THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER Book 1: Bleeding Kansas: A Novel Of The Zombie Apocalypse (18 page)

Well, good for him, I think, taking another gulp from the growler bottle. All governments rule by terror. Kerch’s terror just happens to be more terrifying than most. I wonder what that Paulson guy said to Kerch to bring this on. I noticed Paulson wasn’t there at the party.

It’s tricky what this kid is doing, especially with the multiple stops. He’s got 300 or so
deaders stumbling up after his Caddy. They bunch up in the middle. So many rows deep, the ones along the edge who are just following the horde don’t see the moving vehicle, don’t smell the live meat dangling out the window. They can’t see, but they know there are structures up on these knolls. Where people used to live.

I see some of these gray, ripped faces turned
towards my window and I freeze. A shift in shadow might be enough to bring them up the driveway. Them and 300 of their friends. Oh, Jesus. I’ll need to get Rebecca to kill me for sure because there is no way this is going to end well….

But t
he ones that are moving, keep moving. Any that look sideways eventually follow, pushed on by the ones behind them. As the last of the herd passes in front of my window I realize what they mean by calving the herd. Evans’ crew figured a way to draw a number of deaders. As enough of them passed, or (more likely) the herd was already thin enough in the middle, they cut them down. What could be a horde of thousands is only a few hundred. A few hundred you could Pied Piper away with one smart-assed kid and his subwoofer.

I’ve got to hand it to Kerch. In less than two weeks he’s taken the most grotesque human catastrophe since the Black Death and made it work for him.

All I want is a change of underwear and a quiet place to hole up. After I make sure my family is really gone, that is. I need to do that much first. But that’s it. I have no need to rule the world. Nor do I care to help some other alpha dog rule the world. It was bad enough when everything was “normal.” Now….

I listen as the
Caddy and its grisly entourage disappear into the dusk. The kid isn’t wasting his time stopping in front of the empty houses towards the end of the lane. He’s rolling straight out to the road leading down to Old Man Sanderson’s fields. Standing there in the near perfect darkness I take another hit from my growler jug. I feel like I should have a cigarette. Can’t say why. I quit smoking 20 years ago.

I turn and walk right into—Rebecca? I stumble b
ackwards with the jug sloshing in my hand. I nearly fall into the window before I get my feet steady beneath me.

“Oh calm down, it wouldn’
t be fair in your condition! Look, I know you don’t want to be bothered but I need a glass for my cognac. I was hoping you could get it for me. Or give me the lantern and I’ll look for myself.”

I look around for the lantern. She holds it out in front of her. “Here.”

I take the lantern from her and walk out the door. I wait until I’m in the middle of the hall before I fire it up. Then I go downstairs. I pass quickly through to the kitchen. I’d rather no one catch so much as a flash behind these blinds.

I find the hutch with the specialty glasses. Two long-stemmed tulip glasses are clinking in my hand as I climb the stairs. Before I make the first landing my text alert go
es off. I continue on up. I come to the door to my room and set the lantern down on the floor as I dig for my keys. Rebecca appears at the edge of the light.

“We’re drinking in here?”

“I don’t want the light in the front room. I was hoping you’d pour me a hit. We don’t have to keep each other company.”

“It’s creepy in this old house. You mind if I hang for just a little while?”

“Fine.”

“I liked this room better in the first place.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

“I won’t.”

I push the door open. Rebecca picks up the lantern and follows me inside. I nod at the dresser and she puts the lantern there. She picks up the glasses from the bed and begins to pour as I check my phone.

ALL CLEAR. Pls remain indoors as crew clears bodies. Leave gens off per norm.

“I didn’t know we left our generators off at night,” I say.

Rebecca hands me my glass.
“Only for the summer when it’s tolerable. The winter is going to be something else, though. We either get tankers of fuel or get the electricity going again. Either way, we’ve got to get these dead people cleared out of town.”

“I have no doubt our esteemed patron Mr. Kerch can make that happen.” I raise my glass.
“To our esteemed patron!”

“So you’re really thinking of sticking around?”

“Why not? Emory laid out a nice spread at that death trap he set up this afternoon. I’ll be honored to kill a few thousand zombies for him.”

Rebecca looks at me suspiciously. “You lost everyone. That’s what I’ve been hearing. You have family in Colorado and now they’re gone.”

“My wife is gone. I don’t know what happened to my children.”

“How old were they?”

“Seventeen and nineteen.”

“
You’re not going to try and look for them?”

“
Survival would mean them going where the former citizens aren’t, and that means well away from our neighborhood. They could be any number of places along I-25 from Monument to Pueblo. That’s a lot of area. All I can do from here is wish them well. They’re smart kids. If anyone can find a way to get by it’s Sybil and Jack.”

“It doesn’t bother you that Mr. Kerch put those dead people on those poor kids?”

“What poor kids? If they’re not going to contribute, no shrimp and lobster for them! By the way, you say you can’t have shrimp and lobster?”

“God, no, and I love it!”

“You can have mine from the box downstairs.”

“What’s this for?”

“A peace offering. Not an apology, mind you. Just peace.”

Rebecca smiles icily as she lifts her glass towards me: “Let there be peace between our houses, Mr.
Grace.”

I hold my glass up. “Peace.”

Rebecca sits on my bed. I take the chair at the foot of the bed. It’s very good cognac.

After a while Rebecca says, “I lost everyone, too.”

“Yeah?”

“No. I lost everyone before this all happened.”

“Any advice for the newly bereaved, then?”

“No. Not really.”

I laugh, hold up my glass.
“To alcohol!”

Rebecca does
a terrible job of suppressing a smile. “You’ve adapted to all this rather quickly.”

“There’s not
a lot going on in the way of alternatives.”

“No,” says Rebecca, looking into the distance. “No, there isn’t.”

We sit in silence for a minute. Then: “You mind if I bring back some candles for the room. This lantern’s a little bright.”

“Do what you have to do.”

Rebecca takes the lantern out of the room. I reach over and finger the blinds on the window. It’s completely dark out now. The stars twinkle brightly through the humid Kansas air. The temperature would be going down in Colorado Springs, where the air is drier…speaking of dry, I should wring out my underwear and hang it up….

Rebecca returns with the candles. She lights both and turns off the lantern. The light is warmer, more intimate.
“Better,” she says, settling back on the bed. “Oh, how are you over there?”

I raise my glass.
“Never better.”

“H
mm. Let me top you off.”

Before I have a chance to get up she’s leaning over me, the silk from her lingerie top brushing my face. I glance down to see the curves of her breasts as they push against the fabric
as she fills my glass.

Rebecca’s eyes meet mine. “Okay?”

“Yeah. I just remembered something, though.”

“Oh?”

“If I don’t wring out my underwear and hang it up I’ll be going commando tomorrow. I should probably set my alarm so I can start up the generator and run the electric dryer.”

Rebecca straightens, still standing very close. “You’re going out into a sea of hungry dead people tomorrow and you’re worried about your junk swinging free in your pants?”

“The last thing anyone needs out there is a distraction.”

She puts a finger on my nose. “Stay right there.”

Rebecca takes a candle from the dresser and walks to the bathroom behind me. I hear the water in the sink as she wrings it from my shorts. There’s a glug as she unstops the drain, a fresh run from the spigot as she rinses the soap from the shorts and sink.

“You don’t have to do that,” I say.

She shuts off the water. “No, I don’t,” she says. I hear the rustle of the shower curtain as she drapes my shorts over the rod. I hear her dry her hands before she comes back out. “I’m leaving the candle in the bathroom on top of the toilet. I think we can get by with one in here.”

“I wish I could have seen that,” I say.

“Seen what?”

“
You rinsing out my shorts. There’s nothing sexier than watching a woman take care of basic household business.”

Rebecca reaches down, runs her fingers along my ear. “How long were you married, Mr.
Grace?”

“Twenty-two years.”

“You ever step out on her?”

“No
.” I look up into her eyes. Even with the light behind her they flash at me. “I’m not looking for an award. We just took it day by day.”

“U
ntil the days ran out.”

“Yeah.
Pretty much. No kiss goodbye.” I draw a long, burning swallow from the cognac. “Couldn’t afford it.”

She
looks at me curiously. Given the kind of man a woman like Rebecca is used to, an expression like “couldn’t afford it” must sound laughably strange. I smile and turn my glass up.

Rebecca
reaches out, wraps her hand around mine. She takes my glass, raises it to her lips. She puts it on the dresser. Before I can protest Rebecca turns and falls into my lap.  Her long fingers curl around the back of my head. “You
sip
cognac,” she says, before demonstrating on my lower lip. My lip burns with the residue. “You don’t
gulp
.”

Her open mouth, hot and stinging
, presses into mine. I feel the heat beneath her silk top as I clutch her to me. I’m drowning myself in this hard young woman, drowning the lost old married guy with near-grown kids in a baptism of strange spit and premium liquor.

With a strength that might have amazed me five minutes ago I rise from the chair, Rebecca cradled in my arm
s. This is something I have to do. The kiss was one step over the line. It’s time to commit fully to my new life. Full-body immersion, anointed in the oils of her warm, living flesh.

I cradle her in one
arm while ripping down the covers with the other. She bounces lightly as I drop her, smiling lips parted, her steel-gray eyes flashing. I meet those eyes with mine, knowing they’ll belong to someone else entirely when the sun finds us in the morning.

17

It’s the sound of the power coming on that wakes me the first time. I feel her side of the bed.
Only a hint of warmth where I’d fallen asleep spooning her sticky-wet heat. No, but Rebecca is turning on the lights on her way out, bless her heart….

I awake
n again at my customary five-minutes-before-the-alarm. I’m looking around for my phone—it should be under my pillow but I was too preoccupied to do my planned pre-sleep prep. I throw my feet over the side of the bed and cast about the room. I find my phone in the chair I was sitting in before things took a turn for the animal last night. On top of the clothes I was wearing yesterday evening. Laundered, dried, and folded. My underwear, too. Right under the phone.

Rebecca turning on the generator before she left was a nice bonus,
but if you’d told me she’d wash and fold my clothes, even pick up the room before leaving, I’d have said you were full of shit.

Her
womanly musk lingers thickly in the air. Part of me doesn’t want to shower the memory of her from me. Which is all the more reason to get it over with.

Rebecca’s not stupid
, I think as I turn on the water. She knows I didn’t buy her invitation to white-knight her away from her professed misery here. She also knows I’m making plans of my own that don’t include kowtowing to the likes of Kerch. How that’s coming out in her report back to the Big Man, and what he’ll do about it—well, hell. The only thing I can do is make myself look really good in the field today. Pay for last night’s dinner and then some if I’m to buy myself another day’s time.

The quick soap-and-rinse helps me wake up. I dress in the clothes I had laid out for hunting yesterday. Fuck
it, I’ll even blouse the cuffs around these boots.

I thump down the stairs.
The smell of coffee flavors the downstairs air. The pot’s already timed off but it’s still warm enough. When was the last time I’ve had coffee? I’m starting to lose track of the days. Now I know my headaches and general difficulty in staying awake wasn’t just dehydration and pain-killers.