Post-Apocalypticon, page 15
part #2 of Apocalypticon Series
The result of it all: the longer someone had been a duster, the more grotesque he looked; the more his skin had been burned away, and the more pain he was in...and the more furious he was.
The dusters that closed in on Ben now were in severely advanced stages of hardened rot.
“Not good, not good, not good, not good,” Ben said, his heart racing, fear clutching at his chest. “Faster, horse!” he cried, kicking his heels into the horse’s side. “Faster!”
But the horse was tired, hadn’t been properly rested in days, and instead of going faster, it slowed. The dusters closed in. “Fuck!” Ben exploded. He yanked the shotgun out of its holster and leveled it at the nearest duster, only about ten feet away now. He pulled the trigger, and the buckshot exploded through the fog. It caught the duster square in the chest. The monster jerked and stumbled backward from the force, but the shot didn’t even break skin. The duster righted itself and lunged at the horse. Ben lifted his left foot, moving it out of the way, and the duster slammed into the horse’s haunch, right where his ankle had been, hitting it with full force. The horse stumbled sideways, whinnying and whining, its hooves scrambling sideways across the hardpan and sliding up to the edge of the canyon.
Kill it! Patrick screeched.
“I’m trying!” Ben screamed. He lurched forward to stabilize himself on the skittering horse, and he swung the shotgun back over his arm and pulled the trigger. The second barrel exploded, catching the duster’s face at point-blank range. Buckshot broke through the skin where the duster’s yellow ooze was already seeping through, and a good enough portion of the shot caught the snarling monster in its eyes, bursting through the milky green vitreous and blasting through the skull and into the brain tissue. The duster fell over, dead.
“Come on, horse!” Ben screamed at the stupid animal’s head as he reached into the saddle bag for two more shells. “Move!”
But the horse was tired and spooked. Its eyes wide and searching, it skittered along the edge of the cliff, lifting its front legs into the air, snorting and huffing and spinning. The rest of the dusters were closing in.
Time to run, Patrick said.
“No shit.” Ben shoved the shotgun back into its holster and set to work fumbling with the straps of the saddle bags, working the buckles loose. He pulled the bags away from the horse and wrapped them around his own waist, cinching them tight. Then he yanked the shotgun back out of the holster just as a second duster leapt at the horse. This time, he wasn’t fast enough with his reaction, and the rock-solid duster smashed into his shin with its shoulder, pinning Ben’s leg against the horse’s flank. Something in Ben’s shin popped, and he cried out in pain. The horse was knocked off balance, and it fell down on its side, hard. Ben was thrown from the saddle, his leg wrenched free of the duster’s weight, and he slid across the sand, tumbling end over end. He skidded to a stop on his belly, and his feet slid out over the edge of the canyon. He gripped for purchase on the desert floor, and his fingers pulled deep trails of dirt behind them as his momentum pulled him over the edge of the cliff up to his waist. His hips slammed down against the wall of the canyon, and he hung there, clutching the earth, his legs dangling over the drop. The swam of dusters hit the fallen horse, ripping into it like a cloud of angry locusts. They sank their teeth in the horse’s hide, and Ben watched in horror as the animal screamed and threw its head while the dusters went to work, tearing it apart with frenzied hands and teeth.
One of the dusters looked up from its meal, its mouth dripping scarlet red. It saw Ben dangling over the edge, and it scrambled to its feet, stepping over the other dusters and tumbling over the dead horse. It fell down and hit the sand hard, but pulled itself up to its knees and scrabbled toward Ben, dripping blood and saliva, hissing and snorting and reaching for him with its green, mottled fingers. The duster lunged, teeth first, and Ben did the only thing he could think to do.
He let go of the earth, and he plunged down into the open air of the canyon.
21.
The blonde woman dragged herself to her feet and rose unsteadily on wounded, shaking legs. She wiped the blood from her eyes and took stock of the other women around her. She kept losing count when she tried to tally the bodies that lay strewn across the street.
The women in their strange nightgowns had come at her with fury, fighting and clawing like demons with hot pokers up their asses. They were small, flimsy-looking things, but their bodies were like steel—hard, inflexible, unyielding. They’d given her more of a fight than she’d reckoned, and the cuts and the gashes and the gaps in her flesh and the blood that seeped through her clothes and matted her hair—all those things were testimony to it.
Most of the women were dead. Some of the others were on their way. A few were just bruised or broken, but enough to have settled them down. The blonde woman was the only one standing.
She bent down and picked up a pitchfork, stabbing the blood-tinged tines into the ground and leaning on the handle for support. She lifted her free hand to her brow, blocking out the sun, and surveyed the ghost town. Her horse was gone.
If she’d had enough blood left in her, that would have made it boil.
The man she was tracking had ridden away on her horse, and he’d taken everything with him, including the small pack he’d slung down by the jail house doors. That didn’t leave her with much of anything. She spat in the dust, but she couldn’t begrudge him too much. He’d managed a lot for such a small man. Besides, he’d left a trail as obvious as if he’d been riding a herd of elephants. She’d catch up to him soon.
He’d pay for stealing her horse then.
She believed him when he said he didn’t know where the bandits were headed. He was too scared to be lying. But for a man who didn’t know where he was headed, he was heading there too deliberately. He had something that was pointing him in the right direction, she was sure of that. A map, a compass, some marker held in his mind—something. He may not have known where he was going, but he knew how to get there.
Which didn’t explain why he’d taken the horse in a different direction, southwest instead of northwest. Trying to throw her, probably. Make her think he was zig-zagging blindly across the desert. Maybe he was smarter than he seemed.
Or maybe he just didn’t know how to ride a horse.
The woman looked down at her left arm. The sleeve of her Henley had soaked through with blood. One of the waifs had slashed at her with a garden hoe, and the metal plate had lodged itself in her forearm. The blonde woman had returned the favor by breaking the waif’s jaw in two places and leaving her alive. But the wound was worse than she’d thought. She pushed the sleeve up her arm, over her elbow, revealing not just the hole in her flesh, but also a series of raised white lines, a close pattern of scars that blanketed her skin from wrist to elbow. They stood out in great contrast to the blood, channeling an oozing scarlet river down her arm. She pulled a dirty rag from her back pocket and mopped up the blood. She spat into the wound, rubbed a mixture of dirt and saliva into it to stop the bleeding. Then she tied the rag around the gash, cinching it with a grunt.
One of the women lying on the ground watched her with wide, scared eyes. She lifted a trembling finger at the white marks on the blonde woman’s arm and whispered, “The Thirteen Mercies! The Thirteen Mercies!”
The woman gave her a boot to the face. She didn’t speak after that.
She flexed her fingers, to make sure there was no serious nerve damage from the forearm wound, and satisfied, she lumbered through the mess of bodies until she found someone who was alive and conscious. It was an older woman, in her late fifties, maybe. She’d broken a shovel across the blonde woman’s back, and it had hurt like hell, but she had let her live because something in the older woman reminded her of her own mother. The blonde giant crouched down next to the woman now, grabbed the front of her nightgown with one meaty hand, and hefted her up into a sitting position. “Horse?” she grumbled. “Truck?”
“No…no horses,” the woman said, shaking her head, holding up her hands to try to protect her face. “We ate ’em, for food. No horses.”
The bigger woman jostled her impatiently. “Truck!” she said again, her voice like nails dragged across sandstone.
The older woman pointed with a shaking finger toward a clapboard barn tucked away behind the jail. “We got a car…” she said, her voice trembling.
The blonde woman let go, and the older woman fell back against the ground. She rose and shuffled down the alley, ignoring the pain in her ankle where one of the ghostly women had caught her with the flat end of a shovel. She walked with one hand against the wall of the jail house for support, leaving a trail of blood smeared into the grain of the wood.
She reached the barn and pulled open the doors. Inside, parked beneath the hayloft, sat the woman’s car. In truth, it was a Meyers Manx dune buggy, a two-seater off-road go cart with wide tires, a silver roll cage, and a cherry-red fiberglass frame. Two round headlights peeked up from the corners of the hood like a bashful pair of sweetheart eyes.
The keys were in the ignition, and the needle on the tank pointed to full. The blonde woman lowered herself into the driver’s seat, rocking the dune buggy on its shocks and sinking the frame so low that it ground against the chassis. She turned the key; the buggy started up on the first try, roaring to life. The woman smiled. She hadn’t even seen a running car in years, much less driven one. But she knew the fuel was probably spoiled, and she didn’t know how far she’d get before it rocked the tank, so she didn’t give herself time to enjoy the purr of the engine or the feel of the steering wheel rumbling in her hands. She threw the buggy into gear and rolled out of the barn.
She opened up the engine on the main road, spinning the tires and kicking up a cloud of dust that swallowed the litter of bodies scattered on the ground. Then she rumbled out into the desert, over the harsh terrain, following her horse’s trail and heading southwest.
22.
Ben opened his eyes. He was surprised to find himself alive.
“We fell, right?” he asked, dazed. His head thumped from the back, and the sky above him seemed to tilt and pivot when he opened his eyes.
We fell, like, a lot, Patrick confirmed.
“Is this hell?”
No. I don’t hear any ABBA.
That, Ben decided, was infallible logic.
He blinked a few times, hard, and with feeling. The sky spun itself back into something bordering on focus. He had fallen; he remembered that very clearly. There are very few eventualities, he decided, that imprint themselves on the human memory like the feeling of dropping into a lethal freefall down the side of a deep canyon. Yet here he was, settled on firm ground, looking up at the sky through a cloud of green haze, and he was alive, and the world was calm.
Then a duster leapt out into the open air above, jumping off the edge of the cliff, spinning its arms wildly in the air, and diving down toward him head-first.
Ben screamed. He rolled over, curling into a ball and covering his head with his hands. He peeked through his fingers, and his situation suddenly made perfect sense; he had fallen, yes, but he had fallen onto a flat ledge that jutted out from the wall of rock like a platter, about thirty feet below the lip of the canyon. Over the edge of this flat outcropping of stone, the air opened up for another thousand feet until it collided with the hard stone floor of the canyon.
The zombie plunged toward him and slammed into the edge of the platform. Ben heard the bones and the hardened veins in its jaw crack, and the zombie snarled in anger as it bounced off the stone ledge and out into the open air, plummeting down into the depths of the canyon.
Ben crawled carefully over to the far end of the ledge and peered down after the falling runner. He watched in awe as it hit the ground and burst apart, its hardened limbs scattering across the canyon floor in a disgusting spray of red blood and yellow-green ooze.
“Wow. I haven’t seen a runner explode like that since Ponch,” Ben marveled.
Ponch made them explode way better, Patrick insisted.
“Ponch was pretty good.”
Ponch was the best.
“No, I mean she tasted pretty good. Remember?”
Patrick declined to respond to that. But Ben thought he could hear his imaginary friend crying, just a little.
Another duster zoomed past Ben’s head, close enough that Ben ducked backward in surprise. He could feel the breeze as the creature dropped past him and into the canyon. Ben caught his breath and scrambled away from the edge of the cliff, backing up against the wall. Another duster streaked past, then another, and another, and soon it was raining zombies. Some of them smacked into Ben’s ledge as they fell, glancing off the stone and breaking or cracking before plunging toward the canyon floor. One of them actually landed in the center of the platform and clamored to its feet, snarling and drooling its yellow-green slime. Ben scrambled to the side, away from the duster, and his hands knocked against the shotgun, which had fallen with him. He dove for it, but his hand was clumsy, and he knocked it away. The barrel slid out over the edge of the cliff and teetered, deciding whether to stay or fall. Ben lurched forward and snatched the gun just as it tipped over the lip of the stone. He swung it up by the stock, whirled around, and fired as the duster leapt. The blast caught it in its snarling open mouth and exploded out the back of its head in a spray of sickly green gore. The dead duster collided with Ben, soaking his shirt in its filth. He blenched, tried not to gag, and pushed the rigid body off of him, down into the depths of the canyon.
“Hey, watch it!” a male voice from below screamed.
“Who’s up there?” a woman added.
“Wait...yeah, who’s up there?!” the man replied.
Ben tilted his head in the direction of the voices, confused. All he saw were two little rocks, two loose pieces of debris from the hailstorm of dusters. He crouched down, inspecting them carefully. “Oh my God,” he breathed, reaching out slowly and brushing his fingertips against the stone. “I do have a brain tumor, and it’s making me hear talking rocks.”
“Talking rocks!” the male rock sputtered. “Talking rocks! Did you hear that?!”
“Who does he think he is, calling us dumb rocks?!” the female rock demanded. “Who do you think you are, calling us dumb rocks?!”
“I ought to knock his block off! I won’t do it, because I’m a Christian man, but I’m telling you, I should knock his block right off!”
“You should knock his block off!” the female agreed. “You should march right up there and do it!”
“I will!” the male decided. “I will knock his block off—just give me the chance! Just give me the chance!”
“I am going to be dead by morning,” Ben realized, feeling his cranium for signs of protruding tumors. “I’m not stage four...I’m full-blown stage five.”
“There is no stage five!” the female howled.
“It’s true! It’s true! If she says it, it’s true!” the male agreed, agitated and extremely excited. “She would know if there was a stage five—she was a nurse!”
“I was a physician’s assistant!” the woman screamed. Then Ben heard the sound of a sharp smack of skin on skin, and the male voice yelped in pain.
He stared down at the rocks, incredulous. “How do rocks even know what a physician’s assistant is?” he wondered aloud.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” the female screamed. She sounded very put-upon. “He thinks we’re rocks! He actually thinks we’re rocks!”
“He’s an absolute abomination!” the male shrieked. Then, more quietly, he said, “You hit me right in the eye...why did you do that?”
“Shut up!” the female cried, and again, Ben heard the distinct sound of skin on skin.
“Ow!”
“You are rocks,” Ben said, trying to make his voice resolute. Something inside of his maligned and broken brain thought that if he could convince the rocks that they were just rocks, they would realize they didn’t have vocal cords, and they would leave him to die in silence.
“Fuck you!” the female cried.
“Honey—language!” the male gasped. Then he added, “But yeah, fuck you!”
Ben dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and pressed in, somehow irrationally hoping to clear his ears by threatening his vision. It didn’t make a whole lot of sensory sense, but if there was one thing he remembered about the human brain from his high school biology class, it was that the entire organ was extremely complex and could hardly be understood by any single neurologist, and therefore was far beyond his own mental reach.
“You’re just rocks,” Ben insisted, closing his eyes and massaging his temples and praying for the voices to stop. “Shut your stupid not-mouth mouths...you’re just rocks.”
“Oh my God, does he think we’re actually rocks? He’s insane!” the male cried.
“He is utterly, totally, completely, and irrefutably retarded,” the female agreed. “We’re not rocks, stupid!” she shouted. “We are human people, down here!”
“You shouldn’t use that word,” the male said quietly. “It’s horrible.”
“Shut up!”
Ben twisted up his face in confusion. He stared down at the rocks. They just sat there, dull and unimpressive in the fading daylight. He pushed a finger against one of them. It rocked backward against his touch, like a normal rock, and it didn’t seem to complain.
“Man. I am in serious trouble,” Ben decided.
“Yeah you are!” the male voice shouted. And now that Ben was right up against the edge of the cliff, it sounded like the voice was maybe coming from somewhere else, somewhere that might not be the little pebble under his finger. He scooted forward and peered uncertainly over the edge of his platform.
