THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER Book 1: Bleeding Kansas: A Novel Of The Zombie Apocalypse (21 page)

I’m wondering
whether to back the truck in first or jump out and address this now when the Goth kid comes out with his katana. I stop the truck to let him cross the lot towards the two. He draws his blade from the scabbard along his back, makes a show of whooshing it around over his head.

“I never caught his name,” I say.

“That’s Trenton,” says Krystal. “He wants everyone to call him Oni-bara now. Says it means ‘Devil Rose.’ More like Devil Dork! I never understood those anime freaks.”

The wo
man makes a course correction to intercept Devil Dork. An angry and wanting moan rises from her gore-crusted lips. Her companion adjusts likewise, rocking sideways, focused on the tall, pale young man wearing the long black coat in the middle of May in humid, sun-baked Kansas.

Devil Dork brings the
blade down to one side of the woman’s neck. She falls to the asphalt in halves, her organs and entrails flopping wetly to the pavement. The man behind her hesitates. His head is back, sniffing the air. He’s backing away when the blade goes through his neck. His head tumbles from his shoulders to the parking lot. His body falls backward and lands across it, putting one shoulder up.

“Great,” says Krystal.
“As if it didn’t stink enough out here already.”

I’m backing the truck up next to Randy’s at the loading bay. I kill the engine and we get out. Going up the concrete stairs along the side I see Randy’s flatbed already has fryers and frozen turkeys
stacked in a spill of meltwater. Five cases of burger patties sit off to the side. It’s backed in over the lower steps so we have to climb under the rail to get up.

“D
idn’t you have some shopping to do?” says Krystal. “Now’s your chance.”

“Yeah, I do,” I say, looking around the area.
It’s a broad lot arcing over either side of the large graded knoll the Supercenter is on, Whatever comes up here will have to lean into the incline. It won’t be easy. But it won’t stop them, either. Worse, we won’t know we’re surrounded until too late.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” says Krystal. “We’ll be right here.”

Krystal goes to help the boys in the freezer. They’ve found a dolly and are using it to stack the boxes of patties and ground beef from the freezer. Wide puddles of water cover the floor but it doesn’t smell like anything is turned—yet. Then again, it’s hard to tell with the smell of dead people in the air.

“Where’s that chick I saw earlier?” I say, looking in on them.

“Marta’s s’posed to be bringin’ us some ice from up front,” says the guy in the trilby hat. “You might wanna go check on her.”

“Yeah, will do.
What’s your name, by the way?”

“
Timcat. Like ‘tomcat,’ but with Tim.”

Jesus. “Great.” I nod to the guy in the Chiefs hat.
“You?”

“I’m Randy.”

“All right. Move fast. Oni-boner or whatever his name is just got two walkers outside. You can bet more are on their way.”

Randy and
Timcat laugh. “I hear ya, boss! We’ll handle it!”

I push out the
service doors into the main of the store. The heat, the stench, is gagging. Like Kansas City outside the hotel this stench has layers to it. Just when you think you’re getting used to it a fresh wave of putrefaction billows over and it’s all you can do to keep your stomach from turning inside out.

A grunting and shuffling to my right draws my attention to the man in the cargo shorts
struggling towards me. His difficulty is exacerbated by having only one working leg. Apparently whatever got him worked one side; even his arm has had so much muscle chewed and sucked away it’s useless. He’s managed to pull himself up along the shelves on the back wall and hop-shuffle towards the sound of our activity.

I draw my
panga and walk over to the half-man. Flashing back to Rebecca’s smooth motion with her gun, hitting her target along the sweet spot of the curve, I raise the blade and divest the half-man of his one good arm. The fine silvery deluxe claw hammer I found in a tool box in the garage is in my other hand; I bring the blunt end crashing between his eyes before he has a chance to drop. He goes over backward, cracking the back of his skull for good measure as he hits the floor.

These
exertions don’t make this easy but I have to control my breathing, if only so I can hear what’s around me. I turn my head slowly to take in my surroundings, waiting for my panting to quiet. Eventually it’s enough that I can hear the stirrings down the various aisles across the store.

Goddamn it, let’s just get that underwear
and get out of here!

Panga
in hand, I jog down the wide aisle separating the grocery from the dry goods. There are display islands in the middle of this aisle. I’m come to the clothing section and the racks enclose the right side of the aisle like little banyan trees concealing the predators beneath.

A hand claws at me from beneath one of these and I miss a step, my foot coming down on that hand. But that gives the other hand a chance to grab at my boot.
It’s a small blue hand, with stubby blue fingers and yet I can feel its death-rigored grip through the leather.

I pull my
panga and swing but the child is wrapped around my boot now—a little thing with a yellow ribbon in her hair and the fatty child skin chewed away on one side of her face. An eyestalk hangs eyeless from one socket but the muscles about her jaw are intact and working. Her little baby teeth are bearing down hard on my boot. I lift up my foot and kick at the display in the middle of the aisle. A small ribbon of intestine trails beneath her waist; she has no legs, not even bones.

Her teeth bear
down harder.

I pull my hammer an
d smack it into her yellow-ribboned hair. The pain in my foot intensifies and I snap-grip the handle in my wrist as if the hammer was a drumstick and her head the snare. Her little skull cracks open and her body falls limp.

R
igor clamps her little jaw fast to my boot. I shuffle towards the end of the center-aisle display. No one is in this food aisle to the left so I ease towards it, propping my backside against an end-cap shelf so I can figure out how to get little Brittney off of me.

I grab a fistful of her hair and try pulling her head back. I see the gaps in her front incisors; if her adult teeth were in—hell, even if her originals were still there—they would have broken the skin of this boot. I need thicker boots, steel-toed.
And thick socks. Save for that strip of intestine (which has since slithered off the rib bone it was caught on) the girl’s torso appears to be hollowed out. No insides, no stomach to even hold her meal and yet she crawled along, with this sick, pointless hunger. How many more are scuttling along like this out there?

When I found this deluxe claw hammer in the garage I thought it might double as a convenient tool with which to break into things. I never thought I’d be fitting the broad tines through the top gap of a small child’s teeth. The rotten blood in her ruined gum runs down my boot, adding one of those special nuances to the boxed-in stink in the air that makes me gag.

It’s when I see the tracks of tears through the dirt on the good side of this child’s face that I unload my breakfast into the aisle. I jerk the claw-end up hard and snap this flesh-and-blood reminder from my boot, this notice of how our position on the food chain has adjusted. Just as lions think nothing of culling the young of a zebra herd, something got hold of this once-five-year-old charmer in a pink Disney Princess T-shirt and made a meal out of her. And in turn made her into this….

I let out a furious yell. Goddamn it, come
at me, you ugly, fucked-up shits!

I p
ush myself away from the endcap, stepping carefully to the side, not wanting to slip, not wanting to see the remains of the child face up in a puddle of vomit. Unable to rid myself of the sight of her remaining eye, the terror and agony of a little girl’s last moments sealed within its dry, dead glaze…

…Claire. Jesus.
I think of my daughter Sibyl….

I listen and
hear the slow shuffle-slide throughout the store, coming down any of the dozens of dark, hot, stinking aisles. I’ll have my chance with whoever-whatever killed this girl soon enough.

I
’m jogging down the middle of the aisle, rounding the corner of the Men’s section. I find my size in boxers and grab five three-packs. I pick up some socks and colored T-shirts. I need something to carry this so I step out into the broad main aisle between the main goods and the checkout lanes and look for the chrome tree with the cloth shopping bags. There’s one by the outside corner near the shuttered entrance.

Now I’ve got one arm free. Time to find Marta. I see movement in the pharmacy area. I jog down the aisle and find myself face to rotting face with the most distressed-looking dead person I’ve seen yet.

He’
s in his late teens. I don’t see the terror of his death so much as he looks…green. His chin-to-crotch gore bib glistens with bright yellow gobbets like crumbs of wet rancid popcorn. He staggers towards me. I swing the panga but instead of taking off his upraised arms—which he doesn’t seem to have strength to raise—I slash his throat clear back to the spinal column. The rust-brown corpse gravy oozes thickly through the flap, his already discolored face paling visibly as it leaves his skull.

I don’t want to step up to him without
first taking off his arms and he won’t hold them up for me. Dropping my bag I put both hands to the handle of my panga and swing a hard chopping blow between his shoulder and elbow on either side. His limbs tumble to the linoleum, rank blood splatting from his stumps. Instead of charging me in a rage, though, he backs off, moaning miserably. I draw my hammer, switch hands with my panga. I do the same snare drum snap with the hammer as I’d done with the girl. He falls to his knees and maybe I’m seeing things but his dead mottled face looks relieved,

“Another one of those, huh?” says a sharp-toned female voice behind me. I turn to see Marta, carrying a cloth shopping bag of her own. “I dropped four of them on my way here.
Looked sick as dogs.”

I’m looking around the pharmacy area. It occurs to me I might need something while I’m here.

“Don’t even think about it,” says Marta. “I got all the good shit.”

“Good for you,” I say. I go to the vitamins and start scooping bottles of Vitamin C supplements into my bag.

“What the hell you want that shit for?”

I go to the aspirin aisle and scoop the shelves there. I consider getting another bag, maybe a cart.
On the other hand, there’s plenty of places to loot between here and Colorado Springs. We really need to finish this up and hit the road….

“Wait!” Marta says as I turn to go.
I stop and she runs up to me. I resume walking as she catches up. “Look, you don’t have to be all anti-social and stuff. I’m not gonna give you grief like those other little show-offy shits.”

“Nice to know.
I take it you’re not bothering with the ice?”

“
Fuck that! Old Man Kerch got plenty of ice and everything where he is. We’ll get the runty and the rotten and the leftovers down at the high school, like since we got corralled in there.”

“You’re telling
me
this?”

“C’mon. Everyone knows you don’t
wanna be here. Including Kerch, I imagine. Better watch your shit, is all I’m sayin’. By the way, was that you hollerin’ a few minutes ago?”

“I thought all you were saying was I’d better watch my shit.”

“Hey, look, those four I killed? I’m not sayin’ I took ‘em on at once. I mean, I’m not sayin’ you—”

“
Shhh! Listen!”

It’s a
heavy flop-slide, flop-slide. A clattering as the thing gets caught in one of the circular racks of clothing.

“Oh, God,” says Marta. “That thing sounds huge.”

The morbidly obese woman pushes aside the racks like a squat Tyrannosaurus Rex pushing aside trees to get to its prey. Her curly white hair is a nauseous pale yellow from the dead scalp showing beneath but at least the rest of her looks more or less normal. That is, normal about her head. Discounting the red, gore-clotted teeth and mouth, and the rage to rip, rend, and feast in her face.

The rest of her as seen through the streaming rags of her muumuu is a horrible sea of red-yellow hole
s in a wide ocean of pale, quivering flesh. Globs of rank, yellow fat fall from some of the wounds, especially the one opened in that broad, naked fleshslide flopping over her privates.

“
God, no!” and now it’s Marta’s turn to give up her breakfast.

I bring the
panga up and slice it hard through the middle of the woman’s skull. It goes in but not deep enough; it’s sticking. Her arms reach out for me and I lean into the blade and push her back. The blade slices further down the middle of her face, squeaking through the groove it carves through her skull. Finally all 300 pounds of this woman spill over. We jump back barely in time as glistening fatty tissue like bright yellow corn kernels in red gelatin bursts forth from all those bite wounds, ripped wider by the heavy woman’s impact to the floor.