The Hungry Dead (13 page)

After the shoot-out that killed the young policeman as well as the two perps, Sheriff Paul Harkinson and Deputy Bruce Barnes badly needed to unwind, so they were in a homey little coffee shop on the main street of Willard, two blocks from the county police headquarters. For privacy they had chosen a high-backed wooden booth in a corner, even though at the moment they were the only customers. Harkness was sipping coffee and munching on a cream-filled doughnut while Bruce was talking on his cell phone.

“But it rang thirteen times, Linda! If you'd keep decent hours, you wouldn't be dead to the world so late in the day!” He listened briefly, then got even more exasperated.

“Don't you sass me! I just wanted to let you know I'm okay, but I'll be working late. Will you make sure to eat something besides junk food?” He listened again, then jabbed the off button and plunked the phone on the table.

Harkness said, “Your daughter givin' you some crap, huh?”

“They talk about sweet sixteen! Well, she's more like snotty sixteen!”

Bruce sipped his coffee, then bit into his frosted doughnut as if biting someone's head off.

“Don't let her give you heartburn,” the sheriff said. “Kids today got a lot to deal with, and it makes 'em a little wacky, you know?”

“Tell me about it!” Bruce said. “Linda's got natural good looks, but she tries to make herself ugly. Rings in her nose and eyebrows, hair chopped up like it was done with an ax, and dyed purple. Weird tattoos on her legs and arms, and I don't want to know where else. Ginny is no help—she's a bigger mess than my daughter is!”

Sheriff Harkness nodded his head in empathy. He knew that Bruce was speaking the truth about his ex-wife, Virginia, who used to be a beautiful, dependable woman but was not that way any longer. She got hooked on painkillers while trying to recover from a car accident that had left her with debilitating back and knee pain and crippling fits of clinical depression. From oxycodone she had gone on to Percocet and crack cocaine. Bruce had tried valiantly to hang on to the marriage and had suffered through Virginia's failed attempts at rehab and her myriad of promises, crying jags, and false hopes, till finally he couldn't take it anymore. They had been divorced for over a year now, and though he had gained custody, Virginia's inroads into Linda's life were still a threat. He couldn't keep them entirely apart, and when Linda was with her mother, Virginia's lazy, self-pitying lifestyle seemed like “carefree fun” to Linda's addled teenage brain. To top it off, Bruce was paying a thousand dollars a month in alimony to Virginia because the court had ruled that the failed marriage had left her dependent upon him and unable to take care of herself; therefore, according to the court, her well-being was still largely his responsibility. This seemed grossly unfair to Bruce—and also to the sheriff, if truth be told. Bruce had argued that
he
was being punished because
she
had made herself into a drug addict, but the ruling still went against him. In spite of all this, he was struggling valiantly to get by on a policeman's less than lucrative salary and to cope with all the hazards of being a single parent.

Harkness said, “Today's society is sick. People who wanna be good parents are fightin' an uphill battle against drugs, booze, and sex.”

“Yeah,” Bruce agreed with a sigh. “I'm pretty sure Linda is sexually active. I tried talking with her about love and commitment, but she called me a dinosaur and laughed in my face.”

“Well, maybe she'll turn out okay somehow,” the sheriff ventured.

But Bruce went on worrying. “I know she's tried marijuana. I just hope to God she's not into anything worse.”

“You can't watch over her all the time, Bruce. You're just gonna have to let her make some mistakes and hope they ain't the really bad kind. This is harder for us cops than for most parents 'cause we have a tendency to sorta be control freaks. We wanna save people from themselves and keep 'em in line.”

“I shouldn't be crying on your shoulder,” said Bruce, “when we've got bigger fish to fry.”

The sheriff nodded in agreement and said, “Right now we've got us a situation we not only can't control, we don't even know what to do next—unless we get some kind of lead.”

“Do you think a general epidemic is gonna break out?” Bruce asked.

“Probably not,” Harkness said, dolefully mulling it over. “We don't know where Melrose's daughters may be headed, but we know it's to a secret lab someplace. As long as their cargo doesn't get loose, I don't think we're lookin' at the same kind of thing we had sixteen years ago. But I'd like to put an end to whatever they might be up to before we all go to hell in a handbasket.”

In the murky candlelight of the Hideaway, Bearcat and Slam sat at a round oaken table guzzling vodka straight from the bottle and wolfing down burgers and fries. Henry stood behind the bar where he could keep a close eye on his daughter through the serving window. She was still in the kitchen cooking up more food, and Honeybear was in there with her.

Bearcat suddenly barked, “Hey, Henry, you got a basement in this joint?”

“No, it's built on a slab.”

“Where the hell do you store stuff?” Slam demanded.

“In my shed out back,” Henry said. “I have a generator in there, if we could get to it.” He wouldn't mind having some light in his place, if for no other reason than it would make it easier for him to monitor the hoods' movements. And it would give them fewer dark, shadowy places from which to lurk and then pounce on his daughter.

“Hmmm . . . what else you got in that shed?” Bearcat mused.

“Like what?” Henry asked him.

“Like copper cable. Or better yet, fencing wire or barbed wire.”

“What for?”

“For me to know and you to find out.”

“There is some copper cable,” Henry admitted, trying not to lose his temper, for fear it would give Bearcat and Slam all the provocation they would need to start beating on him or raping Sally. “I guess about a hundred feet of it, for when I use the Weedwacker. None of the other kind of wire though. I never had any use for it.”

Slam said, “Why don't you have a cell phone or at least a portable radio?”

“I do have a cell phone,” said Henry, “but it's not getting a signal. I imagine a tower is down. I thought about having a radio in here, but my customers never want to hear anything but the jukebox or the TV.”

“Well, what good is the generator to us right now?” Slam asked gruffly. “It ain't gonna help us pull in any stations if the cable is out.”

“It'd give us power for the refrigerator and the electric lights,” said Henry.

“Fuck that!” Bearcat barked. “I got my own ideas what I wanna use the generator for!”

“There's a radio in my pickup,” Henry said. “If you want to risk going out there to listen to it.”

Bearcat said, “What we need is a shortwave radio so's we can listen to the police bands.”

Henry shook his head despairingly. “Power's out. Phones are out. I wish we had some kind of communication with the outside world.”

“Why?” Bearcat said sneeringly.

“So we'd know exactly what's happening,” said Henry. “How widespread
is
this thing? What are the authorities doing about it? And what do they advise
us
to do?”

Slam and Bearcat both snickered. Then Slam said, “
Piss
on the authorities! Me and Bearcat has permanently
run afoul
of 'em as the sayin' goes. Like I tol' ya, they find
us
here, we're as good as zombie meat.”

“
If
they find us,” Bearcat said. “Which they might not do right away, if all the communications is down.”

“They might think we'uns is poor innocent lambs!” Slam blurted drunkenly, and it sent him and Bearcat into paroxysms of laughter.

Finally Bearcat said soberly to everyone within hearing distance, “Don't believe it if anyone tells you we're hard men. We're just misunderstood. We try to do good, but no good deed goes unpunished. Right, Slam?”

“Right on, Bearcat,” Slam said, continuing the charade.

For the past week they had been trying to distance themselves from a horrendous crime they had committed in a suburb of Pittsburgh. It was a home invasion gone bad, but in their own minds they were not to blame—it was the fault of the victims. If the man of the house, Jonas Silverberg, hadn't tried to be brave and snotty, he'd still be alive to talk about it, and so would his wife and his two sons who had to die because of his own foolishness. Honeybear had met the Silverbergs in her square previous life as a nine-to-five receptionist for an insurance agent. She had filled out some of the computerized forms pertaining to their homeowners' policy, which revealed that they were temporarily keeping cash and jewelry at their house that was worth an estimated twenty-five thousand dollars. The fact that they happened to be Jewish made them perfect targets for her new skinhead buddies, and she figured she'd really get in good with them by handing them the Silverbergs on a silver platter. In fact she put it that way—“the Silverbergs on a silver platter”—when she told Slam and Bearcat all that she knew about them, including their home address, their work schedules, and their days off. The two skinheads chortled when she made an even bigger joke out of it, saying, “From now on we'll call them the Platterbergs.”

“You gotta get us in there,” Slam said. “They ain't gonna open the door to
us
. We look too fuckin' suspicious.”

“Don't be stupid,” Bearcat countered. “They know who Honeybear is. Cops'll track us all down through her. We gotta go in with masks on.”

“That means a nighttime job,” said Slam. “We bust our way in, and they won't know what hit 'em. Honeybear can stay in the car, and be our lookout and getaway driver.”

They pulled off the home invasion on a Tuesday, a couple hours after midnight, because Bearcat said it was best to rob people in the wee hours when they were all in bed, so nobody comes home and surprises you. Honeybear stayed outside in the car, ready to gas it and take off. Wearing red bandanas for masks, Slam and Bearcat kicked the Silverbergs' back door in, charged upstairs into the master bedroom, got the parents under control at gunpoint, and then rounded up the two kids. They tied and gagged the whole family except for the mother because they wanted her to lead them to the cash and jewelry, which Honeybear had told them was in a safe, and they wanted Mrs. Silverberg's hands to be free to work the combination. But she wouldn't talk, and she wouldn't budge. All she did was cry. So they took Jonas Silverberg's gag off and told him he better do what he was told or they would rape and kill his wife. That's when he called them “despicable assholes” and Slam pistol-whipped him, and Mrs. Silverberg jumped into the tussle, and in the flurry Slam's mask came off—so Slam shot her. Now the whole family had to be killed because they could describe Slam, and if the cops got Slam, they would immediately figure out that his accomplices were probably Bearcat and Honeybear. The two skinheads didn't want to keep on shooting people, for fear that the noise would attract attention, so they got knives from the kitchen, herded Mr. Silverberg and his kids down into the family room, and slit their throats. The bodies weren't discovered for two days, but the license plate number and the make of Honeybear's car were memorized by a woman walking her dog in the quiet of the night, and the three renegades had to go on the lam. They ditched and torched the car, but that didn't do much to take the heat off them.

Highly pissed because they hadn't glommed onto any of the cash and jewelry, Bearcat gave Honeybear a good beating as soon as they got themselves holed up in a fleabag motel. He felt that everything that went wrong was either the Silverbergs' fault or else Honeybear's fault for setting up such a bum job.

When Bearcat took a desperate chance on getting in touch with Drake and Bones, and Drake bragged about the big rig they were going to hijack, full of equipment from an outfit called M-R Electronics, it seemed like salvation—a chance to come up smelling like a rose, just like the rose in the emblem on the truck. But once again Bearcat had gotten drunk on the smell of somebody else's cork. The big rig and its promise of electronic gear was nothing but fool's gold. He had hoped that the cargo could be fenced for a ton of cash. But whoever heard of fencing a truckload of zombies?

Flipping a greasy burger on the grill, Sally said, “What did those two guys mean when they talked about you? You didn't willingly join up with them?”

“Hell, no, not at first,” Honeybear said. “I was Little Miss Goody Two-shoes, with a prim little job at an insurance agency—till Bearcat and Slam bopped in and robbed the joint with two other guys named Drake and Bones. They gagged me and tied my wrists and dragged me with them in the back of a van while they held up a couple more places! I was scared out of my wits. I wanted to make them like me so they wouldn't kill me, and I figured if I gave myself to them it wouldn't be as bad as being raped. Thinking about it like that, I got turned on in a weird way. There was a side of me that liked the things they did. They didn't take any crap from anybody, they weren't part of the rat race that I had always despised, and they showered me with the money and stuff that they stole.”

Sally was subtly trying to engage Honeybear in meaningful conversation, in hopes that she might make a connection with her and maybe turn her into at least a partial ally. In an attempt to draw the girl out, Sally said, “They say that even bad guys have their good side. Do you think that's true of Slam and Bearcat?”

“Well, to them I'm their ideal blond, blue-eyed Aryan woman. No man that I ever went to bed with in my old life had me up on that kind of pedestal. Or any other kind of pedestal whatsoever.”

“You're flattered by that?”

“I am, in a way. I admit it.”

Sally blinked and raised her eyebrows, then went back to pressing the sizzling burger patties with her spatula. Through the serving window, which provided her with a view out to the bar, she saw Slam gleefully pushing buttons on the dead, unlit jukebox, pretending to be selecting music. As if he were the record he had just played, he started singing a rock song badly off-key and dancing drunkenly by himself, hugging a bottle of vodka. Then Sally's father went by, eyeing Slam warily and carrying a little cardboard box over to the table where Bearcat was still sitting.

“You find the stuff?” Bearcat demanded.

Henry said, “Lead balls, black powder, and extra flints.”

“How about wadding?”

“It's in the box with the other stuff.”

“Bring me the weapon,” Bearcat ordered.

Still dancing and stumbling around hugging the vodka bottle, Slam called out, “Why you wanna piss around with it, Bearcat? It holds only one shot at a time, and what if it blows up in your face?”

Henry fetched the black-powder musket and handed it to Bearcat, who hefted it fondly. “I know what I'm doin',” he said confidently. “My grandpap had one of these. I just wanna see what it'll look like to blow them zombies' faces off with a big fat lead ball.”

With a loud clatter, he spilled the contents of the cardboard box out onto the tabletop.