Heartland Junk (Part II): Sanctuary (6 page)

Chapter 9

              THE EXPERIMENT had been a resounding success. I was given carte blanche to brew as much horse piss as I wanted.

              I had already fermented the juices, so next I turned to the grains. Barley, millet, and quinoa. Barley is the most common ingredient in beer. Ninety-nine percent of the shit is made from barley, from the Stone Age to the modern day. I picked a handful of the grains from a bag and held them up to the light. They were pale, light-brown ovals with a thin line running through their center from top to bottom, each one about the size of a fingernail clipping if you haven't clipped for awhile.

              Barley by itself won't turn into beer. It doesn't have enough sugar. Somewhere along the long timeline of human history, a thirsty yet observant man noticed that old barley grains left sitting in an earthenware jug full of rainwater turned the water into a sour beverage that made his head swoon. Thus, beer was born. Now, we call that process, where the barley sits in water for awhile, malting. How do I know? I read the manual on my Mr. Brew kit. It said: Naturally rich in starch, the barley seed contains an enzyme which converts that starch to sugar when the seed begins to sprout. Once you've got enough sugar, you dry out the barley seeds, kill the growth process, grind it all up, and ferment it. Voila, beer. Sort of.

              Leave it to people to complicate the process as much as possible. Somehow, what started by pure accident turned into a highly articulate science. There are kilns for malting, temperature-controlled mash tuns for soaking, sanitizer solutions for killing bacteria, et cetera, et cetera. Since I didn't have any of that special equipment, I had to improvise. In the basement, I found two old, five-gallon paint buckets that still had a thick, white sludge inside them. Perfect. I didn't want to waste any of our drinking water, so I drove out to the duck pond on the edge of Joshuah Hill and spent an hour washing them out while the sun dipped along its westward arc.

              A glistening, oily white rose spread over the pristine surface of the pond, radiating in a half-circle from where I stood knee-deep in the mud along the shoreline. I didn't even watch out for zombies anymore, didn't even carry a weapon. Whatever had caused them must have gotten rid of them just as quickly. The world around me was as empty and still as a graveyard, the empty buildings just vacuous reminders of our own frailty. It hadn't even yet been two weeks, and already the lack of maintenance in the park was showing. The grass was now higher than my shins, creeping over the severe borders of the twisting walkways. Leaves and dust covered the hardwood benches. All the animals that had been driven into hiding at the emergence of this madness had returned en masse. Squirrels frolicked in the trees over my head, ducks prattled and dove at the far edge of the pond, prudently skirting the spreading slick of paint and suds. At the far edge of the park, up where it ran into Jeremiah Street, I saw three does grazing on the overgrown lawn. As long as I'd lived here, I'd never seen deer.

              Rinsing my hands off one last time, convincing myself that the remaining flakes of wet paint dust wouldn't harm the beer much, I packed up and headed back to the Jeep. I tossed the buckets in the back and circled around to the driver's door when something caught my eye. It was across the street from the park, at the bottom of the low drainage gorge that fell away below River. Just a round bit of white, poking through the grass. Down there, away from the caring hand of a gardener, the undergrowth was thick and unkempt, constantly damp from the road runoff. It was just chance that I saw it, I think.

              I made a cursory glance up and down the road, suddenly less sure of my solitude than I had been moments before, then slid carefully down the steep incline. Rough grass heads scratched at my exposed arms and face, and low brambles tore into my jeans. At the bottom of the slope, the ground was spongey with mud. It sucked at my sneakers as I pushed forward. I began to feel uneasy, a clenching feeling in my gut, telling me I was making a mistake. But there was nobody around, so I pressed on to where I'd seen the white glint.

              Thick woods rose up on the other side of the gorge. Behind them, I knew, farmland sprawled away from Joshuah Hill in a radial pattern. I reached the lowest point of the gorge, where a ribbon of cracked mud pinpointed the path of water whenever there was a heavy rain. It was mucky, still pocked with puddles of stagnant water, and in the center of one of the drier portions was a human skull.

              Pieces of green flesh clung to the sections of exposed bone like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle, topped with sparse clumps of white hair. I could see shallow grooves in the scalp and cheekbones where animals had torn at it, ripping away the meager morsels. The lips had been torn clean, exposing both rows of grinning teeth in a death's head rictus. Whatever flesh remained was long past fresh and decaying rapidly. One eye socket was entirely empty. The other held a festering mass of soft gray lumps, and as I watched, a white grubworm crawled out of the socket and dropped onto the open lower jaw. And in the top of the skull was a thick crack that split the bone from front to back. I stumbled back. Tripped on a low vine. Squelched into the mud on my ass.

              It was Mr. Collins. Jesus, it was Mr. Collins.

              Worse, though, was the print outlined in the mud beside the leering skull. It was a perfect mold of a small, bare foot, like a signature in the spongey earth. The toes were pointed toward the woods in front of me, and—I could barely see it—there was another footprint farther up the bank. Someone had walked through here. No, not someone. People. Along the muck-filled bed in either direction, I could make out more footprints, all heading in the same direction. How had I missed them? An army had marched through here. And they'd dropped a skull.

             
Don't do it, Ray.

              But someone had to. Fuck,
someone
had to. We'd stopped talking about it, sure. The zombies had disappeared, and for all our bickering and bitching, we were actually starting to enjoy ourselves in our little haven at River House. But we hadn't forgotten about it completely. Nothing disappears, not really. The zombies had moved on, but they were still out there. Maybe this would tell us something, give us a fucking clue as to what the hell they were actually doing. Give us an idea of what to expect in the future.

              Because zombies don't snap out of it when you hit them hard enough. Zombies don't go back to normal when you shoot them full of heroin. Zombies don't carry off their fucking dead.

              Rivet was right: It was time to start figuring out what the fuck was happening.

              I leaped across the muddy ribbon and started up the far side of the bank, toward the woods. It was starting to get dark, but if I didn't do this now, I doubted I'd get the courage to come back and look another time. The tangled pines and hardwoods loomed over me. At the edge of the woods, I turned back. Across the gorge, now nearly level with me, was River Street and the idling Jeep. The falling sun reflected off the hard surface of the road and turned it into a shining rivulet of gold. The warmth of the day seemed to be sucked into that strip of hot color, pulling the air out of the forest behind me in a cool, chill breeze. I shivered, turned. The shadows under the towering pines beckoned me. A single, bare footprint mocked me from the mat of dead leaves on the edge of the woods' floor. Beyond that, the ground was too dry to hold any more signs of whatever infernal army had passed beyond this threshold.

              I stepped out of the sunlight into the hush of the trees.

Chapter 10

              THE QUIET sucked the breath from my lungs. Nothing moved in the trees, not even insects. While the wildlife had come back to claim its own on the other side of River Street, this little pocket of woods had been abandoned by life entirely.

              I left the comfort of the sun and walked across the carpet of leaves, even my own footfalls eerily silent. Old, musty air seeped up into my nostrils with every step that disturbed the ancient leaf litter. Moldy and dank, it enveloped me in frigid arms, sending chills whispering across my spine. Above me, twisted limbs formed a dark, skeletal canopy, a parasol that blocked out all but the most tenacious rays of sunlight. Bleak clouds tinted orange in the waning light peaked through the canopy at my tiny form, alone on the vast forest floor.

              The patch of woods itself wasn't really that large, of course. I'd even explored it a few times as a kid, when every pocket of Earth—a.k.a. Joshuah Hill—uncrowded by other people was a marvelous new world. It was just a narrow belt, about two hundred yards wide, that cut off the houses along River from the wheat fields beyond. This same strip of trees continued until it touched the backyard of our River House, a mile or so to the west.

              But at the moment, a precipice marking the edge of the world could have lain along its far edge. It was vast and unknown. Here there be monsters, God dammit.

              I was spooking myself. I understood that even as I let it happen. Never could seem to stop it. Only this time, it wasn't just my imagination running wild. The skull was real. The footprints were real. Instinct told me that whatever had left them there was long gone, but knowing it to be true didn't stop the hideous possibilities from wheeling through my head.

              My sneakers crushed leaves and twigs with the soggy murmurs of the dead, and I tried in vain to remember when I'd last taken a dose. Three, four hours ago? The thought was a new horror, another corpse tossed upon the stinking pile. I knew I should turn back, but just as the woods had beckoned me into their interior, they now drew me deeper with tangible force. Curiosity killed the cat, but the cat came back. I had no fucking return.

              Ahead, a wash of orange light broke through the trees and I knew I'd reached the southern edge of the narrow belt. The air clung to me, a blanket smelling of dead leaves and earth and rotting limbs, the conflicting scents of old growth and my own acrid body odor. Despite the chill, I was perspiring heavily. I stank with fear.

              The edge of the forest drew closer, a sense of airiness and space sneaking into the stifling placidity under the wide conifers and maples. A breeze rustled the leaves gently above me, and with it came a new scent: putrefaction. No longer the comforting aroma of rotting wood, but the stomach-churning stench of rotting flesh. Somehow, I already knew what I'd find when I breached the trees and stepped out into the open field beyond, even before the smell hit me.

              Wistfully, I thought of the idling Jeep back on River Street, the freshly cleaned buckets, my trifling little brewing project somewhere far away in another world, untethered to this one and wholly unreachable. By leaving the road, by entering the woods, I'd climbed aboard a starship with no return vector. My feet carried me forward of their own accord, two miniature God damn steam engines constructed without brakes. I couldn't stop them even if I'd wanted to. No, I had to see what was out there. Even if it confirmed everything I'd always feared about these zombies.

              I paused at the perimeter of the woods, unconsciously hiding in the shadows which had become my allies against the future. Something unimaginable waited ahead of me. I understood at least that much, and the thought terrified me. But I couldn't wait here forever. If I didn't follow through with this and get back to River House, my body would process the last of the drugs in my system and reduce me to...whatever the fuck these things were. In front of me, just past the line of the woods, was a tall swathe of overgrown wheat stalks that the harvester hadn't been able to reach. It had grown wild, possibly for years, forming new hybrids with the seeds from each successive year's crop. The papery gold seed heads grew higher than my head in some places, and I had to push through this strip of wheat to see the field proper.

              I broke through and stood at the edge of a long field of waist-high wheat, entirely uniform from edge to edge, all the way to where it crested a low hill in the distance and disappeared from sight. Borders of dark trees hemmed the field in on the left and right, forming a natural fence between this field and the onces to either side. The setting sun on my right hovered just over the treeline. It bathed the field in rusty orange and forged long, molten shadows away from the stalks, striping the field into a tiger pattern. A breeze swept through the wheat on the distant hill and carved a path down the hillside, as if some massive, invisible snake was gliding toward me out of the horizon.

              I don't know how I noticed any of this because, about fifty feet in front of me, stood a line of dark people. My heart gave a stuttering jolt, sending a rush of bile into my throat. There were at least twenty of them. They were unnaturally still, and due to the way the light struck them, I couldn't tell whether they were facing toward me or away from me.

              Instinctively, I crouched into the wheat, letting the thin stalks brush my face. The people just stood there, unmoving. Staring. Had they seen me? I didn't think they had. In fact, I had a creeping suspicion that they couldn't see anything. This wasn't exactly what I'd expected, but it was close.

              I lowered myself onto hands and knees and began crawling toward the row of dark shapes. Sunlight struck their left sides at such an extreme angle that the rest of their bodies were obscured in shadow, halfway between silhouette and nightmare.

              I didn't have a weapon. I could feel my head clearing itself of hydrocodone, feel my limbs getting lighter by the minute. This was foolish. No, it was fucking suicide. I crawled closer. I had to know. For everyone. For Rivet, for Jennie. For me. Dammit,
I
needed answers. Rivet was always right, in the end. It just took everyone else awhile to come around.

              I scrambled closer, keeping my head below the ceiling of clear air above the wheat. Stalks bent and snapped beneath my palms, my knees, the rubber toes of my shoes. Every few seconds, I popped my head into the clear to see how close I'd come. And every time, the statuesque bodies loomed nearer, watching, waiting for something. Dark sentinels in the growing twilight. I could see now that they were turned away from me, all of them, facing south over the darkening field.

              With startling speed, the sun dropped behind the treeline off to the left, sending shadows racing past me to reunite with their dark brethren on the opposite border. Its light still reflected on the high clouds overhead, filling that wide, endless sky with fire even while the ground sank into darkness. The line of people was now a true silhouette, outlined against the arc of gold clinging tenaciously to the distant hilltop.

              They were just ten feet away now, the people. They hadn't reacted to my approach, hadn't turned from their eternal vigil, and I was now close enough to see why.

              They were staked to the ground.

              Impaled through each person's chest was a long, stout pole that held them upright. One had no head, just a bumpy line along the top of its shoulders. Mr. Fucking Collins. Two, with longer hair, wore dark, striped pantsuits. This was them. The zombies we'd killed our first day. An eon ago, it seemed. I shrank lower into the wheat, pressing my chest to the ground, and through sheer force of will kept my hammering heart from bursting through my rib cage. Through a shifting veil of umber, I could see their shoulders and heads rising above me. We'd left them on the street, and someone had dragged them out here to erect this gruesome tableau.

              What the fuck was this? What was the purpose? A burial rite? A sign? Here there be living, an all-you-can-eat people buffet. Come get some.

              Shaking, I stood. There was no reason to hide. They were all dead. Dead...again, I guess. But the real kind of dead, where they didn't move or walk or try to eat your Christfucking throat. Slowly, I stepped around to the front of the grotesque scarecrows. Their eyes were all open, that same milky pink that the zombies got, but dull and lifeless. Staring without seeing. There were the secretaries, and Judge Mathers, and the thin guy with the beard who'd come from the hardware store. I looked for the little boy in the Orioles jersey and saw him staked beside Mr. Collins, both of them headless.

              The world teetered around me a little. There were people staked in a field. No cops, no crime scene tape, no news coverage. Just people with wooden posts rammed into their chests and propped up in a field, and nobody around to give it a second thought. The past weeks had been insane, but I was still struck every so often by how complete of a reversal life had become. I'd split a man's head nearly in half with an axe. Just whacked it like a honeydew melon. I wasn't in jail. People weren't writing about me online, aghast at the monstrous evil that could lead a man to do such a thing. We'd littered a road with corpses, raided a pharmacy, raided a grocery store. Somewhere up north, a clan of meth heads was kidnapping kids and women.

              Life was entirely fucked. And that was just in Joshuah Hill. Who knew what the rest of the world had become.

              And the zombies weren't as mindless as we'd prefer to think. I took another look at Mr. Collins, at his wrinkled arms dangling limply at his side, at the tip of the pole sticking up through the fleshy stump that had once held his head. He hadn't been an unthinking animal. I'd been close enough to know. These things had purpose of some kind. Whatever the fuck they were, they were still alive. We
were
murderers.

              I had to get back. I had to tell Jennie and Rivet what I'd seen here. We needed to go ahead with Rivet's plan. Find out if we could save them.

              I turned to walk away when one of the corpses opened its eyes. I hadn't paid attention to this one, hadn't seen its closed lids. Now they blazed, pink and alive. Its head turned to me. I fell back and shit myself I was so scared. My hands scrabbled against the hard earth and flattened wheat stalks. I turned to to get onto my knees, to stand, to run, and I saw them coming over the little hill in the distance. Hundreds of shambling bodies crested the peak and surged down the hillside toward me.