ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) (18 page)

The infected woman continued her steady march down the
centerline in Duncan’s direction.

Ten feet.

With the alternating
slap-crack
of flip flops
striking dead flesh and sun-warmed pavement resonating eerily in the early
morning still, he raised the shotgun and tucked the buttstock tight against his
shoulder.

Eight.

Duncan laid his right cheek on the black polymer stock.

Six.

He squeezed his left eye shut and gazed down the barrel,
parking the sight between those flesh-devouring eyes.

Four.

Finger tensing on the trigger, Duncan eased the weapon off
his shoulder a bit and dropped the barrel by a few degrees.

With a little more than an arm’s reach between the business
end of the shotgun and the hissing creature, Duncan drew up the last bit of
trigger pull.

The explosion was tremendous, setting his ears to ringing
and causing him to narrow his eyes to slits, which kept him from seeing the
initial results of his gruesome experiment.

Back in the truck, however, Charlie witnessed it all. And
because of the perceived safety and acoustic barrier the glass and metal of the
cab provided, he didn’t flinch or close his eyes when the discharging shotgun
rocked Duncan in his forward-leaning stance.

Consequently, Charlie saw pink mist again, only this time it
was jetting from the small of the woman’s lower back just before she seemed to
levitate off of the blacktop. In the next microsecond the violent impact from
hundreds of tiny lead pellets shredding her guts had her flying backward,
nearly horizontal to the road, pink flip flops tumbling away wildly on separate
courses all their own.

“What the …” Charlie mouthed as he watched two more wholly
unexpected events taking place. He saw Duncan crunch another shell into the
chamber, sending the spent one tumbling out in a wide arc, spinning and
refracting the rising sun all the way to the road, where it bounced and
skittered to a stop near the prostrate corpse that—despite missing a
cantaloupe-sized chunk of abdomen—was struggling mightily to rise.

Bare feet somehow finding purchase in the gore sloughing
from its own destroyed midsection, the aerated woman rose to standing and took
a long lurching step toward the unwavering shotgun barrel.

“The rules,” bellowed Charlie through the half-closed
driver’s side window.

Complying with the barked order, Duncan elevated the gaping
muzzle until it was aimed at a spot between the listing corpse’s button nose
and meth-affected picket of teeth. He drew a breath, said a prayer of
absolution in his head, and then squeezed the trigger.

This time, on account of the ringing in his ears from the
first blast, Duncan didn’t flinch or jump or close his eyes. He saw it all. The
nose and cheeks and soulless eyes disappeared with the booming report. Close
behind, the frothy morass of pulped skin, hair, and cranial bone rode the shock
wave for a short distance before painting the warm blacktop in a gray and red
sheen.

Torn to ribbons by the expanding cone of buckshot, what was
left of the pink tube top flopped limply through the air for a long moment
before settling softly back to earth like a large scrap of tickertape.

Casting his gaze in a full three-sixty, Charlie saw they
were still alone at street level. Once he scrutinized the surrounding
businesses and apartment buildings, however, he learned the shotgun blast had
drawn attention to them. Here and there curtains were drawn back in the windows
flanking the street. Heads were bobbing behind the glass. Jaws were moving and
phones were pressed to ears. But he wasn’t worried. The threat was eliminated
along with any doubt still in his mind that the recently deceased infected were
in fact coming back to life.

Shaking his head against the shrill ringing, Duncan took a
pace forward and crouched next to the mutilated corpse. He lifted one hand off
the ground. Turned it over, inspecting it closely. The skin was cool to the
touch. The two fingers and thumb not missing their tips and nails were
strangely white. The palm was marred by a deep semicircular laceration—a kind
of imperfect bloodless arc divided every quarter-inch or so by a bridge of
unblemished skin.
Teeth did this
, thought Duncan. The wrinkled skin on
the corpse’s knuckles was cut so deeply that when he manually flexed one hand
into a dainty half-fist, white bone glistened within.

“C’mon, Quincy M.D. People are stirring,” Charlie called out
as he reached over and ran the driver’s window all the way down. The next
admonition as he hinged back over was said quieter and lost on Duncan, “And I’m
sure they’ve already called the cops.”

Before the word “cops” had escaped his lips, Charlie
detected movement in his right side vision. Partially obscured by the A-pillar
and telescoping side mirror, whatever it was tore his gaze from the crumpled
form Duncan was standing over, which in turn got his head moving directly into
a blast of air being driven forward by the impossibly large barrel of a wooden
baseball bat.

As the brown blur and subsequent sensation caressing his
cheek caused Charlie to reflexively flinch and recoil from the window, two
things became abundantly clear. The first was that the bat was being swung on a
flat arc right-handed by an incredibly tall African American teenager standing
just off the Dodge’s passenger-side front tire. The second thing that came to
Charlie in the ensuing microsecond was that something else was moving off his
right shoulder. And it was coming in fast, with purpose, and drawing
dangerously close to his face.

The two moving objects, one known, one still a mystery, came
together equidistant between the A-pillar and right side-channel of Charlie’s
open window. The
slap-crunch
of wood impacting flesh and bone was
entirely unexpected. Grateful the morbid noise was from the bat meeting the
human head now filling up the entire window opening, Charlie simultaneously
released the grab bar and began drawing his head and upper body toward the
center of the bench seat.

But he wasn’t as quick as he used to be. Fast twitch muscles
failed him and suddenly a misshapen head was driven into the truck and had
butted his upper arm and shoulder before his body could respond to the neural
commands.

Impacting Charlie with roughly the same load of kinetic
energy the bat had just transferred from the young man’s coiled muscles, the
forty-some-odd pounds of greasy hair and clammy flesh sent a shiver through his
shoulders before striking the B-pillar with a resounding
thunk
.

Even as the kid’s perfect follow-through was cutting the air
outside the door pillar, like a mini hail storm, shards of the mystery
assailant’s splintered teeth were pelting Charlie’s face and the truck’s back
glass.

Torn between twisting back around to check on his friend, or
leaning over the gore-spattered window channel and gawking at the form that had
just crumpled into a vertical heap on the road, Charlie drew in a deep breath
and did both—sort of.

As he lifted his butt off the seat to regard the male form
on the road with its arms and legs askew and cratered head leaking rivulets of
brackish blood, he yelled at the top of his voice: “Duncan ... get your ass
over here!”

Before Charlie could swing his gaze from the still-moving
corpse to the young man who had bravely come to his aid, said young man rapidly
delivered two more chopping blows to the squirming body. One, a solid shot to
the temple that snapped the head around, and the other, a coup de gras
thunk
to the dome that opened a fissure and started a slow trickle of gray matter.

Breathing hard, the young man regarded Charlie and his eyes
seemed to soften. “You and your friend best get,” he said, tapping the bat on
the road to rid it of accumulated detritus. “It ain’t safe here. It ain’t safe
anywhere.”

“Duncan,” Charlie bellowed, as he craned around.

“I’m here,” Duncan said, rounding the tailgate on the
passenger side.

“This guy just saved my ass.”

Stopping and eyeing the corpse, Duncan replied, “Then thank
the man so we can get a move on.”

“It was nothing,” the young man said to Duncan. Hitching a
thumb toward the apartments off his right shoulder, he added, “But there’s more
of these things back thataway.” His eyes narrowed as he regarded Charlie. “And
your friend’s right. Y’all better go.”

Duncan looped back around, opened his door and crawled
behind the wheel. He leaned forward and met the young man’s stare. “You need a
lift somewhere? We’re heading east. Going to put some distance between us and
the city.”

Shaking his head no, the young man propped the bat on his
shoulder and backpedaled away from the Dodge, warily eyeing the nearby
two-story complex adorned with foot-high wooden letters that read:
Norma
Jean Apartments
.

“Thanks, bud,” Charlie called out after the kid. Then,
massaging his aching right arm, he sat back hard into the seat. “Helluva close
call that was.”

“Yes. It. Was,” Duncan said as he watched the young man
until he disappeared from view behind some hedges fronting another nearly
identical apartment building. “And it’s got me thinking—”

“About what?”

“Who,” Duncan said. “In a roundabout way … this little near
disaster got me thinking about my brother. He’s one of those guys who have that
prepare-for-the-worst, hope-for-the-best kind of mindset. Before the Y2K scare
he was always preaching that in case of a societal breakdown, no matter what
caused things to go to hell, you gotta gather friends and family together. Good
people who have your back.”

Nodding, Charlie added, “That’s what I meant when I said
strength in numbers back at the house. I wasn’t thinking just you and me. Hell,
I
was
occupied with watching your back and it nearly got me killed.”

“Then I think we ought to keep our eyes peeled for some good
folks to side with. Ones we can circle the wagons with if God forbid the need
should arise.”

“What kind of people?”

Duncan gestured toward the direction the kid had taken.
“Like Slugger, there … streetwise survivors who aren’t afraid to get their
hands dirty, if you know what I mean.”

“And how do you know someone’s real intentions if you don’t
know the person? You have a portable polygraph in that NRA bag of yours?”

“No, I don’t. We just gotta trust our guts, Charlie. Same as
humans have been doing for millions of years. That sick-to-the-stomach feeling
our ancestors got from a brush with a sabertooth tiger and that electric tingle
you get in your gut when up against someone you think might have bad
intentions—they’re one and the same. Just took us a lot of time and bad
experiences to refine ‘em.”

“Hope we run into more like that young man with the bat,
then.” Charlie stole another look at the corpse outside his window. “Yep, he’s
one of the good ones.”

Changing the subject, Duncan gazed at the apartment and its
windows and the faces peering down between parted curtains. “Goodbye,
Norma
Jean
.” He dropped the transmission into Drive and pulled away from the curb
slowly as if leaving a pair of corpses in the northbound lanes of a usually
busy thoroughfare was the new norm.

Shaking his head, Charlie said. “Even in times of duress …
the smartass in you always finds a way out.”

Duncan made no reply to that; instead, he jumped back into
the
pink mist
story exactly where he’d left off. “So, while we’re
waiting for the weather to break so we can fly back to base without
accidentally becoming one with the side of a mountain, my co-pilot slinks off
to find a hooch so he can grab some shuteye. Gotta sleep when the opportunity
presents itself in Nam. Anyway, while the co-pilot’s away, Thigpen, remember
him … he’s my door gunner. Thigpen’s never one to use his downtime wisely. He
goes and grabs a couple of beers for him and a cup of joe for me. Then we put
on ponchos and go outside. Set up a couple of ammo crates near the wire and
start shooting the shit in the driving rain.”

“How close to the wire?” Charlie asked in a low voice.

“Pretty damn close,” Duncan answered soberly. “The area had
a lot of enemy activity at the time. Viet Cong probing the defenses nightly.
The warnings meant nothing to Pig Pen. Twenty-plus missions in and out of real
hot and hairy LZs all the while hanging out of a
slick
and
not
catching a live round has a way of instilling a feeling of invincibility in a
man. And Pig Pen thought he was going to make it through the war unscathed and
live to be a hundred years old.” Duncan slowed and swerved right as a car shot
from a side street half a block up ahead.

Taking advantage of a rare chance to pick his friend’s brain
on a topic rarely broached, Charlie asked, “And you? You were the one flying
the bullet magnet in and out of those LZs.”

“I felt a little of it after time and again squeezing my
Huey into a tight opening in the canopy and living to tell the tale. Pig Pen,
though … he was convinced he was
bulletproof
.”

“Pig Pen got
sniped
right next to you?”

Duncan cast his gaze left and then right as the last of the
apartment buildings slipped by. Knuckles white on the steering wheel, he jumped
back into the story he’d told only once, a decade ago, to a shrink trying to
help him deal with his drinking and its root cause, PTSD, the new acronym the
doctors at the VA were using that stood for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that
Duncan chalked up to being young and seeing too much, too fast. “Ten minutes
into our outdoor bull session and Pig Pen’s already got three beers down his
gullet. Sadly, he’s not even close to being tipsy. He could hold his liquor
then like I can now. So we’re talking as quiet as we can on the top of this
muddy hilltop in the middle of the jungle. Name of the firebase escapes me now.
Anyway, I stand up and turn away to piss, and out of the corner of my eye I see
the flash and hear a single gunshot. Real close by, too.”