Death and Biker Gangs (15 page)

“What the hell are they doing in there?”

That probably meant Tony and Dax were enacting their grand distraction. I peeked over the edge and spotted two bikers almost immediately below me.

They didn’t really look like a biker gang, aside from the leather chaps and the big Harley-Davidson parked a few feet away. They wore flak jackets that they’d probably swiped off dead soldiers, and neither of them looked older than twenty-one. 
Damn, I’m being pursued by college kids.

The taller one had a cigarette in his mouth. “One of them’s a girl. Blair says to leave her alone.”

“I don’t see a girl, but…are they square dancing?”

“They…shit, dude, I think they are?”

The bikers leaned forward, clearly absorbed in whatever Dax and Tony were doing.

I decided it was time to let slip the dogs of war and crept back to my little crew of dead fellows. I stood up when I got to the edge and waved at the revenants. Previously, even looking at one had seemed to draw giant bunches of them.

This group didn’t seem to notice me.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Didn’t it just figure? The one time I 
wanted 
their attention on me, and they were interested in the cracks in the ground. “Psst,” I whispered. When even 
that 
failed to stir them, I chucked a small pebble their way. “Hey, 
dead dudes
!”

The soldier and the EMT were all but clawing at the wall within seconds, and I scrambled along the edge, staying in their line of vision. They rounded the corner, utterly fixated on me. I hadn’t felt this attractive since the last time I got pawed at a Radiohead concert.

Shit, I really just thought that. 
I needed to stop humanizing dead people.

I hunkered down and let the former EMT and the soldier slam their hands against the wall. Their grunted complaints carried up, and I fruitlessly pressed a finger to my lips. “Shut up, guys, don’t let them hear you yet.”

If anything, they got louder. Zombies don’t really follow directions all that well.

The businesswoman came shambling up next, followed by the goth kid. The random passersby and the child without a dog brought up the rear.

I always loved parades. “All right, revenants,” I said, hoping they wouldn’t get too loud, “follow me. To arms!”

I led the charge of the undead to the corner. I dashed back and forth between the two groups, grimacing as the distance closed between them. I kept waiting for the biker kids to hear the undead prancing toward them, or see me staring down at them, or do 
something 
that indicated they knew what was on the way.

They kept right on talking.

 “Move,” I whispered. “Please move?”

How could they not hear the revenants coming? Even
I
could hear them, and I was fifteen feet in the air.  

I stared over the side, my heart pounding. 
What the hell are you idiots doing?

 “You know,” one of them said to the other, “I really miss karaoke.”

“Hey!” I called down. Their heads snapped up, and the taller one’s mouth fell open. I’m pretty sure my mouth fell open, too; their faces were covered in bleeding sores, and their eyes were almost entirely red. 
Christ on a pogostick, what’s wrong with them?

The EMT and the soldier sent up their howl.

Shit! 
I pointed behind the building at the parade of ghouls. “Run! They’re 
coming
, you idiots!”

Too late.

The dead mob spilled around the corner, and they all but tripped over the bikers in their haste to get to me. They happily transferred their attention to the screeching, leather-clad gents in front of them. I guess you can’t be picky about your entrees when you’re dead.

“Holy fuck!” A gun fired from nearby, and their companions rushed to aid them. I gawked down from the roof, unable to tear my gaze from the weeping wounds and bloodshot eyes. 
Something’s wrong with them...something’s wrong...

Flesh tore, and one of the boys shrieked.

I almost dropped my gun. “Run! Run, you fucking morons!”

The ghouls shredded them with hellish ease.

“
Bitch!
” One of their companions—a big guy—leveled his machine gun at me. I flung myself to my belly just before a spray of bullets mowed at the gravel around me.

I decided it was time to bow out. I wriggled back across the rooftop, then skittered down the ladder. The boys and the dog were waiting for me.

“They ate them,” I blurted out the instant I landed. “They 
ate them!
”

“We saw,” Dax said. He looked awfully white.

“That was…inventive,” Tony said.

“I didn’t mean to—I thought they’d 
move
, but there was something with their faces, and—”

Dax grasped my shoulders, looking me in the eye. My God, he’d never forgive me—Dax, who thought everyone ought to be able to just get along—he’d probably throw me to the revenants after this. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, Dax, about—”

He squeezed my shoulders a little too hard. “Vibeke, this is a real bad time to lose your shit.”

I nodded. 
Keep the shit. Keep the shit. 
We started walking away from the parlor, and I tried to ignore the screams and moans from the other side of the building.

I kept waiting to wake up from the nightmare.

Hell, I’d been waiting to wake up for weeks.

I didn’t. I just heard their screams, over and over.

“You did what you had to,” Tony said as we walked. “They should have been more observant.” He waited a moment for Dax and me to catch up. “Wish we could get at that bike of theirs.”

“What, so you can break that one, too?” Dax asked.

Tearing. Chewing. Screaming. Skin ripping off bone and muscle
. I couldn’t get the imagery out of my head. “They ate them. They didn’t look up and the things came around the corner and—”

“We 
saw
,” Dax said. “What was wrong with their faces?”

I tried to remember some of crap I’d seen in the medical center, but kept seeing long, stringy sinew stretching from arms to jaws, and blood spewing out of ragged arteries. 
Holy fuck, I’m a murderer. 
“I don’t know…it looked almost like…”

“Evil stardust,” Tony said, quickening his stride. “It’s all evil stardust. And they’d have done the same to us. Those fuckers sent us the severed head of the guy who helped us. They weren’t trying to make friends. Remember that.”

***

At some point during the day, I realized we’d left the head in the cooler.

We could have at least done poor Eccleston the courtesy of popping him in the cranial cavity before skipping town, but between square dancing and feeding people to revenants, he’d been forgotten.

“What if he eats his way out of the cooler?” I asked once we’d slowed down enough to make conversation.

“Then he’ll sit on the floor gathering dust until the end of time,” Tony said. “He can’t exactly move.”

“Are you sure?”

“You think he’s just going to roll around like a tumbleweed, biting any ankles he comes across?”

Actually, that was disquietingly close to what I’d pictured for the head.

No one said a word about how I’d handled the biker kids. I likened it to extra compartmentalizing, really; before the end of the world, I shoved bad experiences and all the things I wanted to forget into a box and locked it up. I did the same thing with the meteors, the horrors that followed, and the accidental atrocity we’d just committed.

No,
 I reminded myself, 
the accidental atrocity 
I
 just committed.

The sky had darkened by the time we found a place to stay. I couldn’t tell what time it was anymore; it might be four o’clock or five, or even later, depending on what month we were in.

Funny, how time stops mattering when you have nowhere you need to be.

We finally reached the outskirts of Muldoon, passing two-story brick buildings that had turned gray with ash. All of them sported the usual locked doors and CLOSED signs.

“I guess it’s lucky it happened at night,” Dax said, trying the latch on the lone restaurant on the strip. Luca’s Pub was closed on Thursdays and Fridays, or so its still-visible business hours told us. “A lot of people were at home, asleep.”

“I’m surprised we haven’t seen more zombies in pajamas.” Tony glanced both ways down the street. “I think this’ll do for tonight. We’ll have to be careful.”

The place seemed shut up tight, but that didn’t mean someone—or several someones—hadn’t locked himself up 
before 
losing his humanity and developing a taste for things like the flesh of the living. We peeked in through the windows, but all I could see were empty tables with barstools resting on top of them.

“Looks clean,” I said. “Dax?”

He went to work on the lock while Tony peered up at the sky. “Hurry it up, Boy Scout. I want to cover our tracks while it’s still light.”

“Maybe they’ll decide we can control the zombies, and they’ll just leave us alone.” Dax got the lock undone and pushed the door open. “Who wants to take a peek?”

“Ladies first,” Tony said.

“Oh, the gallantry here is overwhelming.” I drew my pistol and stepped into the darkness, twisting this way and that. “Anybody here?” I called, stooping down to look under tables. Nothing so much as moved, much less sprang or shuffled with outstretched hands. I whistled the opening bars of “The Imperial March,” which seemed like it ought to draw out any crazies in the area.

Nothing. “Seems clear to me.”

An immaculate bar stood on one end of the room, surrounded by tables and booths. Dax inspected the bathrooms, I checked out the kitchen and staff break room, and Tony spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the bar itself…ostensibly for possible evildoers, but I think he was just taking stock of the alcohol.

The refrigerators were all dead, but I found rows of canned and dried goods tucked away in the cupboards. My mouth started watering when I spied the first box of oyster crackers, and before I actually realized what I was doing, I’d scooped up several soups and some canned ham and chicken, and brought them out into the main room. “Can we stay? Can we 
stay
?”

Dax snatched one of the cans of chicken from me, yanked the pull-tab, and scooped the contents into his mouth. “My vote is yes,” he said between gulps. “Is there more?”

I could only stare at him in horror. “I think you’re supposed to cook that, Dax.”

He shrugged, grinning at me in between bites.

We locked the front door and set up camp.

***

“So who do you think Luca was?” I asked later that evening, watching Dax add salt and pepper to what still resembled tomato paste. He hadn’t suffered any ill effects from the chicken yet, and had placed four candles underneath the saucepan to heat up soup, noodles, and water. The two of us had managed to plow through two bags of stale croutons while he cooked. “Owner? Just a name?”

“Check it on Yelp?”

Willing to play along with the joke, I dug my cell phone out of one of my jacket pockets. I hadn’t tried plugging it in since we’d left, but I pushed the power button, half-hoping it had retained some sort of charge.

The black screen mocked me. I set it down on the table and propped my head in my hands. “I feel kind of like Viggo Mortensen in 
The Road
, when he and his son found that cache of food and supplies.”

Dax poked at the paste. “I think they also found hot water and a decent stove, didn’t they?”

“They weren’t dealing with the undead. Just angry cannibals.”

“What about cannibals?” Tony thumped a carton down on the table next to me. “Are we embracing cannibalism fully? I found some more candles.”

“Yes, and you’re first on the menu.” I stretched a hand toward the bar. Dinner might be uninspired at best, but a good hard drink sounded divine. “So are we gonna talk about that?”

Tony’s grin stretched across his face. “I dunno, are we?”

“Red goes better with soup,” Dax said.

And that’s how three idiots who hadn’t had a drop of alcohol in weeks ended up with three bottles of the most expensive wine we could find.

The general Rules of the Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland suggest 
not 
getting howlingly drunk if you aren’t hiding out in a cement bunker or in some sort of crazy fortified treehouse. You certainly shouldn’t get tanked when there’s a damned assault rifle within an arm’s reach.