Five Days Dead (16 page)

Rages

              Knowing there was so much interest in his death may have been a surprise to Harley, but not much of one. Once people got to know him, they usually wanted him dead. 

He sat on the hood of his battered pickup 12 miles outside of Price, waiting for any sign of the old man and not entirely sure what he would do once he saw him. Twice he had seen Edward Toll do the impossible. He hadn’t intended to kill the old man’s wife, the blast to the NG tank on the car was meant to give the couple a chance to escape. He still wasn’t sure why he had tried to save them. He had acted on impulse and impulse is what had driven him most of his life. It was on impulse that he sat on the truck waiting for the old man when he should be miles and miles away. 

Impulse and curiosity. 

The old man could have killed him. Harley was good with a blaster, but whatever forces the old man held in his hands would have proved better. He had spared him and Harley wondered why. He supposed he was just stupid enough to sit around and try to find out.

But as he waited his thoughts were on his mother somewhere in the deserts of the Navajo Nation. He couldn’t reach her by Link, but he knew danger was coming for her and everyone around her. The Wrynd in the Castle Valley would move that way eventually and if they didn’t there would be zombies around the Phoenix Hub that would surely be going there, if they weren’t there already. If she was to survive her son needed to get to her. But first he would see what the old man had to show him.

Harley had lived in the Castle Valley for more than 10 years, roaming here and there but eventually ending up back at the farmhouse on the outskirts of Orangeville. He didn’t know why. It just felt like home. While he sat and waited for the old man he considered how in all the time he had lived in Orangeville, he had only seen Edward Toll and his wife a half dozen times and had never paused to give them a moment’s thought. He remembered the old woman trying to give him one of her apples and being denied by the old man. Why had he done that? Harley had been just a boy. Perhaps it was all by the old man’s design. He remembered the lightning flashing in the clear sky and reaching up from the parched earth beneath his feet to strike down the Wrynd surrounding them. 

The marshal had told him to keep an eye out for the Gray Walker and kill him if he could. He had heard whispers of the Gray Walker for a number of years, but they were mostly just tall tales of a stranger wandering the desert. Other than the legionnaire’s story of him taking away her linktag, there were few stories that attributed supernatural powers to the man with the gray eyes. But Edward Toll – Harley had seen the powers in the old man. What would Marshal Tempest think if she knew such a man was alive and walked the Wilderness in this New Age of Discovery?

Harley lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly while the morning sun stretched higher into the sky. It was another warm July day with hardly a hint of cloud. It was looking to be a dry summer once again and by August what was green would be kindling. Most of it was kindling already. He connected to his scye and sent it scouting toward Price. The day before, after making good his escape from the zombie infested city, he had sent it into Huntington in time to see Quinlan and his children turn and start up Fairview Canyon. He found himself wishing them luck and was more than a little surprised.

His scye found Edward Toll stumbling south two miles from where he sat with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The old man looked rough, ragged and badly dehydrated. There was no way he would make it another 20 miles to Orangeville on his own. When he lowered the scye within the old man’s reach, he batted at it as if it were a fly, his eyes glazed and delirious. Harley frowned. He had watched the old man kill more than 20 Wrynd with a flick of his wrist but now he was dying of exposure walking down the highway. How was that possible?

He sent the scye soaring again and before he brought it back he turned it further south. There was dust on the highway and Harley’s scye raced that way.

“Scuttle me.” 

There were two semi-trucks heading south on the highway. They were pulling cattle trailers behind them and inside there were scores of people, clinging to the slotted walls. Through the scye, he could hear them screaming and he could smell the fear in them. At the steering wheel of the trucks were Wrynd and Harley looked twice just to be sure. Zombies were driving. Sitting on the roof of the cab of the first truck was King Orrin himself. He was madly grinning and slung around his waist was a holster and sidearm. A red scye floated easily by his right ear. They would be on the old man in a matter of minutes.

Harley had always lived by instinct and in the past few days had started to worry that his instincts were off kilter and would in the end get him killed. But he knew no other way. As the Wrynd bore down on the old man on the road, Harley tossed his cigarette away, climbed in his truck and raced to meet them.

“Things are about to get intrestin.”

              Orrin slept among the carnage he had wrought the night before and woke covered in blood. He felt magnificent. The ink coursed through him and he felt more alive, more powerful than he had in weeks. It was a good day to rip and tear and eat and kill.

When he walked down into the hotel lobby, Ralph was slung over a chair, snoring softly and Nina was curled up on the floor by the hotel desk. Ralph had a pulse rifle wrapped in his skinny arms and Nina had a holster and pistol strapped to her waist. He smiled. Good enough then.

He didn’t wake them but went outside to find the two semi-trucks Ralph had spoken of parked in front. Ralph had painted in blood Orrin’s name on the doors. Orrin didn’t know whose blood, but he thought it was an excellent touch.

He stretched and cracked his neck and examined the old trucks with interest. They would serve nicely. He had taken his first shot of ink years before and walked away from the life he had known and loved to live a life he had been commanded to live. In all that time, he had not driven a vehicle, used a weapon or even taken advantage of technology except to order more drugs. He found himself relishing the return of a life he held so dear. He drew his sidearm and the blaster felt like an extension of his own body. He looked forward to using it very soon.

He let Ralph and Nina sleep for another hour and then kicked them awake. His other Daggers, Luke, Yolanda and Christian, came down from one of the upper floors, looking pleased and Orrin did not ask them what they had been up to because he did not care. He ordered them to make things ready. They gathered up the prisoners out of the reception hall and herded them into the cattle trailers, enjoying the sounds of their screams in the morning air. Ralph brought him the case with the ink and Orrin opened it to look inside. They were all still there, which meant that Ralph might live to see another day. He was a good Dagger.

“Bring four not so enthralled in the flare. I need them to be able to think and be useful. He looked at Ralph and Nina. “You two come with me. The rest of you stay here and organize the others. I want more people found and brought here. No more killing. We need them alive. I have need of their teeth and claws.”

Luke, Yolanda and Christian looked unhappy to be left out of the battle and skulked away. Orrin turned to Ralph and Nina. “We go south until we find the old man. When we do we stop the trucks and unleash our cargo.” Orrin slapped the side of the cattle trailer and those inside screamed and rushed to the other side. “We let them out one at a time. We squeeze them through the chute like cattle and when we do you inject each one of them, twice.”

Ralph and Nina grinned. “They’ll be uncontrollable.”

Orrin nodded. “Yes they will.”

The semis wove through the wreckage in the city until they reached SR-10 and then picked up speed. Orrin rode sitting on the roof of the cab of the leading semi, enjoying the sensation of the air whipping past him, of the dryness of the blood on his chest and legs, of the feeling of the blaster at his side.

The air was shimmering off the old asphalt as they made their way out of the city. At first Orrin thought that it might be a mirage, the tiny dot on the horizon, but as they drew closer his eyes focused and he knew it was the old man, stumbling southward. He leaned forward with anticipation. A flash of light beyond the old man caught the zombies’ attention and when he looked up he recognized Deputy Shelley’s pickup flying toward them.

Orrin roared with approval. With rage. With hunger.

Harley’s truck screeched to a stop 20 feet from Edward. The semis were running side by side down the highway with Orrin standing up on the hood of one of them, waving his arms in delight. Five hundred feet from where Edward still stumbled along, oblivious to everything around him, the trucks skidded to a stop on the four-lane highway and turned with one truck’s nose facing west and the other facing east. Six zombies scrambled out of the cab of the semis and raced to the trailers. One of the Wrynd used a cattle prod to zap the screaming hostages in the trailers and they stumbled toward the back, where the other zombies funneled them out of the door one at a time, injecting them in both arms as they passed through.

Those infected stood dazed for a moment, but it only took a moment before the ink took effect, and then they unleashed a blood curdling scream that echoed through the desert.  Their mad eyes flashed with a storm of raw energy and desire and compulsion and hunger, and the first thing they saw when they were overcome was the little old man stumbling down the road. They roared and raced toward him in ones and twos and then there were a dozen and two dozens and Harley scrambled out of his truck with his blaster in one hand and a water bottle in the other.  

He cut down the closest Wrynd with a shot that surprised even him and the Wrynd at the trucks fired back. The pulse blast whizzed two feet over Harley’s head. They weren’t good, but they weren’t bad.

“Zombies with blasters. It just keeps getting better.” Harley ran toward the old man and grabbed him by the arm and when he did the last of the energy in Edward Toll seemed to exhaust itself and he sank to his knees on the hot asphalt. Harley brought the bottle to his cracked lips and Edward drank greedily. Another pulse blast ripped away the road eight inches from Harley’s left knee. 

Harley stood and fired off eight quick bursts with his blaster and eight more Wrynd dropped to the ground. When they did more than a dozen of the other zombies fell upon them and started ripping them apart. One thing you could count on was zombies not being particular about what they ate when on the ink.

A blood curdling roar made everyone stop in their tracks; even the zombies eating their recently fallen comrades lifted their heads and looked back when Orrin stomped on the hood of the truck in fury.

“Harley Nearwater!”

“When did my name become such a curse?”

Harley shook his head and looked toward the big Wrynd king. He should have moved on. Orrin’s scye raced toward him and Harley flicked down his eyeset and sent his own scye racing to meet it.  The scyes met in the middle, clashing together in a blast of light and sparks and Harley reeled from the pain the impact inflicted on his own body. He tried to slip the scye around Orrin’s but every move he made the zombie countered and with every strike of one scye to the other the two men flinched and grunted from the effort. At his feet Edward still drank from the water bottle but made no effort to stand and while Harley fought scye to scye against the Wrynd king the other zombies were coming their way. There were too many of them and not enough of the fallen to distract them anymore.