Scavengers (26 page)

“Touch him!” Bal Shem ordered, anger flooding his voice. Selah cowered between the filing cabinets and the desk. Tears rolled over her cheeks as her whole body trembled.

Spread on the floor of the trailer was the mangled, mostly devoured, twitching body of a man. Stringy bits of meat clung to his joints. His ribs were broken, but his abdomen was intact. All skin and muscle tissue on his limbs were gone. Bal Shem let the infected eat everything that wasn’t vital to the person being healed and useful again.

Selah sobbed, her hands and arms caked with dried blood. Her clothes were filthy. Flies buzzed around her unwashed hair, and the trailer smelled foul. “Please. I’m so tired. I can’t.”

“You can and you will. Touch this man, now!”

Selah stretched her hands to the gruesome remainder of a man. She closed her eyes tight and blindly groped what should be a corpse. Shudders of exhaustion shook her small body, and her knees buckled. The generals of Bal Shem fought to be the first to catch her. To touch her. Snarling, they shoved each other in the struggle.

“Enough!” Bal Shem shouted. They stopped quarreling. He held Selah by the waist, supporting her body. “Finish it!”

Selah grasped the man’s leg bone. Her shoulders slumped. Her head lulled to the side.

“She needs to sleep,” the only woman in the room said. “Too tired.”

The others nodded in agreement. Bal Shem was furious. “She can sleep when she’s finished with this one.”

“It’s happening.”

They gathered around the man’s body and watched as it regenerated. It was a miracle of supernatural reconstruction. Veins straightened and reconnected, striated muscles uncurled and enmeshed. Blood seemed to flow beneath a transparent layer until skin reformed like a crawling sheet of wet rubber, then solidified and formed unbroken layers over the wounds. And then, the man sat up and screamed. As if he knew he’d been resurrected again to serve as a perpetual feast for Bal Shem’s infected masses and was crying out not so much from the pain of his death, but the pain of his existence. Over and over again, they consumed the bodies of the healthy, and then forced Selah to heal the all but dead heaps of bone and organs.

Selah went limp. Bal Shem passed her to the woman who took her to the closet to sleep.

The woman returned. “Too many.”

“What?” Bal Shem demanded.

“Too many bodies to heal. The girl is too tired.”

“We’ll let her sleep longer.” Bal Shem said, ending the discussion. “Blue Shirt,” he said to the general in the blue plaid shirt. “Take woman and troops in one Jeep. Drive to the houses along the lake and bring back more people. If we have more healthy, the girl won’t have to fix the bodies so much.”

“We did that before,” Blue Shirt said.

“Yes, you did. But there are still more healthy by the lake.”

The generals looked at each other, seemingly agreeing that this was a good plan. Blue Shirt and the woman lurched out the door, and into the crowd of waiting infected patients that were constantly congregating around Bal Shem’s trailer.

Bal Shem watched Blue Shirt drive the Jeep toward the county road. Blue Shirt was the best driver. He remembered how to operate vehicles. The Jeep swerved, narrowly missing a fence post, but continued along the road until out of sight. Bal Shem turned toward the remaining generals.

“The food is being delivered to the barn and the tents?” he asked.

“Yes. We’ve done everything like you told us to do.” An infected named Joe answered.

Bal Shem gave him a satisfied smile. “Good. All of you are doing very good.”

Joe snickered nervously, but pleased. “Can the girl touch me?”

A scowl replaced Bal Shem’s smile. “No, you idiot. Woman just told us the girl needs sleep. She’ll touch us later. Find her the cans she liked.”

“Peaches,” Joe said, and left the trailer in search of the fruit.

Rubbing his temples, Bal Shem tried to focus. As the days progressed, the pain intensified. Selah’s touch lost its potency and he needed her more often. Without her regenerative touch, his mental skills faded. He forgot more. He grew angrier and less competent. As long as she routinely touched him, he could function on an almost normal level. The others improved as well, none quite as lucid as he became, but close to it. But their constant demands were sapping her powers.

His brain ached.
Pounding. Pounding
. Pounding with the reverberation of a surging ache, like a hangover on a hot day. He could feel the bones of his skull vibrating.

His headache was intensified by a female scream outside.

He staggered out onto the steps.

There was a loud argument in front of the barn to the right of the clinic trailer. The barn behind the clinic trailer was in bad condition. They rarely used it for anything, but the larger barn now housed some of the healthy upon which they fed. The voices grew louder. Bal Shem spotted three infected patients who held a healthy woman against the barn door.

Two other infected men grunted at the three aggressors. Joe appeared from the storage shed, anger in his voice as he ordered the trio holding the loud woman, Evelyn — Bal Shem remembered her name because she’d caused problems before — to let her go. Unauthorized consumption of the healthy was forbidden.

Two of the infected balked at the order and moved closer to bite the screaming woman. Joe cursed. “Let her go!”

This kind of behavior was expected from the feral infected, but those identified as such were kept on the other side of the camp now. Bal Shem frowned.
Maybe more are deteriorating. Growing worse
, he thought. He watched as Joe finally pulled a gun from his waistband and shot the two troublemakers. The gun reports snapped the air and echoed across the farm. The headshots jerked their necks. Their bodies fell to the dirt, and the woman shrieked, running into the barn.

Joe ordered the bodies delivered to the feral quarter. If the bodies were not too ravaged, the feral would eat their own kind if they couldn’t find a healthy person. Joe gestured wildly to the pair who were supposed to be guarding the barn and then, leaning over, picked up the bag he’d discarded beside a water station. Joe delivered the bag of canned peaches to Bal Shem, then left for the feral quarters to make sure the bodies were disposed of properly. 

Bal Shem took the peaches inside. Slowly, he opened a can and plopped the golden fruit into a plastic pink bedpan. He would give the peaches to the girl when she awoke.

He gently opened the door to the closet, careful to keep the light from shining on the face of the sleeping child. Selah’s chest rose and fell weakly with each breath. Bal Shem was relieved to see she still had life in her.

“Sleep, little one. Sleep.”

He closed the door with a quiet click, fighting the urge to yank it open and touch the flesh of the girl and stop the pounding hammers that tortured his sick mind.

“Oh, that had to hurt,” Private Abbott said, laughing, as they watched the Jeep on the road in front of them dip into a massive crater passing for a pothole. Metal shrieked against asphalt, and the Jeep bounced back onto the road.

Dr. Robbins rode in the first Jeep with Private Brooks and crates of supplies. Dejah, Shaun, and David rode in the vehicle behind them, every muscle in her neck and jaws clenched with nervous anticipation of what they’d find at the camp, and a nearer dread that they’d end up on their roof in the field. To describe the county road they were on as “poorly maintained” would have given it too much credit. The Jeeps bumped and bounced over crater-like potholes, washboards, and deep cracks in the earth that looked deep enough to die in. On a normal day, she figured the road only saw action from tractors and a battered pick-up or two, if that. Dejah clung to the side of the door, cold air freezing her face and ears.

“I wish I had a hat!” she shouted over the din of the Jeep. David and Shaun concurred.

“Cold fall this year,” Private Abbott said. The Jeep swerved to avoid the jagged pothole encountered by the vehicle of Dr. Robbins and Private Brooks.

Dejah let her mind wander to fall, to this autumn that was like no autumn that had ever come before. No harvest parties, no fall festivals, no beer sampling or human-sized turkey legs at the various Octoberfests. No, this autumn had only seen the arrival of destruction and death. Halloween was a complete bust, unless you considered the real life walking zombies a plus. She watched the trees whiz past as they drove along: oaks of all variations, southern pines, cypress trees — the greens just hinting at a fade to brown.

The Jeep ahead slowed to a stop, and Private Abbott braked. Abbott shifted into park and got out, walking to the driver’s side beside Brooks.

“What’s the problem?” Abbott asked. Brooks had turned off his Jeep.

“Right front tire is flat. Didn’t you see it?”

Abbott crossed in front of the vehicle, and looked at the tire on the front passenger side. A large two-pronged harvester blade protruded from the black rubber like fangs ripped from a giant mechanical vampire bat.

“Damn.  Looks like a blade off an old combine.”

Brooks got out of the Jeep. Abbott frowned at the destroyed tire some more. Then he glanced at Dr. Robbins. “This won’t be a problem, doctor. We’ll have the tire changed in a matter of minutes.”

David leapt from the Jeep and approached the soldiers who were removing the spare tire from the back of the vehicle. “A few minutes are all these bastards need to find and swarm us, gentlemen.”

“He’s right.” Brooks nodded. “Abbott stand guard, I’ll change the tire.”

“I’ll help,” Dr. Robbins seized the jack, and started back around to the front. David joined him.

Dejah and Shaun sat nervously in the car, scanning the dense trees for signs of threatening movement. The wind blew deadfall and dried leaves in whirlwinds of brown and black around the tree trunks, forming strange patterns that seemed suspicious at first glance.

“I wish they’d hurry,” Dejah said to Shaun, her voice low.

Shaun rubbed his arms fretfully. He knew as well as she did they were sitting ducks out here on the road. There was nothing else out here aside from them and trees, and a few abandoned trailers set back in the woods here and there. “You want me to go see if they need any help?”

“No, we should stay out of the way.”

“Did you see my new boots?” Shaun pointed to his black-booted feet. “Genuine Army issue. Courtesy of the U.S. government.” He grinned and gave her a thumbs-up. Dejah looked down at his shining boots and smiled with him, nodding appreciatively.

Gunshots ripped the air. Dejah reflexively jumped at the noise. Shaun dove onto the floorboard, hands over his head, as if the sky would collapse. The gunfire continued.  The M-16 in Private Brooks’s hand spat lead into the treeline several yards from the road.  The rifle reports echoed.

“Oh, shit,” Dejah said. “Stay down, Shaun.”

David ran toward her and the Jeep.

“Start the Jeep,” he yelled. Abbott ran behind him. Dejah climbed over from the back seat and turned the key. The engine fired up. Abbott and David reached the vehicle at the same time and scrambled in.  Dejah jumped out of their way into the back seat to make room.

“There’s a lot of them,” David said. He grabbed a rifle leaning between the seats and prepared to fire.

In front of them, Private Brooks wasn’t driving. Instead he was firing into the wave of infected that was now fanning out toward them from the road and trees.

“Damn it, drive!” Abbott shouted, and reluctantly waited for the doctor and Brooks to turn around.

“They’re behind us!” Shaun screamed. They shot glances backward to see their escape route being closed off by a wall of infected zombies, lurching, shambling, and moving closer to the two Jeeps. But what gave them reason to pause was not so much the now too terribly familiar vision of sick humans hungry for flesh, but the awkwardly out-of-place vehicle that led the group behind them. In front of the mass of gore-smeared infected an Army Jeep drove at a jerky pace, stopping and moving, stopping and moving, as if the driver were having trouble with the manual transmission, just barely pulling it off.

“Holy shit, they’re driving.” Abbott stared, incredulous.

“And shooting,” David added, as the road beside the car was raked with bullets.

“The hell did they get guns?”

One zombie wore the tattered remains of an Army uniform sans sleeves. He kept pulling on the rifle strap of the rifle held solidly in the hands of the infected walking beside him.

“I’m guessing whatever soldiers were sent to the camp earlier didn’t get a happy reception,” David said, ducking at each new gunshot.

“Fuck,” Abbott grabbed the rifle from David’s grip and fired off a few rounds, picking off a handful of infected in the process. Those behind the fallen simply stepped on or over the fallen zombies and continued toward them.

Brooks and Dr. Robbins ran back to them and piled into their Jeep. Robbins climbed stiffly into the back and wedged in next to Dejah.  Brooks launched himself into the bed of the rear cargo area through the open back of the Jeep.

“Safety in numbers,” Brooks said.

Abbott laughed grimly. “Are you seeing the same shitstorm I’m seeing here? ‘Cause we ain’t got any fucking numbers. Our asses are zombie food.”

Shaun clung to Dejah’s arm.

The infected surrounded them from every direction. Brooks and Abbot fired, but there weren’t enough bullets to kill them all. David gripped a pistol and joined the firefight, but again, for every zombie he killed, three more appeared behind it. When the magazines were empty, there wasn’t any time to reload.  Premature night fell upon them, as all remaining daylight was blocked by the awful visions grasping hands ripping open the doors, gnashing teeth, open sores, tattered flesh. Hands grabbed them, pulling their clothes, their limbs, their hair. Their screams and shouts rose over the grunts and moans of the zombie crowd. Shaun was pulled away from Dejah by a multitude of hands.

“Dejah! Dejah!” he shrieked, fighting, kicking, hitting whatever he could connect with, but there were too many of them.

“Shaun!” Dejah called. She couldn’t see where he was through the wall of infected humanity. So many of them. She felt smothered. Suffocated. The smell of them was awful, like sweat-damp rotting meat smeared with feces. “Shaun! David,” she choked.

“Dejah!” David shouted from somewhere a few feet away.

“I’m over here, still by the Jeep,” she yelled in reply. “Where’s Shaun?” Terror filled her voice. The kind of terror only reflected in the voice of a mother who has lost her child. She clawed and fought the mobs of hands holding her. She became an enraged animal, letting loose all of her fear and rage in a furious attack.  It kept them at bay, but she was not released. She kicked, hit, yanked, leaped, and jumped, trying to see over their heads, trying to see where they’d taken Shaun.

She didn’t hear him shouting anymore.

God no. Please God, please….

A car horn sounded, long and loud, and every one of the infected monsters froze where they stood. They seemed fearful to even breathe. The car horn stopped. It had come from the zombie-driven Jeep.

“What are you doing?” a raspy voice shouted over the heads of the crowd. “You were told
not
to harm them.”

Low murmurs buzzed through the foul-smelling crowd. A few reluctantly glanced at the infected person standing beside them as if they’d just awakened from a confusing dream in a place they’d never seen.

The hands tightened their grips on her arm as Dejah strained against them, still looking for Shaun.

“Shaun? Shaun!” she shouted.

“
Silence, woman
,” the rasping voice commanded. She could see an infected man in a blue plaid shirt, standing on the seat of the Jeep he was driving. He was the one talking to them. Infected, and driving … and talking. Giving orders.

“Do what he says, Dejah,” David said. A zombie near him slugged him in the stomach. David doubled over, holding his gut still healing from the knife wound. He wheezed as the wind was knocked out of him. From what she could see of his face, pain seared him, but the infected clinging to him didn’t release their holds.
They’ve organized
, she thought, not willing to contemplate what that meant just yet.

“Silence!” Blue Shirt said again. The infected man giving orders climbed from the Jeep and went to the road. The mass of zombies parted for him like water for a shark’s fin. As the mob split for the man to pass, a puddle of blood and organs staining the road came into view.

Dejah gasped. As the zombies continued to step aside, Shaun’s torso, torn and gutted, glistening under the rays of dying sunlight, lay splayed in plain sight. Arms wrenched from sockets. Blood pumping from the stump of his neck where his head once was. Intestines coiled out over the road like gray skinless snakes, torn free from the lower half of his body. Shit fell from the shorn ends in brown clumps into the red-black blood on the asphalt. Not far from the mass of gore lay a leg, a section of blood-slick bone stripped of its flesh where a thigh used to be. And on its foot, below the blue jeaned knee, was a shining black boot, courtesy of the U.S. government.

The dawning realization of what she saw spread slowly from the core of her spine to an awful place deep within.

“Shaun!” Dejah screamed hysterically. “No!  No-you-fucking-didn’t-
you-goddamn-monsters-NO!”
In a berserker rage, she thrashed and flailed against the hands that held her. David shouted for her to stop. She didn’t care. Tears filmed her eyes, flowed to the ground. She was a wailing mess of rage as she flung herself against her captors, struggling to reach Shaun’s remains. They closed in around her.  She heard their growls and moans but she cursed them and screamed louder, as if her fury was a scalding power in itself, and she could destroy them all, see
them
ripped to shreds, see
them
torn limb from limb, see
their
guts slithering from
their
rotten carcasses – and make it all happen from the sheer force of her screams, wrenched as they were from the deepest pit of pain and grief.

They crowded her.  Their sheer mass finally restrained her completely. A fetid, filthy hand clamped over Dejah’s mouth, silencing her shouts into muffled mews. She slumped to the road, sobbing.

A few infected crouched around the scattered parts of Shaun’s corpse, eating in an animalistic frenzy.

“Stop,” Blue Shirt said.

“Hungry,” someone said in a sound that was more grunt than word.

“Bal Shem commands to bring them to the farm,” Blue Shirt said in his stilted tone of authority.  He awkwardly held a rifle, military issue, in his right hand.  The left hand, which he used to steady the weapon, had twisted fingers, as if they’d been broken.

The huddled group continued devouring Shaun’s remains.

Blue Shirt raised the rifle, leveled it. It kicked in his hands as it fired.  Three of the defiant infected fell over, splashing into the pile of carnage. “I said
stop
.”

The others backed away, but there was reluctance and grumblings against the leader. There were more infected wishing to eat than were wishing to obey the man in the blue shirt. As if visibly struck by a surprise solution, and out of apparent fear that the horde was growing more feral and would turn on him as well as the healthy, Blue Shirt stood straighter as he offered them a compromise: “Eat this woman and finish the boy. The rest will be taken to Bal Shem.”

David sprang into action. He’d been docile long enough that the sudden move caught the infected by surprise and he ripped his right arm free. He swung a punch at his nearest captor, but his liberation was short lived. He was immediately subdued by a dozen growling zombies. “Dejah!” he yelled, voice taut with anguish.

Dejah was numb. She hung from the arms of her captors, head bowed. Certainly Selah was dead. Shaun was dead. Soon, she would watch David die as well. If only she could die once and for all …
no, no you can’t give up
.