Zombie Pulp (32 page)

THE MATTAWAN MEAT WAGON

The kid’s name was Blaine. He had heart, but his head was no good. Naïve as all hell and Cabot took every opportunity he could find to remind him about that. About how things worked and his place in the larger scheme of things and how he better not fuck up because too much was riding on it.

“I don’t get it, though,” the kid said. “Why me? Why do I pull something like this? Did I piss somebody off? I mean, shit.”

Leaning up outside the warehouse door while the meat was loaded in the back of the truck, Cabot lit a cigarette and sighed. “Everybody gets a shot, kid. It’s nothing personal. But in Hullville we all pull our share. You, me, everyone. I make this trip once a month.”

“Yeah, but in the back of the truck—”

“You don’t worry about what’s in the back of the truck.”

Cabot knew the kid wasn’t liking it, knew he thought maybe it was a little barbaric and maybe more than a little uncivilized. But those words had lost their meaning here in the brave new world. Ever since Biocom started sweeping people into the grave and waking ‘em back up again, things had changed. Morality, ethics, humanity…abstract concepts. The country was a cemetery now.

No, he wasn’t going to beat that drum.

The kid wasn’t real bright, but he wasn’t that stupid. Cabot wasn’t going to remind him what his life had been like before a patrol found him out there in the Deadlands and brought his sorry ass into Hullville. How the town had patched him, smoothed out his rough edges, put food in his belly, a pillow under his head and a roof over him. They did it because they needed him and he needed them and he seemed like an all right kid.

The Council did right by him.

And now, favor for favor, it was time to earn his keep.

Chum came out of the warehouse, his overalls grimy, his eyes looking like open wounds that wanted to bleed. “Okay, Cab. You’re loaded. Take it easy.”

“That’s my way,” Cabot sad, grinding out his cigarette and watching the fog coming in off the lake.

Chum hooked his elbow, said, “I mean it, Cab. Watch the kid. Watch him.”

“Sure.”

Then Chum was gone and Cabot was standing there feeling a little weak in the knee. He cleared his throat of fuzz. “Okay, kid. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Blaine kept trying to swallow but it just wasn’t happening. He froze up and Cabot took him by the arm and led him over to the steel-reinforced cab of the big Freightliner.

“Relax, kid,” he said. “Just pretend you’re delivering beef to the butcher’s. Because that’s exactly what you’re doing.”

*

It was funny, Cabot got to thinking as he drove. Just five years ago the world was full of cities with people in them and now there were just a lot of graveyards and ghost towns out there swarming with the walking dead. A few far-flung burgs like Hullville and Moxton, walled-up medieval towns protecting themselves against a coming siege. Once humanity ruled the Earth, now they hid in ratholes and crossed their fingers, made offerings to the Wormboys to keep them happy.

After the gates were closed behind them, Hullville faded into the fog and there was desolation. Ruined little towns and collapsing farmhouses, overgrown fields and wrecked cars, overturned trucks. Day-glo skull-and-crossbone signs set out, warning the unwary away from the Deadlands. Not much else. Just the fog and the night and whatever waited in it.

“How far?” Blaine wanted to know.

“To the drop-off?” Cabot shrugged. “Twenty miles. We gotta go slow in this soup. Be a real pisser if we crashed into an old wreck and had to hoof it. That would be a real hoot.”

“It got a name? This place?”

“Not anymore. Just a ghost town now.”

Cabot drove on, feeling the Freightliner purring beneath him. She was solid and steady with a 220 Cummins under her hood. Medium-duty, she was small compared to some of the rigs he’d handled, but she’d do in a pinch. The cab had been reinforced with riveted steel plating and the side windows weren’t much more than gunport slits now, the windshield only slightly larger, all of it shatter-resistant and impact-resistant plexiglass. The cab was armored like a tank and with where they were going that was a good thing.

The fog grew thicker, tangling and twisting, flying past them in fuming pockets and sheets. Got so they couldn’t see much out there in the headlights but the jagged contours of gnarled black trees, a few rusting cars on the side of the road. Nothing else but that mist, enclosing and enveloping, blowing out at them like steam from a pot. Now and again, Cabot spied shapes and shadows moving through it but he didn’t dare mention it. Kid was getting nervous. Starting to shift a lot in his seat, looked like he was about to have a litter of puppies.

“Why do you do it, though?” Blaine asked him.

“This? Because I was a truck driver before and that’s what I’m good at. You need a load run through hard country, I’m the guy for the job. I ain’t worth a shit at anything else.” Cabot told him how it was in the old days, running freezer trucks of Texas beef up from Kansas City, flatbeds of harvesters into Boise, tankers of hi-test down to Little Rock. “Been everywhere and hauled everything, kid. This ain’t so different. Not really.”

Blaine studied the rack of pump shotguns. “Oh, it’s different, I think.”

Cabot shrugged. Maybe the kid wasn’t so dumb after all.

He drove on, cutting through the fog, keeping the truck in creeper gear all the way. Just too damn much wreckage and debris on the roads. They’d used a big loader a few years back to sweep all the wrecks into the ditch or onto the shoulder, but now and again some fool tried to cross the Deadlands or skirt them and he plowed his pick-up into a rotting hulk and created yet another driving hazard.

Blaine sat up straight, looked out his window port, tried to catch something in his rearview. He stared at Cabot. “You see that?”

“What?”

Kid swallowed. “I don’t know…I thought I saw some woman standing there by that wrecked van. Looked like she was holding a kid.”

“Out here?” Cabot stepped on the accelerator, got them moving a bit quicker. “Ain’t no women or kids out here.”

“But I thought—”

“Maybe you saw something, but it sure as hell wasn’t a woman and what she was holding was no kid. You know better than that.”

“But she didn’t look…
bad.”

“Some of ‘em don’t, not until you get up close and see their eyes, smell the stink coming off ‘em.”

There he went being fucking naïve again. Jesus. Kid knew the score, all right. He’d gotten his ass into a bind out in the Deadlands when he and some other survivors tried to slip through in a van. They’d blown a tire outside Carp River of all places. That town was just as infested with Wormboys as a dead dog was with maggots. And, yeah, the comparison
was
appropriate. The kid got away, but the others were butchered out there. He hid out by night, ran by day for over a week. That’s when a patrol from Hullville out mopping-up stragglers came across him and brought him back—

Cabot jerked the wheel to the right to avoid a smashed minivan and nearly put them right into an overturned Greyhound bus rising from the ditch like a missile from a silo. He jockeyed the truck a bit, jerked the wheel this way and that, got her under control. Just as he did, a blurred form appeared out of the fog. They both saw it for maybe a split second before it thudded off the Freightliner’s grill and was gone.

“Christ!” Blaine said. “You’re gonna kill us!”

Cabot laughed. “Don’t worry kid. I could thread a fucking needle with this baby. Relax.”

But the kid was past relaxing and Cabot saw it.

He couldn’t seem to sit still like his shorts were full of ants. He was tapping his fingers rapidly on his knees, shifting around, peering out the port of his window. Cabot could hear him breathing real fast like he was ready to hyperventilate. There was a sheen of sweat on his face.

The radio crackled and the kid jumped.

There was static, then: “Seven? You alive out there? Talk to me.”

Cabot grabbed the mic. “Hey, Chum. We’re about ten minutes out.”

“How’s that fog?”

“Like soup.”

“Anything to report?”

Cabot peered out into the soup. “Not much. We got a wrecked bus that’s a hazard. Seen a couple stragglers, no numbers, though. Sweet and clean.”

There was silence for a moment. “How’s your guest doing? How’s Blaine?”

Blaine sighed and shook his head.

“He’s not liking it much, Chum,” Cabot said, winking at the kid in the dim cab. “Sitting over there with a sour look on his puss like he’s got about seven inches of cruel loving up his ass and he can’t shake it loose.”

Chum giggled over that. “Okay, don’t be a stranger, Cab. Out.”

“Why’d you have to say that?” Blaine asked Cabot. “It sounds gay.”

But Cabot never answered him because in the back of the truck there was a sudden thudding sound, a thumping. Then something which might have been a hand slapping against the rear door, a low moaning like someone was in pain.

Blaine had balled his hands into fists now. He was shaking.

“Just our cargo, kid,” Cabot told him, grinning. “They must be waking up back there. Dope must’ve worn off. It does that. We better push it, get our piggies to market.”

*

It began with a microbe in Clovis, New Mexico.

A robotic satellite called BIOCOM-13 was sampling the upper atmosphere for microorganisms of possible extraterrestrial origin. Somewhere during the process, it found the microbe, analyzed it, sealed it in a vacuum jar, then proceeded to get cored by a rogue meteorite. Long before a maintenance crew could get up there, BIOCOM-13 fell into a rapidly decaying orbit and plunged to Earth.

It crashed outside Clovis, its sample jars bursting upon impact. Several were bacterium of terrestrial origin, a few exotic mold spores, and a virus. The virus would come to be known as
Biocom
after the satellite. The virus, it was later learned, was not from Earth. It had drifted here, scientists theorized, perhaps stuck to a rock or a speck of cosmic dust, on a trip through deepest space that might have lasted ten-thousand years or ten million.

It probably would never have made it down if the satellite hadn’t grabbed it.

NASA exobiologists had long said that the possibility of pathogenesis resulting from contact with an alien microbe was minimal. That extraterrestrial agents such as bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and multicellular parasites evolved differently and would share no common biochemical or cellular traits with terrestrial types. Ergo, it was more conceivable for a human being to get infected with Dutch Elm Disease or wheat rust than an alien microbial agent. But Biocom was a virus. And NASA had left viral agents out of the loop. Viruses have no cellular machinery of their own; they convert that of the host organism to reproduce themselves. So a virus is a virus is a virus, regardless of where it comes from. It adapts to any chemistry.

And nobody knew where Biocom came from.

First contact was in Clovis and from there it spread in every conceivable direction, mimicking pneumonic plague and putting two thirds of the world’s population into the grave within six months. But they didn’t stay there.

They started rising.

They got out of their graves, feeding on the dead and the living and spreading the virus like the common cold. If you got bit, you died. And if you died, you came back with a whole fresh slate of culinary impulses.

Of course, nobody believed it at first.

Zombies? The dead rising? Utter bullshit. File it away with those aliens on ice at Roswell and Bigfoot shitting in the Oregon woods. But the stories did not go away: they proliferated. From Florida to Maine, Michigan to Texas, the dead
were
rising. And it wasn’t long before videos of the same showed up all over the internet. One in particular was posted to YouTube. It got so many hits it crashed the server.

What it showed was Clovis, New Mexico.

At first glance, the grainy video taken with a night-vision device looked almost comical, like something from a Gary Larson cartoon about the living dead: men in bathrobes and fuzzy slippers, women in fluffy nightgowns with curlers in their hair, all wandering the streets in the dead of night. Then some daylight footage was added and things got spooky. Men, women, children. Some stark naked and some dressed in burial clothes, pallid, decaying, infested with vermin. They were rising from cemeteries and crawling free of mortuary slabs and morgue drawers. Their faces were gray and seamed, their eyes flat dead white or lit a lurid red and filled with a cunning, evil intelligence, narrow teeth jutting from shriveled black gums, chattering and gnashing, looking for something to bite.

This is when people started to worry.

And when they saw the video of the naked little boy with the glaring black autopsy stitching running from throat to crotch feeding on the dead cat or the bloated woman breastfeeding her swollen, blackened infant while grave maggots wriggled in her dirt-clogged hair…well, panic ensued. The authorities denied it all, but still the stories spread and nobody believed what they were told because by then, they had all seen the walking dead. Biocom overflowed the graveyards and deceased loved ones came washing out, knocking at doors and windows in the dead of night with grim appetites.