Death and Biker Gangs (18 page)

Sleep sounded like a most excellent proposition. I picked a spot a good distance away from my puking tree and curled up into a ball, trying not to notice the world spinning wildly around me.

Not just booze…can’t just be booze…been drunker than this…I killed those boys...

Noise broke through the unnatural stillness. I thought I heard motors rumbling and coughing, noises I never wanted to hear my own car make.

Voices broke through my mental haze every now and then; male voices, deep and gruff and sharp. Someone argued with Tony, then made cooing noises over the dog. The argument intensified, and I eased myself out of my fever dream, returning to my sick, hungover body in the ash.

Dammit, I had to barf again.

I crawled back over to my tree and let it rip.

“What’s wrong with her?” one of the voices asked. A pair of big boots appeared in front of me, and the man’s voice sounded distinctly disapproving. I squinted up at him, but he blurred into nothing more than a bulky gray mass. “She knocked up?”

“I hope not,” Tony sounded a little strained. “She’s sick. They both are. Picked something up in Elderwood…”

Another male voice cackled. “Heard Hammond had himself a nice little infestation.”

Infestation? Is that what we’re calling dead people now?

“He was a dick,” a third voice said.

I twisted around. Tony glowered at me from not far away, held in place by a big guy with a big gun.

“Dammit, Tony.” My head cleared enough to realize I should be annoyed with him. “I thought you were going to keep watch.”

“I fell asleep.” He didn’t sound particularly apologetic about it, either.

The guy standing over me gave me another nudge with his boot. “Looks like y’all are pretty sick. The shit from the impact sites spreads fast in the air, or what’s left of it.”

“Blair and his boys caught a bad dose,” another said.

Tony leaned as far away from the gun as he could. “So it’s probably best if you don’t come too close, right?”

I couldn’t decide whether I should sit up and puke the way I wanted to, or if I ought to keep on playing half-dead plague victim in hopes of scaring these guys off. As the churning in my stomach grew more insistent, I settled for leaning away from the guy’s boots and spewing the bile a few inches away.

The surrounding menfolk made the requisite disgusted noises. “You 
sure 
she ain’t knocked up?”

I pictured Tony shrugging as he said, “I’m not sure about anything these days.”

“You smell like liquor, dude.” I heard one of them take some deep sniffs. “You drinking?”

“Maybe.”

“Shit, how stupid are you? Getting tanked out on the road like this? Fucking moron. Poor girl doesn’t stand a chance.”

Big arms wrapped around me, and I let out a pitiful squeak.

“Hey.” Tony’s voice sharpened. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Getting her out of here. What’s that kid doing over there? Give him a poke.”

Dax moaned.

“Think he’s dead,” the other voice said.

I was carried somewhere. At least, I think I was carried; I felt air rushing past my head.

“She’s 
ours
,” Tony said.

“Looks like she’s ours now.”

I was vaguely aware of being stashed into the backseat of a car. Someone pressed a plastic bottle into my hand. “Gatorade,” he said. “Drink up.”

The Gatorade didn’t taste entirely the way I remembered, but I figured the shelf life had to be at least a half-year. Once I’d downed half the bottle, I shoved it at the nearest figure.

“Good girl.”

The last thing I remembered was the engine turning on.

TWELVE

I don’t know how much time passed between passing out in the truck and regaining full lucidity. I was vaguely aware of drinking more Gatorade, of swallowing pills, of hunching over the toilet retching.
Did some
 
fuckhead roofie me?

Someone held my hair back when I barfed into the toilet for the umpteenth time, and I think I screeched when I was doused with cold water.

Roofies. 
The small part of my brain that still functioned tried to regain control of the situation. 
Did they roofie me? They aren’t doing anything. Am I being hosed off?

“You gave her too fucking much,” someone snarled.

“She’s sick, dude.”

“You can’t just shove a bottle of antibiotics down her throat! That’s strong shit!”

Antibiotics? They’re giving me antibiotics?

I threw up again.

When I finally came to, I was in bed.

I actually let myself relax for a precious few seconds, tucked underneath blankets, safe from the world and all it had become. Maybe none of this had happened. Maybe I hadn’t even gotten up for work—it was all a terrible fever dream, and I’d open my eyes and find my roommate in the kitchen and a recorded 
Daily Show 
episode playing in the background.

I opened my eyes, and the whole shit situation came crashing back down. Meteors. Revenants. The rush to camp, the escape, a bunch of angry biker gangs, me 
feeding 
a bunch of bikers to the undead, the drinking…

Where the hell am I?

I’m sure there’s some folks out there who are celebrating the grave new world and the creatures in it. I’m not one of them. Reliving it every damned morning is worse than waking up to a smoke detector with the battery running low.

I sat up and looked around wildly, kicking the blankets aside. I was in a pale blue bedroom, and my king-sized bed faced a TV stand with a silent, dusty set.

I reached up to rub my eyes, and jumped when soft gauze touched my skin. Someone had changed the bandage on my hand. Well, that was nice of them. I hadn’t been too good about remembering that.

Something didn’t feel quite right, though. I peered under the blankets.

Oh. I was naked.

Well, this is different.

I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered, then spotted my clothing in a pile beside the bed. 

My clothing, incidentally, sat right next to a gigantic pile of firearms. 

Interesting...

I did my best to ignore the guns for the moment, and picked up my clothes. They had been cleaned as much as they could be; the jeans were probably beyond saving, but I decided to appreciate the thought. I dressed hurriedly, then peered out the window.

I was stashed away in some kind of house. I had no clue what time it was, but the rural setup suggested we were somewhere on the outskirts of Muldoon, where the city hadn’t quite encroached on the surrounding farmland. There were some detached buildings, a couple of RVs, and vehicles scattered amidst dead plant life.

I didn’t see any dead people wandering around. That upgraded my opinion of the place.

“You’re awake!”

I whirled around, hands scrabbling for a gun I no longer possessed. 
My rifle. I want my rifle
. Hell, even my pistol. Anything to help me face the grinning teenager who had manifested in my room, holding a bottle of blue liquid.

His yellow grin widened. “Hey, I don’t mean you no harm. I just came to give you more Gatorade.”

I pressed my back to the wall. “What happened?”

“You were real sick. We gave you some of them pills, you know, the ones for syphilis…”

Syphilis. They used to treat syphilis with mercury. They gave me mercury pills? 
No, even a bunch of backwater Midlands hicks wouldn’t be that stupid. Not to mention you couldn’t really get mercury pills anymore. 
Must’ve been antibiotics. Maybe they threw a sedative in there, too. 
That was a much happier assumption.

That left the unfortunate conclusion they’d jumped to. “I don’t have syphilis.”

He cocked his head to the side. I figured he was about eighteen or nineteen, and he’d either lost a lot of weight recently or he’d dressed in the jeans and button-down shirt of a much huskier man. “But you got the…the doo-dads.” He gestured vaguely at my face, and I gathered I still had spots on my skin. “You know. The doohickeys.”

“You know a lot of the standing water’s gone bad, right?” I reached up and felt the welts; they seemed smaller, at least, so I figured they were healing. Within another day or so, I might look relatively normal. Well, as normal as I could look after a very poor diet and weeks without sunshine. “I fell into an acid puddle or something. I don’t have 
syphilis
.”

“Oh.” He smiled, flashing those awful yellow teeth again. What, had he just stopped brushing and flossing entirely?
 
“Well, that’s good.”

I managed not to cringe away. “That’s not what syphilis looks like, anyway.”

“So you’re a smartie-pants, eh? Arthur will be happy.” He set the Gatorade down on the bedside table and strolled over to me, and I fought not to lean away from his stench. He gestured out the window. “Like what you see? We’ll get a whole farm going here, soon as the skies open back up. Blair wanted to build a greenhouse before that, but now…”

“Blair?”

“Yeah, you made him really mad, you know. He’s not doing so hot. He wanted to find some women, but you ain’t worth the price. That’s what he says, anyway.”

Oh, I didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Where are my friends?”

He shrugged. “We left ’em. One was real sick already, the other wasn’t worth the bullet. We even let them keep their guns. It’s been two days, they’re probably dead.”

Two days? 
I’d been out of it for two days?

“I’m Ronald, by the way.” He stuck out his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, I shook it. There was no point being rude to the guy, at least not yet.

I shuffled my feet, wondering if I dared make a break for the door. “So can I go find them?”

Ronald squinted at me. “Now why would you want to go back out there? It’s all kinds of fucked up. We had twelve guys here to start, and now we’re down by half. ’Sides, y’all went and got shitfaced with all this crap going on. You guys are really stupid.”

“I know.” There was no point in denying it. “But they’re still my friends.”

He smiled thinly. “Blair said we don’t need more 
men
.”

I smiled back and turned my attention to the outside, studying the bleak, dried landscape. Blair didn’t need more men…that meant they were looking specifically for women. And hell, what were a bunch of guys going to do with women?

Oh…
oh.

My stomach twisted.

Well, at least now I knew the situation and could handle it appropriately.

I killed those boys...maybe this is karma...

“We got armed men patrolling the grounds,” Ronald said cheerfully, as if he was trying to sell the place to me. “We cleared out the groundhogs when we first set up camp, and we don’t see more’n two a day now.”

“Groundhogs?” I pictured the rednecks taking potshots at Bill Murray.

“You know, the dead fucks. The zombies. They were thick as groundhogs when we got here, but the place is strategically important or some shit, so we cleared them out.”

Groundhogs. I’d have to remember that. I made a show of looking at the guns in the corner, trying to appear impressed. “So is this your armory?”

“You don’t need to worry about those,” he said hurriedly. “We’ll be taking them out just as soon as the boys get back from the food run. You know how to shoot?”

Is he serious? 
Granted, I hadn’t been carrying a firearm when they picked me up, but I thought guns were the first thing a person looked for when the goddamn living dead starting walking around. But I wanted him to relax, so I shook my head and tried to look fearful. “No. They thought I’d just hurt myself.”

“Idiots,” Ronald muttered. “You’re better off. Once we clear the city, we’ll live like kings. All those ruffians who don’t think Blair had good ideas…all those 
stayers
.”

I’d heard that word before. Hammond had called us 
stayers
 when he realized we hadn’t left, and it had been bandied about a few times since then, usually to deride those who decided to stick it out in their homes. “And what are you doing with the stayers?” I asked carefully.

“Arthur handles the ones we can’t negotiate with. We dump them in Old Town.”

Handles 
probably meant 
kills
. “You just leave them there?”

“Yes.”

And they called 
us
 stupid.
 Old Town Muldoon was probably completely infested. I kept my mouth shut, thinking information might be power at some point. “I see. Who’s Arthur?”