The House of Daniel (33 page)

“That's right,” Harv said. “Can you let us get to the entranceway to unload these poor folks?”

“Yeah, come ahead.” The cop turned around and shouted to his friends. Then he told Harv, “Once you do, keep heading south. Put some distance between you and this—this craziness.”

“I'll do it.” Harv drove up to the hospital entrance. He took everything slow and easy, so he didn't look dangerous. With so many frightened men with guns around, that seemed like a real good idea.

A nurse and a couple of doctors in white coats came out to give us a hand with the firemen and the people from that car that hit the pole. One of the docs had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I'm not sure he remembered it was there; it was almost singeing his lips. His eyes looked a million miles away, as though he'd seen too many horrors all at once. Well, on that black night I guess he had.

“Operating by candlelight,” he said to nobody in particular. He sounded as dazed as he looked. “The lights went out, and we fell back a hundred years. If we get a generator, or a wizard who can call light…”

I don't know if they ever did or not. We shifted around on the bus now that it wasn't quite so jam-packed. Harv pulled away from the hospital. We headed south, the way the cop told us to. Like everybody else, we were trying to get away.

*   *   *

We drove down US 85 to Castle Rock, thirty miles south of Denver. That took us most of the night. I have never seen a road so jammed as that one, not in all my born days. I guess we went faster than the zombies did, because none of them broke into the bus and tore us to pieces. But I don't know why they didn't. All of Denver was trying to get away down a highway that wasn't wide enough for half of it.

Folks used both sides of the road to go south. That helped some, but less than you'd think. For quite a while, till they blocked northbound traffic farther south still, people who didn't know about the zombie riots were still happily coming north, bound for Denver. They were happy till they ran into our southbound wave, anyhow.

Some of them ran into some of us for real. Harv drove past some nasty head-on smashups that blocked half the road and made traffic even worse than it was without 'em. If one of those wrecks had blocked the whole highway … Well, in that case you'd likely be looking at some other yarn right about now.

It was getting light, and we were just about to Castle Rock, when he pulled off the road and onto the shoulder. Off to the side was a field, or maybe you'd call it a weedy meadow. “I think we've come far enough,” Harv said. “We can maybe grab a little shuteye here and try to decide what to do next. House of Daniel is supposed to play in Greeley today, and if I can work out how to get there from here—”

“And if the zombies aren't tearing Greeley to pieces,” Wes broke in.

“Yeah, that, too,” Harv agreed. “If we can get there, and if the town's still all in one piece, we'll have ourselves a game.”

“We got train tickets from Denver back to Pittsburgh tomorrow mornin',” Quail Jennings said. “Don't look like we'll be able to use 'em. Have to talk to the railroad, see how much extra they gonna charge us to change things.”

“They shouldn't charge you a dime,” Harv said. “Not your fault you aren't there. Not your fault the trains outta Denver aren't on time, either.”

“You right, suh,” the Crawdads' manager answered. “You right, but they ain't gonna care. Any time they think they kin screw some extra money out of somebody, they gonna do it.”

Anybody who's ever had to rearrange a train ticket knows about that. It's not about whether the railroad'll screw you. It's only about how hard. That kind of thing runs all through too many different kinds of business. Maybe it's not such a wonder the zombies rose up. Maybe it's a wonder the people didn't rise up with 'em.

Vampires suck the blood out of people in Russia, they say. Over here, the railroads and other outfits like 'em do the job instead. That could be why the vampires got the zombies boiling, if that's what they did. They were jealous. They wanted the chance for themselves.

I wasn't worrying about that when I got out of the bus. I was worrying about whether the zombies had gone crazy everywhere at once, not just in Denver. And I was worrying about my stuff, back at that boarding house we couldn't get to. But the devil with stuff. Long as I was alive and able to play ball, I'd bring in a little cash, and sooner or later I'd buy more stuff.

We had a few blankets and things in the bus. Some guys lay on those. Some just flopped in the weeds. And some stood guard over the rest, in case the zombies came that far after all.

I was one of the guard-standers. I felt tired, yeah, but way too keyed-up to sleep. As the sky got brighter, you could see the smoke coming up from the north. Some of that smoke might've been from my burning stuff, or from Merchants Park. I couldn't do anything about it any which way. In my baseball uniform, with my bat at the ready like a gun, I could imagine I was a soldier on sentry-go.

Or I could till some real soldiers in khaki and some cops in dark blue marched past us, heading north. Two or three of the soldiers had metal tanks on their backs and things like hoses in their hands instead of Springfields. “What are them contraptions?” asked a Crawdad who was standing watch with us.

I had a notion, but I wasn't sure enough to say. Wes was: “Those are flamethrowers. When I was a green kid, I was in on the very end of the War to End War. Believe me, if anything'll settle a zombie's hash for good, it's one of those babies.”

My punchy thought was
No, it'll turn 'em into hash, and overdone hash at that
. I didn't come out with it. You get really tired, it's like getting drunk. All kinds of stupid stuff bubbles up inside your head. If you're even halfway smart, you leave it in there and don't show it off.

We did a couple of hours watching. Then Wes woke up some of the guys who were sleeping so we could get some rest. I didn't know if I'd get any rest when I stretched out on the ground, but next thing I knew my face was on top of a weed and somebody was waking me up. It was Azariah.

“We're gonna get rolling,” he said. “Harv wants to go down to Castle Rock and then head east on this road that runs that way.”

“Okey-doke.” I yawned. My stomach growled. “Maybe we can find something to eat, too.”

“Maybe so,” Azariah said. “C'mon.”

Traffic had thinned out some when the bus got back onto US 85 again. We made it into Castle Rock in about forty-five minutes. Castle Rock was a tiny town. All the folks coming down from Denver just swamped it. Not enough food, not enough places to stay, not enough anything.

The Pittsburgh Crawdads got off there, anyway. Quail Jennings gravely shook Harv's hand. “I don't thank you for beatin' us, but I thank you for your kindness afterwards,” he said. “They got phones here, an' a train station, an' a CC office. We kin get back east from here. May take a while, but we kin.”

“You sure?” Harv said.

“I am,” Jennings answered. “Had plenty o' time to think it through. Take a while, cost some money, but we'll make it back where we belong.” His players nodded.

“Good luck to you, then,” Harv said, and they shook hands again.

Carpetbag Booker got off, too. “You only sign me through the tournament, Mistuh Harv,” he said. “You know that.”

“I do know that.” Harv nodded. “But I was hoping you'd stick with us longer once you saw the kind of ball we played.”

“It ain't the kind of ball, suh.” Carpetbag sounded a little embarrassed, but he plowed on anyway: “Easier bein' with my own kind—easier on everybody. Don't git me wrong. You been fair with me. I ain't never gonna say nothin' else. Still an' all, though … I gonna head East, too, only I don't aim to go's far's them Crawdads. Gonna pitch fo' the Kansas City Regents fo' a spell.”

“Well, I wish you luck, too,” Harv said. Since Carpetbag wasn't under contract, what could he do but make the best of it? “Maybe you'll play for us again, or maybe we'll take our licks against you on the road.”

“Could be. You travel all the time, an' there ain't hardly no good colored team that don't,” Carpetbag said. “I would be pleased to go with y'all for a while some other time, an' that's a fact. Good luck to you, too. We licked the Crawdads. We licked 'em right out o' their spikes.” He said that loud, so his old Pittsburgh team could hear.

I wondered if they'd jump him when he hopped down from the bus, but they didn't. Away he went, head up, stride bouncing, never looking back. All by himself, he was bigger than any team he played for. Maybe he wouldn't be if they ever let whites and coloreds play against each other in the bigs, but maybe he still would, too. He was one of a kind, Carpetbag Booker. I'm gladder than I know how to tell you I got the chance to play with him, even if it was only for a few games. Yeah, I'm from Oklahoma. I'm still glad. You don't like it, lump it.

*   *   *

From Denver to Greeley, if you go from one to the other the straight way, is around sixty-five miles. From Castle Rock, if you don't pass through Denver to get there, you have to drive around the other three sides of a big rectangle: east, north, and then back west again. The long way around? You bet.

Harv didn't care. Most of the refugees from Denver kept going south, along the eastern edge of the Rockies. When we headed east instead, we could make halfway decent time. And we were getting farther from Denver with every mile we drove, just the same as they were.

Colorado is a funny state. The western part is mountains. The eastern chunk, though, it's all prairie. Once you get a little ways away from the Rockies, you could've figured you were back in Kansas. Wheatfields and cows, that's what it was. A little cool and a little dry to be Oklahoma, but it wasn't all that different from the part of the country I came from.

We got stopped by two roadblocks before we got to Limon. That was where we'd start the northbound leg of our rectangle. The first block was cops. They looked over the bus to make sure we weren't hauling any zombies or vampires. When they didn't find any, or any coffins, they waved us on.

Eddie tried a laugh, but it sounded shaky. “Remember that bull session in New Mexico?” he said to me. “Ain't gonna see vampire outfielders flying after fly balls in night games any time soon.”

“Well, that's what they get for firing up the zombies,” I answered. We didn't know for sure that was what had happened. But we'd heard it, and it seemed to make sense, so we believed it.

The second roadblock was about ten miles farther east than the first. It wasn't the police. It was farmers and herders. The roadblock was hay bales and a tractor. The men carried hunting rifles or shotguns. A couple of them just had pitchforks. What good a pitchfork would do against a zombie, I can't tell you. Maybe they made the fellas toting 'em feel better, anyway.

Those cops had been men doing a job. The farmers were scared out of their wits. They made us all pile out of the bus. Then they searched it like you wouldn't believe. If we'd given them the least bit of backtalk, they would've shot us. They might have been sorry about it afterwards, but that wouldn't have done us any good.

“Them things, they're out there, and they're comin' to get us!” one of them said. He wasn't wrong, exactly, but he wasn't exactly right, either. Didn't seem to me there were enough people out here to draw either rampaging zombies or hungry, twisted bloodsuckers, but what did I know?

I'll tell you what I knew. I knew I had a beard and longish hair in country where the menfolk didn't wear 'em. That was plenty to keep me quiet. If a couple of them hadn't heard of the House of Daniel, maybe even been to a game or two, we might've had a tougher time than we did.

Wes bought gas in Limon before we turned north. “Been a lot of people comin' through here. I'm almost out of fuel,” said the fellow who ran the station. “Heard me a pile of crazy stories. Any o' that stuff true, or do the city folks have the vapors again?”

“Some of it's true,” Harv said as he paid him. “I'm glad you've still got the gasoline.” Limon was lucky to have one gas station. If it had run dry, where would we have got more? I had no idea. By the way Harv sounded, neither did he.

North of Limon, we came to another roadblock. This was more farmers, not cops. They didn't seem sure whether to block cars going into Limon or the ones coming out. To them, Limon was a big city, almost like Denver. It was a place bad things could come from, even if they weren't too clear on what kind of bad things those were.

“Gotta keep the devils away!” a farmer said. “I put some silver shot in with my double-aught buck.”

I'm sure silver shot won't do anything special to a zombie. I'm almost sure it won't do anything special to a vampire, either. But, while I'm plenty dumb for all ordinary use, I'm not dumb enough to argue with a spooked farmer not quite aiming a double-barreled shotgun at my belly button.

We eventually got past those guys, too, and rolled north till the little road we were on joined up with US 34 just east of a town called Brush. They had a sugar-beet processing plant there. Some of the people doing the hard, brainless work at the plant, work nobody would want to do under the hot sun, weren't people. They were zombies. Whatever had gone wrong in Denver hadn't here. Not yet, anyhow.

One more roadblock, this one outside of Greeley. Cops manned it. We didn't have any trouble getting by. The cops knew we were ballplayers. Some of them had gone down to Denver for tournament games.

One guy even knew we were supposed to play the Greeley Grays. “Didn't expect you'd be coming from this direction, though,” he said.

“Yeah, well, we kinda had to take the long way around,” Harv answered.