This Dark Earth (30 page)

Numerous moans sound from the darkness of the woods.

Dap curses. “Christ on a crutch. That’s an extended damily. Time to run, boys.”

The shambler totters in front of me, the smell overpowering. It’s like a walking sewer full of dead pig. I nearly choke, but the silhouette grows and lurches, so I raise the shovel and swipe it across its head. Hard. With everything I’ve got.

The shovel, nearly ripped from my hand from the force of the blow, shudders and rebounds, but the zombie goes down.

I hear Dap scramble down the tree. I get the impression he’s rushing, but the flash of steel in the dark tells me he’s cutting the hammocks and stuffing the white nylon into his rucksack.

Dap and Klein drop to the ground, next to Fulcher and me.

“I said run. It’s time to run.”

“Which way?”

He points. “Stay together.”

We move, hunched over in a skulking trot, our boots ripping at the earth, cracking twigs, making entirely too much noise.

There’s a damily between us and the horses, which nicker and rear.

It’s not hard to tell the horses aren’t happy. Horses do not like dead people. In fact, they’re pretty adamant about stomping them.

“Ain’t nothing for it, gents. We’ve got to deal with these bastards. To arms.”

Everyone hoists their respective headknockers. A shovel, a couple of hammers, a tire iron. Hammers are the preferred headknocker, I’ve noticed, but I like the army trench shovel because it’s bladed as well. If you can get one down, a couple of well-placed jabs and you can separate the head from the shoulders.

We wade in.

Dap has always seemed to me to be a sour, squirrelly little
dude, but he moves like lightning. He’s dropped one rev with his hammer and moved on to the next before the rest of us know what’s happening. I push forward.

One of the revs is fresher than the others. She spasms forward, grabbing me. Thank God she’s short. She starts gnawing on my arm, safely encased in Kevlar motorcycle armor. Even though the teeth aren’t breaking skin, the pressure on my bicep is excruciatingly strong. I yelp.

Klein swipes her head with his tire iron and she folds, almost taking me down with her.

Falling is death. If you go down in a group of shamblers, you’ll never get back up.

“Thanks.” The little courtesies like that are what keep us from becoming like them. Well, that and not dying.

Fulcher, despite his earlier fear, holds quite well against a rather large basketball player of a zombie. He bats the zombie’s arms away with his hammer, once, twice, steps in and swings at the teetering dead man’s head, missing. Dap pops up, lashes out with a booted foot, and crumples the shambler’s knee. The zed topples like a tree, and when he’s down, Fulcher pounds his head to mush.

There’s one more shambler, a charred corpse that could be man or woman. Its fingers are burned off, and it smells absolutely awful. At some point its jaw was knocked off or dislocated, chomping on someone.

Fantastic.

While it’s palming and pawing at me, leaving streaks of char against my vest, I jab it in the face until it falls to the ground, then stomp on its head until it stops moving.

There’s more moaning behind us. An extended damily, for sure. An extended nuclear damily. I hate to think how many more rads I can take before my body becomes one big walking cancer.

Dap’s with the horses now, untying them. I run over. We left saddles on them just in case, and since the case is fucking affirmative . . . well, I’m glad we have Dap with us. Otherwise, we’d be ballast for zed.

When we mounted before, I had to have Klein hold my horse for me. Not now. I amaze myself by popping right up on the beast and whirl her around to look for Dap. Shadows move in the darkness and moans sound from all around.

There’s times where you think you’re gonna scream and you know you shouldn’t and you do whatever you can not to scream, but it feels like it’s gonna come out, like you’re gonna lose control of your own body and let the terror out. That’s how it is now, reins and shovel in my hands, not able to see shit, and the feeling doesn’t subside even when a larger piece of darkness materializes in front of me, horse-shaped, an LED light flashing at the ground.

“Keep on my ass, boys.”

For a second I think he’s going to follow this with “or you’ll wake up in a shambler’s belly,” or one of his other tidbits of zombie wisdom. He doesn’t, thankfully.

The light moves away, and I spur my horse after him.

Things grab at me in the dark, rip at my legs. I swing the trencher like a demented polo player. Something grabs at me, I swing. Terrified, I have no clue, no sensation even, if I’ve hit anything, but I’m moving fast, trying to keep up with the
swaying blue light ahead of me, rocking on the back of the horse, in the night, surrounded by unquiet dead.

The high-pitched horse scream, when it comes, is followed by bellows and cries for help. They stop within seconds.

Fulcher is fucked. As is the horse he rode in on.

We’ve gone into full gallop, that rocking, slow back and forth that feels liquid and effortless. Out of the night, I make out other bits of night that have more form. A tree line, a rock.

I hear too. Zombies don’t have a corner on that racket.

There’s a horse behind me. I just hope the horse has a rider.

Soon the light in front slows. Dap has dropped to a canter, and my horse, having more sense than I do, slows as well. The rear horse draws even with us, trotting now, and I see that Klein has made it.

“Well,” Dap says, and the thickness in his voice tells me he’s been hoarding chaw. How he popped it into his mouth at a gallop is anyone’s guess. “We ain’t camping no more tonight.”

Dap doesn’t bother mentioning Fulcher.

“Let’s get a move on. We go steady and careful until sunrise, and then haul fucking ass.”

Sounds good to me. I glance at Klein, and, from what I can tell in the dark, his usual implacable demeanor is a little frazzled. I can’t even imagine what I look like.

Maybe my hair has turned as white as Mark Twain’s.

I’d believe it.

Dap had been
bitching when they came to tell us.

“This is a miserable damned detail, Broadsword, salvaging houses. What’d I do to deserve this?”

“You were born. And survived the Big Turnover. You rather be working the Wall?”

He hocked and spat.

Barker dumped an eight-foot two-by-four onto the wagon and walked back to the house. We’d already dismantled the roof into component parts—timber into one pile, the scrap roofing wheelbarrowed to the river to be dumped—and were working down to the studs. Klein was on guard detail, modeling sunglasses and hoisting a bludgeon instead of a shotgun, trying for all the world to look like a penitentiary guard from
Cool Hand Luke
. Even though we’d managed to ring Tulaville—twice—with chain-link, you can’t be too wary. The zeds have ways of getting around anything. Climbing up from the river. Coming out of uncleared basements. Falling from the skies.

Who knows? But come they do.

When the house was down to its cinder blocks and studs, we drank water from a cooler, smoked grapevine, and sat on the concrete foundation and watched Bridge City.

“Damn, she’s a pretty sight.”

She is. We whitewashed the trusses in the first of summer to get rid of the verdigris, using the barrels of exterior paint found at Landry’s Hardware. I guess whitewashed isn’t the right phrase. We painted it, anyway, and that was a struggle, erecting the scaffolding and the rigging. The womenfolk planted clematis near the arches in spring, and now,
late summer, it grows up the base of the trusses, over the women’s quarter and northern section of the gardens, all of it making the bridge look like some forgotten Roman temple, multihued with a garland of purple. The clematis is stunted, but we don’t get as much sunshine as we used to, before all that ash went into the sky. Joblo thinks the ash has settled in the Arctic, discoloring it. Causing the snow to melt. The oceans to rise. More water pushed into the air. Cooling the earth, maybe.

As far as growing seasons go, we haven’t had a good one since the Big Turnover.

The shadows lengthened toward us from the west and Dap said, “Heads up, Broadsword. Here comes your boss.”

“Hell could he want?”

Dap puffed on his grapevine and said, “Oh, I imagine quite a bit.”

Most of Eureka
Springs is long-dead cinders. It’s surprisingly devoid of shamblers as we clop through the narrow, winding streets. Hard to tell if the fires were set or they occurred naturally,
postmortem mundi
. We had quite a dry summer last year, and Eureka is smack dab in the middle of a forest.

I haven’t been inside a city in years. Eureka was never truly a town as you’d know it. Perched in the Ozark mountain forests, it was a Victorian holdout with small streets lined with dainty, embroidered houses and crammed with artisan shops staffed by hippies. Now the ruins look more European than American. Definitely not Arkansan. The charred skeletons of
pines and deciduous trees scratch and scrabble at the sky, and we ride past black, jumbled timbers. Beyond the char of trees, the wind moans in the pines. Somewhere, in the little dead hamlet, a shambler answers.

I came here once with Julian, before the end. We stayed at a bed-and-breakfast and fucked ourselves silly, slept late, and ate thick toast with marmalade and drank wonderfully old scotch and walked hand in hand, unafraid, down the quaint little streets, peering in shop windows with their endless trinkets and homemade peanut brittle. Unafraid, even here in this little backwoods Victorian fantasy. The hippies smiled at us. Matrons scowled. And we laughed.

But that was a world ago. We never rode the train.

I pull the hand-drawn map from the interior pocket of my Kevlar jacket, unfold it, and lay it as flat as I can on the pommel of my saddle. Dap reins in next to me and leans over.

He jabs a finger at a nexus of connecting lines.

“We’re there.” He smells like sour sweat and chewing tobacco. Not all unpleasant. But not roses either. “And we’re facing that way, I believe.”

Makes sense.

“So we need to angle here, looks like, and descend. If I remember correctly, there’s a gulley running through that part of the town.”

“There’s gullies everywhere around here, but yes, you’re dead on.”

Unfortunate turn of phrase, that.

We ride down the street, descending the hill, passing tight between buildings, some of them looking like they were built
during the WPA-era works programs. Bathhouses, maybe. Libraries. But there are only a few, and they are sooty black on the outside.

The moaning grows louder, and it isn’t the pines anymore. A shambler teeters from behind a building. This one actually has moss or something growing all over him. He looks like the Swamp Thing.

But there are more undead where he comes from. They shamble out from behind low-slung walls against hills or up from clusters of charred timbers.

It’s the sound of hooves on pavement that draws them.

Dap curses, looking at Klein’s and my horses’ feet.

“You gotta wrap them in cloth! Goddamn it! If you don’t, you’ve got a fucking procession.”

He stops, wheels his horse around, cursing silently. His mount’s feet aren’t wrapped. I don’t understand why he’s yelling at us. Except maybe he looks like he’s in dire need of a smoke, and I don’t know why I think that but he’s got the rangy build and wiry arms and chiseled face that would only look complete with a cigarette.

“Haul ass, boys!” Jesus, what a cowboy.

He canters down the incline, clopping on asphalt, weaving in and out between cars. My horse clops after him.

After a while, we break into a canter and pass beneath a canopy of dense, green trees. The branches hang low and whip past our heads. It smells good here, moist and leafy, fragrant with honeysuckle and the breathing of green things. When I was a boy, we’d walk past Gammee’s fence, into the buckbrush, bucket in hand, and pick blackberries until our
hands were bloody and blue. Happy. It smells like blood and buckbrush here.

Smells take you back.

I see a sign on our right. It has a train puffing billows of cartoonish white smoke into the air and reads: “Ride the E.S. & N.A. line! Parents and children, take your family on a
steam-powered adventure
! One mile ahead on the right!”

The locomotive on the sign looks like a simple boiler and turbine. Old school. Older school than I thought. Like this thing rode the rails in the Old West, or before. Shit. There are so many things that can go wrong here.

And there’s the fact I’ve never driven a train.

On the bright side, there’s only two ways it can go.

Backward and forward.

I can’t hear any moaning. Despite the fact that this was a tourist attraction, we are still talking rural Arkansas. With luck, we won’t have a throng of dead waiting for us or on our tails.

Yeah. Right.

Joblo and Gus
rode bikes. Joblo did just fine on his, his long hair whipping around his head in a definite mad-scientist manner. Gus had a harder time of it, missing his hand. He held his stump in the center of the handlebars and his other one on the hand brake. He clenched his jaw as he rode. He didn’t look like a child anymore.

Gus beckoned me away from the group. I pulled a shirt over my head, took one last sip of water from the ladle, and ambled over.

“You can say no, Broadsword. That’s within your right.”

That’s how they started.

“Say no to what?”

“The mission.”

I could’ve kept asking the obvious questions. But I didn’t. I just waited for it.

“It’s a train,” Joblo said, his eyes bright. “And they won’t let me go. So that leaves you and Richards and . . . well, that just leaves you, really.”

“A train?”

“Yeah, an old wood-driven steam locomotive, maybe a hundred miles from here, north, in Eureka Springs. It was a tourist destination before the Big Turnover. They’d make little one-, two-mile runs down a stretch of railroad track. Carry the kiddies, their parents. Hot dogs, cotton candy, all that shit.”