Last Rites (27 page)

Sometime in the night Lucy heard a light rain falling on the roof. She sat there with Carole and Christine in their usual spots, saying nothing, their individual shame and weakness slowly giving way by morning to the fragile strength of the bond between them.

Lucy walked out front just as the sun rose. It had stopped raining, though there were still puddles on the ground from the night before. She paused to look up at the guard tower and was greeted by a whistle. The one who liked her body so much was still on duty. Yesterday’s show hadn’t been enough, apparently. No, he’d want something more elaborate and personal before he’d leave her alone. She slowly unbuttoned the big, striped shirt and kind of swayed, as though to music. Of course, in her mind there was music—the fourth movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony—slow, with only strings at first. She remembered the piece perfectly, vividly. She should, she’d played and listened to it so many times.

With her eye closed, the whole scene didn’t even seem so bad, with that internal soundtrack to keep her mind occupied and entranced. Lucy let the shirt fall partly open, careful to keep her maimed left breast covered, and only reveal the firm, round, smooth right one. The morning air felt cool and damp, but the sun was already shining brightly enough that it deliciously warmed her face and bare skin. She cupped her right breast with her hand, sliding her palm up and over it, then slipping it back down to take her nipple between her forefinger and middle finger. She repeated this motion several times, still with her eye closed, as the symphony’s movement progressed and picked up pace.

She could’ve continued this quite pleasantly to the end of the piece, but she heard a snore and a groan and that broke her reverie. It was early enough in the morning that the other men might still be asleep and she couldn’t help but think how her unwanted admirer might actually be masturbating to her display. Though Lucy couldn’t articulate why that’d be wrong, exactly, she knew instinctively that it was so sufficiently disgusting that no music, no matter how sublime, could drive the thought from her mind, or let her overlook the way she had to degrade herself for their amusement. Lucy turned and bent at the waist, hiking her shirt up, and then hooking her thumb on the top of her pants to push them down a bit. She slowly ran her left hand in circles over her buttocks, then lightly smacked it a couple times. Hopefully, that’d finally be enough to satisfy him, whatever he was doing, so she stood up and continued walking around the corner of the house.

Once she was out of sight of the guard tower, Lucy buttoned her shirt back up. She went around the house, retrieving the pot she’d put under one of the drain spouts. Holding it behind her back, she slinked to the front of the house and returned inside. Thankfully no one stopped her or demanded anything this time.

The light had increased enough that Lucy could see the other two women in the living room. Lucy grabbed a rag as she went over to Carole first. Bending down, she cleaned the woman’s face with the wetted rag, wiping off all the blood, scrubbing her chin especially, where the stains were stubborn and caked on. Lucy turned and did the same for Christine, who looked at her more quizzically than Carole had. It was harder with Christine—she was more jowly and the blood had dried thicker in the creases of skin.

Christine grunted and wiped her face on the back of her sleeve. “Huh. When did you get so into being clean?” she asked.

Lucy sat next to her and started wiping around her own mouth, though she suspected there wasn’t nearly as much on her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just felt like it. The sun’s out.”

Christine reached for the pot. “Nothing special about that. You want me to do yours?”

“Sure. Do what you can.”

Christine helped clean Lucy off and handed the pot back to her. Lucy looked down at the water. It was stained pink from dipping the bloody rag into it. Lucy sniffed, and it still smelled mostly like rain water, fresh and cold. She raised the pot to her lips and sipped. The metallic taste of the blood and the foulness of the rag did little to obscure the sensation of the water’s purity. She swirled it in her mouth before swallowing. Her mouth finally felt clean.

“Take,” she said, offering it to Christine. “Drink it. It’s not bloody.”

Christine grunted again. “It’d taste better if it were,” she said, but drank anyway. She passed it on to Carole, who took some as well before setting the pot down.

They sat a while longer before Lucy stood up. “Let’s go outside,” she said. “The sun will feel nice.”

They walked outside. The sun did feel very good, but there was some commotion at the gate, with men climbing down the rope ladders they kept stored up in the towers. They boarded a military-looking vehicle that drove away a moment later, as the ladders were raised back up. Only two rifle barrels protruded from the tower now.

Christine pulled her and Carole away from the tower, back around the corner of their house, as more dead people emerged into the yard. “Something’s going on,” Christine whispered. She raised her shirt. She still had the bomb there. “If something happens, you want this now?”

“What?” Lucy was shocked. Everything always happened too quickly here. You were either sitting around for days, doing nothing, or people were running around asking you to fight and kill and die right then, in the next two minutes. How did they live like this?

“Food men are going away,” Carole said. “There must be trouble. Men here might decide to attack. They always talk about it. Never get up the nerve. But if they do, it might be our time to get out of here.”

“I thought you said it was easier to stay here?”

“Easier than wandering off by yourself,” Christine said. “If men attack, then it’s not so easy, ‘cause then we can’t just stand there and let them be killed. And maybe then we’ll all get out. Maybe we’ll hurt the bad men. Teach them a lesson. Maybe they won’t come looking for us then, if we hurt them bad enough and run away.”

“Can’t know for sure,” Carole said. “Anything could happen.”

Christine leaned forward and put her hand on Lucy’s shoulder. “We’ll stay with you, if you want to stay here. If you want to go and find your man, we’ll help you get out of here. It’s up to you. But you’re faster than me. You could do more with this, if we need to.”

“All right,” Lucy said quietly. “I’ll try. But I’ll need a longer string. I’m not just going to stand there like the ch-ch-children. I don’t believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny.”

Christine smiled and patted her shoulder. “Yeah. I know. We’ll go back inside and find some. Then we’ll wait. See what happens.”

As they came around the corner toward the door, one of the guards shouted. “Hey, you bitches! Get inside! I don’t like you sneaking around right now!” It sounded like Lucy’s admirer, but his voice seemed nervous and scared. Good. Lucy had her hand halfway up and was extending her middle finger when Christine shoved her from behind and sent her stumbling into their house.

“It’s not time yet, honey,” Christine said when they were all through the door.

“Yeah. You’re right. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Lucy stayed in the front room, while the other two women rummaged around for weapons and some string. Lucy could just see the tower through the grimy window. The sick fucker got his rocks off humiliating her, but he couldn’t let her out in the sun? Little shit was all brave, so long as he had a gun and was out of her reach. She’d see what kind of shape he was in by the end of today.

People like Christine and Carole and Truman—she’d do anything for them. Anything. Maybe even Rachel and Will were good enough, in their own imperfect, selfish way. She could still tolerate them. Hell, she was in this cesspool for Rachel’s sake: all this shit better be for something worthwhile, so Lucy couldn’t bring herself to think the living girl was utterly undeserving. But people like the guard—they should only fear her, and they clearly needed to be reminded of that.

Lucy moved over to the doorway, out of the line of sight of the tower, and looked up at the sun. Its steady, pitiless light had made her task of reckoning quite clear to her now.

“This gate’s closed,” the guard said. He sat behind a desk, under an awning next to the gate. Different guy than had waved Rachel through the night before, but equally nonchalant. He turned his attention from them, sipped some coffee, and looked through some papers on the desk.

“Why? What’s going on?” Will asked. Rachel had forgotten how cute his plaintive voice could be, how that hint of weakness and need added to his attractiveness. But this wasn’t a good time for it at all.

“Stiffs acting up in the Dead End,” the guard replied without much concern in his voice, looking over toward the tents, back to the two people in front of him, then down to a grainy, black-and-white television screen that showed a section of the city wall. “Happens sometimes. Can’t let anyone in. I’m sure it’ll be over in a little while.”

Rachel sized up the situation. There were some places in the wall where it wouldn’t have been too difficult for them to climb over, if the gate didn’t work out. It was still early enough in the morning that it would be unlikely they’d be spotted. But, on the other hand, her shoulder and elbow had been painful and stiff all night, and it’d still be risky.

She sauntered up next to Will. “Letting people in isn’t the same as letting them out,” she said to the guard, smiling, and bending over the desk. She’d changed out of the dumpy skirt from the night before into some tight jeans, but kept the low cut t-shirt, which was still damp and clingy. The guard eyed her boobs as he sipped his coffee. He was a pretty nasty-looking, middle-aged white guy, greasy and unshaven, hair growing out of his ears—he probably had it on his back, too—so giving him a little show wasn’t the greatest thrill for Rachel, but it had to be done if they were going to start undoing all the shit she’d set in motion.

“No, I guess it isn’t,” he said. “But why do you want to go out there anyway?”

“My Aunt Lucy works in one of the shows,” Rachel said, improvising. Had to spin it right—little cleavage, now a little sob story. “Snake handler. Real holy roller.” That was right on the edge of pushing it too far. You didn’t want to lay it on too thick or with too many details, but she’d seen a tent with people doing that, so she just went for it. “We tell her all the time not to stay out there with the zombies, but she says they’re the best snake handlers—bitten over and over and they keep going, like the Bible says people can, if they have real faith. So Aunt Lucy says, if God watches over them, He’ll watch over her. Long as she survives being bitten by snakes, she says she’ll never be bitten by a zombie. Isn’t that weird?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty weird, I guess.”

Rachel needed to wrap this up, both for them to do what they needed, and because the guard licking his lips while he stared at her tits was grossing her out worse than she expected. She put her hand on the desk and left some bills there: sex, sympathy, money—that was about all she could offer this morning, before they’d have to decide whether to retreat and climb the wall, or snap this ugly fucker’s neck. The way the hairs flared out and then back into his nostrils as he breathed made Rachel incline toward the latter.

“So, Mom called me this morning and told me to run right out there and check on Aunt Lucy. We’ll just go there now, okay? We won’t try to get back until everything’s clear—right, honey?” she said, turning to Will.

“What? Yeah, of course,” Will said. Including him on the charade was probably a mistake, but it felt more awkward, just having him stand there.

The guard looked around, then slid the bills off the desk and into his pocket. “Yeah, sure, whatever,” he muttered.

Rachel hustled Will along, feeling a little better at their chances of success this morning.

As Doctor Jack had predicted, Truman could, in fact, pick locks. Learning to do so had been a nice distraction from studying the vocabulary books over the last few days. Truman still wasn’t very good at it, however, and it didn’t help that he was working in the dim light of early morning, with his head still spinning from what they’d done to him the night before. It took him a long time to get the lock off Ramona’s ankle and free her. After he did, she shuffled over and helped Lou pull up the stake to which he was chained.

“Help Truman,” she said when they were done with that part of the plan. “I’ll get my coat and see what other stuff we can take.”

Doctor Jack had also been careful about not letting Truman see the combination to one of the locks on his cage, and Truman definitely had not learned how to undo that kind of lock. He thought you were supposed to listen to it as you turned the dial, but he’d already tried that on many previous nights without success, so he didn’t try again this morning. Instead, he’d unscrewed some of the bolts that held the bars to the frame of his cage. The cage had not been carefully constructed, and some bolt heads were exposed, especially along the top. But not all of them, so Truman couldn’t simply disassemble the whole thing and slip the bars out. There were some bolts along the bottom holding it together, but with Lou’s help, he thought he could now wrench and bend the bars out of the way enough that he could slip through. It was taking more time than he’d expected, and was making more noise, too, with the cage rattling and creaking as they worked.

Truman winced and was temporarily blinded by the lights coming on in the tent. Not the torches of the night before, but the regular house lights. He covered his face as he heard Lou groan from the uncomfortably harsh illumination.