Jeffery and his friend Brady had both been shot, but it was no big deal. They had both been wearing some serious body armor that we’d scrounged from the armory. Another one of the folks who’d arrived with Jeffery, by the name of Adam, had managed to get a big chunk of his visor shot off, too. I told him that the broken off spot made the helmet look awesome, so he let me keep it.

  Tracer was feeling fine but I felt like I needed another nap before heading out again. With a final warning from me to be careful of the traps we’d set, Shannon, Victoria, Tonya, and a bunch of others went out to scrounge all the goodies left laying on the field of Mars. Meanwhile, I got some sleep.

  Chapter 10

  It was my fervent hope that Reagan would be cowed into a more peacable frame of mind for a day or two. I planned to put that time to good use. I asked anyone with baking experience to get everything ready for my return. They would need flour, sugar, salt, and all the other ingredients necessary for whipping up a gigantic batch of friendship bread. Actually, it wasn’t friendship bread, but that was okay because I was planning on feeding it to Reagan and he wasn’t actually a friend. The special ingredient was going to be a bunch of destroying angel that I had left growing in a cellar some miles east, across the state line.

  Originally, I had planned on using it, as needed, to poison whatever bandits happened along looking to extort the friends I was with at the time. Since that group of friends had moved north to Haven I’d never actually had any use for the mushrooms. By now they had been growing for some months and I was hoping for an adequate crop.

  I had plenty of vehicles to choose from, an embarrassment of riches really. It was a shame, but I felt it was necessary to trash the rest, in order to keep them out of enemy hands. I picked out a nice panel van, just right for transporting a whole bunch of poisonous botanical material, and drove off to the south and then east.

  The trip would be a few hours long and I had to be real careful to stay on the back roads and away from the major former population centers. On the way to my destination I stopped at a country residence where I’d left a cache of weapons and picked up a couple more 9mm pistols and a box of ammunition. Ever since I given my liberated cop gun to Benjamin I’d begun to miss it. I hadn’t thought that I would, but the heart wants what it wants.

  During my journey I did pass an unusual looking home. It was a big two storey mansion with professionally bared windows and a spike topped wall running all the way around a huge estate. At first I thought it might be a nice place to hang out, maybe leave a cache of supplies against future need. The exterior was done in the baroque style with all kinds of angels poking demons and tortured looking Greeks pushing a boulder up a hill or stuck on a burning wheel. One guy was even getting his organs eaten by a couple of birds.

  Another thing of interest about the place were all the pikes out in front of the wall. Each pole was a cut down sapling, trimmed, and with a head stuck on top. The jaws of all the decapitations were working rhythmically, letting me know that they were still undead. Whenever I find a bunch of gnashing cephalic lawn ornaments I always take it as a sign that the folks round about would make lousy neighbors, and I try to keep my distance. I’ve always assumed that was the whole point.

  Shortly after passing by the Decapitation Station (as I thought of it) I noticed someone was following me. You might think I’m bragging about how good my powers of observation are (because they are pretty good), but I’m really not. Detecting someone following in broad daylight when there is absolutely no other traffic isn’t very difficult. About all one needs to do is check the side view mirror once in a while.

  When I stopped on a long straightaway and got out, the driver of the family four door following me also stopped. I thought about putting a bullet in one of their tires but they were over a mile away. I motioned for them to approach but they would not. I found the whole thing rather disconcerting.

  My solution was to get back in the van and drive off. Maybe it was just a coincidence that they started following me as soon as I’d passed all the severed heads. Maybe they were more afraid of me than I was of them (which was probably true in any case). Maybe they wanted help but were too afraid to ask. Maybe they didn’t know a good place to go so just decided to follow the first person they came across. Maybe they were lost and wanted to ask directions. Maybe they had a whole bunch of .44 caliber ammunition which they were looking to give away to the first traveler they met. Tracer and I kept that game up for miles.

  Eventually, by the time I reached the farmhouse with all my fun fungus, the vehicle following me was nowhere around. They had turned off over an hour back and I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them since. I had to guess that they’d lost interest, for whatever reason.

  When I entered the farmhouse and walked down the steps to check the basement, I found that my nice little crop had overflowed from the various planters I’d originally placed them in. The destroying angel had taken root on every available surface, especially in all the saw dust that I’d originally planned to feed them.

  There were some open floor freezers in the basement which I’d had to clean some months back (in order to get the human remains out of them). The final stage of cleaning them had been for me to wash out all of the harsher chemicals. For that purpose I’d used water. Once everybody had decided to leave that place I just left the bucket full of water behind. Now the bucket was empty but the whole cellar had a thin slimy coating of condensation covering everything.

  Every inch of the floor was taken up with a pot, basin, or tray full to overflowing with destroying angel, which had been my plan. From there it had spread until it reached the wooden wall paneling, eventually covering the ceiling and encrusting the support beams. It was a stark and resplendent display of nature’s desire to spread and consume everything in its path; a veritable physical metaphor for a creeping death, and the deadly false promise of an easy meal. I couldn’t have been more satisfied.

  I picked most of it (careful to wear gloves and a surgical face mask) and packed it in my van, which I then parked in front of the barn doors. By then it was well past sundown and I was feeling pretty tired, so Tracer and I had a kip in the barn loft. My plan was to start back before sunrise.

  Tracer awakened me after only a few short hours of blissful slumber. According to his tail there was one interloper approaching the barn. Tracer said that it was a human. I quietly got up and moved to the barn’s door, intending to quickly pass through, get into my van, and speed away.

  Normally, that’s not how I do things. I’d much rather hang around, meet some new people, say hello, kill someone, and then leave. But, because I was already sort of on a mission, I really didn’t want the distraction. I understand that you might think me a tad pessimistic, possibly even hostile, to assume that I was about to find myself in a situation wherein I would need to end human life, but that’s not me talking-- that’s experience doing the talking. Just so you know: when people sneak up on your position in the middle of the night, it’s usually a bad thing.

  The main problem with my exodus strategy was that I was too late. Even without Tracer’s warning I could tell that somebody was waiting for us outside the door, just by the way the shadows fell on the seams between the barn’s timbers. If I tried to open the barn door I figured there was a high probability of me catching a chest full of lead.

  I’d been in that barn before and knew that there was only one other way out, through the loft, there was no cupola. I also knew that the boards that the barn was made of had a lot of cracks between them, perfect for peeking through. With so little light inside the barn I didn’t think anyone trying to spy on me would have much luck. I, on the other hand, could peek out utilizing the significantly greater illumination of my sky-born friend, Luna Hecate. She’s always got my back.

  I had to move around a bit, going from one spy hole to another, until I discovered where my new fan was hiding out. What I saw was just one shadowy figure, a pretty big guy, at least six foot two, waiting off to one side of the door, holding what I took to be sawed off shotgun (I have one of those myself, but mostly only use it when I’m riding Blue). The prudent course of action would have been for me to shoot him dead and move on, but you know me, I’m curious to a fault. I figured to kill him only after I’d learned what he wanted and where he was from and who all his buddies were.

  I placed a hand on Tracer and whispered for him to stay put, then I climbed up to the loft. From there I leaned out and looked down to make sure my target was keeping nice and still. If I tried to climb down to the ground from my elevated position it was probable that I would be seen or heard. The main thing ensuring my invisibility just then was my being above my stalker’s line of sight.

  So instead of climbing down, I hugged the outer wall, reached up, grabbed the roof, and pulled myself up. From there I made my way over to the opposite corner of the barn from my intended victim. After climbing down as quietly as possible I made my way out and around so as to sneak up behind the waiting lurker. Needless to say, I had already turned my beautiful red cloak inside out, revealing only the black liner.

  As I approached unseen, I noticed that the man I was sneaking up on was no man. It was a woman, dressed all in black. Black pants, black shirt, black socks, black shoes, even her hair was black. She had a big old black handled kukri knife in a black sheath on her black belt, as well as a black 9mm pistol in a black shoulder holster. There was also a black satchel lying on the ground next to her with a black barreled bolt action rifle with a black stock resting against it. I wondered if maybe she were one of those goth chicks I’d heard about. She looked to be about twenty years old from where I was standing and seemed to have the poise of an adequate killer.

  I silently moved around behind her and decided to have a little fun at her expense. First, I surreptitiously slipped her rifle off the pack, fell back, unloaded it, and returned it. Then I gave myself the tricky job of reaching around and slipping her pistol out of it holster without her noticing. Uncle would have been proud (not that I was messing around, that would have infuriated him, but that I managed to pick a shoulder holster with the bearer none the wiser). Then I fell back, unloaded it, and managed to slip it back where I’d taken it from.

  “Hi, my name’s Gideon, what’s yours?”

  She gave the absolutely most amusing scream that I’d ever heard, and I’ve heard a lot of screams. Very melodic, too, and not at all annoying, I could get used to it. She managed to jump pretty high for someone who hadn’t had her knees flexed, and pulled the trigger on her shotgun for all she was worth. As both barrels vomited their sweet promise of death out into the void, she was already reaching for her backup, the pistol under her arm.

  She must have wasted five seconds pointing that thing at me and trying to make it work. It was funny the way she so desperately wanted to kill me. First she tried pulling the trigger, then she worked the safety, and then she tried the bolt, before finally gazing at the thing with a priceless look of confusion and betrayal. I had to chuckle as I held up her bullets and let them fall to the earth, one by one.

  To her credit, she was still game. Diving for her rifle, she performed an impressive roll, grabbed the weapon, and came up in a lovely shooter’s stance, displaying a not altogether negligible level of athletic capability. I dropped those rounds as well. I could tell she was starting to get mad.

  “Hey, I just want to ask...” She was pretty quick with that knife, the way she had it up and thrown at my face before I could get a single question in. I caught it, of course, but didn’t throw it back. Casting a glance at the blade made me think of Uncle and the hours we’d spent playing catch. That brought a tear to my eye, which can be a dangerous thing in a life or death struggle.

  She used my momentary distraction against me like a pro. No sooner had I glanced up from the knife than I saw her producing a black derringer from under the back of her shirt. And suddenly I wasn’t laughing anymore.

  I began exercising the Crimson Ribbon Maneuver immediately, causing her first shot to go wide. It’s really not as easy as it sounds when the shooter knows what she’s doing, and it only works as long as the shooter doesn’t stop and think. To help myself out I plucked my little flashlight (which I hardly ever used) off my belt and shined it in her eyes. With that going I was able to keep up the dance until she fired all five of her bullets, but by then I had definitely broken a sweat.

  Once she was out of ammunition she scooped up her bag and began digging around for loose shells. I had to admire her pluck, and was beginning to feel a little remorseful about needing to serve the public’s interest by executing her. Oh well, I couldn’t just leave a wacky murderess running around with her level of skill, someone would get killed.

  I drew Bob from his holster and pointed it right at her face. That usually gets the attention of anyone on the business end, but not her. She remained focused on reloading. I still wanted my answers, more now than ever, so I holstered Bob and moved into hand to hand combat.

  She had minimal training, clearly a black belt or its equivalent. She was a lot bigger than me and I didn’t want to knock her out, since it’s real hard to question people in that condition, so that put me at a significant disadvantage. Even so, I had her face down in the dirt with the cuffs on after a half minute or so. Then we could finally get down to it.

  “What the heck is your problem, lady? Why were you hunting me?”

  She started to cry. I must have stood there with my mouth hanging open for who knew how long, before managing to put my thoughts together. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made a number of grown men cry, just before the end, but I’d always either been breaking their bones, cutting stuff off them, removing ocular organs, or at least had them at death’s door. I’d never gone into an interrogation situation with someone already crying. It totally put me off my game.

  Once I came to my senses I decided to just kill her and put her out of my misery. Her motivations and potential allies would just have to remain a mystery. Before I pulled the trigger she finally spoke.

  “We just wanted to see who you were (sob). To see if you needed a place to stay (sniffle). I wasn’t trying to hurt you (sob, sob).”

  Just how stupid did she think I was? “Just how stupid do you think I am?” I asked her. “You were waiting outside my door with a shotgun. That is not how friendly people greet one another.”

  “It only had rock salt in it (sniffle).”

  I found that hard to believe so I searched through her bag until I found her 12 gauge ammo. I tore through one shell with my teeth and, sure enough, it was loaded with salt pellets. Then I opened the breech on the shotgun she’d dropped and sniffed the barrel. It smelled like salt. Huh.

  I asked, “You want to walk me through this? What’s going on?”

  “We saw you drive by the house and could tell you were just a kid (sniffle, sniffle). We thought you could come live with us (whimper).”

  “Is your house the one with all the severed heads out front? The one that looks like the domicile of deranged vampires?”

  “Yeah (sniffle), we live there. The heads are there to keep people away (blubber, sob).”

  I had to tell her, “Well, mission accomplished. I regret even driving by the place. Was that you following me on the road?”

  “(whimper) Yeah, but you gave us the slip, so we had to split up to look for you (sniffle, blubber, sob). I’m sorry I tried to kill you, but you scared me (sob, hiccup)! There are so many bad men around (sob).”

  “Okay, lady, here’s my plan: I’m going to unlock the cuffs and get the heck out of here. With any luck we’ll never see each other again. If you try anything… well lets not part on bad terms.”

  That was when I noticed that all the noise she’d been making had attracted the attention of a number of unwanted visitors. A big bunch of zombies were moving in from all directions and it was well past time to leave. I could see them by the moon’s chilling glow, moving toward our position. There were only a couple hundred zombies but they had at least four ghouls with them. At first I thought they would pose only a small threat until I noticed how the ghouls refused to leap out ahead of the main group. It looked like their hunting method was to stick with the main horde until they closed and then attack. Furthermore, the zombies were moving a bit better than was usual, more like the ones I’d run into in Christopherton. Those guys had been super annoying.

  I quickly unlocked the cuffs and ran into the barn to get my pack and Mary Ann. Tracer was beside himself with anxiety. I had ordered him to stay put, but at the same time he had, no doubt, noticed the zombie’s approach long before I had. By the time I was out out of the barn, Goth (as I had decided to name the woman dressed in all black) had retrieved her own stuff, reloaded, and was taking pot shots at the advancing dead. I yelled at her to get in the van.

  Since the ghouls weren’t going to break from the pack, I was easily able to outmaneuver them and get back on the road. As we drove off I asked her where her car was. She told me that she had parked it half a mile away so as not to startle me. What a goof. I still wasn’t quite sure whether or not I could count her as a friend.

  While driving away, I tried to get a more comprehensive account behind the thinking which led to her actions. I understood everything she said, it just didn’t make any sense.

 

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