CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Welcome to the Wall
The sign read:
Welcome to the 66 States
Please wipe ur dick
The words were cobbled together out of pieces of broken signs, each letter a different font and a different size than the one next to it. Like a ransom note writ large. Coburn and his ‘herd’ stood beneath it, highlighting it in the combined halo cast by their flashlights.
“Looks like it goes on for miles,” Kayla said.
“Cuts right across the highway,” Leelee said. “Pretty impressive.”
“Impressive?” Coburn asked. “‘Please wipe your dick’ is impressive? You people are easily stirred.”
They never got to Texola.
A mile before they got there, they found that they weren’t going to get there—at least, not easily. Because a wall cut the highway in half like a giant cleaver blade smashing down across it. The wall wasn’t just one wall type: it was dozens of different barriers welded together and held up by posts pounded into the dry earth. Over here, a thick-gauge chain-link. Over there, heavy corrugated metal. Between them, thick green metal poles as big as a man’s arm.
It didn’t stop there. Atop it sat coils of barbed and razor wire, and behind it, on the far side, the wall was further bolstered by…
Well, junk.
Wrecked cars. Old washing machines. Busted furniture. Mounds of debris, stacks of worthless shit. Coburn knew now why someone had gone through a town like Erick and stripped it of everything that wasn’t nailed down (and then some). It was clumsy. It was ugly. It was like something out of Mad Max. But, the vampire had to admit, it looked not only intimidating, but functional.
All told, the wall was ten to fifteen feet high. Made even taller by barbed wire.
Gil shined his light up and down the length of it. “Looks like some of it could be the border fence. The one they were putting up between us and Mexico. One that never got finished.”
“Here, look,” Leelee said, pointing up above the highway. “This part of the fence isn’t just a fence. It’s a gate.” And sure enough, the fence here had a break in it—it wasn’t on hinges, but rather on a track embedded in the dirt. Almost the way a sliding patio door works: unhook it and pull it across the track. At first that didn’t seem to explain how to get through because behind the gate anybody would still have to move a handful of junker cars. But when they looked deeper, they saw it worked the same way. Those cars had been hollowed out and made light, and they too were on tracks. Explained why Coburn caught a whiff of what may have been WD-40: as long as the tracks were lubricated, seemed like they’d be able to slide out across pretty easy.
“The Sixty-Six States,” Kayla said. “I don’t get it. Country only has fifty states. Guess they can’t spell and they can’t count.”
Gil grunted. “It’s not a count. It’s like I said, this is the old Route 66. Cuts right through.”
“The Sons of Man must have territory a lot farther south than we thought,” Ebbie added.
“No,” Coburn said. “I don’t think this is them. Those assholes weren’t exactly a brain trust of intellectuals, but this seems somehow beneath even the Sons. Plus, doesn’t look anything like what the stories say. This isn’t the product of a functional society. Then again, two years is a long time, and nobody said the stories can’t be—”
Suddenly, floodlights clicked on and blinded Coburn into silence. A voice came over a loudspeaker, and they heard the mechanized roar of a vehicle fast approaching.
The cars wheeled back, grinding across the tracks with the sound of what could’ve been wheels or gears turning. The gate, too, began moving—it was not automated, but Kayla also couldn’t see anybody making the motion happen. It occurred, as if by magic.
Creampuff started growling.
When the gate was retracted, more lights blinded them and Kayla shielded her eyes: a Humvee came bounding across the cracked asphalt and skidded to a halt, blocking the opening.
Kayla’s jaw dropped.
She hadn’t expected this. In a million years she never would’ve imagined that the men bolting free of the Humvee, automatic weapons in hand, would be dressed like clowns. But not straight-up circus clowns—no red nose and nuclear-green afro wig. White face paint. Blood circles around their mouths, black paint around their eyes. All smudged, flaking off, exposing patches of stubble and skin.
Three of them stepped out. Three grim-faced, pissed-off clowns.
Kayla looked to Coburn—
Except he was nowhere to be found.
The lead of the trio, a pear-shaped pig with white-blonde dreadlocks sticking out of his do-rag like the legs of a squashed albino tarantula, stepped into the fore, gun up, barking at them. Literally. Barking at them like a dog.
“Ruh ruh ruh,” he barked. “Back up, bitches. I said BTFU or I’ll peel your scalp with a shit-storm of lead.”
They did as told, putting their hands up.
“Drop the fucking bags. Drop ’em!”
They dropped everything they were carrying as the two other Goth-clowns—one built like an inverted triangle, the other a reedy old man whose graying goat-beard was similarly gummed up with greasepaint—stepped in behind the pig-nosed, pear-shaped leader.
“What the figgity-fuck do we have here?” Pig-Nose asked. “Looks like we got a handful of terrorists wantin’ to do some assassination with a bunch of bombs and shit.”
Gil stepped forward, holding up his splinted hand. “Listen, fella, we’re not here to cause any kind of—”
Pig-Nose thrust the gun barrel hard against Gil’s face, the end of the rifle actually entering his mouth and scraping up against his gums.
“Did I say to talk, you old bastard? I didn’t say shit. You keep flapping them lips and I promise you, dude, I will split your motherfucking wig. You gonna step to me? You feel like steppin’?”
“No,” Gil said, pulling gently away from the rifle. He slowly spit a bloody loogey off to the side. “I’m not… stepping.”
“Good. Now whatchoo got in those bags?”
Gil didn’t say anything.
“I said, what’s in the damn bags?”
“I can talk now?”
Pig-Nose looked wounded. “Yes! Yes I told you to fucking talk. I asked you a question, didn’t I? You some kind of retard?”
“Supplies!” Kayla blurted out. She couldn’t stand seeing her father put in harm’s way again. “We have food. Guns. Ammo. Some clothing.”
Pig-Nose pointed the rifle at her. Her guts turned to water. “No bombs?”
“No bombs,” Gil said, hands still up.
“No bombs,” she confirmed with a peep.
Pig-Nose whistled, gestured to the two lugs behind him. “Dope Fiend. Jester. Go get that shit and bring those bags to the car.”
As they moved to grab the bags, Kayla saw movement behind them, by the gate. A shadow eased along the edge of the fence. It was Coburn. The tight knot in her stomach started to loosen, because if anybody could handle these oh-my-god-they’re-actually-clowns, it’d be him.
He held up a finger to his lips, noting that she was watching him.
She nodded.
And then he disappeared through the gate and was gone.
That bastard. Again her bowels tightened.
“Hey!” she yelled out, before she even realized what was coming out of her mouth. Pig-Nose came up, puffing out his chest like a dumpy-assed rooster, and pointed the gun at her heart.
“What are you yelling about, you little slag-a-muffin? Huh? Huh?”
“Hey now,” Gil said, protesting. The old man—who must’ve been Jester, because he wore a ratty jester’s cap with tinkly rusty bells on it—shoved him backward. “She’s just a girl, now. She doesn’t mean any harm.”
“I…” Kayla said, searching for words. “I just didn’t know you were going to take our stuff.”
Pig-Nose chuffed. Might’ve been a laugh, she didn’t know. “You bet your sweet cupcake ass we’re taking your stuff. That’s the payment for passage into the 66 States. You don’t get to see the King if you don’t tithe to the King. That’s the law. One of the only laws here, you feel me?”
“The… King?” she asked.
“Hell yes the King,” he said. “King Brutha Thuglow. The leader of these here glorious fiefdoms. The keeper of Satan’s Carnival. And a straight-up psychopathic ninja. In fact, he needs to meet your asses to make sure you can stay here, that you not some kind of terrorist. So get your poop-chutes into that Humvee. It’s time meet the King.”