up behind, their screams muffled by the glass.

The driver crammed the gearshift into first. The transmission groaned. He released the clutch and took off.

“I’m Pastor Dan,” he said, turning toward them. Set within crow’s feet, his blue eyes shone above a blonde beard. “Pleased to meet you.”

Pastor Dan navigated the armored truck through the town’s streets, periodically blowing the horn. A mob of carriers filed in behind him, like dogs chasing a rabbit. “They like noise and sound…and meat.”

“Who the hell are you?” Jasper asked.

“Pastor Dan. But you can call me Betty.”

“Huh?”

“Old reference. You can call me Al. Paul Simon?”

“Wait…what does that have to do with anything?”

“Nothing.”

“But…but…”

“Why all this?” Dan replied, gesturing around the truck’s cab. “Is that your next question?”

Jasper nodded.

“Better to show you than tell you. Besides, we’re almost there.”

Dan maneuvered the truck through another street, carriers streaming in behind him, slamming their bodies into the bar-covered doors and tearing at the meat protected beneath the chain-link cage.

Nestled between a series of dilapidated houses, a high school appeared. Dan pulled into the school’s parking lot, steering around parked cars and debris until they reached the back of the school. There a small football field sat, surrounded by rising, rusting bleachers, all enclosed within a high-walled arena.

As they approached, Ed smelled the unmistakable odor of human waste and death trickling in through the air vents. A low murmur built to a roar as they approached, eclipsing even the cries of the carriers behind them.

At the arena’s entrance Dan slowed the truck to a crawl before a tall wooden gate. Nudging the gate open with the truck, he drove inside the arena.

Nothing could have prepared Ed for what he saw.

Trapped inside the stadium’s walls, hundreds upon hundreds of carriers intermingled. Their screams and moans rose like a macabre rock concert, so loud it seemed as if they’d somehow gotten inside the cab.

Some of the infected lay on the ground, moaning, while others ran in circles, arms flailing and heads shaking. Some fought with each other, as if driven wild by the appearance of the truck and the meat. Dozens of carriers charged the doors, slamming themselves into the metal bars before bouncing harmlessly away.

The truck continued forward, waves of carriers parting like the Red Sea before Moses before amassing at the carcass hanging just out of reach.

“Funny thing is, they pretty much let me pass,” Dan said, staring in the rearview mirror. “The movement seems to get them worked up, but they’re really only concerned about the meat back there. They stay pretty hungry.

“Thing is, you gotta keep it up and out of their reach or they’re likely to yank us over,” Dan said, speeding up. “Had to put a fence around the truck bed to keep ‘em from climbing inside.”

They drove to the far end of the field, cutting through carriers like a plow through soil. “That should do it,” Dan finally said, glancing in his side mirror. “I think all ones following me are inside. Now for the drop.”

Grasping a rope tied off to a hook and fed through a hole in the roof, he pulled. The carcass fell out of its protective cage, the rope zipping up and through the hole in the roof as the deer’s body struck the muddy ground. The mass of carriers fell upon the remains, their screams and wails so loud Ed wanted to cover his ears.

“We gotta hurry now,” Dan yelled over the din of frenzied carriers. He punched the gas. The truck lurched and began rolling. He sped around the random carriers lying on the ground or still dragging themselves toward the crowd, a look of concentration painted on his face.

Just after passing through the front gate, Dan slammed on the brakes and opened his door.
“Stay inside,” he said. “Gotta shut this gate.”

In the rearview, Ed watched Dan run to the gate and pull it toward him. As the carriers swarmed the meat deeper inside the arena, Dan yanked the gate closed. A latch clicked into place before he ran back to the truck and hopped inside, shutting the door behind him.

“And that’s that,” he said, smiling. He stared at Ed and Jasper for a moment, noticing their shocked expressions. “I sometimes forget what this must look like to other people.”

“Understatement of the year,” Ed said.

Dan laughed. “You two drink whiskey?”

“Especially now.”

“Good, cause I got a whole bottle of Jack and I don’t like to drink alone.”

* * *

“What the hell was all that back there?” Jasper asked. He sat at a table arranged in the former teachers’ lounge of Pastor Dan’s school. On the table in front of them stood a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and three plastic cups still a quarter of the way full.

Dan smiled in return. “The simple answer is God’s work, but I don’t think any of this is simple.”

“You’re baiting them, attracting them…like the Pied Piper.”

“I suppose that’s an apt analogy.”

“What are you doing with them all?” Ed asked from across the table.

“I used to try to take care of them, but mostly now I just try to keep them off the streets so they don’t hurt or kill anybody else.”

“How many are in there?”

“Maybe a thousand? Two thousand? Hard to say for sure. They don’t really speak up for roll call.”

“But...why?” Jasper asked. “Why do you do it?”

“A calling?”

“For real?”

“Well, my dad was a preacher going way back, but his dad before him was anything but. Petty criminal, mostly, and he seemed partial to beating the crap out of my grandma. As it turned out, one night in a drunken stupor my granddad took a nasty spill down the basement steps. Broke his neck and died.

“Nobody openly accused my dear old grandma of wrong-doing. I figure most folks knew it was for the best and let sleeping dogs lie. Seeing all the awfulness that was my granddad apparently had a hell of an effect on my dad. Not wanting to follow in his footsteps, he took to the church and went on preaching all the way up to the end.

“I suppose you could say that was his calling. In fact, carriers were breaking down the doors to the church while Dad was up there, fist in the air, preaching salvation and repentance. He stuck with it to the end.

“Me, I wasn’t really all that active in the church, not like my dad was, but I knew my way around the Bible and I knew what logic holes and contradictions to avoid in mixed company. And yet somehow I lived through that massacre at the church.”

“And you ended up here,” Ed said.

“Kinda sorta. After my family died I just wandered around, cursing God and whatnot. A lot of survivor’s guilt in those days. I bounced around for a while, staying alive by wits, luck and the grace of God.

“Eventually I landed here. Apparently this place had been used as a shelter of some kind, but by the time I got here everybody was gone. They left a lot of stuff behind, so I moved in.

“Then one day I was out at that old football arena over there, pissed off at the world, when this idea came to me. I got that truck running, outfitted it and took to the streets, rounding up the infected and locking them in that pen.

“Those deadwalkers out there, as a lot of folks like to call them, they’re still people. I figured if I could do something for them then maybe I could find some kind of solace. Come to terms with what happened to my family…and to the world. I figured maybe that was my purpose here, like some kind of divine challenge.”

“So you’re not really…what do they call it…a licensed preacher?” Jasper asked.

“Officially? Nah, but what does that really mean? You can’t prove religion anyway. It’s all based on faith. Just because some group rubber stamps an application doesn’t make you a good person. And having your Jesus license doesn’t mean that you’re doing the Lord’s work. You’re either doing it or you aren’t and that’s that.”

“Well, you’re not like any preacher I ever knew,” Jasper said. “If so, maybe I’d have been more interested in church.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“So you round them up, but you don’t euthanize them?” Ed asked.

“I’m no executioner. I let that course run naturally.”

“But wouldn’t they be better off out of their misery?”

“Not my place to decide, least the way I see it. But I know how you feel, because it sure is hard to watch them wither away. And I watch them a lot. Too much, I think. I’ve seen things.”

“Like what kind of things?”

“Well, the sick ones, the really sick ones that can’t move, they’re not dying off like I would’ve thought. They just lay there, day after day, month after month, clinging to life. Eventually they die, but it takes forever.”

“So how the hell are they staying alive for so long?”

“That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it? I have a hunch though.”

“What’s your hunch?”

“I think something’s keeping them going, something unnatural.”

“You’re not going to tell me it’s the devil?” Jasper asked.

“What? No. What kind of fool do you take me for?”

Jasper’s smile faltered after an admonishing look from Ed.

Dan took a sip of his whiskey, wiping his mouth on this sleeve. “No, I think it’s that virus. It’s keeping them alive somehow. Well beyond their expiration date. Think about it, shouldn’t all the infected be dead by now? It’s been four years, for crying out loud. How are they still alive if something isn’t keeping them that way?”

“Good question,” Ed said, following Dan’s cue and sipping his own whiskey.

Dan’s eyes narrowed. “But that’s not the part that scares me most. The healthy ones? They’re getting smarter.”

“I told you!” Jasper exclaimed, pointing at Ed. “I told you they were starting fires on their own!”

“Well, there’s definitely something odd going on with them,” Dan continued. “They’re gathering together in packs out there in that pen. Working together. They walk along the wall looking for a way out. I’ve even seen them trying to climb on each other, trying to scale it. And the dead ones? The strong ones eat ‘em up, lickety-split.”