The Hungry (11 page)

"What the fuck, are you serious?"

"Look, lady, you've got two choices. Cooperate and get in the truck, or we hogtie you and throw you in there defenseless. Which is it going to be?"

Miller couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Did it ever occur to you that…?"

"That's it!" said the Sergeant. He pulled a pair of flex-cuffs from his belt, twisted her arms behind her, and secured her hands. Darla and Terrill Lee were also smashed against the truck and handcuffed. Scratch, however, had different ideas. He slammed his fist into the face of the nearest Guardsman, caught him right in the jaw and dropped him like a zombie with a bullet in the brainpan. Before he could hit the next one, two of the other Guardsmen bum-rushed and tackled him. The sergeant shoved the barrel of his rifle in Scratch's face. Two Guardsmen wrenched his arms behind him and secured his hands. Then one by one, the soldiers lifted each of them up, dumped them unceremoniously into the waiting truck and climbed in after them. Inside, the Guardsmen dragged them to their feet, and shoved them into a sitting position on the long benches. They hitched their handcuffs to short chains attached to the back of the benches. Nobody was going anywhere for the time being. Not now.

The sergeant waved his rifle. "Sit there and shut up." He turned to the soldier Scratch had punched. "You okay? Look, if they try anything, you have my permission to feed 'em to the zoms."

Miller stared at the undead things that were groaning at the back of the vehicle. It looked like a suburban family gotten rotten. They were shackled to the wall of the truck. They struggled against their restraints. Hungry, so hungry.

"Yes, sergeant," growled the angry soldier, rubbing his jaw. He plopped himself down on the bench opposite them. He sat there, rifle at the ready. The soldier seemed indifferent to the three zombies chained up only a few feet away. His attention was focused on Scratch. He wanted revenge.

"This is what you consider protective custody?" shouted Terrill Lee. "We haven't done anything wrong. What the hell is going on?"

What is it about locking up Terrill Lee that somehow he gets a spine and drops a pair of nuts?
wondered Miller.

The soldier just stared. He didn't look up, even when the hungry zombies shook their chains. He wanted Scratch.

Terrill Lee blustered. "I demand to speak to your commanding officer. I demand…"

"Just shut up," said Scratch. He was staring back at the soldier with a smirk. "Let's see what happens next."

The shooting, which up to this point had been more or less continuous, slowly died out. The cleanup was over. A moment later, the rest of the squad boarded the truck, which trembled and began moving. The view of the outside spun sideways in a wave of dust. They turned away from Flat Rock and headed East out into the scorching, eternally flat desert.

The angry sergeant remained standing. His big body swayed with the motion of the truck. "Macumber, Wells," said the sergeant, indicating two of the soldiers, "you two keep these specimens quiet." The man turned his attention on Miller and the others. "Now, why don't we have us a little chat?"

Miller almost didn't register the question. She was concentrating on the soldier called Wells. She studied his face. He seemed familiar. With that last name? Still, it was hard to tell who it was under all the black face paint. For his part, Wells studiously ignored her.

"Hey, wifey!" the sergeant shouted. Miller looked up. She had almost forgotten he was there. "You wanted to talk, big shot. Here's your chance. You go first."

"What do you want to know?" she asked, cautiously.

"Let's start with what the hell were you doing in the middle of a pack of zombies driving a stolen police cruiser?"

"We were trying to survive,
Sergeant!
" She looked him up and down, trying to decide if he was worth toying with. "We were being chased by a biker gang. The only way out was through the zombies."

"There was a biker gang after you?"

Scratch stared stoically at the sergeant. Darla ignored him. She was watching the zombies, those child-like eyes stretched wide with terror.

"Why were they chasing you?" the Sergeant asked Miller. And now he was studying Scratch more carefully.

"Why do bikers do anything?" asked Miller. "Because they thought they could rape and murder us and get away with it. Under the circumstances, they were probably right. Thank God we had these two men on our side."

The sergeant kept his gaze on Scratch for a moment longer. He let it go. He turned his attention back to Miller. "Okay, and what happened to your shoulder?"

This brought Miller up short. She wasn't in a hurry to explain what happened back in the jailhouse the day before. The whole thing was an embarrassing blur. God, had it only been yesterday?

The sergeant became impatient. "I asked you a question!"

"Oh, this? I cut myself shaving," said Miller. She'd had enough. "Look, dipshit, why don't you just tell us exactly where we're going and why you're restraining an officer of the law?"

The Sergeant reddened. "That's classified."

"Classified? What kind of bullshit answer is that?"

"It's the only answer you're going to get, lady." The soldier turned his attention on Scratch. "Hey, model citizen. Why don't you tell me why your kind of boys were chasing you?"

"Why don't you suck my cock, skeezix?" replied Scratch. He hawked up a wad of mucus, and cheerfully spat on the sergeant's boot.

The sergeant looked down at his soiled boot. He keyed the mic on his shoulder. "Stop the truck," he commanded.

The driver immediately braked, and the truck wavered as it came to a halt. The angry soldier brought his face close to theirs. He said softly, "Here's the way this is going to work. You're going to answer my questions truthfully and promptly, or I'm going to drop you off in the middle of the desert chained to these poor fucks," he said, gesturing to the zombie family. "How long do you think you'll last if I do that?"

Darla whimpered, the terror in her eyes growing worse. The sergeant focused on her. "What about you?" he asked her. "You got anything to say?"

"Don't let them things eat me," she begged.

"Why don't you tell me what's going on."

"All I know is that the lady sheriff had arrested Scratch here. When the zombies came, she had to let him go after he'd shot her. I was with the Blood Riders when they ran into her and this wimpy guy. They ran over one of us, so we went after 'em. Everything was going great until Scratch went AWOL and took us with him. That's when we drove into the zombies, and you burned them up for us. That's it."

"So the model citizen shot the sheriff. Huh." The soldier turned to Miller. "Wanna try this again?"

"Look," said Miller, "what happened, happened. Scratch saved our lives back there, and under these circumstances, that's all you need to know."

"What about you, cowboy," said the sergeant to Terrill Lee. "What do you have to say for yourself?"

"I know less than she does," Terrill Lee said. "Penny here came to me to fix up that shoulder after she got shot and got all that zombie crap all over her face and clothes and that open wound. I cleaned everything as best I could. She was really brave. So I patched her up and gave her something to wear, and right then…"

Suddenly he stopped, realizing that all the soldiers were now pointing their weapons at Miller.

The Sergeant said, "Are you telling us she's recently come into contact with zombie blood?"

Miller stared at Terrill Lee in disbelief.
Could he really be that stupid?

The sergeant keyed his mic on his shoulder again. "Marcus, get moving. One of the prisoners is contaminated. Get us back to base on the double."

"Yes, sergeant," came the static-filled reply. The truck lurched forward, steadily accelerating. They had to hang on to the walls to keep from bouncing sideways into the zombie family. The soldiers stayed away, their weapons trained on the prisoners. They seemed far more scared now. Scratch spat on the floor again, then closed his eyes and pretended to go to sleep.

"Nice work, Terrill Lee," whispered Miller. "No wonder you're my ex." Then she added, almost as an afterthought, "You are really one dumb fuck."

SEVEN

Young Corporal Wells moved Miller away from the others and shackled her closer to the three zombies. The creatures continuously pulled at their chains, hungry for flesh. "Damn it," Miller said, "Don't do this. I am not going to turn into one of those things."

The spooked Guardsmen remained unimpressed by her certainty. They held their weapons firmly pointed at her head.

"Terrill Lee, tell them I'm going to be okay."

Terrill Lee opened his mouth. He held it like that for a long moment but shut it again. "You will. Maybe. Aw, shitfire, honey, I don't know."

Miller had finally had it. She lit into him. "Why you squirrel-dicked, pasty-faced, whiney, passive-aggressive little two-pump chump! Everyone told me I was a damned fool for marrying you and boy howdy, were they freaking right. You never could stand up to a fight, not when it mattered. You dumb-assed redneck twit, I need your help—right
now
—and you can't even concentrate on your package long enough to find the cojones to back me up. What the fuck is wrong with you, anyway?"

Terrill Lee continued his fish imitation, opening and closing his mouth. "Babe, I wasn't there."

"Hell, no. Shitfire. You ain't gonna become one of them things, Sheriff," said Scratch. Spoken with conviction. "I
was
there. That blood you got on you, it's your own. You'll never get close enough to them zombies." He puffed out his chest and shot Terrill Lee a cocky smirk. "Anyways, not while I have anything to say about it."

A pissing contest? Miller stared at him for a long moment.
Men.
She smiled. "Look at that, Terrill Lee," she said. "Here I was, going to put Scratch in prison for thirty years, making his handsome sweet cheeks hugely vulnerable to even larger crowds of smelly tattooed men, and he has the guts to stand up for me. What's your fucking excuse you sad-eyed, skinny-gunned twerp?"

Some radio traffic interrupted the ongoing soap opera. "Firedog One-Eight, Firedog One-Eight. This is Crystal Palace. What's your status and ETA?"

The sergeant waived everyone to silence. He keyed the mic on his shoulder. "En route to base, sir. Be advised we've acquired three specimens as ordered. Also, we have reason to believe that we have a living, recently contaminated subject who is as yet unchanged. I repeat, unchanged. We've got her restrained and covered. ETA twenty-five minutes."

"That is outstanding, Sergeant! Haul ass. I want you here in fifteen minutes. And I also want that living subject still living when you get here. Changed or not. You copy that, Firedog One-Eight?"

"Roger, Crystal Palace," said the sergeant. He did something mysterious to his radio. Said, "Marcus, skip every red light between here and base and run over anyone dead or dumb enough to be stumbling through the crosswalk. We gotta get these specimens back in fifteen flat."

"Yes, Sergeant," said the driver. They accelerated yet again. The engine screamed like a stuck pig. After a few moments, a wicked shimmy began running through the entire body of the vehicle. They bounced high and low and sideways as the vehicle roared through the rocky desert. Miller looked out of the open back of the military truck. The wide ribbon of road was just a blur with a white line in it. She estimated that they were going just shy of one hundred miles per hour. She had a worrisome thought,
Would I even know it if I was changing? If I was about to die and come back?

The vibrations continued then accelerated as they hit the open highway. Miller's teeth began to chatter. Her stomach went cold and clenched with fear. What were they going to do, put her with the creatures? Experiment on her? She looked at the sergeant and said, "You're making a mistake."

"Won't be the first one," he said. He did not look up.

Miller grimaced. Scratch had his eyes closed and was pretending to take a nap again. She knew his mind was working. Terrill Lee studied his shoes as if they held the key to understanding abstract physics. Miller licked her lips. What a shitty couple of days this was turning out to be. With nothing else to focus on, she turned her attention to the group she'd now dubbed the Addams Family—the zombies chained in the opposite corner of the truck, perhaps a yard and a half away. It was the first time she had a chance to really look at a zombie up close and in person, rather than just blowing its fucking head off. They seemed so miserable. So
hungry.
Part of her felt sorry for them.

One of the zombies was a woman in a dress. Miller guessed her at around thirty years old, though in the condition she was in, she could have been any age from eighteen to seventy when she'd died. The woman had become that emaciated. She looked like she had become completely dehydrated, just shriveled up like a raisin. Her skin had a sickly green hue to it. If this had been a dead body—and Miller had seen more than her fair share of corpses as a small town Sheriff—Miller would have guessed that she had been dead for around a month. Her skin was like parchment, paper thin and torn in multiple locations. The woman also looked as if she had walked through a pane of glass. Her ear was missing, as was part of her scalp. There was a gash where her throat used to be. Miller guessed she'd had her throat torn out by some other zombie before coming back. Not a pretty way to go… or end up. Miller pictured herself, a zombie lady in a wedding dress, wandering through the sand, eternally empty and endlessly moaning. She trembled at the thought.

Miller turned her attention to the little girl. She wore overalls with flowers embroidered on the front pocket. By her height, Miller guessed she was about seven years old. She was in much better shape than the woman. Her skin was pale white but still soft looking, as if she had died within the last few hours. Her only visible wound was on her face. Her nose, lips, and chin were all missing, exposing bare teeth and nasal bones. No blood ran from her face. The ugly sight unnerved Miller. There was no reason for this to be happening, any of this. Miller was used to the damage that humans could inflict on each other, but whatever caused the zombie outbreak was unlike anything she had faced in her worst nightmare. The fact that this little girl was cut down just as her life had begun, well, Miller could accept that. Shit happens. But the idea that the little girl had then been reanimated into this… this ghoul? No, that was almost too much to handle.