James Robert Smith, page 4
When there was no food left in the bag, he went back into the open and began to cast around, hunting. At last, he did detect what he was searching for: the scent of his family. People had fled in every imaginable direction in every possible way. South, North, East, West. They’d gone toward the coast, following the flowing rivers. They’d headed up and down the seaboard. Some of them went west. That was where his family had gone. And BC would follow them. It might take some time, but he’d figure out where they were running and he’d find them.
He would.
In the late afternoon, with the light fading, BC headed off. There were sounds that he could detect but which didn’t interest him. He heard the whimper of a child from two blocks away. There were people talking in harsh voices two streets over—very easy to hear now that the air was no longer filled with the sound of engines and the stink of exhaust. If those people did not soon shut their mouths, they would be quickly found by the roaming undead whom he could hear quite distinctly as they, too, tried to pinpoint those voices. But BC didn’t care about those strangers. They were not a part of his pack. Only Rick, Tilly, Maya, and Little Rick were of his pack. Only they were worth searching for and protecting. Even if they had abandoned him, he still had to find them.
Heading up the street on which they lived, he ducked easily beneath tumbled limbs that the car had been forced to drive around. He could see where Rick had taken the auto through yards to avoid fallen timber. Tall grass was pressed down where the tires had crushed the overgrown lawns. Stopping briefly to touch his nose to the ground, he had the scent distinctly and continued on his way, stopping only now and again to assure himself that the scent he was following was foremost in his mind. He had to keep that scent and this feeling foremost.
As he trotted along at a good pace, using the same streets the family had traveled, he began to spot the shambling dead emerging from between buildings and from behind trees and abandoned cars. They’d probably been alerted by the sound of the family’s car as it motored slowly along and had just now come to discover where it might be. They were out of luck, for even BC could not detect the familiar sound as he made his way steadily. Before very long, these things would lose interest and even forget what it was that had spurred them to move. They would turn, perhaps, and get back to the slow, inexorable plodding that took them always downhill, seeking that path of least resistance.
Even when BC passed within a short distance of any of them, they gave him little notice. For some reason, he was not something of interest to them. They did not wish to kill and eat him, nor even to attack him or block his progress. All they wanted was human flesh and to move steadily and easily in search of that want. BC eyed them suspiciously, but gave them less notice the farther he traveled and the more of them he saw. In all ways but one, they were beneath his notice and high on his level of contempt.
As the day slowly ebbed, the shadows grew longer and the light became first high gold, then tinged in red, then fled altogether. These were things that BC noticed not at all when it came to color, and only acknowledged vaguely the changing of daylight to starlight. There was no moon, but BC’s eyes were attuned to a different contrast than those of humans. He could see as well in the night as in the day. Better, in some ways, since there were no shadows to confuse him.
Off to his right, he heard a sound: the snapping of dry leaves along the side of a house. He stopped and peered in that direction and at first did not see anything at all. And then, slowly, he made out the form of another dog. A dog much larger than he. The other canine form was crouched low to the ground, braced solidly against the concrete foundation of the house under whose eves it thought it was hidden.
BC, too, crouched low. His ears went flat against his head and his teeth were revealed—white and sharp. A very low growl emerged from the depths of his chest.
The other dog relaxed somewhat, acknowledging that it had been seen. But it continued to hold its position. Slowly, BC backed away, not wishing to engage in a fight. He didn’t know just where he was going or how long it would take him. He couldn’t chance any kind of an injury if conflict could be avoided. So he carefully retreated until he was safely behind a group of azaleas, their blooms still hanging on in the late spring air. Only then did he turn and race away with some speed down a row of unfenced yards until he was sure that he’d put a good amount of space—and safety—between himself and the strange dog.
After that, as the night dragged on, he did his best to alternate his route between the hidden places behind houses, down cluttered alleys, and on the main thoroughfares where he could detect, from time to time, the scent of his family as they progressed westward, toward the hills below the mountains. In the night, BC kept hearing the sounds of other dogs, always at a good distance. Sometimes the piercing howl of cats would come to him as they settled quickly into new lives without their masters who had either fled, or become cold, shambling monsters. Once, he heard dogs screaming in battle; numbers of dogs who were challenging one another and tearing dog flesh in some squabble, the sounds of which he could scarcely interpret.
Packs were forming.
In lieu of the old pack leaders of the traditional human/dog families, new ties were being made. No more people were around to be the Alpha, and so such had to be maintained by even older traditions largely ignored, but never forgotten.
Blood was in the air.
Despite his best efforts, BC’s coat bristled at the bright scent of dog blood and the triumphant howls of his fellow beasts in the night. He snarled again, lightly, and began to look around for a safe place to bed down. He was a stranger in this place, but it only took him a few minutes to find a spot—a dry and leafy crawlspace under an old shack abandoned even long before The Event. He curled up there, his brushy tail covering his nose, his back to concrete, the gentle flow of air coming to him from east to west, some small sounds of insects in the soil and in the leafy matter out in the yards. And, slowly, he was able to relax and, finally, to sleep.
Some time later, his muscles lost almost all tension and he slumped there in his leafy bed, completely asleep. His nose twitched. His lips quivered as he experienced various emotions and recalled old sounds, faces, scents, and textures. BC’s paws twitched, as he dreamed.
“BC!” The voice startled him. Not just because it was the sound of a human voice, but also because it was a voice he did not recognize.
“BC!” It repeated his name. “Sit up now and listen to me. I’ve come to tell you things.”
BC did as he was told, sitting slowly up and raising his head to attention and opening his tired eyes. He looked around, but all he could see were the old timbers above his head, the dry earth beneath the house, and the leaves around his feet. There was no person around him at all. Who was it?
“Never mind that,” the voice said again. It was a male voice. It commanded in no uncertain tones. He was familiar with those tones and there was no question of obedience. “I’m here to talk to you, BC. I’m here to tell you what needs to be done, because you are the one who can do it.”
Blinking his eyes, BC tried to see where the voice was coming from. He could not pinpoint it through hearing. It seemed to come from all around him. Turning his head, he still could find no one around.
“Don’t you worry,” the voice said. “I’m here. You need to understand something.”
Finally, BC saw a form at the far end of the house. It was moving toward him, and he was beginning to think that the position he’d chosen, with concrete and earth at his back, might not have been such a good idea, after all. The form took shape. It was a dog. Like him, he figured. Although there was no scent, the shape was familiar. About the same size as he was—fifty pounds or so. Not much difference in the body shape, either. As it got closer he could see that the ears were larger, more pointed, more pronounced. The snout, too, was more pointed than his, and little more elongated, and that mouth was gaping slightly, revealing a tongue that lolled from between toothy jaws in an almost comical way.
BC awoke with a start. He peered around, nervously, searching for a presence, straining to hear that voice that had spoken in the tongue of his pack leader.
But no one was there.
The Leading of Dead Ned:
One day, it had been Ned Waters. Ned had been an English professor at a major university with tenure and respect from his peers, if not his students. He’d been liked well enough, of course, but none of that mattered anymore. What mattered now was that he was dead—one of the walking dead.
The strangest thing was how he’d died. Professor Waters lived in a three-bedroom house in a working class neighborhood. He could have afforded better, but he liked that house and had lived there for more than fifteen years. His nearest neighbor, though, had been under the erroneous impression that Ned Waters had been a homosexual. If asked, this neighbor, Ron Diggs, could not have said exactly why he had this idea. Perhaps it was because he’d seen Ned embrace another man in parting at one of the outdoor barbecues the professor sometimes held in his back yard. Maybe it was because he’d once seen Ned on television defending a gay pride march that had been held on the university campus. Or maybe it was because Ned was highly educated and that was something that Mr. Diggs couldn’t fathom. To his way of thinking, maybe only faggots went to college.
Ned had heard that his neighbor thought that he was gay, and this amused him. It was funny because Professor Waters had no such tendencies whatsoever. It wasn’t that he was disgusted by such an act—it was just that he enjoyed the ladies. He’d had quite the parade of lovers over the years, all of them women, and he was never wanting for female companionship. Diggs had figured them all for fag-hags, Waters supposed.
It never would have mattered at all if not for The Event, of course. And the hammer of Payback that hit the nation with such finality in the last weeks of what could be considered civil society. During those last mad hours, Ron Diggs had concluded that Ned Waters and all of his kind were somehow responsible for the zombie plague. Diggs had heard it said that maybe it was all just some mutation of HIV that was running through the population and causing the dead to rise as flesh-eating monsters. He didn’t believe in evolution, but the word mutation did not associate itself with ungodly ideas in his limited experience.
That was why he had no problems shooting Ned Waters through the back when he saw the college professor emerging from his house one morning when the world seemed strangely silent, when a light fog hugged the ground, when it seemed that the queer teacher who lived next door to him had no problems and no concerns at all. Ron had lost his wife to the plague; had seen both of his sons killed in the crazy violence after the dead began to rise, and he was without hope. But he was damned if he’d sit and watch a monstrous queer like Ned Waters go about his way with an actual smile on his damned face.
Pulling the trigger and sending a slug from his 30.06 into Ned Waters’ back had been the easiest thing in the world. He’d been so intent on taking the shot and so happy that he’d so obviously killed the man with that single bullet that he hadn’t heard the undead shambling from the shrubs behind him. Figures that had been standing there under cover of darkness all during the night, things with the patience of trees; which now laid their unfeeling hands on his arms and shoulders and dragged Ron Diggs quickly to the earth where he could only scream senselessly while they devoured him alive.
By the time Diggs was a pile of steaming flesh being picked and eaten by a growing gang of undead, Waters’ body began to twitch with a new kind of un-life and the thing that rose slowly to gape in ignorance at the world was nothing like the college professor who had walked the street less than an hour before. Dead Ned stood and looked out with fish-belly eyes at his neighborhood and recognized little and understood nothing save for the single urge that ticked constantly inside his skull:
“Meat.”
And in what was left of the mind of Ned Waters, that collection of gray matter damaged by lack of oxygen and initial decay, the meat he had in mind was that of the last woman with whom he’d copulated:
Tilly Nuttman.
She lived not two blocks away, and even in his current state he knew how to get there. It had been only hours since he and Tilly had engaged in one sex act after another, hidden away in the walk-in pantry of her house while her husband lay comatose from the effects of too much wine. For Tilly, the wine had merely sharpened her desire for her secret lover, and for Ned the alcohol had increased his sex drive and enabled him to withhold his orgasm at will. Several times.
And, now, a walking corpse wishing only to find and devour the living, he was fixated on the one place he wished to be and the person he most desired. Ignoring the zombies who still struggled and feasted on the corpse of the man who had killed him, Ned stumbled off, finding his sea legs and heading off toward the Nuttman home.
Around him, the world was strangely silent. There were no sounds of machines at all. No televisions blathered into the decaying neighborhoods. A few insects buzzed through air heavy with humidity, and there were birdcalls now and again. But no human voices broke the quiet. It was as if the world had been swaddled and muzzled. Dead Ned’s feet scuffed on the concrete sidewalk and crunched dry branches when he crossed weedy yards, but he was unaware of these sounds; they did not concern his new way of looking at the world. For now, there was only “meat”, and the image of that meat was the face and form of Tilly Nuttman.
He shuffled on.
Along the way, another of the undead noticed him moving with purpose. It had learned in its brief new unlife that such purpose of movement meant a reward of flesh. It knew that when another of the undead walked with such a pace and in such a way, as if walking a marked path, that there was likely a chance of finding the living. Having shed its ego—no longer a she, no more a prosecuting attorney in the DA’s office—it fell in a dozen feet or so behind Dead Ned and followed.
Then it was that another, the walking corpse of a freshman college student wearing a tie-died T-shirt and sporting a pair of huarache sandals and dangling genitalia was soon following the once-attorney. And then it was a housewife, her right arm dangling red and loose, bitten a score of times as if it had been a crimson, meaty corncob. In no time it was Ned in the lead, with the other three shambling in a clumsy race behind, Dead Ned oblivious of those it had attracted.
***
When the sound of the car faded, and Ned was alone with the house and the frustrated zombies who had followed, it stood up and shuffled through the doorway into the yard. After a while, Dead Ned went down the steps and stood in the grass and gravel and peered around. The other dead folk wandered off, but Ned remained, waiting. The day faded. Night fell. The sun rose.
“Meat.” It was the only thought still in its head. But of course the meat he had desired was not there. That meat was gone.
In a little while, the dog who had pulled him down and made him miss his chance came trotting back to the house. Ned continued to stand in its place in the yard and made no move to stop the animal. It had a companion. The two of them went up the steps and into the house. It could hear the sounds they made as they ate. Dead Ned’s hearing was still good, and he was aware of the noise of powerful jaws crunching the dry food in the bag in the pantry. And it could even hear the lapping of dog tongues as the two drank their fills from the bathtub in the house. But Ned only continued to stand and wait.
After a while, the dogs emerged from the house. They both looked at Dead Ned and then turned away from him and trotted up the streets from the direction they’d come. Something in the wad a cells that had been Ned’s brain recognized the smaller of the two dogs. It associated that dog with “Meat-Tilly Nuttman”. Watching, it seemed rooted in place as the two canines trotted away, getting smaller in the distance.
“Follow,” suddenly occurred to Dead Ned. “Find Meat,” it assured itself.
And, putting one foot in front of the next, it made after the pair of dogs.
That’s the way it had been, for moths, never quite losing sight of the dog that, he knew, would eventually lead him to that thing he craved.
Melissa: In August, When the Cities Were Burning:
Melissa wasn’t sure what to do. Her parents were dead. She’d gone to their place to see if they were okay, and to take them away with her if they were at home. But it had been too late. The house had been broken into, both the back door and front door had given way. Several windows, too, had been shattered, including the huge picture window at the front of their brick ranch.
It had only taken a moment inside to assess what had happened. From the amount of blood on the floor and walls and the living room furniture and carpet (her mom was a neatness freak who had insisted on pure ivory furniture and carpet), there was no way the residents who’d been home had survived. There were bloody footprints everywhere. Handprints of pure gore streaked the walls. Bits and pieces of meat were strewn here and there, and even a section of human forearm was lying on the white marble tile in the kitchen. At first, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to examine it to see if it was the remains of one of her parents. But finally, she had to force herself to look. It had been a part of her father—the US Marines tattoo was unmistakably his. She crouched before it for only a moment, sobbing.
As a last resort, she’d called out to her mom, standing there in the foyer, blasted as it had been by the mindless violence that had draped it in a mad and bloody Pollock design. “Mom!” She all but screamed, not quite breaking into panic. At first, only silence had greeted her, but finally a door, the one leading into the walk-in pantry in the kitchen had creaked slowly open. What had stumbled out was not her mother or her father, but it was a bloody wreck, once human and now implacable and undead, and ravenous. The face was completely strange to her and it was not one of the neighbors she’d met. It came out of the darkness of the pantry, stared at her with eyes shot with hunger and hatred and began to shamble toward her the way they all did. The way this one must have done when it had helped to break into her parents’ home, killing them.
