Dead Lands Pass the Ammunition (2 page)

So they jumped down with Mack and started swinging. An inspiration to the rest of us, I suppose.

I sat in my perch and watched, my fingers shaking on the stock and pump of the gun, sweat beading on my forehead.

I wasn’t the only one watching.

That morning was the beginning of Mack’s end.

Like I said before, there were different kinds of folks in the new order. You had fighters, and you had the politicians. They were guys like Big D and Donnie, older guys who managed to survive because they had the young bodies of bucks like Mack and Lennie to hide behind. Not that Big D showed any cowardice. Not that Donnie wasn’t a tough motherfucker himself. They just used their brains more than brawn, and to beat the meatwads, a camp like ours had to have a little of both.

Big D’d been the head honcho of the camp since I arrived. He’d dubbed the place Worlds of Fun. He was a tall dude, long, thick fingers and face with a crooked nose. Rumor held he’d busted his snout long before the end. His eyes were blue and pale, sort of like Rex’s, but they still held color. A little color, at least. When he looked at you with those pale blue eyes, your skin started to peel away so he could get at the guts underneath.

But the other thing about Big D was that his face stretched out like a rubber mask with dark bags sagging under his eyes and jowls on either side of his mouth. Permanent wrinkles littered his forehead. He could pass for one of the meatwads except his heart still pumped. I suspect that’s why he became the leader.

Donnie, his number one, hung onto the edge of Big D’s shirt like a baby to its mama. He was the one I worried about the most—thin like a weasel with a pooch of fat around the middle. His bandy white arms flopped at his sides when he walked. Pockmarks from squeezing too many zits littered his face. When he spoke, his words sounded like they were launched straight down at you from one of his upturned nostrils. I never trusted guys who gauged you by the line of their nose. Donnie carried a pistol, and not one of your everyday snub noses or police specials. A couple old-timers said he’d picked the 9mm he carried from one of the dead—he’d stolen a meatwad’s gun.

Can’t imagine what a meatwad might need with a firearm, but a story’s a story—nobody makes you believe it, just like this one.

These two fine politicians happened to be watching the morning Mack and the others went berserker on the meatwads. There’d been plenty of fighting before—fighting was a way of life. Death was a way of life. But Mack hadn’t ever taken the leap of faith into the middle of the broil like that before. Mack hadn’t quite etched an impression on someone in power like that before.

Once the commotion settled outside the walls, Big D had two guys pull back the big arm which kept the gate in place. He strode through the doorway into I’d only seen Big D in the wild three or four other times. Like I said before, there were politicians and there were fighters, and he belonged squarely to the former category. He’d take one trip every few months on a hunting expedition, two guards with guns flanking him the whole time. Before dusk, they’d return loaded with squirrel meat or the occasional possum. They always brought back one of those undead bastard’s heads. Big D had the head mounted up on one of the towers like some kind of trophy until it would rot away and leave a stained skull. Damn thankful I never pulled duty with the rotten melon up there.

So there he was, waving his fat-knuckled politician’s hands. I leaned over the edge to hear.

“Mack, my friend,” Big D began. His slick as greased-goose-shit politician’s voice slid out of his mouth like hot butter. He called everybody
friend
when he was looking for something. “Quite a show you put on this morning.”

Mack grunted and wiped the sweat and grime from his forehead. “Just teaching those bastards not to fuck with us.”

“A damn fine show,” Big D said, and then he leaned really close to Mack, close enough I suspect he whispered something  in my friend’s ear. I couldn’t hear. I’m not sure I wanted to hear because the way Big D talked sometimes made me want to smash his face in with the stock of my gun. When they reentered the compound as several guys went out to deal with the burnt and bludgeoned meatwads, they both wore smiles sharp like daggers.

Mack had been shacking with this girl named Sasha for a couple of weeks.

I doubt Sasha was her real name because it sounded far too exotic for a ratty-blonde with big tits and hint of country in her voice. She said she was from down near Salina and I had no reason to doubt that bit of history. I figure Sasha must have been eighteen, maybe nineteen—either way a year or two younger than Mack and me. Maybe she had a diploma; maybe not.  She slithered around the compound, wagging her body all over like she was older and a little savvier. Sasha knew you were watching, and sometimes she’d glance over a shoulder and carve a piece from you with her deep brown eyes to remind you she knew.

The two of them slept in what we called the family quarters, a bunkhouse of corrugated metal, grey studs, and peeling plywood like the rest of our little camp, but the bunks were big enough to sleep two wide. They weren’t betrothed or married or anything, but most social conventions evaporated in the face of survival.

The women fell pretty neatly into a couple of categories, too. But it was different, slightly. They were
all
fighters. I saw a girl of nineteen give birth in the camp. Even with the rotters and the death and everything, I never saw so much blood or so much strength.

Before everything came apart, before the plague and the war and the end, I never understood how much fight it took to care for a child. I’d never doubt the fight in any mother once I saw the grit in their eyes. In a different place, my stomach might have turned over. Before the world fell to pieces, I might have skipped writing those lines about babies and taking care of the children because it sounded so God-damned archaic like something out of Old Testament law. Like I was some kind of backwoods redneck.

Hell.

The women were survivors, just like the men. Every one of them could, and would fight.  Under all that,  Sasha would make a politician like Big D blush. Women like Sasha knew the secret strings to pull and make a man dance like a puppet. And most men were more than willing to dance.

~

I made my bunk near the one wall the single men shared with the family room. The family room had a wholesome name but scarred heart. Lennie called it an orgy once, but I wouldn’t believe it. Lennie like to tell stories, and he always puffed them up.

We stayed in the adjoining shack, one wall in common. Maybe we stayed there to remember or imagine. Maybe we stayed close so when we heard the grunting and moaning through the thin metal sheets, we’d grab our dick’s and spank them until the loneliness went away even though it never did. Entertainment, I guess. Self-abuse…

I heard Mack and Sasha whispering the night after the big skirmish, and I don’t mean making the beast with two backs. They were talking.  Their voices came like rats’ scratches at first, so quiet I almost wasn’t sure I heard what I heard.

“You saw the way Lennie and Rex followed you,” Sasha said.

“They just wanted to kill some flesh bags,” Mack replied. “Everybody just wants to kill some flesh bags.  All this waiting around for them to come to us is nuts. I didn’t do anything special. I was just antsy. Ready to do something.”

“You’re a leader. A natural. Half this camp would stand up and bark if you asked them to. God knows I’d bark if you asked me to.”

“Sash… I’m no leader.”

“Bullshit and you know it. Nobody else has the balls you do, baby.”

Mack grunted. I imagined where Sasha’s hand must have been.

“Big D knows it. He hasn’t done anything to move us forward. We just hang here, waiting. He knows you’re going to challenge him.”

“What?”

“He has to know,” Sasha said. “He has to suspect something.”

A metallic squeak leaked through the thin wall. I scooted closer, listening, waiting for their voices again.

“I don’t want to challenge Big D. Plenty of folk love him. He’s done right by us most of the time. He’s kept everyone safe. He was here in the beginning. What’s this all about, anyway? I never mentioned challenging Big D.”

“But you could. You could take him,” she said. “But maybe not out in the open. You know the council would jump on you if Big D was out of the way. If this pest hole needed another leader, you’d be next in line.”

“What about Donnie?” Mack asked. “Donnie lives in his back pocket.”

“What about Donnie? He’s a snot-nosed weasel.”

“Donnie’s a dangerous guy. He’s number two, and suspicious as hell. He’s got that lean and hungry look.”

“He’s a head case. You’re a natural leader.”

“No,” Mack said. “I can’t do what D’s done. What he keeps doing for this camp.”

“He’s an egomaniac and weak, too. You should be in charge.”

“No, Sash. Big D’s the man. He’s kept us safe here. Got us planting seeds and farming. We’ll start raising hogs in the next year—once we grab some of those wild razorbacks down in the bottoms.  Big D’s the man.”

“You think those were his ideas? You think any of that shit is going to win the war against the flesh bags? He doesn’t shit without thinking about which way the wind blows. Just think about it, baby. If you want something, sometimes you have to reach out and grab hold of it yourself. Sometimes you have to make it yours.”

Mack grunted again, and then the squeaking came back followed by a few muffled moans. I rolled over and draped an arm across my ear, trying to blot out the sound.

I’d imagined enough for one night.

~

That conversation nibbled on me. It was still there in the morning, sticking in my side like a wood splinter under the skin. I tried to imagine Mack as leader of the compound, crown prince of thirty odd or so survivors all huddled together in our half-dozen shacks behind makeshift walls. I tried to picture Mack presiding over the gardens and the expeditions to gather food and cooking fuel and kerosene for our bombs. No matter how my brain worked it, I just couldn’t make it come out right. Mack as leader…

Or Sasha as the queen, pulling his strings.

But she already was, wasn’t she? She pulled hard enough for old Mack to tumble into a mess of trouble, filling his head with ideas of grandeur and delusions of a new order where he’d sit in the central hut on Big D’s old throne. Nothing but a stinking stained recliner pulled from a ditch, that throne, but that didn’t matter.

I wanted to forget it, burn the whole stupid conversation from my head, but memories never worked like that—before or after the dead came back to life and everything we knew crumbled like a toothpick castle in a twister.

I chewed on my thoughts along with bowls of bitter vegetables and tasteless potato soup.

But then Mack and I were filling sandbags—we mostly used old plastic trash sacks filled will mud to shore up the outer walls—a few days after I overheard them. My thoughts foamed over into words.

“Sasha’s got a big mouth.” I sank the shovel into the wet ground and twisted to face him.

Mack heaved a bag onto the pile and then turned his square-jawed face my direction. “What the hell are you talking about?” He asked. Sweat trickled a zig-zag line down his reddened face. His eyes went cold like midnight.

“Nothing.” I looked at my soil-stained hands. “Nothing…”

He snorted. “Bullshit. Come out with it P.  You drop some shit like that about Sash, you better be ready to back it up.” His fists curled at his side. A quick flash of those meaty paws skittered through my head. Nobody really wanted to be on the wrong side of Mack.

I swallowed hard and turned back to the shovel. “Just what she was saying about Big D the other night. Stuff she was saying about you being in charge.”

“You were listening?”

I shrugged. “Thin walls. It’s not like I tried.”

Mack scowled. “What of it?”

I heard it in his voice, anger like a volcano ready to pop—anger like the powder of a cartridge right before the pin sets it off.

“She’s going to get you killed is all. She’s going to talk you into doing something stupid.” I wrapped my fingers around the shovel handle and lifted it from the muck. The wrong words crawled over the edge of my tongue and spilled into the air. “She’s got her claws in you pretty deep.”

“Say it again,” he said.

“You heard me.”

His fist hit the side of my skull like a stone. White light burst in my head. My body flopped to the side, limp and broken like a scarecrow knocked down with the wind. I slid a few feet in the mud.

“Motherfucker,” Mack snarled. He stood above me, his back to the corrugated tin wall of the compound. A couple of guys on watch shouted something, too, but my ears couldn’t grab hold of it just then. Blood throbbed in my head. “Lay off Sash, you jealous prick.”

I shook my head, asking for more abuse. “She’s—”

His boot caught me in the gut, and I doubled over.

“She’s… She’s everything. We’re nothing. We’re fucking disposable, you know that? We’ve got to have women like Sash, good tough woman who are going to make this work. It’s not just about fucking and having a good time. They’ve got to be mothers to our kids. Yeah, kids. It’s not something I imagined for my life, ever, but the reality of this,” he paused and waved his hand at the compound, “we’ve got to have good strong women who give a shit. I figure if we want to survive—”