“You’re fucking arresting me for killing a dead person?”
Cliven Ridgeway sat in the back of the sheriff’s cruiser, unsuccessfully trying to wrestle free from his handcuffs.
“It’s open season on them. Says it on the news even.”
Sheriff Evan Foster didn’t turn around to address Cliven. Didn’t even look at him in the rearview.
“Last time I saw Etta, she was as alive as you and me,” the sheriff said. “Until I know different, that means it’s a homicide, and that puts you back behind bars.”
Cliven spat on the floor of the car. “So that’s what this is, huh? Railroad job. And you taking me to jail in the back of the car my family bought for the department. It’s a disgrace.”
The sheriff turned down Harrison Lane. The streetlights were out, the houses dark. The power had gone off eight hours ago and he didn’t figure it to come back on anytime soon. The word the electric company had used was “indefinitely.” That was when the phones worked and you could still get through to someone.
“It’s not the first time you been in the back of my car,” the sheriff said. “And I thanked your folks at the ribbon cutting ceremony. That don’t excuse you of murder.”
“Only it’s not Etta Winnerson’s murder you’re arresting me for, is it?”
The sheriff didn’t say anything. He came up to Schaefer Road and hooked around the turnabout where the Ladies Petunia Club had planted an array of their namesake flowers, dominated by an impressive spread of “wild white,” if he remembered last Thursday’s lecture at the library correctly. He frowned at the body lying in a patch of multifloras. Made a mental note to come back and check whose it was after he was done at the jail. Clearly not one of the reanimated dead. And probably someone the sheriff knew.
Just a few hours back he’d had to put down three of his friends, including Deputy Sheriff Jackson Hayes. He couldn’t say for sure how they’d died, but he suspected two of them had been in a car accident and Hayes had tried to perform CPR on one of them. That seemed to be how a lot of the early victims of the outbreak died, trying to help what they thought were living people.
Cliven was still messing around in the back with his cuffs. A satisfying click followed by a curse told the sheriff that Cliven’s efforts were only succeeding in making them tighter.
“Only two ways this goes, sheriff,” Cliven said. “Either tomorrow the courthouse is open and the judge hands me a get out of jail free card, or the courts never open again and you got to let me out on account of there ain’t no courts anymore. Anyways I can help clean up this mess. I’m a better shot than most of your deputies.”
“Maybe so. We’ll see how it goes either way. But I wouldn’t count on Judge Henderson letting you out again.”
“He’ll let me out or my sister will kill him.” Cliven smiled. “Or worse, divorce him. But you and me both know I’ll walk. How many times you have to try and frame me for this or that crime before you realize, they ain’t never going to put me in jail? Hell, you’re only sheriff because my daddy said a good word for you at election time. Maybe next time I’ll run for sheriff so’s I can arrest you for made-up shit you never done.”
Cliven gave up on the handcuffs and switched to kicking the reinforced panel that sat between the rear and front seats. Every kick coinciding with a word: “They.” Kick. “Ain’t.” Kick. “Never.” Kick. “Going.” Kick. “To.” Kick. “Put.” Kick. “Me.” Kick. “In.” Kick. “Jail.” Kick.
“I’ve never arrested you for something you didn’t do, Cliven. Not being convicted of a crime isn’t the same as never having committed it. That’s a lesson I don’t think you’ve learned.”
Two more kicks: “Fuck. You.”
“Take old Etta,” the sheriff went on. He’d still not so much as glanced back at Cliven. “She might have died of natural causes, or maybe unnatural ones. And yeah, you might have come across her and been attacked.”
“I told you she come after me! Thought she was drunk, her housecoat open and her not even wearing granny panties or nothing. Disgusting is what it was. She come at me and tried to bite my face off!”
“That could be true, Cliven. But it could also be true that you figured you could pretty much kill anyone during a thing like this and no one would question it. Especially an old lady who can’t remember her own name most days.”
“Fuck.” Kick. “You.” Kick. “Twice.” He ended the sentence with two kicks, maybe trying to be clever.
“Is that what you did? Murder an old lady in the street because you thought it’d be fun? They call that a ‘thrill kill,’ Cliven, did you know that?”
Cliven looked out the window at nothing in particular. “I ain’t no thriller killer. It was self-defense. And even if it wasn’t, no way for you to know different.”
The sheriff saw the lights of an oncoming car. He slowed down as it got closer, recognized Chris Miller driving the Municipal Road Works van. He pulled to a stop and the van pulled up opposite him.
“You boys okay?” the sheriff called out his window. He could see young Billy O’Connell in the van alongside Chris.
“We got delayed some but we’re all right,” Chris said. He looked in the back of the cruiser, spotted Cliven.
“Guess things are still on track then?”
“Still on track,” the sheriff said. “I’m just taking this suspect to the jail.”
“All right,” Chris said. “It shouldn’t take us too long, though it’s not the kind of thing I’ve ever done before.”
“You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. I can find some other volunteers.”
Chris let out a short laugh. “It might be wrong to say it, sheriff, but I never wanted to do something more in my life. Me and him”—he nodded at Cliven—“go back a long way. Most people in town could say the same.”
“Most could.”
“We’ll see you at the jail then.”
“See you there. And you two take care you don’t get yourselves hurt.”
Chris waved as he pulled off down the road.
Cliven had followed the exchange closely.
“What the fuck is going on, sheriff? Why’d he look at me like that?”
“I suppose he don’t like you much.”
“Why’s he even allowed to drive around? Thought we was all under martial law?”
The sheriff watched until the taillights of the van disappeared down the road, then he continued on.
“I deputized those boys to help me out during the crisis. I got them running some errands.”
“Them, deputies?” Cliven scoffed. “You’d have done better to make me a deputy than them two. They couldn’t find their asses in a dark room even if you was to give ’em flashlights.”
“Oh, I think they’re the right boys for the job I need doing.”
Cliven looked like he wasn’t sure what to make of that comment.
The sheriff continued on to the municipal building, which is where the three-(now two-) person sheriff’s department was housed. It also contained the holding cells, the courthouse, the mayor’s office, and the town clerk’s office. The double-wide front doors had both been left open by someone, and the glow of the interior emergency lights spilled into the night.
He pulled up right in front by the stairs to minimize the distance he and Cliven would have to walk in the open, then got out and surveyed the quiet street. All dark as midnight except for a few stores that had their own emergency lights. The pharmacy. Hardware store. June’s Café.
Someone had tried to pry open the security gate of the pharmacy to little success other than busting the window. The sheriff added a note to his mental to-do list to try to figure out who’d attempted to break in, though he was pretty sure no one was going to file a complaint about it.
As he turned to retrieve Cliven from the car he glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, a figure in the distance. He put his hand to his gun but took it away a moment later. If it was one of the walking corpses he thought he would have seen its herky-jerky movements again. So it was either a real person or nothing at all, and neither was enough to distract him away from his current business.
He pulled Cliven out of the back of the car and marched him up the stairs into the mostly dark building, Cliven protesting the whole way.
“You can’t put me in here if the power’s out. I got my rights. I won’t be able to see nothing.”
“Emergency lights are on. Good for forty-eight hours.”
“Yeah, and what then?”
“According to you, the judge will have you out come morning. So nothing to worry yourself about.”
“And what if it’s like you said?”
The sheriff didn’t answer for a moment. “I’m just taking things one step at a time, Cliven. It’s fair enough to say the night has been full of surprises and I expect things to continue that way.”
As they walked down a hallway and past the sheriff’s personal office, a figure suddenly loomed out of the dark at them.
Cliven stiffened and tried to pull away, but the sheriff had him by the cuffs and held him steady. The figure stepped into the halo of an emergency light and revealed itself to be Joe Donovan, owner of Donovan’s Tree & Lawn Service and father to Sue Donovan, who’d recently been found murdered.
Cliven recoiled from Joe more fiercely than if it’d been one of the walking corpses.
“What’s he doing here?” he demanded from the sheriff.
Joe’s eyes were rimmed with red and his face was pale as death. His skin had a clammy look to it and you could just about feel a wave of heat coming from him. Joe stared at Cliven like the prisoner was some kind of demon who’d just erupted from hell. Then he turned to the sheriff.
“I can’t do it, Evan.”
“Do what?” Cliven asked.
The other men ignored him.
“That’s okay,” the sheriff said. “We’ll handle it from here. In fact, I think it’d be better if you left before the boys get back. No need for you to see that.”
“I thought I could, but I can’t,” Joe said.
“Do what?” Cliven demanded again.
The sheriff put a hand on Donovan’s shoulder. “Go home. Be safe. See your wife.”
“I don’t know if I can look her in the eye after…”
“You can look her in the eye. You haven’t done anything. Something’s been done to you. Now you got to try to heal from it.”
“What in the fuck are you two talking about?”
“The others are downstairs,” Donovan told the sheriff. Then he turned to face Cliven. Without warning he struck the captive man across the face, an open-handed slap that rocked Cliven’s head to the side.
Joe raised his finger to Cliven’s face like he was going to say something, but then lowered it and shoved past him.
“I’m going to go see my wife like you said,” he told the sheriff, and hurried out of the building.
“Jesus Christ!” Cliven said. “He can’t just hit me like that! Ain’t you going to arrest him?”
“I must have been looking away, Cliven. I didn’t see anyone hit you.”
Cliven kicked at the floor in frustration.
“Goddamn it, sheriff, this ain’t right. You arresting me for no reason, then letting crazy Donovan use me like a punching bag. This ain’t right at all.”
“If he did hit you, you might consider how lucky you are that’s all he did. Another father in his situation, you in front of him cuffed and all, things might have turned out worse for you.”
“I fucking told you I ain’t had nothing to do with his daughter! Nothing. I got eyewitnesses back up my alibi. You all don’t even have a single piece of evidence.”
The sheriff stood in silence, as if pondering some weighty question.
“Funny how things work out, isn’t it?” he finally said. “The only forensic tech we got access to decides to go on a European vacation, of all things. First class tickets. Staying at the Four Seasons no less. Would’ve been a hell of a trip I imagine if it wasn’t ruined by the ongoing situation.”
“I ain’t had nothing to do with that,” Cliven said. “I can’t control when someone decides to take a vacation for fuck’s sake.”
“Never said you did,” the sheriff said. “I expect that was your daddy.” He guided Cliven toward the stairs in the back that led to the cells.
* * *
Downstairs there were two small jail cells off an equally small kitchen where the deputies liked to make coffee and bullshit. Fiona Hapsburg, the town clerk, would come down for a cup anytime she smelled a fresh pot, but never made it herself because she’s “not drinking coffee no more ’cause of her blood pressure.” No one minded too much.
Today Fiona wasn’t there but Jeremy Potter and Cindy Kerr were at the table, sitting around an electric Coleman lantern and eating granola bars. Both armed. Him with a Colt .45 that was his daddy’s during the war, and her with a hunting rifle she’d gotten on her fifteenth birthday.
“Hey, sheriff,” she said.
The sheriff nodded at them.
“What the hell are they doing here?” Cliven asked. “More of your new deputies?”
Jeremy gave Cliven an icy look. Cindy smirked at him, like she knew a secret he didn’t.
“More like interested parties,” the sheriff said.
He tried to guide Cliven toward the cell but now the prisoner started resisting in earnest.
“I see what you got here,” Cliven said. “You’re rounding up everyone ever held a grudge to me, is that it?”
The sheriff said nothing, tried again to urge Cliven toward the cell, but Cliven was having none of it.
“Is this some kind of execution, sheriff? You gonna take me in there and put a bullet in my head while these watch?”
“Why would I do that for?” the sheriff asked.
“’Cause you believe all the shit they talk about me. What Jeremy said I done to his brother, what she says happened on prom night, what Donovan thinks happened to his daughter. And you got a bee up your ass about old Etta who attacked me tonight.”
“Them other things you got off for. And like I said, your story checks out about Etta, we’ll let you go.”
“We ain’t talking about Etta and you know it.”
“If you got things weighing on your conscience, Cliven, that’s not my fault.”
The sheriff stopped him and looked straight into his prisoner’s eyes for the first time all night. Cliven was taken aback by what he saw in the sheriff’s gaze. The rest of his face was unreadable as stone, but the sheriff’s eyes practically burned with hatred.
“You got something you want to confess to me, boy?”
Cliven looked around for help, but only met Jeremy’s cold stare. When he looked to Cindy she let out a small giggle but said nothing.
“You got maybe one chance to say something decent here,” the sheriff said. “I’m asking you again, you got something you want to confess to me?”
Cliven turned away from the sheriff. “No,” he said weakly. He didn’t protest any more when the sheriff led him to the cell.
* * *
The cell was ten feet long and five feet wide, with the obligatory bare metal toilet and sink, and a bench inset along one wall that could double as a cot. It wasn’t meant to house prisoners for more than a night or two before they were moved up to county jail.
There was a small, rectangular opening about waist height in the cell door where prisoners put their hands to be cuffed or uncuffed as needed. As soon as the sheriff put him in the cell, Cliven backed up to the opening and held out his hands to be released, like it was something he’d done before. The sheriff ignored him.
“Ain’t you going to uncuff me?” Cliven asked.
“No, I don’t believe I will tonight,” the sheriff said.
* * *
An hour passed with Cliven loudly moving around the cell trying to get as comfortable as possible and the other three chatting in semi-hushed tones around the table.
“Maybe we should go look for them,” Jeremy said after a while.
“They’ll be all right,” the sheriff said. He idly went through his notebook, going over the events of the night. It was his habit to jot some unofficial thoughts here in addition to the formal notes and paperwork the job required of him. Just little bullet points to keep things straight in his own mind. The current day’s entry was filled with more notes to himself than almost all the preceding pages combined. One stood out, scrawled larger than the rest: “Shot Hayes in the head.”
The only time before tonight that he’d discharged his firearm in the four years since he’d been elected sheriff was to put a deer out of its misery. It’d been hit by a car and half crippled.
Tonight he’d fired seventeen shots and “killed” eleven people, or at least former people who’d died and somehow been reanimated. Tonight was also the only time he’d had to go into the trunk of the cruiser and get extra ammunition.
People often say it felt like “living a nightmare” when bad things happened to them, but this was the first time the sheriff could recall experiencing the sensation himself. Even more shocking was how routine it had become, shooting at another person. Once someone figured out you needed to hit them in the head to keep them down, it’d gone a little easier. Whatever made them like that also made them slow and uncoordinated. Long as you didn’t get too close or run out of ammo, and you didn’t panic, it wasn’t too hard to keep safe.
In a small town like this with everyone owning guns and knowing how to shoot them, they’d eventually been able to clear most of the dead they could find. The sheriff thought the worst of things might even be over for now. When it got light they’d take the municipal van out and start collecting the bodies and try to figure out how the rest of the world was doing. He was pretty sure things would be bad in the big cities.
His thoughts were interrupted by a loud bang from upstairs, and the sound of people struggling. Cindy and Jeremy readied their guns straight off, but the sheriff left his in the holster. He figured it was just Billy and Chris returning with their package.
* * *
“The thing of it is,” he told Cliven through the bars, “that because the forensic tech was in Europe, we had to send Sue Donovan’s body to Summerton County for the autopsy. At least we were supposed to, but they’re backed up on cases so she’s just been sitting in the morgue.”
There were more sounds of struggling upstairs and a crash as some of the photos that lined the main hallway were knocked down. Then there was the loud, meaty thunk of something falling and Chris called out, “Hold her steady, damn it.”
The sheriff didn’t pay it any attention, but Cliven’s eyes were riveted on the stairway.
“You see what I’m getting at?” he asked Cliven.
More noises from upstairs. The rustle of thick plastic, bumps and thuds. You could hear Billy and Chris breathing heavy from all the way down here.
“I’ll go give them a hand,” Jeremy said, more loudly than he’d intended. He bolted up the stairs as more noises drifted down to them. Bump, bump. Thud. Bump.
“I don’t know why you’re going on about an autopsy on some dead girl,” Cliven said.
“Because if they’d performed the autopsy in the normal course of events, they would have taken out her brain to weigh it,” the sheriff explained. “But in this case we didn’t touch her other than some basic measurements and to put her in the drawer.”
Cliven was pressed up against the bars, eyes wide as he waited to see what Billy and Chris were going to bring down the stairs.
“What, you mean she’s … she’s one of them?”
The sheriff nodded.
“Strangulation doesn’t affect them, Cliven. I guess because they don’t breathe although I don’t really know.”
Bump, bump, bump.
“You gonna tell me what that noise is, for Christ’s sake?” Cliven said.
The sheriff stared at him, as if deciding whether he was going to respond. Finally he said, “I think you already know what it is.”
Cliven made a noise that was probably supposed to be a “no” but that sounded like the last breath a man dying of tuberculosis might take. He cleared his throat, tried again. “No, I…”
Just then Chris came down the stairs, walking backward with his arms wrapped around the bottom end of a long black bag that was twisting and bucking. A body bag. Then Billy came into view holding up the top part, with Jeremy following ineffectually behind him.
The bag gave a shudder and the end of it hit the railing, hard, almost knocking Chris off balance and making the metal rail ring with a deep bong.
It finally dawned on Cliven what was happening.
“Don’t you bring that thing down here!” he shouted up at them.
The sheriff gave him a puzzled look.
“I thought you wanted to get closer to her, Cliven? Her best friend, Jenny Jacobs, told me you wouldn’t leave her alone that night. Followed her like a dog in heat, she said.”
“None of that’s true!” Cliven screamed. “None of it! You got the wrong guy!”
Chris and Billy wrestled the slowly writhing body bag down the last of the stairs and dragged it in front of the cell. It slowly flopped back and forth, an obscene sight, and Chris had to step on one edge to keep it in place. Both he and Billy were sweating from their efforts. Jeremy was sweating too, but not from any hard labor.
“A thirteen-year-old girl, Cliven,” the sheriff said. “What’s a man like you doing chasing around a thirteen-year-old girl?”
Cliven backed into the far corner of the cell, putting as much distance between him and the body bag as possible.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!”
Cindy let out another giggle. “I don’t think we’re the ones getting fucked tonight,” she said.
Jeremy looked like he might throw up.
“I’m … I’m going upstairs for some air.”
Before he left he turned to Cliven.
“I hope it takes a long time, you son of a bitch. A long time, you hear?”
Chris was having a hard time keeping the bag in place.
“We going to do this, sheriff?”
The sheriff nodded, took out his gun and the keys to the cell.
He unlocked the door with one hand and held the gun on Cliven with the other.
“I’m opening the door, Cliven. You try to come out of there and I’ll shoot you for attempted escape.”
The fight had gone out of Cliven, though. He remained cowering in the corner.
“This ain’t right,” he said, mostly to himself. “It ain’t right.”
“Like you ever done anything right in your life,” Cindy said. “I’m going to enjoy this, you piece of shit. I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.”
The sheriff motioned to Chris and Billy.
“Put her in.”
The two men dragged the body bag into the cell, snagging it on the doorframe for a second before wresting it free. The whole time the bag shifted around like it was full of huge, drunk bumblebees trying to get out. Finally, they got it all the way in and Chris stood straddling it.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Open the zipper a little, then step out. Billy, you back out of there now.”
The sheriff kept his gun ready, to use on Cliven or the dead girl as the need might arise.
Chris pulled at the zipper tentatively, like he was trying to snatch hot food off the grill. The zipper only moved an inch. He tried again. Four more inches, then a hand pushed its way out, grabbing for him. The hand had painted red nails that contrasted unpleasantly with its dark blue-gray skin.
Chris yelped and leapt for the cell door, catching his foot on the top of the bag. The hand scrabbled for him and he heaved himself out of the cell to avoid it, landing on his ass.
“You clear?” the sheriff calmly asked. When Chris nodded he closed the cell and locked it.
* * *
“You know what I found out?” the sheriff asked Cliven.
Billy and Chris had gone upstairs as the dead girl started to emerge from the body bag like a broken butterfly coming out of a cocoon. Billy said he didn’t have the stomach to watch what was coming next, and Chris had wordlessly tagged along. Cindy, however, watched the whole time, munching on a granola bar.
“They’ll eat anything that lives. A man, a horse, a dog. And if you leave them at it long enough, they’ll eat right down to the bone.”
The dead girl named Sue managed to stand upright, her jaws working silently as if already biting into flesh.
Cliven pressed up against the concrete wall in the back of the cell as tightly as possible, turning his shoulder as if he could somehow block the girl with it. He was talking continuously to himself now, like a scared child might.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no…”
Sue seemed to get her bearings and spot Cliven at the same time. She let out a sort of hissing sound and reached for him.
Cliven panicked, kicked wildly at her, an awkward movement with his hands cuffed behind his back. He missed her entirely and she clutched at one of his legs, getting a momentary grip on it. As soon as her hand touched him he thrashed like he’d been burned, managed to get his leg free and aimed a kick at her head. This time the blow connected, catching her across the jaw. It was a hard hit, but she reacted as if she didn’t feel it at all. She grabbed at his leg again, catching it, and tried to bite through his jeans into his calf.
Cliven’s mumbling turned into a screaming, gasping howl of terror. He pulled his leg back from her and kicked at her head again, but she got his foot, pulling him off balance and sending the two of them to the floor. He twisted around, trying to get back up as she lay on top of him.
The sheriff turned to leave.
“You coming?” he asked Cindy. He had to raise his voice to be heard over Cliven’s yelling.
She shook her head, never taking her eyes off the cell.
The sheriff nodded. He went up to his office on the main floor as Cliven continued to howl and scream below. He pulled out his notebook and flipped to the page about the Sue Donovan case. He crossed off Cliven Ridgeway’s name under the heading “Suspect.” Farther down the page, under the heading “Aid and abet,” was another name, Abel Ridgeway. Cliven’s father.
The sheriff figured they’d have enough time to get to Abel before dawn.