ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) (13 page)

“Where are we going now?” Charlie asked. He was looking in
his wing mirror and saw a person in surgical scrubs scurry to the cyclist’s
form and toss a black blanket-looking thing on the grass next to it.

Duncan pulled away from the curb with his attention divided
between the narrowing Jersey barrier funnel ahead and flurry of activity taking
place in the side mirror. “
Infected
,” he said. “And they wasted no time
in bringing out a body bag.”

Charlie said, “Probably standard practice—”

“What necessitated the tag-and-bag in the first place was
far from standard practice.”

“She
was
resisting,” Charlie said, rubbing his left
shoulder.

Eyeing an ambulance-width break in the Jersey barriers on
the right, Duncan said, “No … it wasn’t that. There was fear in the younger
soldier’s eyes. They were all terrified of whatever she had become infected
with.”

“So … they put a
bullet
in her brain—” Charlie drew
in a deep breath and powered up his window.

“Hell you doing?”

“What if it’s airborne?”

“Then we’re already infected.”

“You sure?”

Shaking his head, Duncan said, “She damn near gave us both a
spit bath back there. Roll your window back down. It smells like a bucket of
assholes in here.” He sniffed his armpit. “And it ain’t me.”

Half a block down 47th where the street began to level off
there was a break in the barriers allowing access to a drive leading into some
of the staff parking for Providence Hospital.

While the Traffic Division building and its acres of parking
pretty much owned the southwest corner of East Burnside at 47th, Providence
Hospital proved to be a goliath, its campus sprawling north and east for
several blocks in each direction. The main building fronted 47th and cast a
shadow on everything around it, most notably I-84, which snaked through the
gully once known as Sullivan’s Gulch.

In the passenger seat Charlie was scrubbing at his face with
the front of his shirt. White gut exposed and jiggling like a bowl of Jell-O,
he said through the thin fabric, “You really think we can get the
infection
from spit and sweat?

“No idea,” Duncan replied truthfully. He slowed the truck to
a crawl, leaned over the wheel to peer past Charlie, and saw at least six deep
and static on the drive, the ambulances that had blazed by them a few blocks
back. There were paramedics scurrying about unloading patients, some on
gurneys, most ambulatory. Soldiers were milling about. Nothing about the way
they held their weapons and kept their heads constantly moving said things were
under control on the premises. That the discharged patient loading area was
being used as a makeshift ER in-processing site only added to Duncan’s unease.
He swung his gaze forward and sized up the soldiers at the looming roadblock.
“I wonder what the trauma offload area looks like.”

Charlie lowered the shirt long enough to say, “No doubt as
full as the pickup area.”

Preparing to stop for the roadblock identical to the one
behind them, Duncan shifted his body to the right a bit and glanced down to see
if any part of the shotgun was visible.
Good to go.
Charlie’s boot heels
were abutting the pump and keeping it out of sight.

Back at it with the shirt, Charlie asked, “You have a plan
B?”

Duncan remained tight-lipped. Mainly because he didn’t
really know. He had a dead body in the loadbed. There was a shotgun, its
legality debatable, underneath the seat. And as a cherry on the sundae he had a
.45 caliber Colt Model 1911 perched on his hip and in plain view on account of
his losing his shirt two blocks back.

“That’s a helluva plan B, buddy. Thanks for letting me in on
it.”

Ignoring the quip, Duncan said, “We’re going back to your
place so I can think this through.”

“And Tilly?”

“If the soldiers don’t detain us … I don’t know,” Duncan
replied, the Dodge’s brakes grating as they rolled up to the roadblock.

In the distance the Portland police set up on the overpass
to guard the north approach made the obligatory effort of turning their heads,
then quickly returned their attention to turning their queue of vehicles away
from the hospital.

The guard soldiers didn’t appear to be concerned. Their
rifles remained aimed at the ground. Only one of them, a woman in full battle
rattle, met Duncan’s gaze.

Feeling one-hundred-percent redneck, naked from the waist
up, tiny old man boobs on display, he offered a tentative greeting, lifting one
hand off the wheel while forcing a smile. In his head he was chanting
don’t
look in the back
, all while Charlie was fidgeting and all but holding up a
sign begging the rest of the soldiers to pay them closer scrutiny.

As the concrete barriers closed in, Duncan prepared for the
worst. Which he imagined would include the female soldier seeing Tilly’s
corpse, leading to him and Charlie being thrown in jail until the forensics
people could get to the house and verify their innocence. Then his gut clenched
when he recalled the recent shooting and realized the two check points were
most assuredly in radio contact with each other. He couldn’t help but think
that if the fully infected got the bullet, then those in contact with the
infected most likely warranted a long period of quarantine crammed in with
other infected. Suddenly a stint in jail didn’t seem so bad.

“We’re fucked,” he said through clenched teeth.

But apparently Lady Luck wasn’t through with them for the
day. Instead of the anticipated request to come to a full stop, the female
soldier, helmet snugged down tight, flicked her narrowed eyes from Charlie to
Duncan and then raised a gloved hand and motioned to her right. Considering she
was brandishing an M4 carbine, who was Duncan to argue?

So he cut his left blinker on, out of habit, mostly, and let
his foot off the brake, slow rolling the ninety-degree left turn. And as the
truck swung around broadside to the grim-faced soldiers, he saw in his wing
mirror the entry road he guessed meandered away to the back of the hospital
where trucks rolled in to deliver food, medical supplies, and whatever else a
hospital required to run efficiently. Near the entrance to this feeder road was
a shiny red garbage truck. Painted on its side in large white letters were the
words: ROSE CITY SANITARY. Hinged up in back of the big rig was a rectangular
metal hatch the size of its entire squared-off back end. And stacked to the top
of the truck’s garbage ram plate were scores of shiny black body bags identical
to the one the cyclist had been stuffed inside of.

Leaving the soldiers behind, he flicked his gaze from the
macabre sight that had just sent a warning tingle crawling up his spine and was
instantly distracted by two more things that interested him greatly. The first
was a glimpse of Interstate 84 compliments of Charlie’s oversized side mirror.
There was no traffic moving on it whatsoever. Last time he had seen it empty
like that was when one president or another had visited and shut down 205 and
84 between the airport and downtown to all traffic.

The street they had been directed to follow was no wider
than those in Ladd’s Edition and ran parallel to Interstate 84 for a short
distance to another roadblock, where more soldiers wearing stern looks directed
them away from the hospital and thankfully whatever battle was currently being
waged there between man and microbe.

Covering his mouth with his forearm, Duncan stopped the
truck long enough to ask the soldiers why the roadblocks were springing up so
suddenly around town.

The soldiers said nothing.

So Duncan asked them what they knew about D.C.

Still, they remained quiet, stoic.

A small two-door import formed up on their bumper and
honked. Three sharp blasts. All business. Duncan flicked his eyes to the side
mirror and saw the woman driver’s arms and gums flapping. Though the reflection
of overhead wires criss-crossed the windshield, he clearly made out the words:
Move
that piece of shit, asshole
.

Duncan smiled coyly at the woman’s reflection in the mirror.
Then, as the horn went silent, he swung his gaze back to the soldiers standing
at ease.

“Throw us a bone,” he pleaded. “Please?”

Remaining tight-lipped, gloved hands clutching their black
carbines, nearly in unison the soldiers motioned him onward with shallow sweeps
of their barrels.

Incredulous, Duncan said, “You can’t tell us
anything
?”

Slow wags of their heads now accompanied the movement of
their rifles. Duncan locked eyes with each of them for a split-second. And that
was all he needed to discern the severity of the unfolding situation they were
all embroiled in. The younger of the two was definitely scared. However, the eyes
of the one wearing the sergeant’s stripes hid nothing. They were narrowed to
slits. His compact muscled body was fully opened up to the Dodge. A ghost of a
smile curled one corner of his lip. Everything about the redhead
twenty-something screamed
I want to get some
. And Duncan couldn’t really
blame the lad. Having been young and stateside when the war in Southeast Asia
started, he had wanted nothing more than to hit that seventeenth birthday so he
could enlist and serve his country as so many in the Winters’s family had done
before him. Never was a Winters boy that needed a poster with Uncle Sam
pointing a finger and making an obvious proclamation to get the patriotic
juices flowing.

The horn blared several more times. No order to the ragged
reports this time. There was panic building in the car’s driver, of that Duncan
was certain.

So in full understanding, knowing the troops had orders and
a job to do and all that, he nodded and moved on. However, in doing so, he
raised his left arm off the window sill and gave the woman in the little car
behind him the finger. He turned around and saw Charlie snickering.

“What?”

“Just staring at your
moobs
. That’s all.”

This time it was Charlie who got the bird.

Duncan smiled.

Progress, not perfection.

Overcome by a feeling of helplessness the likes of which he
hadn’t experienced since the Viet Cong made their big move on the South more
than four decades ago, Duncan drove them home in silence, taking back roads and
steering clear of 39th Avenue and the numerous National Guard roadblocks that
had sprouted up all along its length.

Nearly halfway home, a few blocks south of the Woodstock
neighborhood, they were struck by how clear the roads were. No longer were
random vehicles blazing down side streets and blowing lights. It was now so
quiet it seemed to Duncan that he and Charlie had been dropped into a Twilight
Zone episode.

It was pushing ninety degrees outside, the leaves were still
green, albeit brown at the edges from the recent stretch of similarly hot days,
yet the stores and bars were shuttered and dark as if it was Christmas
Day—about the only day of the year anymore there was a commerce shutdown of
this magnitude. There were no cars in the lots. No people in a mad dash to
stock up before the perceived coming apocalypse. No people bending elbows in
the bars behind glowing neon.

Finally, seemingly reading Duncan’s mind, Charlie said, “Did
someone declare Martial Law?”

“I didn’t get the memo,” Duncan quipped.

Realizing they’d been cutting south by east across the city
with the radio off since he’d silenced it in front of Providence Hospital,
Duncan reached for the volume knob.

“Sure you want to know what that was all about back there?”
Charlie asked, an ominous tone to his voice. “Because if Martial Law has been
declared, there’s going to be many more like her—”

Slowly stroking his silver mustache, Duncan looked sidelong
at Charlie. “What do you mean by that last part?”

Momentarily at a loss for words, Charlie pinched the bridge
of his nose and drew a deep breath.

Seeing a police cruiser crawl by in the opposite direction a
block west, Duncan leaned heavily on the gas pedal and took a quick left
followed by a right and then another tire-squealing left at the next block.

Checking over his shoulder for the cop, Charlie finally
answered, “That chickie … she wasn’t right. And those eyes. Sure they were
moving around in her skull. Trying to fix on my face.” He shivered and
swallowed hard. “But they were clouded over, Duncan. Like somehow cataracts had
formed between the time we left Tilly’s and arrived at the hospital.”

“I saw ‘em,” Duncan conceded. “And she had a smell about
her.” He upped the volume on the radio, signaling an end to the conversation.

The speakers emitted nothing but soft static as they slid
through 72nd. The sign on the pole in front of the mom and pop grocery there
was dark. The declaration
Open 365 24/7
spelled out with removable
letters on the reader board was partially true. Because though the signage and
interior lighting lent a contrary position, the door was propped open and a
teen and a man Duncan recognized and guessed was the owner were busy loading
stock from the store into a panel van parked sideways across the entry.

“Should be the other way around,” Charlie observed. “Open
24/7, 365.”

“Least of his worries,” Duncan said. With no sign of the
patrol car in his rearview, he doubled back the handful of blocks, ignored the
blinking red, and turned left to continue east on Flavel. Growing tired of the
incessant hiss, he leaned forward and thumbed the Seek button on the stereo
head unit, starting the tuner automatically cycling down the dial. Flicking his
eyes back to the road, he said, “Maybe there’ll be something on here that—”

At 82nd, Duncan hung a right and saw the cruiser he had been
trying to avoid stopped at a red light a block distant. Though he had been
lucky on a couple of occasions today, his timing on this particular light
hadn’t been touched by it.

As the radio tuner locked on a channel playing a prerecorded
loop put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta,
Duncan slowed the truck and began craning out the window as if he were lost. In
doing so he noticed how things had changed since he’d passed by here last. On
the east side of 82nd, the blocks and blocks of establishments with signs
offering
Private Lap Dances
,
Authentic Tamales and Burritos
,
Liquor
,
and everything in between were darkened, their OPEN signs flipped to CLOSED. On
the corner opposite the Chinese Take Out place the windowless pawn shop no longer
had an armed guard standing underneath the now extinguished neon sign still
promising
Cash for Guns, Gold, and Jewelry
. A few blocks south on 82nd
Avenue it was obvious the storefronts with signs offering all kinds of
financial transactions were shut down as well.

Like semaphore on a ghost ship, colorful banners and flags
strung above the used car lots popped and wagged in the brisk afternoon breeze.

Strange
, Duncan thought,
even the hookers seem to
have taken the rest of the day off, as if they got rolled up with the
sidewalks.

Just when Duncan thought they were going to be forced to
interact with the officer at the red light, the cruiser’s light bar exploded
with sound and color and the Charger sped away south.

Duncan exhaled as his light turned green. Then, seeing the
cruiser turn right a number of blocks ahead, said, “Thank you, Lady Luck.”

***

The sound the big Dodge made crunching up the gravel drive
set the neighbor’s dog to barking. Duncan parked on the pad and stilled the
engine, which, thankfully, reduced the dog’s mournful braying to a series of
inquisitive growls.

“You need to put a shirt on. Before you do, I recommend
running some deodorant over those pits.”

Duncan raised an arm and sniffed. Shaking his head, he said,
“Still not me.” He hooked a thumb at the sliding window. It was open a hand’s
width, with Tilly’s bloated corpse visible by the tailgate.

Charlie scrunched up his nose.

Duncan added, “She’s been dead a day and a half. It’s to be
expected. Bicycle Girl … not so much. How do you explain the smell comin’ outta
her piehole before the soldier popped her?”

“For the hundredth time,” Charlie said, forcefully. "I
don’t care what you think the CDC scientists meant by the gobbledy gook they’re
spewing on the radio loop … that girl was
not
dead. Not in the real
sense of the word.”

“Well Tilly is,” Duncan said. “And we can’t leave her out
here for the bugs and animals to get to.”

Fearing Duncan was going to advocate moving the stiffening
corpse into the house, Charlie swallowed hard and said, “What are we going to
do with her?”

“We can’t bring her in the house.”

Charlie visibly relaxed. Then, having an idea of where
Duncan was going to go next with this, wagged his head side-to-side and said,
“Let’s at least try calling the coroner or a mortuary before doing
that
.”

Duncan looked at his phone. “I’ve got zero bars. You got a
better idea?”

Charlie said nothing. He stepped from the truck and slammed
his door, starting the canine barking again.

Duncan closed his door quietly and walked to the rear of the
truck. Head down with both hands clutching the tailgate, he pictured Tilly on
her deathbed, a peaceful and serene look on her face as if she hadn’t a care in
the world.

However, as he let the tailgate clang open, what he saw
lying there would stay with him forever. After being subjected to the spin
cycle that was their roundabout trip from Ladd’s Edition to Providence and back
to Charlie’s, the old girl looked as if she had gone twelve rounds in the ring
with Muhammad Ali. Her nose was broken in the shape of a lightning bolt. And it
was evident her left arm was dislocated by the way it seemed to be waving at
him from underneath her body.

Charlie whistled, then uttered a couple of expletives. “Look
what your Duke Boys’ driving did to her.”

“She’s dead, Charlie,” Duncan drawled, gesturing at the
corpse. “Unlike Bicycle Girl, Matilda didn’t feel
any
of what caused
this.”

Charlie plucked the comforter and sheet from the truck bed
and tossed them by the fence, setting off another round of angry barking. He
said, “The cyclist was dead, too. You heard what the CDC Director was saying on
the radio.”

“How could I not have? Thing kept looping the same
information.”

“Then you heard him ticking off the same
rules
that I
did.”

“I’m done rehashing that,” Duncan scoffed. He grabbed ahold
of one of Tilly’s plump ankles, the exposed skin there cool and strangely
elastic-like. “You going to help me or not?”

After a fair amount of tugging and nudging they got the
corpse out of the truck bed and onto the cement parking pad.

Duncan stood beside the prostrate corpse and massaged his
lower back.

Without saying where he was going or what he had in mind,
Charlie disappeared into the house.

Grumbling and still shirtless, Duncan worked his way around
the side of the house. Swatting away thorny grabbing branches on some sort of
overgrown bushes, he finally located the Rubbermaid shed containing Charlie’s
garden tools.

The shed was locked, so Duncan trudged back to the truck to
the tune of more barking. He moved the shotgun aside and rummaged under the
seat blindly until his hand brushed the cool smooth vinyl of the truck’s tool
kit.

After another round of bushwhacking he was back at the shed,
the toolkit unrolled, screwdriver in hand.

Hoping to use the metal eye part of the shed’s locking
mechanism as a fulcrum of sorts, he inserted the pointed end of the
Phillips-head next to the small padlock. After finding adequate purchase, he
gripped the handle and applied his entire two hundred pounds to the equation.

After a brief groan there was a gunshot-like snap as the
four rivets holding the metal base plate in place sheared off. Newton’s Law
being what it is, the opposite reaction was Duncan landing face down in the
coarse bark dust with a wind-stealing thud.

He lay there for a second gulping air and staring at the
reddish-brown mixture of cedar shavings and topsoil. Once his breathing was
back to normal, he rolled over onto his left side and worked his right arm free
from where it had become trapped between his gut and the ground. Fearful he may
have fallen on the screwdriver, he held it up in front of his face and turned
it over in his hand, inspecting it for blood. The eight-inch chrome shaft was
bent into a shallow “V.” However, thankfully, it was still clean and reflecting
the afternoon sun.

Charlie’s voice carried from the corner of the house nearest
the garage. “That was a close call there, Old Man. No hospital’s going to drop
what they’re doing to sew your pasty carcass back up.”

“Thought did cross my mind. Figured I would’ve just finished
the job Samurai-style.”

Charlie pushed through the warren of unkempt bushes, stopped
before Duncan, and said, “Not quick by any means with a screwdriver. But
effective all the same.”

“Yep,” replied Duncan, picking himself off the ground.
“Insert the blade into the stomach near the navel. One quick pull to the left.
Then one more back to the right where you start—”

Charlie finished for him. “—and drag the
tantō
right
up the gut … literally. Balls of steel, those guys. And after seeing what the
alphabet networks are showing on the tube now …” He went quiet and helped brush
the dust and wood slivers from his friend’s back and shoulders. “Ritual suicide
sounds like it just might be the easy way out.”

A strange look fell on Duncan’s face as he parted the shed
doors.

“What?” Charlie asked, brow furrowing.

“The dog isn’t barking.”

“Noisy bastard’s not growling either,” Charlie added. “Which
one of us is going to check it out?”

Duncan shook his head no.

Both men stood rooted and looking over their shoulders
toward the front of the house.

After a few moments of silence the warble of distant sirens
broke the spell. Duncan shrugged and grabbed a shovel from the shed. Wiped the
cobwebs from it and inspected the blade. It was sharp and shiny, the wooden
handle barely worn. Judging from the condition of Charlie’s yard, he guessed it
hadn’t seen a palm since last summer or the one before.
It’ll do
, he
thought.

“You want to hear what I saw on the tube … or not?”

“Fill me in while I dig,” Duncan said, ambling back the way
he’d come and adding enough scratches and furrows on his right side to balance
out the roadmap of them already criss-crossing his left arm and ribcage.

When they reached the parking pad, the dog was still silent
with no clear reason why.

Charlie peeked around the Dodge. “Nothing there.”

“Dog’s crazy. That’s all.” Duncan stabbed the shovel into
the ground underneath the willow. While he dug the grave, Charlie detailed all
he knew about was happening from coast-to-coast—none of it good. Duncan stopped
digging only when he heard mention of the dusk-to-dawn curfew that came along
with the recent declaration of Martial Law.

After processing what that meant for them and the
predicament they were in, Duncan resumed digging and listening, wondering all
the while how his friend had absorbed that much material in the short time he
was inside. Channel surfing and speed reading the crawl, he presumed. When
Charlie finally fell silent, Duncan had the beginnings of a Tilly-sized hole
scratched into the topsoil and a worsening sense of dread tickling his spine.

For ninety minutes he speared the shovel into the ground and
deposited the dirt onto a growing pile near the neighbor’s fence.

Charlie had disappeared back inside at the twenty-minute
mark and had stayed there.

The entire time Duncan was digging, sweat was pouring down
his face, back, and sides, stinging where it found its way into the fresh
wounds there. In a way the pain helped to keep him going. Kind of like
self-flagellation, his steady movement contributing to the pain which seemed to
be drawing him nearer to a much-needed closure to the day’s events.