Z-Burbia 3: Estate Of The Dead (4 page)

“I…I…I…,” Carly stammers then burst out crying.

“Well, shit, girlie,” the man says. “No need to blubber like that. I’s just playin’.”

He leans down close to her and Carly can see that his left eye is swollen shut and oozing yellowish liquid. She reaches up and touches his cheek.

“What happened?” she asks.

“Ain’t nothing,” the man says. “Got into a tussle. I won, but came away with this. It’ll heal up. Or it won’t.” He shrugs. “Don’t matter since I got a perfectly good one on the other side, right girlie?”

“Yeah,” she says, “you do.”

“Thank ya,” he grins. “No
w how’s about we get you up outta the crick and back to my cabin? Sound good?”

“No,” Carly says
, “I can’t move.”

“Can’t move?” the man asks then looks her over. He spies the leg. “Oh. That. Well, I’ll do the moving. All’s I need is for you to keep your mouth shut. It’s gonna hurt fierce, but you’s have to stay quiet. Understand?”

“Yeah,” Carly nods. She tries to smile, but her lips won’t obey.

“You having a fit?” the man asks. “Oh, never mind.” He crouches and scoops his arms un
der her. “On the count of three. One, two.”

He lifts and Carly doesn’t stay quiet. She starts screaming at the top of her lungs as the bone stretches the skin of her leg.

“Now that ain’t gonna do,” the man says.

The last thing Carly sees is his forehead coming at her face. Fast.

***

The pain drifts in and out of her dreams, but it’s the smell that brings her around.

The smell of cooking meat.

“There ya are,” the man s
ays. His face illuminated by a large fire set into a good sized stone hearth. “You been sleeping so long, wasn’t sure you’d come back alive or as one of those things.”

“One of…?” She trails off, the words unable to form from her dry throat.

The man smiles and fetches a cup on a table shoved into the corner of the room. Carly glances about and sees she’s in a small, wood cabin. A real cabin, not some prefab thing she used to vacation in. Vacation…? With who?

“You okay there, girlie?” the man asks as he lifts her head and puts the cup to her lips. She tastes the cold, clean water and sucks at it greedily. “Look like ya seen a haint.”

“Thank you,” she says as the cup is taken away. “What’s a haint?”

“A ghast, ghost, ghoulie,” the man says. “Where you from, girlie? You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

“I don’t know,” Carly says, “I can’t remember anything.” She thinks for a second. “Wait, what did you mean by one of those things?”

“Th
e dead folk,” the man replies. “The flesh eaters. Zombies. Like in them movies. The mountains is overrun with them.” He glances about the cabin. “But we’re safe here. For now. Don’t see too many up this way. Not unless some fool girl goes screaming her head off.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Ain’t no thing,” the man smiles. Carly is glad he’s helped her, but there’s something to that smile. He cocks his head. “What?”

“I don’t understand any of this,” she replies.

“Nothing to understand. Except that you have to do what you need to do to survive nowadays,” the man nods. “Whatever it takes. But I’m used to it. Been up here for years now.”

“Are you alone?”

“Not now, I ain’t,” the man smiles. That smile…

“But you have been?”

“Nah, I’ve had company. There’s always company when you go lookin’ for it.”

He gets up and goes back to the fire. He pulls an iron poker from the fire, looks at the glowing tip, and smiles.

“You say you don’t know your name?” he asks her as he rotates the poker in his hand. “That so?”

“I…I don’t remember,” she says
, “I don’t remember anything.”

“That’s good,” he says. “Very good. ‘Cause I have a name for you. It’s the name you were meant to have.” He walks over to her, poker still in hand. “Elsbeth. That’s your name.”

“I don’t think so,” Carly says, her eyes drawn to the glowing iron. “What are you doing with…? Hey. Hey! Why am I tied down?”

Carly realizes that her body is strapped to the cot she’s lying on. Before she can say anything else, the man jams a large, smelly cloth into her mouth. She tries to scream around it, but just chokes on the pungent material.

The blanket that’s covering her is torn back and Carly can see she’s completely naked. Her leg is splinted and bound, but that’s all that covers her. She looks back up into the man’s eyes, seeing the hunger there.

“Now, my sweet Elsbeth,
time we made you pretty,” he says. He starts to lower the poker to Carly’s belly then stops. “Damn, if I ain’t rude. I know your name, but you don’t know what to call me.” The smile. The smile. The smile. “You can call me…Pa.”

The poker is thrust flat against Carly’s
, now Elsbeth’s, abdomen and she shrieks against the gag until it is all too much.

All. Too. Much.

Pa smiles down at her as she screams and squirms and prays for it to stop.

“You know any good jokes,
Elsbeth?” he asks. “I love me some jokes.”

***

Z-Day plus one hundred twenty.

“Ain’t no game left in the woods, pa,” Elsbeth says as she kicks open the door of the cabin and throws down two dead crows onto the table. “Oh, who’s this? Didn’t know we had company.”

“Elsbeth, girl, this is your Uncle Jeb,” Pa says. “Come say hello proper. Show him what a good girl you are.”

The man sitting against the wall looks her up and down as he twirls something in his hand. Something metal, something glowing.

Elsbeth closes the door slowly and starts to take her shirt off, knowing what’s coming next.

***

Z-Day plus three hundred fifty-five.

“They killed him, Pa!” Elsbeth cries as she runs along the French Broad River. “They shot Uncle Jeb right in the eyehole!” Her face is scrunched up with rage. “I’ll kill all them! All them!”

“Shut it, girlie,” Pa snarls as he tries to keep up. He coughs and shivers at the pain in his chest and face. Reaching up, he worries at the hole in his right cheek and a hole that keeps getting bigger and bigger, smelling of rot and puss. “You’ll bring the dead down on us.”

Elsbeth looks around, her eyes scanning the woods. She shuts it. Doesn’t want to anger Pa. Not while he’s sick. Not while the green stuff keeps eating his face.

They don’t stop running until they hit I-26. Then they see the horde of Zs that shamble and shuffle between the wrecked cars that litter the interstate. Elsbeth ducks low, as does Pa and they crouch by the side of the road, waiting for their chance. After a few minutes, they see an opportunity and sprint across, scrambling up the hillside and back into the cover of trees.

A few Zs turn and start to follow, but they can’t get purchase on the loose soil. They stop after a few minutes and join their fellow undead, going back to the familiar artery of lives they can’t remember.

***

Z-Day plus three hundred seventy.

“What do we do now, Pa?” Elsbeth asks, huddled into the corner of the basement, a damp tarp wrapped around her to fight off the cold as Pa tries to get a fire going. “None of the houses have no foods left. We picked ‘em clean. No foods up in the woods, had to leave. No foods down here in the city. That mean we haves ta leave too?”

“Quiet,” Pa hisses.

“But I’s just
...”

“Quiet!” Pa snaps. “Listen!”

She quiets and hears what he hears. Screaming.

“Some woman needs help up there,” Elsbeth says.

“She does,” Pa says. Then smiles.

The smile.
The smile. The smile.

Elsbeth shudders.

“Let’s go help her,” Pa says.

They do.

They fight off the Zs that have the woman and her wounded husband surrounded. They help her carry him back to their basement. They help her have a seat on the floor by the fire. They help her watch as Pa bashes her husband’s brains out. They help her with her grief by bashing her brains out.

Then they help themselves.

To her.

Chapter Two

“Elsb
eth?” I say. “Hello? Earth to Elsbeth? You gonna help me here or what, dingleberry?”

“Sorry,” Elsbeth says. “I was dreamdaying.” She frowns. “Don’t call me a dingleberry. That’s shit that hangs from your butthole ‘cause you don’t wipe right. I know that.”

“I’m just messing with you,” I say. “Calm down. And it’s daydreaming, not dreamday...”

“You want my help or not, Long Pork?” Elsbeth frowns as she holds a board out to me.

“Yeah, yeah, sorry,” I say. “Call it whatever you want.”

Long
Pork. It’s what cannibals call human meat.

It’s also what my good friend, Elsbeth, calls me. My name is actually Jason Stanford, but I prefer to go by Jace. Like most things in her life, Elsbeth ignores what she wants to. So she calls me Long Pork. I let her because she’s saved my ass more times than I’d like to admit.

And she can kill me with her bare hands at any moment.

Especially since I only have one arm. Well, not technically true. I hav
e
one and a half arm
s
. My left arm, good ol’ southpaw, is fully intact. It has all parts, especially that handy-dandy, well, uh, hand. Makes for gripping things well. Which I am doing with this hammer.

The other arm is severed at the elbow. I did the severing. Not too bad of a job, if I do say so myself, thank you very much. Kinda had to. Since a Z took a liking to my right hand
and gave me a love bite. It was either chop off my arm or turn into a walking, moaning, slobbering, flesh-eating monster. Not much of a choice there.

So
now, eight months, three weeks, and four days later, I have an array of prosthetics that I can strap to Stumpageddon. Yep, I named my stump. It keeps me from curling into a ball and crying. Yet, even with a variety of hooks and clamps and spikes and stabby-stabby bladey things, I’m still a guy with one arm. Sure, Reaper and Dr. McCormick have done their best to outfit Stumpageddon, but the reality is that because of where the arm is severed I just don’t have the right leverage.

You ever have elbow fights as a kid? You know where you bend your arm so your hand touches your shoulder and wave your elbow at your friend while they do the same thing? It’s like that. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve learned how to fight, just in a totally different way than before.

Before I became an extra for The Pirate Movie, I had a bat I called The Bitch. The end was reinforced with long spikes driven through it. I could swing that thing and pierce some serious Z skulls. Dead went the Zs. But I don’t have that kind of leverage anymore. Now my go to weapon is a long spike that I thrust using the momentum from my shoulder. Kind of a lunge and thrust, pull back, lunge and thrust, attack.

It works. Just not as well as having two arms.

However, good old fashioned manual labor isn’t so bad. I don’t really need Elsbeth to help me as I nail the last few boards in this fence. I have my clamp attachment on. By extending or withdrawing my shoulder, I can work a short, wide clamp on the end. Helps me grip stuff like boards, or just brace things. I’ve gotten good enough with it that I can even twist the end and hold a nail.

No, the real reason I wanted Elsbeth to help is because she has been disappearing from work duties here in Whispering Pines. We’ve been rebuilding the subdivision I blew up about a year ago. I didn’t want to blow it up, but this guy Vance was all like, “Argh! I’m a psycho and I want your sh
it and I have nefarious plans!” I was all like, “Natural gas go boom, bitch! Suck it!”

Or something like that.

“What?” Elsbeth asks.

“Huh? I didn’t say anything,” I reply.

“You have been acting like you need to pee,” Elsbeth says. “That means you want to say something. Most people it means they need to pee. Not Long Pork.” She shakes her head. “Means he has something to say, but is too much of a pussy to say it.”

“Well, now that you’ve buttered me up, I guess I’ll spill it,” I say.

“I didn’t put butter on you,” she frowns. “I don’t eat people anymore. Why are you being so mean?”

“Whoa, whoa, it’s just an expression.”

“Stupid expression.”

“Yeah, I guess it is,” I say. “Wonder where it came from? Who was the first person to decide that you should put butter on someone? What the hell is that
…”

“Long Pork!” Elsbeth shouts.

I can hear a few hammers close by stop. People get twitchy when Elsbeth shouts. Not without reason. She is one badass cannibal savant even if she has given up her taste for thigh meat.

“Sorry,” I say. I set the hammer down by the stack of fence boards. “I do have something to say.” The impatient way she looks at me hurries my ass up. I think she’s actually ready to pop me one. “You’ve been going off on your own a lot lately. Just wondering what’s up. In fact, I’m not the only one wondering.”

“I’m looking for cannies, like you all want,” Elsbeth says quickly. She had that one planned. I don’t buy it.

“We’ve cleared out all of North Asheville as well as downtown,” I say. “There are still random survivors in West Asheville, as well as out in East Asheville. But you’re going south.”

Elsbeth just stares.

“And I think
Lourdes and her people have South Asheville covered,” I continue. “They’ve said so. So, still wondering where you’re going.”

“How do you know I’m going south?” Elsbeth asks, her head tilting to the side. You know, like a curious lioness just before she pounces on some poor, wounded animal.

“Um, well… I guessed?”

“You’re a bad liar, Long Pork.”

“So are you.”

Ooooh, she doesn’t like that.

“Who says I’m lying? I’m looking for cannies. That’s what I said. It’s true.”

It’s my turn to give her a “look
.” It isn’t anywhere close to as effective as her look.

“Where are you really going, El?” I ask bluntly. No time for the Jace and Elsbeth dance. I’m tired.

Her face scrunches up and I tense my entire body, not sure where she’s going to hit me. Then she relaxes and sits down on the stack of fence boards. They shift and slide out from under her and she falls on her ass. Before I can even think to laugh at the slapstick, she shoots me a death glare that takes about eight years off my life expectancy.

I do not laugh. No laughing.

Once she has her embarrass rage under control, she shakes her head and sighs.

“I’m following the girls,” she says.

I have a feeling she expects me to know what this means.

“Not following you,” I say.

“Yes, they are,” she replies.

Shit. Now I’m really lost. I grab a seat next to her.

“Start over,” I say. “What the fuck is going on?”

“The girls that have been following me and watching us,” Elsbeth says, her voice intoning
that I’m a complete moron. “I follow them. They don’t know.”

Too many questions go through my head.

“Okay, we’ll get to the ‘watching us’ part later,” I say. “Where do you follow them to?”

“That big house,” she says
, “with all the fields and woods around it.”

“Going to have to narrow it down for me,” I say. “That describes a shit ton of houses around Asheville. Every douchebag that had Biltmore envy built one of those.”

“Yes, that place,” she smiles. “You’re smart, Long Pork.” She punches me on the shoulder. My confusion is what distracts me from the pain.

“El, I love you like family
...”

“Because I am family,” she says, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. She has trust issues.

“Yes, exactly, you know that,” I say. “Stella and me and the kids, we all think of you as one of us. Hence the ‘love you like family’ words that came out of my mouth. Can I finish?”

“I don’t think so,” Elsbeth says. “You’re always talking, talking, talking. It’s what everyone says.”

This is not going well.

“Right. I get that,” I sigh. “But what ar
e
yo
u
talking about? What big house?”

Her brow furrows and she puts a hand to my forehead. “Heat must be stroking your brain, Long Pork. Because you already guessed which house.”

“Nope, no heat stroking going on,” I smile. “Wait…the Biltmore? Is that the house?”

“Yeah, stupid. You said that. You sure you aren’t stroking heat?”

“I’m sure,” I say.

“Stuart knows that,” Elsbeth
says. “Why didn’t you ask him?”

James “Don’t Call me Jimmy” S
tuart is Whispering Pines’ Head of Defensive Ass Kicking. I gave him that name. It fits. Fifty-something, ex-Marine gunnery sergeant, he has a team of ass kickers that keep Whispering Pines safe from the crazies out there in the post Z-Day world. Not that there are a ton left. We’ve either cleared them out or they’ve come and joined us here or at the Grove Park Inn.

Or Reynolds Mountain. Fucking Reynolds Mountain…

“Stuart knew where you were going?” I ask.

“Yeah, of course,” Elsbeth says. “I thought you sent him after me. He’s been following me for a week. He’s good, but not that good.” She leans in close, looks around to make sure we aren’t being listened to, which we aren’t since everyone else is busy working and putting the finishing touches on the dozens of houses we’ve spent months rebuilding. “Sometimes
,” she giggles. Actuall
y
giggle
s
. It’s a little creepy. “Sometimes, I go in crazy directions just to make him hike everywhere. He’s old, he gets tired, it’s funny.”

“Sounds hilarious.”

“It is!” she guffaws and slaps me on the shoulder. Ow.

“O
kay, we have established location. Now how about the why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you following the girls?”

“Because they are watching us, stupid,” Elsbeth says and stands up. “I’m getting Stella. There’s something wrong with you. You’re supposed to be the smart guy and you’re not being smart. I’m worried.”

I get up quickly. “No, I’m fine. Seriously. It’s just we’re talking in circles. It’s making me dizzy.” I hold up my hands before she can respond. “Not physically dizzy, just mentally dizzy. I’m not actually dizzy, okay?”

“O
kay,” she says, “I get that. I’m not stupid.”

“No, no you are not,” I say. “The girls…who are they?”

Elsbeth’s face goes dark. She twists her lips about. “I don’t know. But I do. But I don’t. I see them in my dreams.”

In her dreams. Shit.

“Like Ms. Foster? Like how you see her in your dreams sometimes? Singing?” I ask.

“Yeah, like that,” Elsbeth nods. “So I follow them when they are done watching and they go home.”

“You think the Biltmore is their home?”

“Yeah,” she nods
, “I’ve watched them go in there.”

“Whoa, hold the fuck on…you go onto the estate?” I ask. “How? The place is covered in like a thousand Zs.”

She shrugs. “Yeah. Not that hard.”

She’s holding something back. There is key information just waiting to be told. I hate it when someone keeps shit from me. Drives me nuts.

“Listen, El, if you know...”

Our phones chime. Incoming texts.

Landon Chase is Head of IT and he made sure our Wi-Fi network was one of the first things reestablished in Whispering Pines. It’s made the rebuild way easier.

“Need you, please. Can’t make C
ounsel meeting. I have the shits.”

Stella. My wife. Board Chairperson for the Whispering Pines Homeowners’ association. As leader of the HOA she is supposed to go to the Grove Park and meet with Lourdes Torres (commander of the private military contractors), Ed Lassiter (leader of the Labor Force), Big Daddy Fitzpatrick (head of the Farm), and Critter (Big Daddy’s brother and leader of whatever the fuck he’s leader of). It’s the monthly Survivor Counsel meeting.

“Why does she need me?” Elsbeth asks.

We find out quickly as we walk into my house, one of the very first that was rebuilt from the many scraps and components of the aba
ndoned neighborhoods around us.

“Hey, b
aby,” Stella says from the couch, “I’m sick. It was the apples.”

“I told you they were too green,” I say.

“But they tasted so good,” she sighs. “Can you go in my place today?”

“Sure,” I say
, “I’ll get cleaned up. What’d you need Elsbeth for?”

“She’s going with you,” Stella says.

“I can take care of myself,” I snap.

“Yes, yes you can,” Stella sighs
, “but I’d feel better if she was with you. Okay?”

“Oooh,” Elsbeth smiles. “I can go swimming!” She claps her hands and does a little dance.

“Can I go?” Greta, our fourteen year old daughter asks from the walkway above. “I want to go swimming. And Tansy and Becka will be there.”