Crusade (Eden Book 2) (44 page)

As they walked the wild man fell in behind them. He was speaking to himself, “In the beginning, good always overpowered the evils of all man’s sins…”

The boy followed him through the bushes and trees. They emerged on a road packed with hundreds of vehicles stretching further than the little boy’s eyes could see. The first several dozen vehicles in line were tanks and armored personnel carriers.

“…lay destroyed, beaten down, only the corpses of rebels…”

Thousands of human beings waited patiently around the vehicles. When Bear appeared from the green they cheered—a massive sound that drowned out the wild man.

The boy followed him to a truck that rested on four of the largest wheels he had ever seen.

“…so come now, children of the beast, be strong, and…”

They were at the front of the line. Ahead of them stretched a vast double-decked suspension bridge. The boy knew it was the George Washington Bridge because he had seen all the signs for it, as he’d approached the line of tanks and heavily armed men and women this morning. M67 flame tanks and M4 Dozers had moved across the six lower and eight upper levels, immolating thousands of zombies that had tried to cross to them. Knocking cars and trucks stuck on the bridge out of the way, off to the sides, they had cleared a path down the center of each level.

Bear walked away from the truck, over to the side of the road, acknowledging the armored and armed men and women who greeted him. Some were eager, some wore serious looks, but all showed respect. He walked through and past them and stopped when he judged it a good place to do so.

He lay the doll wrapped in its blanket on the grass beside the road.

Bear walked back to the truck, around to the rear, and climbed aboard, pulling the ladder up with him, laying it in the bed. The wild man was there waiting for him, seated with his back against the cab.

He walked over and stood next to where the wild man sat, checking the MK 47 automatic grenade launcher mounted on the roof of the cab. A belt of 40mm grenades disappeared into a metal box resting in the bed.

He looked ahead, across the bridge where the flame tanks held the zombies drawn to the bridge at bay, trapped on the other side of the Hudson River. There were millions of zombies waiting across there for them, had to be.

He turned and squinted at the line of tanks and armored vehicles stretched out behind them. Men and women had started across either of the bridge’s pedestrian paths on foot. They streamed by, their faces hard set as they readied for the task ahead. A few of them waved to him, or shook their fists in solidarity.

He turned back to the MK 47 and looked out across the river and bridge. He peered into the city one final time. Satisfied, he banged on the top of the cab. Kevin shifted the truck into gear and the wheels rolled forward.

“Put on your seat belt kid,” Kevin said. “Just in case.”

The tanks, assault vehicles, trucks and cars behind them rolled forward across the bridge. They were headed into Eden to take back the earth.

“You are satisfying in an indirect, false way your lust to jab and strike.” DH Lawrence wrote his once friend, the philosopher-mathematician and pacifist Bertrand Russell, in a letter dated September 14, 1915, citing the latter’s opposition to supporters of the first world war. “Either satisfy it in a direct and honorable way, saying ‘I hate you all, liars and swine, and am out to set upon you,’ or stick to mathematics, where you can be true.” Lawrence, who had and would again flirt with fascism and anti-Semitic views, berated Russell for his “sheep’s clothing of peace propaganda,” accusing him of a general misanthropy, noting, “I wouldn’t care if you were six times a murderer, so long as you said to yourself, ‘I am this.’”

Lawrence was incorrect in his assessment of the co-author of
Principia Mathematica
, and would have done better to turn his critical gaze upon himself. But, much as Lawrence felt for Russell, I now feel for one Tommy Arlin.

When my own break with Arlin came, it came quickly, though not completely unexpectedly. Tommy had long been attracted to the rogues—the low lives and shady characters of history and his own times. I thought we had much in common when we’d first met years ago: our mutual admiration for the lives of the Beats; our appreciation of women of any and all ethnicities; what I thought was Tommy’s progressive political bent.

I was wrong.

Eden
’s modest success wasn’t enough for Tommy. He wanted more,
expected
more. He sent me letters—always by post, the guy avoids email—laying out perceived slights and indignities delivered us by such luminaries as Robert Kirkman and Romero. What the hell was Arlin talking about? These guys didn’t even know we, or our book, existed. I wrote Tommy back stating as much and warning him that whatever course he was planning on taking, he risked making a fool of himself over nothing.
Where was our Bram Stoker?
Arlin kept demanding.

Tommy showed up at my door one clear, spring day, a bottle of whiskey in his hand. Dirtbag Brown was in tow. I wouldn’t let either of them in my house. I needed to shield my wife and two babies from these besotted, borderline belligerent men. We sat on the porch and drank. Actually, they drank. I merely sipped at a plastic cup-full of Arlin’s rot-gut.

“We’re riding a tide, Monchinski,” he said to me, “and History is the ocean.” Tommy abided by his faith that zombies were on the verge of being the next big thing. Bigger than vegetarian vampires and boy wizards. Anyone else emerging on the scene was “stealing our thunder”, and he said he was going to go to Hollywood and confront Woody Harrelson personally. I think I managed to talk Tommy out of that one, which is a good thing because I have no doubt Woody would have kicked Tommy’s ass.

Arlin sat in the hard metal of my deck chair—I hadn’t bothered to bring the cushions out from indoors—spewing half-coherent ideas for any number of stories between swallows of hard liquor. One yarn involved a zombie-like “black widow” virus that spreads homicidal nymphomania among the female population—I opined that his idea was too much like
Y: The Last Man
, even if the male hero of Arlin’s plot was, ingeniously I admit, impotent—to a
Watchman
parody, with a character—Dr. Peneii—loosely based on me. Me, Dr. Peneii? I don’t know why but I mentioned my idea: a screenplay for a screw-ball comedy,
No Zombie Left Behind
. Tommy and Dirtbag ignored it.

If Arlin had come for moral support he wasn’t going to get it from this end. Euripides Brown was drunk as a skunk. When he went and urinated in my wife’s tomatoes, in full view of the neighbors’ houses, I politely asked them to leave, which they did.

Arlin had fallen in with the wrong crowd. The Wood Nation was an obscure east-coast rap “family,” always on the verge of “making it” and getting signed to a label, though as of this writing that hasn’t happened for any of their many members. A motley collection of hustlas, pimps, playas, street soldiers, and hood poets, they went by names like Black Jesus, True Soul-Jah, Sweet Daddy Woo-Woo, Killah Skillz, and Ras Supreme.

They met Arlin through Dirtbag Brown, whom they worshipped, placing him in a pantheon among the great Philly gangster rapper Schooly-D; the obscure, not-even-one-hit-wonder Niggerace; and the Geto Boys’ Bushwick Bill, though they all referred to the diminutive one-eyed rapper by his longer title—Dr. Wolfgang Von Bushwick the Barbarian Mother Funky Stay High Dollar Billstir. The Wood Nation’s A-Suhn and lil’ Whut-Whut had met Euripedes Brown when he was selling bootleg DVDs on a blanket in Jamaica, Queens. These aspiring rap stars were working a corner, selling cooked-up rocks. The two had convinced Brown to accompany them back to their flop with promises of crack. Most likely planning to rob him, they wound up adopting him as a spiritual and influential forebear instead, much like Pearl Jam claimed Neil Young.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me with Arlin came at Horrorfind Weekend in March, 2008. Arlin mailed me a letter saying we’d been “invited to read.” I have to admit I was very excited. I’d been doing what I could to promote the book, answering online interview requests, and appearing for forty-five seconds on
The Miserable Men Show
with the Reverend Bob Levy and Shully, before my internet phone connection cut out and I was disconnected (thanks, incidentally, to Rich Butters for arranging the call). What Tommy didn’t tell me was we
hadn’t
been invited; he’d written and asked—begged—we be put on the reading list. Not only that, after arriving there, I found out we’d both have to fork over fifty bucks to get into the convention in the first place.

I showed up in Maryland in high spirits. I have always liked Maryland ever since I’d commute up I-95 from my home in Smithfield, North Carolina (exit 95 on I-95—easy enough to remember!) to my parents’ house in New York City. Maryland is home to some good, though wild, friends of mine: the enormous Jim Vest with his twenty-two inch arms; world bench press champion Jeff McVicar—who once dumped 600 pounds on his abdomen going to rack the weight and had two inches of his gut pop out his ass, which he proceeded to push back into place with his thumb—and Brian “Flatline” Weston, called such because he had once died from a morphine overdose but came back, making Weston, arguably, a living, breathing zombie himself. And heck, Baltimore was the setting for
The Wire
, one of my favorite shows of all time.

Well, things in Maryland didn’t turn out the way I or Arlin had expected. Scratch that. I really don’t know what Arlin was thinking. He had insisted we share a room, which he made a point of paying for. (Though the sub-prime mortgage crisis had robbed Tommy’s rich grandmother of much of her wealth, he assured me that the old lady was still rolling in dough.) What I didn’t know was that Arlin had brought a few members of the Wood Nation along with him—Ras Supreme, Killah Skillz, and the inseparable pair of Yagi Bear and Ye-Yo. The latter two never slept as far as I could tell, always hoovering comically-giant lines of cocaine which were heavily cut with baby lax, which meant one of them was constantly monopolizing the room’s sole commode. If Grandma Arlin was as blue blood as Tommy always claimed, couldn’t she have at least sprung for a suite?

Saturday afternoon and the time for our reading arrived. Arlin was nowhere to be found. I had left the room early in the morning, wanting to get away from him and the other maniacs, and figured we’d meet up at the location of the reading. When I got there, there was no Tommy. As a matter of fact, the only people in the expansive room filled with folding chairs were fellow Permuted author Kim Paffenroth, a friend of mine—James Doller—from work and his buddies, the Parduba brothers. Where was everybody? Dr. Kim read from his
Dying to Live
then I, feeling extremely pathetic, read for an abbreviated five minutes from
Eden
.

Later that night, after wandering the main convention floor with Doller and the Pardubas—surreptitiously leering at Chainsaw Sally; watching Ken Foree talking with Tony Todd; buying an 8x10 from the director of
Ugor,
a little known series of low-budget, soft-porn, cult serial killer films—I went back to the room and confronted Tommy. Where the hell had he been? At the Sid Haig Town Meeting on the first floor with most of the other convention-goers. Did he give a shit that he’d missed our reading? “History, Monchinski,” he said, “the tide.” Killah Skillz was giving me dirty looks and Arlin was three sheets to the wind, wasted or high or something. I couldn’t tell. Yagi Bear and Ye-Yo were snorting lines off the ass of a high-priced escort in the fouled bathroom.

That’s bullshit
,
Tommy
, I remember saying to him, but he waved me off, dismissing my concerns.

And then he started the argument that ended our friendship. Arlin knows I am an enormous Robert Mitchum fan—hadn’t we included a character in Eden named after him?—and he had the balls to claim that Robert Shaw was a “way better actor” than my man, the original Max Cady.
Bullshit
,
Tommy
, I told him, and it was on. We commenced a game of one-upmanship, Arlin naming a Shaw character or movie and me countering with one from Mitchum. The original Mr. Blue? What about
Mr. Allison
?
The Sting
? Try
Night of the Hunter
. “Jaws, motherfucker,” Tommy cackled, and I immediately shot back, “
Out of the Past
, cocksucker.”