THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER Book 1: Bleeding Kansas: A Novel Of The Zombie Apocalypse (22 page)

Marta is coughing
and spitting. “Goddamn zombie shit!”

“
Yeah, that explains the sick ones,” I say through the hand cupped over my face. We’re already moving away from the massive spill on Aisle Get Me the Fuck Outta Here.

“Huh?” says Marta.

“The sick ones with the yellow down their fronts. They’ve been eating the stuff they shit. Off that fat woman.”

“
What?
”

We
hear the gunfire from outside. “Goddamn it,” I mutter under my breath. Mindful of yellow zombie droppings we run down the long aisle to the back of the store where the service doors lead to the prep area and the loading dock.

We burst
through the swinging doors to find the freezer door still open and Randy and Timcat on the loading dock fighting off the former citizens of Natalia, Kansas. The stinking mob is pressed against the lip of the five-foot concrete dock, reaching and grasping. The white truck backed against the stairs makes it difficult for them to come up at us from that angle, but not impossible. The Goth kid in the long black coat swings away at their exposed arms. He flips the blade and backswings to take off their heads. Yeah, definitely more than three at once.

But there are so many of them.
Their combined moaning is so loud we can hardly hear one another.

“Reckon we
shoulda minded the time, huh, boss?” Timcat yells over the racket.

I run to the edge of th
e dock and begin swinging through their upraised arms. I have to swing deep enough into the horde so I can hammer at the skulls of the ones up front without getting grabbed by ambitious outliers shoving their way towards me. Hammering at their skulls requires my getting on my knees to reach over and pop them and I don’t like that as a defensive position at all. They swing at me with their oozing stumps, snap at me with their foul teeth. I wish I had two hammers; it’d go a lot quicker.

The bodies fall, and now the rows behind them have something to stand on.
I’m able to take their outstretched arms off closer to the shoulder. When this new row falls backwards it knocks down the former citizens coming up behind them. It’s hard standing on a corpse, with the skin slipping and ripping beneath their feet. Once the bodies get two rows deep towards the back, a pale thing in a tracksuit attempts standing on the fallen ones furthest back. He pitches forward and cracks his forehead open on the concrete lip of the dock before I have a chance to do anything with him.

I take advantage of the buffer of fallen bodies to stand back. “This isn’t getting any better,” I say. “We’re either going to jump in our trucks and go, or plan to be stuck here until our arms wear out.”

“Whatchoo think we oughta do?” says Timcat.

“Who had the gun? I heard gunfire.”

“Ain’t nobody here got a gun,” says Timcat. “Someone was horsin’ around there at the bottom of the west side of the parking lot. It’s drawin’ all these things to us!”

“I got a gun!” says
Krystal.

“What?”

“Right here,” she says, pulling a 9mm Glock from her purse. “It was in the glove compartment of the truck. I’m sorry.”

I take the
Glock from her. Just like the one I had in Kansas City. Might well be same one, I don’t know.

“There was an extra one of these that went with it,” says
Krystal, handing over a magazine. Thank the dark gods, it’s full.

“Good job,
Krystal. Here, take these,” I say, handing her the truck keys. “I’ve got an idea.”

“If
this don’t work we’re fucked,” says Timcat.

“Shit,
ya think!” says Randy.

Goth kid cries out. His ar
m has been caught by an alert young woman who brings the full unrelenting force of rigor mortis into her bite. He drops his katana; it’s seized by pale blue grasping hands and pulled into the swarm.

“Goddamn it!”
I run down the steep loading dock steps. I have to chop through a forest of fingers and hands clawing from the rail. I backslash off the woman’s head and pull Goth boy away, careful to hug the wall on our way back up.

“Marta!
Timcat! Somebody mind this gap! Whoever’s got the keys to the white truck, have ‘em ready!”

I pull Goth boy out
just as a little boy crawls up the stairs in his filthy pajamas. Marta takes the boy’s head off with her machete and kicks it towards the crowd at the lip of the dock. It hits a white bearded man in the face, knocks him back before tumbling into a dark forest of dead, shit-stained legs. Marta turns towards the stairs where the only thing holding back the mob is their sheer numbers trying to get over and around the flatbed of the pickup and cram onto the narrow stairs.

“Whatever the hell it is you think you’re
doin’ please do it quick!”

“Randy!
Timcat! Who’s driving the white pickup?”

“I am,” say Randy.

“Don’t drive your load to Kerch’s place. Take it directly to the high school.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so! Unless you don’t like eating! I gotta go!”

One thing about our focus towards the stairs is that the mob is massing at this corner. This gives me room to make a run for the far corner of the dock. I’m not a young man, I can’t action-hero jump this thing. But I doubt I’ll have time to butt-
scooch over and let myself down nicely. I’ve got to move. And pray I don’t break a leg doing this….

20

A few blind heads turn as I make my run. I stop abruptly at the edge and hop over, bending my knees as hit the ground. I edge around the back of the mob. The heads that turned to follow my movement have lost sight of me behind their fellows. I look around. No reinforcements. Yet.

My bright idea was to use the
Glock to draw their attention. Here with their backs to me, though, I see a way to draw them off that doesn’t involve making a racket that brings more dead people to the Supercenter.

I have to put nearly everything I have into these tw
o-fisted swings. I get through one row and half of the second, the heads smacking the pavement, the bodies falling stiffly after, the corpse-gravy red-brown and everywhere. Then the remaining three and a half rows go quiet.

The quiet is so sudden, and such a contrast to the racket before, everyone freezes. T
he only sound being the scraping of their feet as they shuffle around to face me. I make a quick slash at the ones closest to me, then back away. When they don’t come at me right away I run up and take off three, four, five more heads.

At last they
scent me. The moaning begins anew as the mob begins moving away from the trucks. I slice away a hand and two more heads, then dart back again.

I look at the
(once) people coming towards me. Not all of them have the bib. I see some in the crowd who seem to be there for no other reason than that’s where everyone else is. The ones in the more expensive clothing, the suits and the silk pajamas obviously not from Wal-Mart or Target, are the ones who seem to be most aggressive, the most
entitled
to the meat before them. The ones in the more “common” clothing defer to these, though it’s clear they’ve got a hunger, too.

It’s like a gift, their coming at me like this. I think of that child
in the Wal-Mart, the tears she cried, how she must have screamed as she was manhandled and chewed into by these monsters. I tease the crowd towards me. They shuffle faster than you’d think but I manage to dart back, watch them reform as they come towards me, gathering closely behind their alphas.

After a while I can’t stand it anymore and I charge into them.

They bring their arms and hands up. Some of these things even manage to touch me and it makes me crazier. My arms and shoulders and chest burn with the exertion, the swinging, the chopping, the shocks of impact. They don’t falter. The more I look into their faces, their stupid, dust-whitened eyes, the harder I swing.

“Goddamn, save some for somebody else!”

“Fuck you!”
I’m chopping into torsos, arms, faces, asses. I swing from both sides, moving up and down the line. By the time I get to the last four they’re backing off. I’m kicking their heads across the lot, watching them disappear over the edge of the knoll. Some are biting and snapping, some are plain dead and bug-eyed astonished for it.

Those last four run into Marta’s machete,
Timcat’s demo bar, and Randy’s hunting knife, stabbed through the soft part under one’s jaw and into his brain. The fourth one staggers helplessly away. Three quick, long-legged strides and I’ve got his head rolling over the side of the lot.

“
Holy fuck, man!” says Timcat. He looks about the bodies carpeting the lot.

“What?”

“You got over forty of these things! That ain’t even countin’ the ones at the dock!”

“I got more than that!” growls a voice from the flatbed.

“Yeah, so many you let yourself get wore out and bit!”

I walk over to Randy. “You know a way back to the school from here that doesn’t take us down Oak Blossom Lane?”

Randy
is wiping his blade on the shirt of the man he dropped. “Yeah, sure. We’re not supposed to cut through the Good People’s neighborhood anyway.”

“All right then, I
gotta follow you.”

“No you don’t,” says Marta. “
Krystal ‘n’ me both know the way.”

“All right, then.” I look at Randy. “You know to take the goods to the school, right?”

“It ain’t what we’re told to do.”

“I know, and I take responsibility for that.
I’ve got a feeling that—”

The very molecules in the air are humming:
THOOOOOOOM!

“Let’s ge
t out of here!”

If the thud of the subwoofer wasn’t enough inspiration, the ghastly chorus of dead raising their voices in answer puts a real spring in our steps
. I run to meet the Big Yellow Truck as Krystal drives it towards Marta and me. Krystal stops and scooches over just in time for me to leap into the driver’s seat. Marta climbs in the passenger side and we’re backing up and pulling away in time to see the next wave of walkers leaning into the incline of the parking lot, coming right at us. I turn sharply to dodge them and punch it down the side where we first came in.

“Just turn left and follow it straight out,” says Marta.

I note the dead are all coming from the direction behind us. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to drive as fast as I can down this straightaway lest these things think to follow us. I hand my phone to Krystal. “Text those guys on my phone. Ask them for their status.”

“What do you think’s
goin’ on?” says Marta.

“O
ne or more of the squads has gone rogue,” I say. “Either all the other ones are working together or one has managed to shut down the other two. No doubt whoever fired that gun outside was looking to take us out.”

Krystal
is shaking her head. “I’ve messaged everybody but no one’s replying.”

“Well,” I say, “that’s good news and bad news.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“The good news is I’ve done my due diligence as the sacrificial lamb in charge of this mission. The bad news is the bad guys know we’re still alive.”

The ringtone for a text message fills the cab. “Gitmo says he’s fine. He wants to know where we’re at,” Krystal says.

“Don’t respond!
”

“Wait, there’s another—it’s Brick. He wants to know where we’re at.”

“Great. So now we know.”

“Know what?”

“Who the players are. Five gets me ten Brick is with Kerch. And Gitmo is worried he’s going to end up like Kerch’s personal security.”

“You mean Amos and Andy?” says Marta.

“What?”

“That’s what they called ‘
em. They didn’t like it, but that’s what they called ‘em.”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“Nothing.
It just looks like Kerch has gotten a little overt with his ethnic cleansing. Can’t say I blame Gitmo for making a move.”

“So don’t send any messages out?” says
Krystal.

I take the phone from her.
“Nope. Radio silence from here on out.”

“What do we do?”

“Nothing. Except maybe fight the zombies when they come. If they come. You guys are the labor force. Any side would be stupid to kill you.”

“Not that stupid ever stopped anybody,” says Marta.

“You dropping us off?” says Krystal.

“You know of any
place you’re safer?”

I’m alread
y slowing for the turn as I say this. In under a minute I’m pulling into the high school. I see where Randy and Timcat have already organized the unloading of their truck. Meanwhile, the barbecue is on. I’m no sooner stopped than my flatbed is being unloaded. If I was thinking of getting away with any meat, I was wrong.