Thirty-Five
After the first five or six shots, Reggie found himself wishing for earplugs. By the time he got to twenty, it didn’t really matter. His ears had been pummeled, and the world was now set to the sound of a constant, muted hum.
Outside, the dead fell. They fell and they fell and they fell. A few of them seemed to have some idea what was happening: they looked up, toward the sky, and backed away from their fallen brothers and sisters. Most of them simply shuffled along and fell. A few noticed Reggie and looked up at him with nothing on their dead faces. At that moment, they gained focus and moved on the building, and Reggie blasted their brains onto the faces of those standing behind them.
“Like fish in a barrel,” the old man said, sitting on the bed beside Reggie, gaunt hands on his knobby knees. He was close, far too close. He smelled old and sour and between blasts Reggie could hear him licking his lips.
“There,” Reggie said, finishing the first box of bullets. “Twenty rounds, and I missed once.”
“Good. My turn,” Crate said, and Reggie handed him the rifle. While the old man reloaded, Reggie worked the crowd with his pistol. He was less accurate—a few shots went wild, tearing through shoulders and throats—but he managed to drop four of the corpses nearest the overhang before the old man was done.
“Okay,” Crate said, settling in, raising the rifle, leaning forward.
Before going upstairs, Reggie had done what he could for the kid, cleaning his would with peroxide and packing it with gauze. He hadn’t been a medic in Vietnam, “But by the end,” he’d told Cardo, “we all knew how to push guts back into someone’s stomach.”
Crate had fired twice, but only one of his rounds had connected, entering the kid’s abdomen less than three inches above the base of his penis and blowing a portion of his lower intestine through his back. His spine was intact, but that didn’t matter—the kid was going to die. The sooner the better, for his sake.
Cardo sat beside him in the back room, holding his hand. The kid shook and wept and ground his teeth against the pain, and Cardo fed him shot after shot of rum from a paper cup.
Upstairs, Reggie and the old man rained lead down upon the walking dead, and the kid jumped every damned time gunfire pierced the silence. He’d tried to stuff wads of toilet paper into the kid’s ears, but Richard had only picked them out with quivering, bloodstained fingers.
“Gah,” the kid said, his eyes wild and searching.
“Hey,” Cardo said. “I’m here.”
“Oh. The pain is fading.”
“That’s good, man.”
“Is it?”
“Sure.”
He could see the distrust in the kid’s eyes, right behind the pain and the confusion.
“I’m dying.” It was not a question.
“You just,” Cardo began, looking for the right words and finding only the expected ones, the obvious ones: “You just need to rest, Rich. Save your strength.”
“Cardo.”
“Yeah?”
The kid looked down at Cardo’s belt, dragged his gaze back up to his face. “That your car out there?”
“Shh.”
“The cop car,” the kid said. “In the garage.”
“What?”
“You’ve got to go there,” Richard said, and his hand sought the bottle of rum. Cardo poured him another shot, fed it to him. He coughed, spraying most of the liquor onto Cardo’s hand. “You have to help her.”
“Who?”
“They’re all dead,” the kid said. “Except for Colleen. She’s still alive. One of them said she was still alive.”
The kid fell silent. Cardo tried to give him another shot of rum, but most of it ran down Richard’s swollen face. He said a few more things, none of which made much sense, and then he passed out.
Cardo sat with him for a few minutes, watching his chest rise and fall and listening to the train of gunfire from above, wondering if maybe he should put one round into the kid’s head.
The old man burned through twenty rounds and passed the rifle back to Reggie, manned the window while Reggie reloaded. Crate had been wrong: he’d had fourteen boxes of bullets in his shack—two hundred and eighty rounds. Two forty left, and there were maybe seventy walking corpses down below, give or take.
He took his place at the window and opened fire. The bodies fell, were heaped like sandbags across the parking lot.
They had this. They had it by the balls.
Cardo stepped from the back room and into the store. Stacy sat behind the counter, watching television with the volume down, and Misty stood at the door, watching through a slim opening in the blinds. She looked back at him.
“How is he?” She whispered, and someone upstairs fired the rifle.
He waited until he was standing beside her to answer: “Dying.”
“Poor kid,” she said, pausing as another volley of shots popped through the silence. “They were all pretty nice. I wonder what happened to them.”
“Same thing that’s happening to everyone else.”
Bang. Bang, bang.
“I would have though Huff’s place was safe.”
“Who’s Huff?”
“Huffington Niebolt,” she said. The shots were so loud here, directly beneath the room in which Crate and Reggie took turns at bat. “Not too far up the road. You can’t miss it. He sold doors and windows and things. Lots of land. Up the hill and out of the way. That’s where they all went. One of Huff’s sons took them.”
“Oh,” Cardo said, leaning forward and gazing though the blinds in time to see one of the dead things go down face first. In places, the bodies had fallen three deep. “He said they were all dead, all except for someone named Colleen.”
“Colleen was one of them,” Misty said, looking up at him. “She seemed nice.”
They’re insane, he’d said, and Cardo wondered if that had just been delirium and pain talking.
“Need anything?” He asked, and Misty shook her head. Another gun blast, and Stacy looked at Cardo. On the TV, words ticked by beneath the CBS eye.
“Huh?” She asked, wincing in anticipation of another gunshot.
“Get you anything?”
“Get us out of here, maybe.”
Two shots, back to back.
He stepped into the back, crouching beside the kid. Richard looked dead but wasn’t. His chest rose and fell, and Cardo knew that he could go on this way for a long time. He touched the kid’s boiling forehead and then stood, meaning to go upstairs and take a look at the action from above. He glanced at the back door and the kid’s words stopped him.
The cop car. In the garage.
He eased open the back door and stepped outside, looking around. Aside from the three bodies, there was no sign of the dead. He stepped across the shells and onto the grass, retrieved the hammer from where the old man had dropped it, and walked past the shed and to the ramshackle double garage.
Both doors were down, but the small side door was unlocked. There was very little light inside. The place smelled of grease and gasoline, wet earth and mold, and something else. There was an old pickup truck in front of him, jacked up on cinderblocks. Beside it, a Beistle police cruiser.
Glancing back to make sure the coast was clear, he walked to the front of the truck and lifted one of the garage doors, let in some fading evening light.
Cruiser number four—Tasgal’s car. Bloated and nearly unrecognizable, Clark’s body was slouched in the passenger seat. All four windows were up, holding back most of the stench.
Bang, bang, bang—the shots just kept on coming, and Cardo backed out of the garage, looked around. The broken window caught his eye, and he walked toward Crate’s shack, peered into the window.
I don’t like people going in my house.
The smell hit him. Bound and gagged and visibly dead, Eric Tasgal lay upon the floor of the old man’s apartment, staining the carpet at the foot of the bed and trying to sit up.
“God,” he said, and his dead partner looked at him. Its eyes widened. Cardo pulled his gun.
“Oh, shit,” the old man said.
“What?” Reggie asked, sitting on the other side of the bed, facing the hall and pressing the tip of his right forefinger into his ear, working it.
“Two of them are on the porch.”
“Just two?” Reggie asked, getting up. There were fewer than forty of the walking dead things left, and they were having trouble getting past the bodies heaped before the entrance to the store.
“I think so,” Crate said. “Hard to hell.”
Checking his gun, he stood up and left the room. Misty and Stacy were at the bottom of the stairs. They looked terrified.
“They’re at the door,” Misty said.
“I know,” Reggie said, following Stacy’s gaze. The wounded kid had rolled onto his side and drawn his knees as close to his chest as his condition would allow. Blood spread in a dark splotch upon the surface of the bindings. “How many?”
“Four,” Stacy said, and the back door slammed open.
“You old fucking bitch,” Cardo said, pushing past Stacy and pinning Misty to the wall, pressing the barrel of his gun into the soft flesh of her cheek. Stacy screamed, got herself out of the way, and Reggie raised his Colt, pointed it directly at Cardo’s face.
“Hey, man,” he said. “The fuck are you doing?”
“What did you do?” Cardo growled, pressing harder.
The kid on the floor moaned, and the old man just kept shooting.
“I don’t know what—”
“You’re lying,” Cardo said, twisting the barrel of his pistol against Misty’s cheek, like he was trying to drill into her head.
“Cardo,” he said, not wanting to kill this man he’d just saved. His trigger finger was slick. “Put the gun down and tell me what you think she did.”
The old lady wept, and upstairs Crate squeezed off another round. Stacy stood with her mouth open and her hand pressed to her crystal. At her feet, the wounded kid mumbled.
“My partner,” Cardo snapped, shooting a glance at Reggie. His eyes were wild, a look Reggie had seen before, and he was no longer trying to control his volume. “Two cops are out there, and they’re both dead.”
“God,” Misty said, bringing her veined and wrinkled hands to her face, mashing her cheeks and pressing deep lines into her brow. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. It was Charles. And Crate. He, he—” Her words dissolved into unintelligible sobs.
Cardo let go of her, stepped back, and she slid down the wall, silently weeping.
Reggie stared at Cardo, lowered his weapon. Out front, the door rattled in its frame. Upstairs, Crate fired two more rounds.
“He didn’t hear us,” Cardo said, speaking once more in hushed tones, his breathing rapid. Reggie could see the hammering pulse in the man’s neck.
Reggie looked down at the old woman, unsure whether or not what he felt was anger or pity. She looked up at him, opened her mouth to say something, and Stacy screamed.
The wounded kid had seized her ankle in both hands and tried to bite her calf. She kicked his face with the other foot, lost her balance, and stumbled through the open back door and onto her ass.
Reggie shot Richard’s corpse through the head.
“Damn it,” Cardo said, rushing past Reggie and helping Stacy to her feet. Behind her, four dead bodies crept toward the back door—a shirtless boy in swim trunks, no older than ten when we was alive, now a pale and wasted thing with a ragged and empty black hole where its stomach had been; a lipless naked woman covered in deep bite marks. A man in a hospital gown, its head bound in stained bandages, its left arm in a cast covered in sketches, names, and scrawled messages; a jawless, handless, sexless thing with a wild shock of bloodied blond hair and surprised, lidless eyes.
Conserving bullets, he shot the most able-bodied among them, slamming the door in the faces of the handless thing and the child. The lock clicked home, and one of the things threw itself against the door.
“Should have shot them,” Cardo said. “They’re going to draw more.”
“Dammit,” Reggie said, frozen in place, unsure of what his next movie should be. Too much was happening too fast, and it was like he was on his stomach with mud in his mouth and bullets buzzing overhead. Out front, the door rattled and rattled. Soon it would give, the bell would jingle, and however many of the things were left would get inside.
There were footfalls on the stairs, and Crate appeared, eyes wild, rifle at the ready.
“Get upstairs,” the old man said, and then he noticed Misty sitting on the floor with her back to the wall. He bent over, helped her to her feet, and Reggie watched Cardo.
“Upstairs,” Cardo said to Stacy, who nodded once and hammered up the stairs.
“What’s wrong, woman?” Crate asked.
“Oh, God, Crate. They know we—”
“They know we’re in here,” Cardo said, taking the woman by the shoulders and gently leading her to the foot of the stairs. “Now go.”
She looked back, frozen.
“Go,” Crate said. “I’ll be up in a little while.”
She went.
Reggie looked at Cardo, eyebrows raised, and the old man left.
“What are we doing?” Reggie asked. It sounded like there were now more than two dead things outside the back door.
“Go upstairs, keep shooting them,” Cardo said, looking toward the door leading into the store. “I’m going to take care of this.”
“You need a hand?”
“No,” he said, looking away, eyes distant. “Won’t take long.”
“Okay.”
Cardo stepped into the store, and Reggie plodded up the stairs. The bedroom door at the end of the hall was closed, and Stacy sat on the edge of the bed in the spare room, where Reggie and Crate had launched their assault.
She looked back at him, eyes wide, and her expression of fear softened when she realized it was him.
“She’s in her room,” Stacy said. “I heard her crying.”
Reggie walked to the window. Most of the dead folks down there were actually dead, but the crowd pressing in on the front door was large enough to break through and overwhelm them.
“What’s happening?” She asked.
“We’re waiting on Cardo.”
“Then what?”
“I really don’t know,” he said.
He checked his Colt. Three bullets remained, and the magazine in his pocket was full—he had a total of eleven shots.
Reggie tossed the four shotgun shells from his pocket onto the bed, grabbed his shotgun from where he’d left it atop the cluttered dresser, and offered it to Stacy.
“I really don’t want that,” she said.
“Watch.” He cracked the barrel, removed and replaced the shells, snapped it shut, and went through it once more. “And here’s the hammer. You cock it like this. Got it?”
“I don’t want to.” She was almost crying.
“Take it.” He said, taking his place at the window. “Wait at the top of the stairs. Don’t cock the thing until you know it’s one of them coming up.”
“And if it’s Crate?”
“It won’t be.”
“God,” she said, tears welling in her eyes, and Reggie turned his back on her. He took aim, steadied his hand, and pulled the trigger.
The interior of the store was dim. What little light remained outside was blocked by the bodies pressed against the door, rattling it in its frame.
The old man grunted behind the ice cream cooler, pushing it toward the door, and Cardo crushed down the desire to shoot him on the spot. Before he did, he had to know, had to get some idea of what had happened here.
“Hey,” the old man said, looking up. His rifle rested on the checkout counter, between the large jar of pickled eggs and the chainsaw. “Give me a hand with th—”
Cardo thrust his left hand into the old man’s beard, wrapped his fingers around Crate’s throat.
“Gah,” Crate said, going for the pistol hanging from his hip. Cardo beat him to it, wrenching the gun from the holster and pressing the barrel to the side of Crate’s head.
“What happened?”
The old man croaked. Spittle flew from his mouth, beaded in the wiry yellow hair of his beard. Cardo loosened his grip.
“What the hell?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
The old man stared at him, and Cardo could see the indecision in his eyes, the guilt. “Oh,” he said, and Cardo tightened his grip, dug his fingers into the old man’s flesh. Crate brought his hands up and tugged at Cardo’s wrist. Failing that, he pawed Cardo’s chest.
“Oh?” Cardo asked, and he felt himself unraveling. He’d been here before, not four years ago, when a perp had smashed a glass beer mug across his face, breaking his nose. When Cardo had gotten out of the hospital, he’d gone to the police station and confronted the man in his cell, got his hands around the bastard’s throat. Reality had set in before he’d gotten to do any lasting damage, a reality that no longer existed.
“Huh,” the old man said, gasping. He tried to claw at Cardo’s face, and Cardo pushed him against the ice cream cooler. The door rattled and rattled, dead hands slapping at the glass. The old man’s boots kicked and skidded across the tile, and Cardo pushed him over to the door, slammed his back to the blinds, which bent and parted. Dead eyes peered through the openings.
“What happened?” Cardo growled, and the fear and pain in the old man’s eyes did something to him, made him feel good, like what he was doing—what he was about to do—was the right thing. The only thing. “Why did you kill them?”
He loosened his grip again.
“We didn’t kill anybody,” Crate said, his bushy eyebrows drawing together. There was fear in his eyes, yes, but there was also anger. “The one in the car was dead.”
“Clark.”
“Yeah. He came back. Tasgal shot him.”
“And Eric?”
“Clark bit him. We were scared, goddammit.” There was no apology in his voice. “We took care of him, but when he fell asleep—”
“You tied him up.” He pulled the old man toward him, drove him into the door. The blinds came free and crashed to the floor at Crate’s ankles. The first dead man to have reached the door was pressed to the glass, its right arm pinned against its chest, its nose broken and mashed to its face. Its mouth hung open. Its lips were dark with dried blood. The glass was streaked with filth. The dead pressed in around it.
“Yes.”
“He came to you for help and you tied him up and let him die?” Cardo growled, spinning the old man around and pressing him to the glass, so that he was face to face with the dead man and those behind it.
The old man screamed, tried to push himself away from the door. Cardo let go of him, took several steps backward. Crate jerked away from the door, turned to face Cardo, massaging his throat.
He looked at the rifle on the counter to his left, and the look on his face was not one of hope but of acceptance. He was not fast enough to reach it.
Cardo put a bullet through Crate’s right leg, all but severing it at the knee. The old man screamed and collapsed to the floor, long fingers probing his ruined knee, blood spurting and pooling. Cardo’s aim was perfect—his hand was like a rock. The second bullet tore through Crate’s left shoulder.
His mouth contorting into a pained rictus, the old man squealed. It was a horrible sound, somehow infant-like in its raw simplicity. Crate collapsed onto his wounded shoulder, gasping.
Cardo’s next bullet shattered the glass door and punched a hole in the face of the dead man that had, a second before, been smashed against the door. The lifeless thing crashed forward in a chirping rain of glass, and the dead behind it followed, tumbling and spilling, uncoordinated limbs flapping.
Pocketing the old man’s pistol, Cardo retrieved the rifle from the counter and took a few steps backward. He heard the others hammering on the back door and the sound of heavy footfalls overhead.
“I’m okay,” he yelled at the ceiling. “Everything is okay.”
The corpse Cardo had shot lay facedown in a spreading black puddle. The three who’d tumbled in behind it had yet to regain their feet. They crawled toward the wounded old man, mouths open and eager.
“Mother fucker,” Crate said. His left arm lay useless beneath him. His right reached, fingers clawing at the tile. He pumped his left leg, tried to find some purchase, to push himself along the floor, away from the dead, who stepped and stumbled into the store, one after another.
Five, eight, twelve, and then Cardo stopped counting. They saw the old man. In whatever strange way that they discerned the living from the dead, they saw their wounded prey and they moved in, encircled him, grabbing and tugging and biting.
The old man screamed and screamed, went from sounding like an infant to no longer sounding human at all. A dead woman with a swollen bruise for a face managed to tear away what little tissue held his right leg together at the knee, sliding the severed limb from his blood-soaked pants leg and pressing the wet stump to her lips, sucking and gnawing. The dead were the only ones who enjoyed things now.
They rolled Crate onto his stomach and tore away his shirt and pants. The old man looked at Cardo, tears streaming from his eyes. He tried to say something but managed only to scream garbled nonsense. Cardo raised the rifle, got the old man’s face in his sights. Crate looked hopeful.
Cardo lowered the rifle and watched the hope on the old man’s face twist into something else. He watched a little longer, and then he left. By the time Cardo was halfway up the stairs, the old man had stopped screaming.
“They’re in,” Reggie said. There were maybe thirty walking corpses left outside. They clambered over the heaped dead and vanished beneath the corrugated tin overhang.
“Oh, no,” Stacy said, standing up and looking at the door, an expression of pure terror on her face.
“Hey,” Reggie said, walking to where she stood and taking both of her hands, leading one of them to the crystal that hung between her breasts. “Hey?”
“Oh, God...”
“We’re going to be okay, okay?”
There were footfalls on the stairs, slow and plodding.
“No...”
“Yes,” he said. It felt like a lie. “Wait here.”
Pistol raised, he stepped into the hallway and approached the stairwell. Cardo loafed toward him, head hung low. He held the old man’s rifle.
“They’re inside,” he said, looking up at Reggie.
“I know.”
“Here,” Cardo said, handing the rifle to Reggie, who followed him into the bedroom. Stacy gasped and threw her arms around Cardo. He held her, and the two of them stood there for a few seconds, eyes squeezed shut, upper bodies rocking back and forth. Reggie loaded the rifle, his eyes on Cardo and the woman. Jealousy stirred in his chest, and he choked it down. It didn’t make sense, not now. Or maybe it did, more than ever, he really wasn’t sure. Whatever—it wasn’t something he had time for.
Cardo pulled away from the embrace and sat on the edge of the bed, pressed his face into his hands, and wept. Reggie stood in the doorway, listening, waiting.
“I left him,” Cardo said, looking up at Reggie with tears running down his stubbly cheeks. “God. I let them… I let them…”
“I know, man.” Reggie said, and he thought of the guy in Citrus Heights, the guy who’d accused him of trying to kidnap and rape the boy. “You did what you had to do. It’s okay.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“It is, man. It’s gotta be.”
Downstairs, in the back room, something—a broom or a mop or something—struck the floor. Cardo stared at him. His cheeks were wet with tears, but Reggie thought maybe the man was done crying for now. Stacy sat beside him, wrapped an arm around his shoulders. Yeah, for a time there it could have gone either way—she could have been his or she could have been Cardo’s, and she was Cardo’s now.
“I’ve got this,” Reggie said and left, took his place at the top of the stairs.
“Come on,” he yelled. “I’m up here. Come on.”
The first corpse came into view. Reggie did not miss.
It didn’t take very long. Within an hour, the last walking corpse was taken down, and as the sun dipped behind the trees and the shadows reached from within the forest to reclaim the world, they took what they needed and, carefully stepping over the heaped and fallen dead, packed the truck with supplies and left.